Narratology is a discipline engaged in the study of textual form. Prince states explicitly that "narratology studies the nature, form, and functioning of narrative (independent of its medium of expression) and tries to characterize narrative competence. In particular, it examines what all and only narratives have in common (at the level of the story, the narrating, and their relations) as well as what enables them to differ from one another, and it tries to account for the ability to produce and understand them." (1) It was precisely on the basis of this understanding that he gave his own Narratology the subtitle "The Form and Functioning of Narrative." Not only at the level of "narrating" does narratology attend solely to the study of discursive form; at the level of "story" it likewise focuses on the structure, function, and grammar of the story, abstracting out the formal factors within the story for specialized analysis. Post-classical narratology broke the closedness of classical narratology, broadly absorbing interdisciplinary theory to expand the field and seeking to bridge formal study with socio-historical context; but because it is built on the foundation of classical narratology, it still cannot fundamentally escape the rut of formal study.
Strictly speaking, narratology's practice of splitting story and narrating in two is not scientific. Any story is already a narrated story, the result of an act of narrating; there is only the difference between a briefly narrated story and a skillfully narrated one—there is no story that has not undergone narration, and the writer's writing is always a rewriting and re-narrating of already-narrated stories. For this reason, the "narrating" we propose differs from Prince's purely formal "narrating": it strives to restore the wholeness of narrative activity, regarding the narrating not only as the act of discursive narration but at the same time as an act that contains the narrated object; and this narrated object refers not only to the story but, more importantly, to human action. To be sure, the story is enacted by humans, brought about by human action; in narrating a story one can never be apart from the human and his action. Yet narratology precisely abstracts human action—this most active factor—out of the story, and thereby degenerates into a purely formal study. When human action is abstracted into certain functions and thereby loses its concrete content and stylistic features, literature's core element, "character," can no longer be displayed, and literature is "dehumanized." Although Hawkes holds that "function" in the morphology of the story "refers to 'an act of a character defined by its significance for the course of the plot in which it appears,'" (2) in fact, within narratology's theoretical horizon, "action" is merely a subordinate function constituting the story's plot, and has itself been abstracted into a most simple, miniature "event" type, losing its independent value.
In Story and Discourse, Chatman criticized the formalist and structuralist view of character: "their view is extremely similar to Aristotle's. They too hold that characters are products of the plot, that their status is 'functional'; in short, they take characters to be participants or actants rather than persons (personnages), and hold it to be an error to regard characters as real people… They wish only to analyze what characters do in the story, not to analyze what they are." (3) Once the status of character and personality is debased in literary study, then the action that shapes personality, and the style of action, are likewise debased and, along with character, reduced to a function constituting the story's plot, no longer able to gain independent value and due regard. Character is constructed in reliance on its distinctive action, especially its style of action; the two are interdependent: without the human there is no human action; equally, without action there is no human in the true sense—the human inevitably degenerates into an empty sign, and without distinctive action there is no personality. To neglect the study of human action is in fact to discard the soul of literature. Our reendowing "narrating" with a new meaning aims at re-admitting the core element of the "human" and his "personality," and holds that the act of narrating should not be merely "narrating events" but, first and foremost, "narrating human action." That is to say, the literary act of narrating is in fact a discourse-act of narrating human action; the gist of this shift of meaning lies in turning from the external "event" to the "human" himself, from the interpretation of literary narrative form to the holistic interpretation of literary narration.
When we take human action as the principal object of narrative activity, the story becomes subordinate and secondary; as a category of narratology, its decisive status is being overturned. It is precisely in the process of unfolding the narration of human action that personality and plot are simultaneously constructed. Plot is the fruit of the narrative activity that enwombs human action, and the key to success or failure in literary writing lies not in whether the plot is tortuous and thrilling but in the richness and depth of the personality—that is, in the complexity of the character's action. Forster's so-called "round character" in fact refers to a complex character whose style of action both varies and is gathered into one; the work displays this character from multiple sides.
Action not only foregrounds personality and constructs plot but also links the human with the external world, links the self with the other; it is the medium by which the human enters the world and changes the world and himself, and in the interaction of actions it reveals extremely complex interpersonal contradictions and various social problems. Moreover, the human's different modes of action divide humans into different social groups and establish the social order among them, thereby displaying the morphological structure of a particular society. Only by turning the focus of narratological study from the story to human action can one thoroughly break narratology's closed formalist method and, taking human action—that is, the human himself—as the hinge, establish a substantive link between the literary act of narrating and socio-historical context.
