On Literature as a “Boundary Culture”

In discussing the relation between author and protagonist in literary activity, Bakhtin says: “Aesthetic culture is precisely the culture of the boundary; therefore, it demands a warm atmosphere of full trust that embraces life. And in order to create and process, confidently and on good grounds, the human's inner and outer boundary, the boundary of the world he is in, the premise is to have a firm and reliable standpoint outside this human; standing on this standpoint, spirituality can for a long time master its own force and act freely.” (1) Aimed at the aesthetics circle's previous stress on “empathy,” Bakhtin specially stressed the important significance of “exotopy” (outsideness) in literary activity. He holds that the author must, from a position exotopic to the protagonist and the world of the work, complete his creation; that is, he must be at the outside of the world of the work, at the boundary of the protagonist's world—the boundary of his behavior and inner world; only thus can he endow the work with complete form and value-content. What Bakhtin emphasizes is the “exotopy” that corresponds to aesthetic empathy in literary creation and appreciation, while the characteristic of literature as a “boundary culture” has not yet been deeply analyzed; therefore, there remains a very important theoretical space, awaiting us to make a further deep exploration.

I

In Bakhtin's view, the cultural domain itself is full of criss-crossing boundaries; it has no internal territory. Then, as an “aesthetic culture,” does literature merely belong to the cultural domain and concurrently possess the boundary-ness of culture itself, only embodying the general characteristic of the cultural domain? The answer is evidently negative. Literature, as a special category within culture, as an aesthetic culture, has its own uniqueness; relative to the general cultural domain, the “boundary” has a far more important significance for it.

As an aesthetic culture, literature's fundamental distinction from other cultural domains lies in: aesthetic form is the indispensable important factor of literature. It is precisely aesthetic form that constitutes the uniqueness by which literature is distinguished from other cultural domains, endowing literature with an inexhaustible charm that moves the heart and stirs the spirit. If form is the spatio-temporal characteristic universally possessed by physical objects and general cultural objects, is the boundary of the object—it demarcates the object from the real spatio-temporal continuum, endows it with a characteristic, and declares the object's identity, yet it lets the object still remain within the real spatio-temporal relation, not separating the object from the spatio-temporal continuum to stand independent—then aesthetic form is different: it not only has the boundary-demarcating function of general form, but also has what Marcuse called the “despotic power”; it “distances” the literary work from the real spatio-temporal continuum, lets it transcend, and sublimates it into a fictional aesthetic world, thereby gaining aesthetic independence. The material and raw matter that originally came from reality, because of the despotism of aesthetic form, lose their original real nature and become a constituent part of the literary fictional world, becoming another, utterly different aesthetic element. Therefore, the boundary created by literature's aesthetic form is not only the boundary of physical objects and general cultural objects; it connects two different activities: daily real activity and literary imaginative activity; it borders two different worlds: the real life-world and the unreal fictional world. Aesthetic form constitutes the boundary of two activities, distinguishing two kinds of activity while at the same time connecting two kinds of activity; it distinguishes two worlds while at the same time connecting two worlds.

Just as Bakhtin stresses, in literary activity, besides the action of empathy, there exists at the same time exotopy: it is the foothold from which the author or appreciator, exotopic to the protagonist and to the literary fictional world, views and completes the protagonist and his world. Exotopy is another indispensable important aspect of aesthetic activity; it, like empathy, jointly constitutes the integral of aesthetic activity. The most important factor by which aesthetic differs from a game is precisely that it needs a bystander, that is, the author, listener, or appreciator, who needs a foothold outside the protagonist and his world. Literary creation is likewise so: if the author cannot gain a standpoint outside the protagonist and his world, he also cannot aesthetically complete the work in the end. Without exotopy, literary activity loses the necessary psychical distance and dwindles into a game or a ceremony. (2) Since literature, as a kind of aesthetic activity, simultaneously contains both empathy and exotopy, then the author or appreciator must necessarily be at the boundary of two worlds, that is, between the real life-world and the unreal fictional world. Empathy lets the human throw himself into the fictional world of the work, identify with the protagonist, fuse into one, and grieve and rejoice together with him; exotopy, in turn, stresses the human's independent standpoint, his being outside the protagonist, outside the world of the work, viewing the protagonist and his world. In the whole of literary activity, the human keeps a foothold on the boundary and continually crosses the boundary, and thereby interweaves complex and varied intentional relations. One may say that no activity has the unique boundary that literary activity has, and, because it distinguishes and communicates two different worlds, constitutes such a wide and profound field of vision and such huge potentiality. The basic characteristic of literary activity originates precisely from this unique boundary culture.

