A New Theory of Literary Function

From the 1920s onward, with the advent of systems philosophy, the functions of literature and art have been disclosed more fully than before. The Soviet aesthetician L. Stolovich, by way of the two great systems of “subject — object” and “individual — society” and their mutual relations, proposed eight kinds of functions of art: creation-production, reflection-information, psychological, social, educational, evaluative, ludic, and semiotic. Moisei Kagan, while critically absorbing Stolovich, further placed the functions of art within five sub-systems — “art–society,” “art–man,” “art–nature,” “art–culture,” and “art–art” — and worked out, in each, the function of art. [1, 2] On the whole, this account fits literature too. Especially Kagan’s use of systems theory to place art in the mutual play with society, man, nature, culture, and art itself is highly suggestive. Yet one major flaw in Kagan’s theory lies in his overlooking that the play of literature and art with society, with culture, and with their own being is, all of it, realized through the mediation of “man.” Without that mediation, no function of literature can be realized. To study the functions of literature, then, one must first set one’s eye on the relation of literature and man — and the interplay between literature and man cannot be separated from a concrete socio-cultural background. Only when one places the interplay of literature and man on a concrete socio-cultural ground can one study literary function correctly.

1. Functional Demand and Textual Structure

The function of literature is not single. It is neither only the aesthetic, nor only the cognitive or the pedagogical, but a composite of many functions. Although many writers and theorists especially stress one function of literature — aesthetic, cognitive, lyric, social-critical, and so on — and push that one function to an extreme, the very diversity of their accounts shows, from another side, that the function of literature is not single but manifold.

Textual structure, people hold, determines literary function. This view should be granted as reasonable. For works in different genres, styles, and schools, owing to differences in textual structure, do not develop all their functions evenly. Yet that textual structure determines literary function is only one side of the question. More important is the other side: the reason different textual structures of genres, styles, and schools could take shape and develop at all is precisely that human beings living in concrete socio-cultural settings need different functions of literature. It is because of the human need for certain functions that, from the side of both author and reader, the birth and flourishing of literary genres, styles, and schools with textual structures answering that demand became possible.

In The Transformation of Modes of Narration in the Chinese Novel, Chen Pingyuan made a sample study of the early-twentieth-century Chinese novel. After a fine analysis of the narrative modes — narrative time, point of view, structure — he writes:

Because writers’ understanding and evaluation of the self has changed, the role of the writer’s subject-consciousness in creation and the place of psychological depiction of characters within the novel have likewise changed. So the transformation of novelistic narrative mode has become necessary — from the rise of the diary-form and the letter-form novel, and the shift of the first person from recording what was heard to expressing feeling, to the broader fact that, as the novelist now stresses self-expression, the structural center of the novel moves from plot to the psychology of characters; from a layout following the natural temporal order of events, to a re-editing of narrative time by the gauge of the character’s mood or the writer’s aesthetic ideal; and to choosing a different narrative point of view in order to embody the writer’s subjective intent more fully. All this answers to the May Fourth writers’ self-conscious wish to develop personality and express the self. [3]

Implicit in this account is the thought: it was the awakening of personality and the strengthening of the subject-consciousness during the May Fourth that demanded a corresponding adjustment of novelistic function, and so finally drove the transformation of novelistic narrative modes. Without this special demand for novelistic function, the May Fourth writers would not have paid full attention to new modes of narration in Western fiction, much less consciously imitated them in their own writing. From one angle, then, it was precisely the new functional demand that drove the change in novelistic narrative mode.