In the history of literary development, the center of gravity of the narrated object has undergone an evolution from "story" to "human action." Myth narrates the stories of gods. To humans, the gods are lofty and high above, to be looked up to and worshipped; people can only gratefully receive the grace bestowed by the gods and extol the miracles the gods create—and that is precisely the "story" of gods. This is also why mythic narration does not lack bizarre stories while the actions of gods can hardly escape being formulaic. As the authority of religious theology was challenged, the human formally mounted the stage of social history and at last became the principal role of literary narration. He has been reduced to an ordinary person of equal status, with no extraordinary abilities and unable to create extraordinary deeds; thus the plot lost its moving luster, its importance gradually drained away, and human action for the first time drew literature's major attention. Only by seizing human action can the writer vividly and profoundly shape and display personality. At the same time, the human's psychology is mainly the imprint left on the mind by human action. (4) It is precisely in human action that all the human's loves and hates are contained, his fate foreshadowed, the whole life-history of the individual life intimated; and it is precisely in human action that all the human's possibilities are contained, opening up for us an extremely splendid, endlessly changing world of the possible.
In discussing the grammar of the story, Prince points out that the mode of connecting stories changes with the historical development of the novel: "The nineteenth century became a period in which logical relations between events existed in abundance. In the twentieth century, by contrast, a rare peak was reached in connective elements that allow the storyteller to develop his work not temporally or logically but associatively." (5) The retreat of logical relations precisely intimates that, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the status of plot had already tended to decline, and the story had gradually disintegrated and yielded to action and the psychological activity closely related to action. People gradually discovered that the human's mode of action is not single and unchanging but complex and changeable, varying with the space of activity and the context, yet constituting a whole that is both many-sided and unified; and these wholes of action likewise change with the passage of time and the experience of life. Therefore, from a certain angle, the history of literary development is the history of the evolution of the narrated object—from story to human action, then from single action to complex action, from external action to the inner world, from fixed action to action that changes with experience, from action in public space to private action that also takes in individual space; it is at the same time the history of the evolution of narrative discourse and strategy along with the change of the narrated object. The shift of literature's narrative emphasis from story to human action marks literature's genuine turn to "the study of man." Only after this transformation of understanding does literature cast off "theology" and become "the study of man," and only then does our narratological study thoroughly cast off formalism and become a literary study aimed at "the study of man."
In the past, narratology often regarded the act of narrating merely as a set of discursive narrative strategies, neglecting the influence of discursive register on narrative activity. To correct this bias, we should also examine the narrative medium, viewing the act of narrating on three levels: the human action that is the narrated object (including the story constructed by action), the narrative strategy, and the discursive register. These are three mutually coordinating levels of the narrative act: on one side is what kind of human action the work narrates; on another side is how the work narrates these actions—that is, how it uses narrative strategy to regulate the reader's relation to the narrated action, how it regulates the reader's reception of the character's action; and on yet another side is how the discursive register regulates this relation. It is precisely these three levels that together constitute the whole of the narrative act; they completely describe the overall countenance of the literary narrative act and determine the role that narrative activity plays in the reader's spiritual construction.
Only after reinterpreting the act of narrating do we become able to expound in depth just how literature influences the human's spiritual construction. We cannot speak directly of the human's spirit, cannot abstractly and emptily appraise the nobility or baseness of the spirit; we can only know and evaluate the human's inner spirit through human action. Therefore one should start from human action and, on this basis, go on to explain the psychological roots of human action and the source of behavioral normativity in order to explore spiritual construction. In fact, human action simultaneously embodies the true, the good, and the beautiful. The so-called "true" is action's conformity to lawfulness, possessing practical identity and maintaining the inner coherence of action across various situations. The so-called "good" is grounded in the relation of action to purpose; it is according to the relation of action to purpose—that is, "why one does" and "what one does"—that we judge the good or evil of action. The so-called "beautiful" concerns the mode of action, or more precisely the style of action; aesthetic judgment is the discrimination of "in what manner" action is performed—that is, of the form of action—and we often make distinctions of action's mode as elegant or vulgar, sublime or base. All three are condensed in human action, fused into one, constituting the human's unitary bodily action, and are only cut apart into the true, the good, and the beautiful and separately interpreted because of different angles of interpretation. Since human action simultaneously embodies the true, the good, and the beautiful, we can, through the analysis of action and by following the psychological roots and process of the occurrence of human action, explore spiritual construction—which is to say, the human's spiritual construction is in essence the problem of how to establish normativity for one's own action.
In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard makes an in-depth inquiry into the problem of behavioral normativity, so as to provide a foundation for ethics and morality. She explains the source of behavioral normativity from the reflective structure of human consciousness, pointing out: "The reflective structure of human consciousness requires that you identify yourself with some law or principle that will govern your choices. It requires you to be a law to yourself. And that is the source of normativity." (6) She holds that human action needs a reason, a conception of the right and the good. This first requires endowing yourself with value: you discover that your life is worth living, your actions worth doing; you act out of such a conception, and you thereby gain practical identity. When the human links his action with his own ends and takes this as the maxim of action, then it is willed as a law and becomes the source of normativity. For instance, as a human you are someone's lover or friend, you are a religious believer, a member of some ethnic group, engaged in some profession, and so on; all these identities bring you reasons and obligations for action and prescribe the action you should take. Likewise, insofar as you are a citizen, you are to make a series of decisions together with other citizens, to participate in a general will; in obeying the law your action is autonomous, and you no longer act freely out of private reasons.