On one hand, empathy lets the human throw himself into the aesthetic world of literature, identify with the protagonist, fuse with him, and experience together with the protagonist one and the same event; the human lives in this fictional world while being separated from the real world. The literary independence and aesthetic self-regulation that has been spoken of all along originate precisely from the demarcating function of literature as a fictional world separated from the real world. As a fictional realm separated from the real world, it is no longer constrained by the real law and independently follows the aesthetic order alone. In the fictional realm, the rigidified order of reality has already dissolved. Here, the human can transcend the boundary of class hierarchy and become a free role; he need not bear the constraint of the various norms of reality, the responsibility and risk; he can slip into a dreamland, pursue what his heart longs for. Since he is no longer bound by real aims to realize reality, this even changes his nature—even ardent sexual love can be transformed into spiritual love; he returns to the past event, returns to a fictional world that bridges this side and the other side; he tastes life's various savors, yet, because of the fictionality of the event, loses the weight and pressure within the experience; he soars above, and finally gains free spirituality, truly becoming “himself.” Entering the literary realm, the human is often no longer the human who is the master in real life: he becomes the lover but is not a lover, becomes the lawyer but is not a lawyer, becomes the soldier but is not a soldier… he is the concrete human, has the concrete role-identity, yet is only “the human himself,” because the fictional realm releases him from his original real constraint, lets him freely become himself, lets him freely develop himself. This is a kind of generation toward “myself” or “the human himself,” and is also what people call the “aesthetic return.” Therefore, literary activity must be linked with “true feeling” and the “heart of a newborn child.” It must be pointed out here that it is precisely because, at the same time as empathic activity, there exists exotopy, that the appreciator can maintain a consciousness of the fictional, can distinguish the experience in the literary event from the experience in the real life-event; in the process of experience there occurs an “aesthetic inhibition,” so that a gulf opens between the real event and real behavior, maintaining the heart-dimension and spiritual dimension of the literary event.

Once the human is deeply intoxicated in the literary fictional world, so that his self-consciousness is thereby lost, yet another kind of change occurs: he completely fuses with, and is identical with, the character, and enters the realm of no-self and no-thing. This chaotic realm is precisely the “shock” that Adorno spoke of, and the shaking, the trance, the lost “intoxication” and “ravishment” that Roland Barthes spoke of.

On the other hand, exotopy lets the human again be outside the protagonist, outside the literary fictional world; he keeps a foothold on the boundary of the real world and the fictional world to view the aesthetic world that literature creates, that is, to view the protagonist and his world. But this viewing is by no means the looking or observing in daily life. The “object” of viewing is unreal, purely fictive; it is what Ingarden called the “intentional object,” a fictional imagined world constructed by his own personal participation, in fact the extension of the self, and therefore cannot mix in any utilitarian purposiveness. The utilitarian purpose is dissolved because of imaginariness and fictionality. Therefore in fact his viewing can no longer objectify the “object” viewed, still less instrumentalize it; he himself, because of the suspension of the utilitarian purpose, turns into an independent free subject. And so, the “object” viewed is also transformed into “another subject,” a “you” that stands shoulder to shoulder with the “I” in literary activity, mutually independent yet mutually associating, dialoguing, and generating. This is precisely the “intersubjectivity” in aesthetic activity.