By the same token, the rise and flourishing of the zagan (“miscellaneous-feeling”) essay in the May Fourth period is inseparable from the awakened intellectuals’ strong demand to criticize a feudal society — still conservative, ignorant, harsh — and feudal consciousness. It is also inseparable from a socio-cultural background in which the dissolution of feudal royal authority gave intellectuals somewhat more thought-freedom than before, and in which the manifold foreign new currents and new cultures stood in sharp contrast with the ancient, ossified feudal thought-culture. The zagan as a genre was not invented out of thin air; one might say it was “already there in antiquity.” But that it should, by its mocking-anger style of satire, its sharp and trenchant dissection and rebuttal, its keen and deep observation, push the critical function to such fullness — this had never been the case before. As Qian Xingcun (A Ying) observed, speaking of the “sui-gan-ti” of the early May Fourth:

The birth of the brief essay (xiaopin wen), in the early stage of the new literature, was not because anyone wanted to make pieces fine and tight and polished; it was the need of struggle, the need to say something about social transformation. One could not put it as a long set-piece; one had to speak as the moment allowed. This is why the brief essay developed at that time. [4]

The particular social-psychological demand for literature’s social-critical function drove the brief essay — the “dagger and javelin” — toward full development and flourishing.

If one looks at the development of Western literature, the rise and fall of classicism, Romanticism, realism, naturalism, and the manifold modernist currents and schools are also tied to the human demand for certain functions of literature. The pursuit of the lyric function — fired by the breaking-up of the old order and by ardent longing for an ideal world — led to the upsurge of Romantic literature. The demand to criticize the social evils of reality drove the development of critical realism. These are familiar facts. As for the many forms of modernist literature, they are, at root, the response to the great unease that modern man feels before modern society. Although modernist writers generally oppose the utilitarian view of literature, in fact, for them, literature has at the very least the function of fleeing reality and shaking off inner unease. Their works, moreover, in varied and oblique ways, do reflect, expose, and criticize real society. So one can see: the modern Western shift in functional demand on literature is the very mediator through which modernist literature arose.

It is not only across different historical stages that changes in human demand drive the composition of the literary functional system and bring on changes in genres, styles, and schools. Even within one and the same historical period, differences in socio-cultural background and in functional demand cause different peoples to have differing literary functional features and a wide variety of literary forms. Madame de Staël once explained why the English could not produce the kind of witty, refined, and finely-detailed comic jest that the French had. She held that in England most people are wholly absorbed in commerce and look for amusement only as a pause; meanwhile family life, a fairly stern religion, weighty affairs, and a gloomy climate all incline the English to a sullen mood. For this reason,

the English have no comic playwright like Molière, and even if they had, they would not catch the full subtlety of his work . . . the strong passions and the attention to great matters lead the English to see life only in rough outline. [5]

Madame de Staël draws the difference in English and French literary styles from a complex of socio-cultural relations. Within it lies the idea that the English have no French-style elegant and refined comic jest because the particular social and cultural environment did not let the English form a need for that French-style entertainment function.

All these examples also show that the functions of literature are not static and unchanging. They are a dynamic system that flows, waxes and wanes, and adjusts. On the one side, they are conditioned by the functional demand of human beings of differing historical periods, peoples, and regions, all living within concrete socio-cultural settings; they change with the change of demand. The particular demand stimulates and drives literature to develop certain functions, gradually forming distinctive genres, styles, and schools. On the other side, once literature of a given genre, style, or school forms its own structure and has its own functional system, that system in turn — through the mediation of the human being (author and reader) — exerts a certain regulating influence on socio-cultural development, and at the same time stimulates and influences human demand for literary function, building certain habits of demand, or breeding new functional demands.

Changes in literary function are not driven only by the demand-pressure of human beings within socio-cultural settings; they are also conditioned by the structure and functional system of literature itself, and are the result of the self-adjustment of textual structure and functional system, or of the assimilation and accommodation of outside factors. The change in Chinese poetry from the four-character line to the five- and seven-character lines and to regulated verse, then to ci, qu, and free-style poetry, is a successive and gradual sequence in the change of formal structure and lyric function. Again: man’s attention to the real world drives traditional fiction to spin off documentary fiction; his longing for the future world spins off science fiction; his exploration of the inner world spins off stream-of-consciousness fiction; and so on. The new functional features of these novelistic variants can only be the result of adjustment on the basis of the existing functional system of the novel — either the development of a function that had been latent, or the integration of new function by the existing system.