Korsgaard's so-called practical identity is mainly directed at moral norms, and she especially stresses the important role of the reflective structure of consciousness in establishing the conception of practical identity. She says: "The reflective structure of human consciousness sets us a problem. The reflective distance that separates us from our impulses makes it both possible and necessary to decide which of them to act on: it forces us to act for reasons. And, at the same time and correspondingly, it forces us to have a conception of our own identity, a conception that identifies us with the source of those reasons. In this way it makes us laws to ourselves." (7) Differing somewhat from her view, we hold that identity involves not only moral questions; it is closely related to all the aspects of action—the true, the good, and the beautiful.
To explore this question more deeply, we should further understand the psychological process and mechanism of the occurrence of action. In Mind: A Brief Introduction, Searle introduces the split-brain experiment. A person whose corpus callosum has been severed, isolating the connection between the two cerebral hemispheres, exhibits a strange splitting in his behavioral pattern: when a spoon appears in his right visual field, the relevant visual stimulus is transmitted to the left hemisphere, and since the language function is located in the left hemisphere, he can smoothly say it is a spoon. But when the spoon is shown in his left visual field, the visual stimulus is transmitted to the non-language area of the right hemisphere, and he says, "I saw nothing." In fact, he then reaches out his left hand and grabs the spoon. On this basis Searle proposes that there are two consciousnesses in the brain, each corresponding to a hemisphere, and that under normal circumstances the two conscious domains are fused into a single, unified conscious field. (8) In fact, the left and right brain do not contain two consciousnesses; rather, they respectively contain consciousness and the unconscious, and that psychological process in the non-language area which is not consciously perceived yet brings about the human's action is precisely the unconscious. For a normal person, conscious and unconscious processes often cooperate with each other, whereas in the split-brain person the connection between the two hemispheres has been severed, so consciousness and the unconscious can no longer act in coordination.
The above experiment shows that human action is first of all manipulated by unconscious processes, while consciousness plays the role of reflection, monitoring, and regulation. In daily activity there are many unconscious actions. Shklovsky once recounted a small story about Tolstoy: one day Tolstoy casually dusted the dust off the sofa with a feather duster, but afterward he was entirely unaware of this habitual gesture. On this basis Shklovsky held that habit automatizes and renders unconscious our perception, devouring the human's world. This at the same time shows that when performing a habitual action, the human can often operate directly by means of the unconscious. Especially the human's style of action, since it is acquired in a process of day-by-day, accumulated immersion, lies all the more in unconscious processes. Only when someone must adjust his mode of action in a different cultural custom is the intervention of conscious psychology required. Where conscious reflection and monitoring play a conspicuous role is in the domain of moral activity. When someone faces the choice of whether to act and of the purpose of action, conscious reflection becomes indispensable; he decides action through conscious reflection and according to practical identity, setting reasons for the action.
The human's practical identity is mainly gained through two routes: experience and cognition. First, in the process of personally participating in practice, through immersion the human gradually establishes practical identity. The identity thus constructed becomes not only the unconscious basis of the occurrence of action but at the same time a reason for conscious reflection. Conscious reflection confirms the command the unconscious issues to action, strengthening action's conformity to lawfulness and to purpose—this is the spontaneous, natural "unity of knowing and doing," what people call the cultivation of behavior. The cultivation of behavior endows the individual with good character and a noble spirit; yet this at the same time poses another question: how, when an individual is under the immersion of a vile environment, can he emerge unstained from the mud? Second, by means of the imparting of knowledge and the instilling of ideas—this is a process of gaining "knowing." It sets up a standard for conscious reflection and becomes a force for supervising and regulating action. But because it does not at the same time set up a basis in the human's unconscious and has not yet established practical identity, it must rely on the human's will to intervene in action; and because there is uncertainty as to whether the intervention of conscious reflection is effective, this may lead to a split between knowing and doing. That is to say, the acquisition of knowledge does not necessarily mold a person's conduct, because the relation between knowing at the level of consciousness and action is indirect; it can indeed supervise and regulate action, but it does not directly control action. As Searle says: "Our rational behavior is to be explained by the unconscious mental processes that operate in our enormous capacity for rule-following, where these rules are neither consciously perceived by us nor capable of being so perceived." (9)
Compared with the automaticity, habituality, and enormous energy possessed by the unconscious, the constraint of conscious reflection is neither constant nor all-around, and often appears feeble. The intentional character of conscious activity determines that it always focuses on a particular target and at the same time lets the content outside the target vanish into shadow; this determines that consciousness often attends only to certain aspects of action, especially the purpose of action, and finds it hard to monitor human action comprehensively. The unconscious process, by contrast, directly operates the human's mode of action without trace, so that every movement and every frown become a natural revelation of his individuality—just as Wu Zengqi says in Hanfenlou Wentan: "Thus a chaste woman, even if she chats and laughs by chance, does not lose her dignified bearing; a wanton woman, even if she deliberately puts on reserve, betrays a seductive air from time to time; a girl of a noble and wealthy family, without resorting to adornment, naturally has an air of splendor between her clothes and shoes; a girl of a poor family, even if she dresses up with the utmost care, cannot avoid a bashful form in her movements." (10) Unconscious action shapes the individual's distinctive individuality and determines the spirit and temperament that she involuntarily reveals. From this angle, for the elevation of the human's mind the unconscious has an importance that cannot be ignored. The two processes of consciousness and the unconscious, although they can be coordinated, also inevitably fall into a state of splitting from time to time. This is precisely an important root of the disunity of knowing and doing, of word and deed. Good education should pursue the unity of knowing and doing, the unity of cognition and experience. Literature precisely provides an excellent form of activity for this.