Because aesthetic viewing needs to maintain a certain psychical distance, that is, the penetration of the intellect provides the condition. As long as one leaves the boundary and slightly increases the psychical distance, the intersubjectivity relation disintegrates, and aesthetic viewing immediately transforms into objectifying activity, transforms into cognitive activity or ethical activity, while the person himself has already taken a foothold again in the real world. When the human leaves the boundary of the literary fictional world and returns to the real life-world, when he places himself in reality, he is bound to become the bridge that communicates the two worlds of reality and fiction. The experience, values, and ideology of reality constrain his cognitive activity and ethical activity; at the same time, the fictional world he has experienced once made him transform into “myself,” an independent and autonomous subject, a human similar to what Marcuse called the one with a “new sensibility.” He is pulled by two forces, and cannot but, from within them, re-establish his own new standpoint: a standpoint different from the original real-life standpoint, transcending real power to some extent, and breaking through prejudice and bias to some extent. The world thereby displays a new face in his field of vision, and those phenomena familiar through space and time, taken as customary, are for the first time questioned. It is precisely based on this complexity and variability of literary activity that Brecht used the “defamiliarization” technique to create psychical distance, in order to realize the cognitive-critical function of drama. (3)

The activities of the two inclinations of empathy and exotopy are by no means cut apart. Bakhtin says: “One important (but not the only) aspect of aesthetic viewing is to empathize with the individual object being appreciated, that is, to observe from within the object, placing oneself within it. What follows close upon empathy is always objectification, that is, the appreciator places the individual understood through empathy outside himself, separates the individual from himself, and returns to the self. Only when the appreciator returns to this consciousness of the self can he, from the position he occupies, endow the individual captured through empathy with an aesthetic form, making it a unified, complete individual with a distinctive quality… the two factors of empathy and objectification mutually penetrate.” (4) Aesthetic viewing can never be purely external to the aesthetic object, especially the viewing in literary activity, because the viewer must first transform the linguistic concept into an aesthetic object, give it concreteness, and fill its blanks—that is to say, he must participate in creation before he can possibly view. And creative activity is already doomed to involve the appreciator in the literary fictional world, to join him to the protagonist and his world, that is, empathy occurs. Aesthetic viewing is in a state of activity that is both close and detached, both apart and one. But when the appreciator is fused into one with the aesthetic object, and fused into one with an eternal life-realm, empathy and exotopy mutually fuse—a state that is just as what Nietzsche called the union of the Dionysian and the Apollonian.

Nietzsche holds that in the process of tragic appreciation there is both the frenzy of the Dionysian state—it destroys the daily limits and rules of life, drowns the individual and all he has experienced in the intoxicated passion, attempting to break free of individuation and fuse into one with the living creatures of the world, returning to the eternal life that endures through calamity on the other side of the phenomenon—and at the same time the unconscious contemplation of the Apollonian state, which makes us delight in the individual, using the individual to satisfy our longing for the beauty of great and sublime form, fusing into the mystery of individual life. “The Dionysian magic seems to stimulate the Apollonian impulse to its peak, yet can compel this overflow of Apollonian force to serve it. Tragic myth can only be understood as the imaging that Dionysian wisdom attains by the means of Apollonian art. Tragic myth leads the phenomenal world to its limit, makes it deny itself, longing to flee back into the embrace of the one true reality; thereupon, like Isolde, it seems about to sing aloud its metaphysical prophecy.” (5) Just as without exotopy there is no psychical distance and so no aesthetic viewing, without empathy there is no aesthetic experience, and one even loses the important driving force of aesthetic creation. The human places himself in the exotopic viewing of the literary work, while at the same time empathizing through viewing. Exotopy and empathy are inseparably fused. The aesthetic activity of literature can only occur at the edge of the literary fictional world, at the edge of the real life-world, at the juncture of the two worlds. Literature is the culture of the boundary.