Plainly, the process of literary development is bound to be conditioned by the internal regularity of the existing structure and functional features. Once the self-adjustment of the functional system of a given genre cannot keep pace with human need, it can only turn to another genre for help — taking the strengths of poetry and prose to form the prose-poem, fusing fiction and history into historical fiction, drawing from journalism to form reportage, and so on.

So the study of literary function should not stop with the static analysis of the functions a work possesses, or with the description of the hierarchical relations among sub-systems within a functional system. It must, at the same time, place those functions on a concrete socio-cultural background and, from the mutual relation of man and literature, disclose the dynamic change of the literary functional system. The significance of this study is not only to disclose the composition of literary function but also to offer a fine angle of vision for the study of the laws of literary development — for the history of the evolution of literary function joins together, in a fine way, the inner laws of literary change and the outer factors that bear on them.

What must be emphasized here is that, within the literary functional system, the aesthetic function is the special and basic function that sets literature apart from other writings — scientific and technical papers, applied prose, and so on. The other functions in the literary functional system can take effect only when fused with the aesthetic function. Otherwise, those other functions not only fail to take effect actively and fully, but the text in fact, having lost the aesthetic function, ceases to be literature at all. Herbert Marcuse points out:

The political potential of art lies within art itself, in the aesthetic form as art. [6]

To this should be added: the political, cognitive, ethical, and every other function of literature is contained within literature itself, within the aesthetic form as literature. Lu Xun, with his analogy of flower and color, also stated that

all literature and art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is literature and art, [7]

and so set forth, with great force of persuasion, the indispensable functional feature of literature and art.

2. Intentional Relation and the Realization of Literary Function

Literary function is latent. Its realization is conditioned both by its own latent functional system and by the intentional relation built between the reader and the work. Because of this feature, the functions of one and the same literary text are constantly being newly disclosed, while other functions are constantly dying away. That is to say: not only on the whole is the history of literary development a history of the constant evolution of literary function, but even for a single literary text, its existence is a history of functional evolution — the constant generation of certain textual functions endows the text with enduring vitality, so that it can hold readers across the ages, while other texts, whose functions gradually exhaust themselves, become at last historical corpses.

In the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gave a fine account of the birth of myth, noting:

All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination — so with the actual mastery of these forces, mythology disappears. [8]

Marx’s words may be understood from two sides. First: it was precisely because the ancient Greeks needed, in spirit, to overcome and dominate the forces of nature that Greek mythology came into being. Once this need was lost, the driving force behind the birth of myth was lost too. Second: for the ancient Greeks, myth did indeed carry the function of overcoming and dominating the forces of nature; though this function was illusory — a “pseudo-function” — for the ancient Greeks it really existed. With the development of human practice and the human grasp of the laws of nature, the function that once held the dominant position among the ancient Greeks died away; instead, the previously secondary aesthetic function rose to become the chief function. With its splendid and strange imagination, myth opened up for later ages an aesthetic universe and offered abundant nourishment to later artistic creation. Sima Qian’s Shi ji, when it was born, existed as history rather than as literature — that is, its function was, in Sima Qian’s own words, to

search out the boundary between heaven and man, and follow through the transformations of past and present.