The literary act of narrating sets up an effective path for the reader to establish self-identity. It is precisely in the process of literature's narrating stories, and especially of narrating human action, that the reader deepens his understanding of himself, which helps him to construct self-identity. Frank Kermode holds that the human comes gradually to know the self and the meaning of life, and to establish self-identity, in continually telling his own story, because telling a story is bestowing coherent form upon a fragmented, scattered life, and the self is thereby molded into shape in this process—and literature precisely promotes this process of the human's growth through telling stories. In literary stories, "we establish a concord of past, present, and future, reshaping the past and, in attending to the future, not denying the present crisis." (11) A unified, coherent individual is built on this basis. Conversely, if the self's life lacks the narrative order that story provides and everything becomes "non-narrative," then the human can only become Musil's fragmentary "man without qualities."
If narrating the "story" answers and offers suggestions for "who am I" and "what kind of person do I want to become," then narrating "human action" provides the path for "how to become myself" and "how to become such a person." True identification is action-identification, an involuntary action-identification. Only action ultimately determines what kind of person someone is, what kind of person he is to become, what kind of spiritual realm he has. It is precisely in the process of narrating human action that literature summons the reader to act, undergo, and experience alongside the character, and thereby shapes the reader's unconscious through action, internalizing behavioral norms into the reader's own body. This is precisely literature's foremost subtly transforming effect: it imperceptibly applies behavioral norms to the human, letting the human accept these norms with willing conviction—unlike law or institution, which are merely an external coercive constraint. This is precisely why Confucianism placed the teaching of poetry above the teaching of ritual. Only thus can the human "follow what his heart desires without overstepping the bounds": all his actions issue from the heart, with no need for deliberate effort, yet are always able to conform to the norms, truly achieving the consistency and unity of knowing and doing, and the unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
To be sure, literary works cannot replace the disciplining of action by life-practice; but literature has its own special advantages. Literature can not only transcend personal experience to narrate all manner of human actions but also use narrative strategy and discursive register to regulate the reader's relation to the various actions; it not only lets the reader deeply experience the many flavors of life but can also display the various states of the world for scrutiny, foregrounding before the reader's eyes the various actions that originally lay in an unconscious state, to be dissected and criticized and thereby discriminated in conscious reflection. More importantly: the fictional world that literature provides the reader frees him from entanglement in the various real interests, prompting the reader to act in a manner more in keeping with human nature and to scrutinize the actions of various characters with a gaze more in keeping with human nature, and thereby to raise the self and its action to a new height of humanity.
In Aesthetics of Skepticism, Herbert Mainusch severely criticizes moral preaching, citing Plato's view: "To declare that one already possesses certain knowledge means demanding that others acknowledge and submit, and this must lead to 'instruction.' And instruction, by its very nature, is an extremely dangerous thing." (12) In fact, instruction has already placed oneself and the other in extremely unequal positions; for modern people, this is a means that can only invite aversion and resistance. Fine literary works, by contrast, sidestep preaching. Through literary narration, using narrative strategy and a particular register, they lead the reader into a vivid literary world: either letting the reader share the sorrows and joys of the characters, extending sympathy and admiration to their actions and deeply experiencing the characters' experiences; or letting the reader keep his distance from and reject the narrated characters and himself condemn and castigate their actions, recognizing the essence of the actions and of the social conventions behind them. The work's distinctive narrative person, narrative perspective, and mode of focalization all covertly and effectively regulate the reader's reading attitude and his relation to the various characters and actions, guiding the reader to approach or distance these characters and their actions. At the same time, the discursive register also plays an effective regulating role; for instance, Ba Jin's discourse, which contains a turbulent flow of emotion, often sweeps the reader into the emotional entanglements of the work's characters, following their actions and deeply experiencing their joys, angers, and sorrows; while Lu Xun's distinctive coolness and severity compel the reader to keep a distance from the world of the work and from the characters' actions, to make a profound dissection alongside the author and thereby arouse attention to "cure." Even when literature tells of the vilest events and the ugliest actions, it can still transform them into a warning to the reader, reminding the reader to keep away from the vile and the ugly. Especially literature's penetrating depiction of characters' action exposes, under the beam of art, those actions that have become habitual and unconscious in everyday life. One may say that no other activity provides us with such varied human conditions as literary narration, and no other activity creates, as literary narration does, our ever-changing relations to the various actions, thereby strengthening our self-awareness of our own actions.