II

Literature, as a boundary culture, because it remains at the edge of real life and the edge of culture, on one hand is still under the cover of power and ideology, and on the other hand, because it is marginalized, provides the possibility of escaping the control of power and ideology.

The raw matter and language of literary works all come from real life; they are all permeated with social ideology; and literature too must enrich the work with real experience and value, so that the work has a sense of reality, so that it can produce a sense of closeness and affinity in people, so that it can attract people. A fantastical realm divorced from the human world has no meaning; it will not arouse true interest. Roland Barthes says: “The body-force of ideology is fiction… every fiction is supported by some kind of socially-specialized language, a social mode of language, and intermixes with it: fiction, at that point of consistent stickiness, touches language; at this moment, it congeals unusually, and finds a ‘priestly class’ (classe sacerdotale) (priests, intellectuals, artists) to universally utter it and disseminate it.” (6) Language is the product of social history; it cannot avoid embodying power-relations and bears social ideology. The contest for discursive power, and how to use discourse, and what kind of discourse to use, in fact harbor power-strife and contain the problem of ideology. Literature, as the art of language, necessarily has a more notable ideological character than other categories of art.

In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon points out the tendency of postmodern critical discourse to value the problems of ideology and power, and holds that this phenomenon is rooted in the opposition to liberal humanism—liberal humanism interprets literature and art as eternal and universal things, repressing the historical, political, material, and social factors within them, while postmodern theory questions this repressive behavior. They hold: “Ideology is the general process of producing meaning. In other words, all social practice (including art) relies on ideology and also exists within ideology; thus, it becomes the ‘mode of connection between our words and thoughts and the power-structure and power-relations in the society we live in.’” (7) Postmodern theory, contrary to liberal humanism's enthusiasm for the eternal and universal, turns to favor the historicity and political content of literary activity, striving to reveal the ideology and power-relations contained in literary narrative. They reveal, through discourse analysis and narrative-strategy analysis, the unequal relations existing in the work, manifest the absent and the shielded voice, and question the authority of repression, thereby confirming that literature itself contains an arena where various powers cross and contend.

Literature is not a safe harbor for evading ideology; the work is in fact an arena of power, and the human, in literary activity, undergoes the contention and influence of various forces. In analyzing the rhetorical effect of Lorrie Moore's work “How,” James Phelan says: “Some of the things ‘that happen to us (readers)’ depend on the dual perspective we take within the fiction. When we walk into and out of the position of the narrated object, we are still in the position of the observer, and discover the assumptions the narrator makes about our cognition and belief as the narrated object. To put it further, taking on the role of the narrated object means we play the role of the ideal narrative reader—the narrator tells us what we should believe, what to think, what to feel; while taking on the role of the observer, we evaluate the position of the ideal narrative reader we occupy.” (8) Here, what Phelan calls the “ideal narrative reader” is a reader who completely obeys the narrative strategy and actively cooperates with, and realizes, the narrator's intention; therefore it is in fact the position the narrator sets for the reader in the work, a perspective by which the narrator exercises discursive power, intending to force the reader to obey. When the reader coincides with the ideal narrative reader, enters the fictional world of the work, and, following the guidance of the narrative strategy, relates to and fuses with the narrated object in the way determined by the specific narrative, this in fact is already within the control of the narrator's power. He believes, thinks, feels, and acts according to the narrator's intention, and all this he voluntarily realizes unwittingly—he has fallen into the ideological trap. But once the reader is outside the narrated object and becomes an observer, he can possibly break free of the narrator's control, begin to exercise his own power, and, from his own perspective, evaluate the ideal narrative reader and his position; that is to say, the power the narrator has and the perspective he provides are already in the foreground position of the reader and observer and are questioned. The “dual perspective” in the process of reading-appreciation precisely represents the strife and contention between different powers.