Gradually, the literary grace it carries — especially its vivid, spirit-catching depiction — has made the Shi ji, even as history, also become an outstanding model of biographical literature. The Zhuangzi at the time was “writing for the sake of doctrine,” with debate and rebuttal as its main function. Yet for later ages, what is most admired is its sweeping, sea-wide prose and brilliant fancy. These examples show: in the process of reception, the text is constantly being transformed. This change not only alters the value of a literary text but may even bring about its qualitative metamorphosis, changing its very face. As Terry Eagleton writes:

A piece of writing may begin as history or philosophy and later be classed as literature; or it may begin as literature and later be valued for its importance in archaeology. [9]

In such cases, the functional shift of the text has already brought about a qualitative change in the text itself. Eagleton goes further to argue:

Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and others have literariness thrust upon them. In this respect what one becomes is far more important than what one is. What matters may not be where you come from, but how people regard you.

and even, on this ground, holds that

there is no such thing as an “essence” of literature. [9]

Plainly, this view — which disregards the features of textual structure and assigns the realization of function wholly to the attitude of the reader, that is, to “how one is regarded” — shows its error in being pushed to extreme. The reader’s attitude is indeed important, but the realization of textual function cannot but be conditioned by the text’s own latent functional system. The Zhuangzi can be read as a literary work, while the Mo bian (Mohist Discourse) hardly can — the important reason being that the rich imagination and metaphor of the former carry aesthetic factors, while the latter lacks them. By the same token, not every historical record can become a literary work. The Shi ji can be a model of biographical literature precisely because of its features in narration and depiction. When people do not seek to learn social-historical condition from it but mainly enjoy its vivid depiction and spirit-catching language, the originally latent aesthetic function of the historical record gets realized in the activity of appreciation, and becomes its primary function. To be sure, the “how one is regarded” that Eagleton stresses is genuinely crucial for the realization of literary function. “How one is regarded” is just what intentional relation the reader builds with the text. The latent functional system of the literary text only provides the conditions for the realization of function; the building of the intentional relation is the indispensable path for that realization.

Marx pointed to the manifold relations between man and the world:

The whole, when it appears in the head as a thought-whole, is the product of the thinking head, which takes possession of the world in its own special way — a way different from the artistic, religious, or practical-spiritual mode of taking possession of the world. [10]

Husserl, from another angle, expressed the complexity of subject-object relation:

Cognitive experiences have an intention; this belongs to the essence of cognitive experience; they mean something, they relate in this or that way to an object. [11]

Because literature is not a pure-and-only aesthetic object but a composite of many functions; because human need is manifold and often interwoven; because environment and background conditions are unsteady — the intentional relation a reader builds with a text in appreciating a literary work is often not a purely aesthetic relation but a more complex one. Such complex intentional relations determine that the realization of the functions of one and the same literary text must vary. The writer always tries by various means to lure the appreciator into building, first of all, an aesthetic relation with his work.

A well-known example outside literature is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. A urinal in the place where it “should be” is regarded with a practical eye. Once Duchamp signs it and brings it into the exhibition hall, its value changes; it becomes a work of art. The urinal is still a urinal, only that the exhibition hall and the signature — both “strange” to a urinal — signal one to regard it aesthetically and to build a new intentional relation with it. The lines and color one had not noticed before now suddenly present themselves in an eye-catching way; the once-subordinate aesthetic function becomes its primary function. The literary work uses defamiliarizing means to strengthen its aesthetic relation with the reader.

The feature of literary language — that which sets it apart from other modes of utterance — is that it “transforms” ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary technique, ordinary language is intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, inverted. Language is “made strange,” and by this defamiliarization, everyday life suddenly looks unfamiliar . . . So those habitual responses give birth to new meanings; objective things become easier to “perceive” . . . and the world thus looks new. [9]

Formalist criticism, by using literature’s autonomous function to exclude its social function, does push to an extreme. Yet its emphasis on literary technique, and its account of what technique does, is full of suggestive force. Literature is regarded as literature, and the social function of literature is often realized first through its aesthetic function, just because literature uses all manner of techniques — image, rhythm, meter, and the “defamiliarizing” means of narrative depiction and diction — to build a certain “appellative structure” (Aufrufstruktur). This structure hints at and calls upon the reader to build with it not a practical but an aesthetic intentional relation, so that the aesthetic function — which is the very feature of literature — is realized first, and the basic characteristic of literature is thereby preserved.