Literature splendidly combines the activity of experience with the activity of cognition: compared with life-experience, which often lets one sink deep into it and lose the observation and understanding of the action itself, literary narration lets the reader both deeply experience the various actions and take the various actions as objects of scrutiny, see clearly the conventions behind the action, and form a critical understanding of it; while compared with the knowledge gained through learning, literary narration does not stop merely at intellectual understanding but lets the reader "enter into it and emerge from it," deeply experiencing the various actions, the mind thereby being molded. In literary reading, the reader is both himself and another; he is always continually crossing the boundary of the self, crossing the boundary of the life-world—and this is precisely "empathy" and "sympathy," putting oneself in another's place and feeling as another feels, and at the same time the expansion of the self. In real life the human often finds it very hard to escape self-centeredness and become another, whereas in literary activity this is easily achieved. This ability—cultivated in literary activity—to become another and experience another's action, situation, and fate not only lets the human live centrifugally and effectively expands his individuality and elevates his personality, but at the same time strengthens the understanding and care among people and enhances interpersonal relations. The process of literary reading is at once a process of psychological identification and of behavior-acquisition; it takes the human beyond the range of actual life that the individual is able to reach, and thereby also determines his spiritual character, and literary narration effectively participates in the human's spiritual construction.
The human's spiritual construction is not merely a theoretical problem; more importantly, it is a practical problem, which must be addressed in combination with socio-historical reality.
First, one should see the influence that the millennia-long feudal system has brought to the molding of personality. For feudal centralization to gain its own legitimacy, it must strengthen the notion of hierarchy; otherwise power cannot be effectively exercised. State centralization, clan centralization—even polytheistic religions such as Daoism and Buddhism are decidedly replicas of a strictly hierarchical real society. Under such a centralized system, both national law and clan law can only be deterrent forces for safeguarding power and the hierarchical order, having nothing whatever to do with "fairness" or "justice," and being at most a set of false promises. The Confucian tradition, as the mainstream ideology, although it contains intellectual content of universal value, is fundamentally a tool for safeguarding the social hierarchical order and safeguarding monarchical and clan power. It is itself a parasite bred under monarchy, only trying to safeguard the hierarchical order and centralized rule by replacing the "way of hegemony" with the "kingly way" and "tyranny" with "benevolent governance." This is precisely the root of why rulers almost all venerated Confucianism alone and honored Confucius as the teacher of myriad generations. Yet even so, for the rulers Confucian arts were merely an auxiliary means of mastering the populace; what they truly trusted was the extreme action of violence. Centralized rule cannot give up violence; (13) whoever holds power can wantonly ravage and slaughter the spirit and the body of other individuals.
Even while ostensibly piously sacrificing to Confucius and venerating Confucianism, and even while using the Confucian classics as the questions of the imperial examinations to select officials, the rulers still believed in their bones in violence and relied on violence to maintain the operation of the centralized system; Confucian learning was merely a gilded signboard hung on their lips. Once someone coveted the throne, they would without the slightest softness exterminate the offender's clan to the ninth degree. To seize monarchical power, father could kill son and son could kill father. The replacement of monarchical power relied on violence, the exercise of power relied on violence, and even clan authority could not do without violence. As for commodity exchange, it was severely restricted under the system of valuing agriculture and slighting commerce; the human was firmly imprisoned upon the land and fixed within clan relations, and the possibility of breeding and cultivating interest-individuals from the lower strata of society was thereby strangled. When everyone was bound to the land, and "all under Heaven was the king's land," the individual had nowhere to flee; his fate was already fixed at the moment of his birth, and he could only meekly submit to oppression and extraction. Land, clan-law, monarchical power, religion, and Confucian teaching together constructed an extremely tight, stable system of social structure—as Lu Xun said, what it disciplines can only be slaves or slave-overseers. A hierarchical society is a society that universally loses human value: not only do slaves have no self-value, but the slave-overseer is merely a slave holding a certain power, and even the supreme ruler has no self-value—his entire value is embodied only in the power he wields, and he dreads losing power and becoming worthless, so that he cannot but clutch the handle of power tightly at every moment. The loss of human value precisely provides the basic condition for the rampancy of violent action: as long as one holds power, one can wantonly ravage and slaughter the spirit and body of other individuals.