Phelan rather persuasively expounds the relation of literature with power and ideology. The literary work always presupposes a certain way of viewing the world by means of a specific discourse-mode and narrative strategy; they secretly guide the reader, unwittingly enticing the reader into compliance, secretly instilling a specific ideology into the reader. The reader, in turn, holds fast to his own power, and from his own power and perspective contends with the narrator. In fact, the power-strife in the literary work may be more complex, because the author or narrator cannot always control the work as a whole; even the protagonist and other characters may escape the author's control and develop according to their own logic, thereby constituting “polyphony,” constituting an arena among various factors. However, this only further explains the connection between literature and politics.

The key to the problem lies in the fact that Phelan's exposition ignores the boundary nature of literature as an aesthetic culture; he confuses the literary fictional world with the real life-world, and ignores the difference between the existential state of the human in the literary fictional world and the real life-world. In the literary fictional world, any compulsion necessarily meets with resistance and rejection. To be sure, the narrator can, through various means, entice the reader into a specific position and modulate the relation between reader and narrated object to realize his aim, making the reader fall, unwittingly, into the ideological trap, subject to the influence of ideology. But this is only one side of the problem. On the other hand, the literary fictional world is, after all, a sensuous world; it arouses the appreciator's sensuous force and lets the appreciator's autonomy fully unfold, and this precisely constitutes the effective mechanism for breaking through the cage of ideology and maintaining life itself. Marcuse greatly valued the “otherness” by which literature is distinguished from reality. He says: “Sublimation demands a relatively high degree of autonomy and tolerance; it is the mediation between consciousness and the subconscious, the mediation between the primary process and the secondary process, the mediation between intellect and instinct, the mediation between non-cooperation and resistance. In its most perfect mode, such as in the art-work, sublimation becomes a cognitive force that, while submitting to free repression, at the same time defeats repression.” (9) Literary art, precisely through sublimation, is distinguished from the real life-world and becomes an independent fictional world, becomes the aesthetic culture that dwells at the boundary of the real life-world and the edge of the cultural domain. In the literary fictional world, the real law and real order have lost their authority. Literature follows only the aesthetic order, that is, the order of sensuous life, to rebuild its own kingdom. Even if the narrative strategy entices the appreciator into a specific position, forcing the appreciator to view the world in the narrator's way, the appreciator in this position will still not easily submit to power and ideology; he always proceeds from his own sensuous life to unfold activity and feel the world.

Even when the appreciator is fused into one with the protagonist of the work, he is not simply manipulated. It is generally held that, in the process of literary activity, the appreciator is identical with the protagonist, that is, the appreciator is assimilated by the protagonist, realizing a fusion of horizons, and unwittingly accepts the protagonist's worldview and values. In fact, the situation is not so simple. In literary activity, the process in which appreciator and protagonist mutually contact is precisely a process of associative dialogue; during this, the ideas of the two undergo collision, exchange, and influence. When the ideas of appreciator and protagonist differ greatly, fusion can hardly occur, and the protagonist can often only be in the position of being evaluated by the appreciator. Only when there exist certain common points or similar points between the two can they possibly mutually attract and mutually approach, and go on to complete fusion; and this fusion is not the appreciator's taking the protagonist's ideas as his own and unwittingly being controlled by the ideology the work has. “Fusion” can only be the fusion of imagination; it occurs in the fictive situation. Only when the literary fictional world suspends the real law and real order, and, for the appreciator who places himself within it, real repression no longer exists, and the gulf between consciousness and the unconscious is also removed, does a fused life-realm begin; only then can the fusion of appreciator and protagonist be possible. “Thing-and-self-as-one” can only occur at the moment of “no-thing and no-self,” that is, at the moment when self-consciousness dissolves and one sinks into the fused realm at the bottom of life. From this angle, the identity of appreciator and protagonist in the process of literary activity does not occur at the level of conceptual consciousness, but mainly occurs at the level of sensuous life. This is the calling and identification of life with life, the resonance among lives, and not one party being captured by the ideology to which the other belongs; the power-relation and ideology have been suspended. The free activity of sensuous life is all along non-ideological and anti-ideological. This return to life itself, this discovery of and identification with life, precisely constitutes the force that resists the control of power and ideology. Therefore, in literary activity, the process in which appreciator and protagonist mutually fuse, although there is the influence of ideology, finally in turn arouses the resistance to ideological control.