Another factor influencing the building of the intentional relation between reader and text is the reader’s cultural-psychological structure and needs. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in Goethe’s eye, only

showed the result of a great task laid upon one who was unfit to bear it. [13]

In Freud’s eye, however, it manifested the repressed Oedipus complex, so that the inner desire dwelling in the unconscious gained release and vicarious satisfaction. This difference is not only a difference of interpretation of meaning; it is that different cultural-psychological structures make Goethe and Freud build different intentional relations with the same text, Hamlet. A literary text is a multi-sided, multi-layered, organic whole filled with life. Readers with different cultural-psychological structures, used to reading literary works from their own respective angles, are bound to build different intentional relations with different sides and different layers of the text — letting different functions be disclosed and realized. As Lu Xun said of A Dream of Red Mansions:

Even in the matter of authorial intent, the reader’s eye yields all kinds of readings: the classicist sees the Yi-jing; the moralist sees lust; the man of feeling sees love; the revolutionary sees opposition to the Manchus; the gossip sees palace secrets. [14]

Readers’ different cultural-psychological structures let A Dream of Red Mansions realize its different functions — cognitive, ethical, emotional, social-propagandistic, and so on.

Even for one and the same reader, with different needs and different reading aims, the intentional relations with the same text differ. Pure appreciation is not the same as research into the text; even research by the formalist method differs from research by cultural or psychoanalytic angles. For

the selective character of perception — its “this rather than that” quality — is itself an aspect of intentionality. I cannot, in one instant, attend to one thing without missing another. Even as we affirm one thing, we negate another. [15]

To this it must be added: the selectivity of perception also shows in the fact that I cannot, in one instant, attend to one side of a thing without missing another side. For instance: when Marx regarded the Greek epics as an object of appreciation — taking aesthetic enjoyment from the art created by the “normal child” developed in the most consummate way — and exclaimed that the Greek epics,

in some respects, are a norm and an unattainable model, [10]

he stood in a different intentional relation with them than when he took them as an object for studying the social organization, the modes of production and life, of the “higher stage of barbarism.” That the human being can grasp the object as a whole is not because he can build all intentional relations with it at the same moment and understand every side of it at once. It is because, under the guidance of intention, he can purposefully select sides in turn, understand them in turn, and then integrate them. The manifold functions of a literary text are realized through this integration. So the manifold intentional relations between reader and text named above are, strictly speaking, not synchronic but diachronic, a process: in one instant they do not coexist, but on the whole they fuse and interweave.

Yet another factor influencing the intentional relation between reader and text is the environment, or more precisely the socio-cultural background. Just as the text’s own “appellative structure” signals to and calls the reader (though the reader can choose to ignore it), the socio-cultural background exerts on the reader a kind of psychological “pressure,” builds a certain mental set, and pushes the reader into a particular relation.

Thomas Munro, in Toward Science in Aesthetics, writes:

Some artworks have only certain particular uses, and when these uses die away, the artworks become dead things in cultural history, of interest only to the archaeologist. Others give rise to new functions, even to social uses their creators never dreamed of, and so gain a new life. [16]

Stolovich puts it well:

Values are formed within social-historical systems. They are not only relative in time but, if one may put it so, relative in space as well. In other words: in one and the same time, in different human communities historically formed and in the practice of national life, various — and sometimes, in some aspects, opposed — values may arise and exist. [17]

Here it is clearly indicated that the realization of literary function differs from person to person and from one socio-cultural background to another. This difference is not only because the socio-cultural background orients the mind in a certain direction; it is also because the background itself influences and shapes the human cultural-psychological structure. Lukács, speaking of the relation of Tolstoy to West-European literature, said:

Once the features of one people are received by another, they are no longer the same as in the original national culture . . . and what now takes effect is no longer the same factor that gave the writer his influence at home. Sometimes the writer’s social and cultural background is already blurred or has even entirely vanished in the foreign country, and this often misleads the reader. Yet at the same time, some great features of this writer often come out more sharply in the foreign country than at home. [18]