Both the perpetrator and the victim within the feudal-centralized system equally suffer deeply the psychological harm of violence. In Literature, Power, and Subject, Schwab expounds the imprint that violent action stamps on social psychology. She points out that violence creates "isomorphic oppression": it both inflicts mental trauma on the victim and equally brings nightmares to the perpetrator; both the victim and the perpetrator, and even the next generation, are harmed by violence, and this pattern of violence in the perpetrator culture is internalized by both sides and continually replayed. "The cycle of violence continues, and the hostile parties are isolated from each other, even though they share the same living space and are kin by flesh and blood. Once the power relation reverses, the perpetrator becomes the victim and the victim the perpetrator. But this is not a simple reversal, because the former perpetrators are drawn into a new round of violence with guilt and shame, while the former victims are full of anger and hatred. In a different power configuration, violence makes its appearance again, and the collective mourning of violence remains far off." (14) From this angle, the new form of violence opened up by "taking class struggle as the guiding principle" is still a continuation of the original pattern of violence; it affected every social corner and every person to an unprecedented degree, reshaped the perpetrator culture, and accumulated enormous destructive power for the violent rampage of the "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s. If before this violence had been organizedly launched, guided, and managed, and implemented in a directed way at targets, then the anarchy of the "Cultural Revolution" caused violence to lose all restraint, to flood and run wild, with its destructive power fully exercised. (15) The severe social-psychological trauma it left behind did not receive its due treatment but transformed into another form of mutual-harm pattern in society, because the society shredded by violent action had, beyond interpersonal conflict, no trust, responsibility, or good faith to speak of among its members. Behavioral normativity is established to regulate interpersonal relations; when universal violence destroyed the bottom line of social behavior, tore apart interpersonal relations, and shattered human value and dignity, not only did normativity cease to exist, but it would push society into Agamben's "state of emergency," so that even law was thereby suspended and lost its force. When violence floods, virtue loses the ground on which to stand. Violence destroys individual dignity, and it is bound also to destroy the dignity of the whole nation.
So what changes does present-day China have? Among them, the most important change is economic transformation and the rapid development of the commodity economy. System reform reaches almost all social fields, and its aim is to introduce into them the competition mechanism—that is, the rules of interest-exchange. The reason the commodity economy possesses enormous energy is that it relies on individual interest, fully developing individual desire and fully highlighting individual interest. It is precisely the pursuit of individual interest that endows the commodity economy with motive force and vitality; from this angle, the commodity economy is double-sided: it both injects powerful vitality into social development and fully activates and excavates the human's infinite desire, so that "evil" becomes a driving force of social development. At the same time, it in turn disciplines the human's behavior, making the human grow into an interest-individual whose purpose is the pursuit of private gain. The human is liberated from attachment to the land, the clan rapidly disintegrates, clan-law relations are thoroughly eradicated, and the family too meets an unprecedented impact. Religion degenerates into "embracing Buddha's feet in a moment of crisis," and worshipping Buddha becomes "fulfilling a vow"—this is no longer faith but merely a special form of commodity exchange, an organic component of the whole of commercial activity, and there even exists a kind of distorted form of interest-exchange, rife with the human's bribery of and flattery toward ghosts and gods. The Confucian tradition has long since suffered severe criticism, and even its positive content—such as the thought of "benevolence" and of "the people as the foundation," which maintains interpersonal relations and safeguards social stability—has been cast away like a worn-out shoe. As for Western Enlightenment thought and humanism, they have all along been regarded as a flood of fierce beasts and refused entry. Various kinds of ideological education, because they lack real-world relevance and often stand opposed to and in conflict with the actual state of things, cannot effectively regulate and normalize social behavior, and can only become impractical preaching, high-sounding empty talk. The interest-individual who has grown up in the commodity economy grows deformedly, mired in an unsound social ecology that lacks normativity; the result is to let one dispiritedly see all manner of bad habits: fawning on the powerful, treachery and viciousness, selfishness, narrowness, opportunism, and laxity. The interest-individual has never been able to grow into an independent, rational, autonomous subject. People gradually learn to survive and profit in the crevices of power, scheming to ingratiate themselves with the powerful in order to cheat their way to promotion or earn money; forgery and fraud, flattery and informing, bribery and corruption continually breed and multiply, hard to curb. In literature and art, especially in film and television works as mass culture, the culture of violence still spreads. Apart from war-themed films and TV that deliberately flaunt violence, all manner of palace struggles, harem rivalries for favor, official-circle infighting, market-place trickery, workplace battles royal, rivalries in love, and vicious fights of the jianghu—in which people rack their brains and stop at nothing to scramble for power and gain—emerge endlessly and can best seize the audience's eyeballs. These works that display violence for the enjoyment of violence in fact become a refraction of a pathological social psychology, a component of the culture of violence, and accomplices of the market in catering to the audience; even the cartoon Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf is no exception, and the shadow of class struggle can still be seen in it. Once literature and art give up their own independent stance and sense of responsibility and willingly submit to the market, far from being able to elevate the human's spiritual realm, they can only degrade themselves and keep company with ugliness.