On the “jouissance” that Roland Barthes proposed in the reader's reading, John Fiske makes such an explanation. He says: “Jouissance can be translated as great pleasure (bliss), joyful self-forgetting (ecstasy), extreme excitement (orgasm). It is bodily pleasure, occurring at the moment when ‘culture’ collapses into the ‘natural state.’ It is the loss of the self, and also the loss of the subjectivity that controls and governs the self—the self is socially constructed, and therefore controlled; it is the site of subjectivity, and therefore the site of the production and reproduction of ideology. Therefore, the loss of the self is precisely the evasion of ideology… this body despises meaning or discipline.” (10) When the reader (or author) is immersed in the peak experience of literary activity, when self-consciousness disintegrates in such an experience, when he sinks into the natural state of life, ideological manipulation is bound to appear weak and powerless.

In discussing the activity of interpretation, Gadamer says: “We stand before the other; even before the other opens his mouth to answer, the mere existence of the other helps us break our own prejudice and narrowness.” (11) In the process of literary activity, the human always faces the narrator, the protagonist, or other various characters; he continually meets, dialogues, and exchanges with the narrator, the protagonist, and other characters; therefore, he cannot but undergo the challenge and influence of various powers and ideological notions. On the other hand, literary activity also has its peculiarity: it occurs at the boundary of life and culture, and differs from general understanding-activity. In daily life, “everything familiar is concealed.” “Therefore, the content that understanding the art-work tells us is a kind of self-encounter. But, as one who encounters truthfulness, as a familiarity that contains surprise, aesthetic experience is an experience in the true sense, and one must continually re-grasp the task contained in experience: to integrate it into the directional whole of people's self-understanding of the world and of themselves.” (12) In daily life, we are either busy planning, diligently seeking, or self-abandoned, muddled and confused; yet we are always within the grasp of necessity, under the cover of ideology, so that the true life of the self is forgotten and concealed. Only literary art lets the human again face the self's life itself and discover the true essence of life, that life-reality both familiar and surprising. It is precisely this discovery that endows literary art with an immortal magic, gives it the power to resist external power and to break through the concealment of ideology. It is also for this reason that, when the human reads classical works and is intoxicated in the world of the work, he is not again subjected to the bewitchment and manipulation of the ancestors who have long passed away, unwittingly falling into the cover of an ideology that has long passed; differing from this, in actual reading, those things belonging to ideology have already lost efficacy and become very estranged from the reader, and what truly constitutes dialogue is the hearts of the two sides. That is the communication of heart with heart, the enlightenment and arousal of life, the discovery of the depth of human nature.

Marcuse once profoundly expounded the relation of literary art and revolution. He says that for poetry, even where politics is absent, there is revolution. From this angle, one may likewise say that true literary art, even the most ideological work, still preserves a force that resists ideology. In the ultimate sense, literature acknowledges only true life and the truth of life; at its root it opposes any control, including ideological control. This is precisely the reason literature can hardly make a simple judgment and distinction of “progressive” or “reactionary,” and is also the reason literary classics, through the changes of the age and the replacement of social ideology, still retain their long-lasting charm. As a boundary culture at the edge of real life and the edge of culture, it provides people with a marginalized existence; yet, precisely because it is a marginalized existence, it lets the human be able to retain an ideal free existence, an existence truly belonging to the human.