By the same token, the different interpretations and social uses of A Dream of Red Mansions and of Li Shangyin’s “Jin Se” (Decorated Zither) across different historical periods and socio-cultural backgrounds are excellent witness. The same Dream of Red Mansions has been read as the “figurative history of the rise and fall of a family,” “a classic expounding feudal Confucian morality,” “a meddling in current affairs that alludes to major political events,” or “the history of the decline of feudal society.” “Jin Se,” for its part, has had the readings of the “Linghu Singing-Maid,” the “zither-song,” “mourning the dead,” “self-lament,” “love poem,” and so on. Such manifold readings are not only differences of understanding; they show, too, the differences in the realization of the textual function under different historical conditions.

3. Function and Pseudo-Function, Part-Function and Whole-Function

In Aesthetics and Systems Method, Kagan divides the functions of art into two kinds: one is the function of the work for the creator in the process of creation; the other is the “function of the work itself,” or rather the function of the work for the reader. The division is reasonable.

At the 1949 Nobel Prize ceremony, William Faulkner remarked:

The writer’s duty is to make the human heart noble, to revive courage, honor, hope, pride, compassion, pity, and self-sacrifice — these sentiments which once were the glory of mankind — and to help man stand up. [19]

Graham Greene said:

Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, who do not compose or paint, can manage to escape the madness, the melancholy, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition. [20]

Or as the Grand Historian Sima Qian wrote,

his thoughts had been knotted within and could find no outlet, and so he set down past matters and turned his mind to those to come.

Or Lu Xun, whose aim was to lay bare the disease in order to draw attention to its cure. Or Sidney, who wrote so as to win favor and lasting fame. Or Richards, with the organizing and balancing of conflicting impulses, or Eliot with the flight from emotion and personality . . . All these — whether creation as the fulfillment of a sacred calling or as a means of self-therapy, of venting feeling, balancing impulses, fleeing personality, or even of pursuing reputation — show that creation, for the writer himself, truly carries a functional effect. And this function is not limited to the sides the writer himself is conscious of; it is the interweaving fusion of many functions.

Yet the function a literary text has for its creator is not the same as the function it has for the reader. First, this is because, in the process of objectifying the writer’s aesthetic consciousness, there is wear and loss; the writer cannot transmit to the reader, in full, what he himself has felt, in the hope of arousing in the reader the same response in reading; nor can he have all his intent and good wishes fully embodied in the text. There are technical reasons for this, but more importantly, there is the untransmittability brought by the writer’s vague and uncertain mood and intent — what is meant by “Heart-painting and heart-voice both miss truth.” Or because the creative process is a full-bodied investment of the writer’s being — both conscious and unconscious — the literary text as an objectified form may have locked into it functions of which the writer himself was unaware. Cao Yu, in writing Thunderstorm, did not have an explicit consciousness of wanting to correct, satirize, or attack anything, yet the play in fact carries a very strong critical and cognitive value. Second, once the text is born, it has already left the womb that bore it — the writer — and become an independent existence. At this point, the disclosure of literary function no longer depends on the author but on the reader who builds an intentional relation with the text. Literary value thus becomes

a historical value added on to the literary work, a value that changes with historical change. [21]

The reader not only keeps discovering new meanings and offering new interpretations from the text; he also keeps disclosing new functions. Especially when writer and reader stand on different historical, social, and cultural backgrounds, the functional difference grows greater. Li Bai’s poem “To Wang Lun” may for Li Bai himself have had only the social function of expressing friendship and reluctance at parting; for later readers it goes far beyond personal interchange and transmits a deep, sincere human friendship, with broad cognitive value and emotional appeal. The “Spring River Song” for Emperor Jianwen of the Jin was about the true feelings at a river crossing; for Wang Fuzhi it was nothing less than a wake-up call about human life. The function of the original poem is thus drawn out. Modern researchers’ attempts to find in Journey to the West a rational thought-pattern, and to draw from it lessons for future development, are something Wu Cheng’en never imagined. These new functions, of course, are disclosures of latent potentials in the text, not imposed at will.