The writer ought to keep a high sense of social responsibility and should shoulder the duty of reforming society and reforming life; this means, first of all, that he cannot merely obey the market but should have his own conscience and commitment. Although the power of literature is feeble and it is powerless to change the social status quo, it should under no circumstances drift with the tide and sink and float with the world, but should, in an active posture, intervene in society and participate in the human's spiritual reconstruction.
Literature naturally has the function of mediating interpersonal relations. Nussbaum says: "Unless people have the capacity, through imagination, to enter the world of distant others and to be stirred by the emotions of such participation, an ethics that justly respects human dignity will not be woven into a real population." (16) Only literature can let the reader become another in imagination and enter the spiritual and emotional world of another. It invites every reader in an equal manner, letting them associate equally with the work's characters and build a sincere emotional bond. It is precisely in the process of literary reading that all the reader's disguises naturally fall away, and the everyday servility or arrogance is converted into self-respect, self-confidence, modesty, and friendliness; he views the narrated story in the posture of a human and appraises the characters' actions from the angle of human nature, thereby helping the reader to know himself anew and to reconstruct harmonious interpersonal relations. And foremost among these is the narration of violent action. Such narration of violence should not spread hatred, and still less should it treat violence as a game of gratification; literary narration should be a protest against that attempt to cover up and forget violence, letting the distorted, secretized, and silenced history speak again. History should not, and cannot, be forgotten; "looking forward" in a way that conceals history will only lead us into another error and only repeatedly tread the same disastrous road; "looking forward" must take the clarification of history as its premise, and at the same time the purpose of clarifying history is precisely to "look forward." If violence—this extreme action that tramples on life and exterminates human nature—has not been duly reckoned with, then the cultural soil that breeds violence still exists, and the problems of behavioral normativity and spiritual reconstruction simply cannot truly be placed on the agenda. "If there is a silencing and denial of the history of violence and a corresponding transformation of its cultural-unconscious influence, then isomorphic oppression becomes all the more universal. If violent histories are treated as open state secrets, then they are bound to be replayed." (17) Literature's reckoning with violence is not aimed at the specific perpetrators—that would only accumulate hatred, deepen the social fissure, and even cause the victims to turn into another group of perpetrators. Literature narrates violence for the sake of confession of violence and the mourning of trauma, placing violence anew in the public space to be put on trial, and thereby reckoning with violence of every kind; moreover, the reckoning should be aimed at violent action itself, and at the psychological trauma violence inflicts on individuals and the ominous shadow it leaves on society, awakening the human's sense of self-value, so as to resist any form of violence and thoroughly bid farewell to violence. Only on the basis of reckoning with the perpetrator culture is it possible truly to restore human value and dignity, to inspire the interest-individual to turn from the pursuit of power and money to an awakening to the value of life, to reconstruct the interest-individual who has grown up in the commodity economy into a rational subject, and thereby to reach reconciliation, heal the interpersonal fissure, re-establish reasonable behavioral norms, build a new spirit, and move toward social harmony.
Another important problem that exists at present is the decline of subjectivity. Althusser directly negated the traditional notion of subjectivity, holding that there is no transcendental subject: "the 'idea' of the human subject exists in his actions, or ought to exist in his actions," and all his actions are governed by material rituals and prescribed by the ideological apparatus, so that "the idea of this subject is produced out of these apparatuses." (18) Ideology "interpellates" the individual as a subject. From this angle, the so-called "subject" is in fact a "subjected being." So long as the subject is produced and interpellated, a "subjected being," then it is bound to change with the change of the conditions of production, to be de-centered with the arrival of the network era—or, one might say, to be de-subjectivated. The human becomes a phantom drifting on the network; psychological identification meets an unprecedented crisis; the self becomes something uncertain; and so the individual no longer needs to bear responsibility for his actions, needing neither a reason for action nor any consideration of action's consequences, and the normativity and ethics established with reference to responsible individuals also, having lost their footing, naturally disintegrate. Clearly, the network era does indeed pose a brand-new problem for the human's spiritual construction. On this, Agamben's line of thought may have important value.
On the problem of subjectivity, Agamben offers a more reasonable view. He regards de-subjectivation and subjectivation as a dialectical double movement and holds that the human becomes a subject precisely through de-subjectivation; the human is between the process of subjectivation and the process of de-subjectivation, between identity and non-identity—this is the new "field of biopolitics." "To see the individual as the coexistence of the individual, the individuating principle, and the non-individual, the non-individuating principle. In other words, life is always constituted simultaneously by two states, the personal and the impersonal. They are always related, even when they are clearly separated. The order of impersonal power related to each life may be called impersonal, and de-subjectivation is the daily experience of colliding with this impersonal power that both transcends us and gives us life. For me, this is the question the art of living ought to have: how to relate to impersonal power? How does the subject relate to this power that does not belong to it and transcends it? This may be called a poetic question." (19) This means that even in the network era the human is still in the double-movement process of de-subjectivation and subjectivation; only the relation between the two has changed; and at the same time, only within this double movement does the human spirit win continual reconstruction. Literary narration is precisely able to participate most opportunely in this process. Literary narration always wanders in the marginal zone of existence; it is situated between reality and non-reality, between self and other, between subjectivation and de-subjectivation, between identity and non-identity, and so it continually renews the human's self-subjectivity and continually reshapes the human's mind and spirit.
At this point, one should further note: in the course of the above discussion we have already touched on two different theories of normativity—the first being Korsgaard's normativity, which stresses self-value and is based on self-identity; the second being Althusser's normativity, which stresses the disciplining force of ideology and is based on social identity. In fact, as a member of society, the human both safeguards self-identity, intending freely to become "myself," and yet cannot but actively change himself, adapt to society, and integrate into society; therefore every society simultaneously contains the above two normativities, which constitute a tension field, a "field of biopolitics," and the individual roams within this tension field, occupying a position uniquely his own, and thereby enjoys distinctive action and an independent spiritual character. It is also for this reason that every human has both individual distinctiveness and the commonality of society or collective—a combination of individuality and commonality. In different societies and different stages of social development, the relative relation of these two normativities continually changes, and there exists between them a tension relation of mutual waxing and waning. As society comes to value the human and self-value, this tension field will gradually tilt toward the side of self-identity. Comparatively speaking, such a society respects the individual's life-value all the more and builds social identity on the basis of the free and all-around development of each individual; it is both full of vitality and not lacking in harmonious relations. Unlike the coercive disciplining of ideology, the stress on the human's life-value not only wins dignity for the self but endows every individual with value; this is bound to demand that all the human's actions take respect for every individual life as their premise, and thereby consciously and voluntarily bring action into reasonable social relations. Clearly, respect for human value is the true basis for establishing normativity: it both prompts the individual to bring his own action consciously into the norms and at the same time demands that others' action conform to the norms, thereby constructing a good social environment and atmosphere. From this angle, the current social status quo, although it has not a few maladies, has after all made considerable progress compared with the past; human value begins to be acknowledged, and the human spirit too becomes relatively independent and comparatively rich and pluralistic. The cause of this change is mainly that economic transformation prompts the growth of the interest-individual, the human's self-consciousness is correspondingly strengthened, and the actual efficacy of ideological disciplining cannot but decline. The problem is that the trauma left by violence has not received its due mourning, and the fractured social relations have not been repaired anew. The human's true value still suffers obscuring by power and interest, so any normativity is bound to be hard to rebuild, with the result that, just as the efficacy of ideological disciplining declines, the normativity based on self-identity still cannot be timely supplemented; and the network era poses yet a difficulty for rebuilding normativity. (20)
Literature, as a special field, certainly cannot detach from the control of ideology, yet it is not equivalent to ideology. Literature's narration of human action mainly does not establish normativity for the human through disciplining. Literature never issues a unified command, nor is it self-righteous, and still less is it willing to impose its own views on others; it respects the independence of every reader, the free choice of every reader, and the distinctive understanding each makes. What literature promises the reader is self-identity, not social identity; it is precisely on entering the literary world that the reader truly experiences the dignity of life and the value of the self, that he truly freely becomes "myself," and at the same time confers the value of life upon all the different individuals. Literature only freezes and exposes the various actions, using narrative strategy and discursive register to create Brecht's "alienation effect," foregrounding action before the human's eyes and inviting the human to scrutinize these actions with a more humane gaze and to criticize them, laying bare the various ugly features within them that do not conform to human nature, that distort human nature, that destroy interpersonal relations, that disintegrate social order, and that even lead humanity into the abyss of disaster—so as to arouse attention to "cure." Literary narration also should not set up forbidden zones: the palace, the battlefield, the marketplace, the workplace, the field of romance, the jianghu—all may enter the horizon of literary narration, and every kind of action ought to be an object of literary depiction; the key lies in whether the writer has a sense of social responsibility, with what strategy he narrates, and what register he adopts to narrate—that is, in what manner he invites and leads the reader to view and judge these actions.
The human is unfinished; he exists "centrifugally," and while continually expanding the world he also expands himself, and all of this depends on human action, on how the human acts. It is action that breaks through the human's ready-made image and decides in which direction he grows, and thereby also determines his spiritual character; and literary narration effectively participates in the human's spiritual construction.