In fact, in the process of reception the reader may also confer on the literary text a hypothetical function — what may be called a “pseudo-function.” The god-pleasing power of the Dionysian dithyramb is just such a function imposed by the ancient Greeks according to their own understanding. Liu Shipei also pointed out:

Verse-form writing, though it varies in its main forms, has at root grown out of sacrificial ritual,

with the function of

song to announce success to the gods and the inscription to extol the merit of ancestors. [22]

Just as primal man, out of primal thinking, endowed primal art with magical function, so modern man, often out of conscious or unconscious need, endows literature with functions its textual structure does not actually possess, or arbitrarily inflates some of its functions. RAPP, in the latter half of the 1920s in the Soviet Union, broke loose from the specific character of literature and over-stressed its social-organizing function. The Western psychoanalytic school took literature and art one-sidedly as the vicarious satisfaction of man’s repressed sexual instincts. During the “Cultural Revolution,” Journey to the West could even be used as a tool of class struggle and line struggle. Such arbitrarily conferred or inflated “functions” are in fact pseudo-functions. Although the pseudo-function, having departed from the actual text, often vanishes quickly with the development of human knowledge or the receding of the particular historical background, it does really exist in the process of reception, and is always intermingled with the actual literary functions. As Thomas Munro puts it:

Which functions were and are really effective, and which are purely imagined? In fact, the supposed function is sometimes a mixture of the function that the work truly has and the function imagined for it. [23]

This is not to say that the pseudo-function is purely negative. It is to say that the pseudo-function is a “normal” phenomenon in the process of reception. Under certain conditions, it may even play a positive role. The myth’s function of conquering the forces of nature is plainly a pseudo-function, yet it was precisely the existence of this pseudo-function that drove the development of myth and at the same time endowed humankind with a great spiritual support. In the reception of foreign literature, “mis-reading” often occurs and through it artistic innovation is set off. Brecht’s reading of Beijing opera, and modern writers’ reading of primal art — they twisted and misunderstood their object, but in so doing they endowed the object with the function of inspiring artistic renewal.

The latent functional system of literature depends on the text as a whole. It is the fruit of the textual structure’s own organization and adjustment. Strictly speaking, then, literary function is whole-function. The function held by a part of the text is bound to be conditioned by the whole, for the text — as an organic structure, or what Susanne Langer calls a “living form” — has every part determined by the organic nature of the whole. The whole determines the parts, not the parts the whole. The “public notice” at Mount Jingyang Ridge in Water Margin, once it has entered the whole novel, has lost its original function as a notice. It no longer tells us of any real event in actual life; it is only a fictional set-piece needed for the development of the plot. A. Isenberg, in the essay “The Aesthetic Function of Language,” cites a similar example:

Suppose, in a novel, we read the line: “On the X day of the X month, 19XX, a man stood for three hours at the door of Notre Dame de Paris.” This sentence is not just ink-marks or empty talk; it conveys a thought. It places us before a world humming with human activity. But about the real world outside the novel, it tells us nothing — or gives us mistaken information. Yet we can also regard the same sentence as a statement and go on to check its historical accuracy. [24]

The same sentence, when it becomes part of a novel, has lost its original referential function and has been transformed into a different function.

Readers often pick out famous lines from shi and ci poetry to recite and savor; on the surface, the lines do not seem to change their function in being detached from the original poem. But fine comparison shows differences. Li Shangyin’s lines

The spring silkworm spins to its death and only then is the silk done; / the wax candle burns to ash and only then are the tears dry

in the “Untitled” poem express deep love between man and woman; once detached from the concrete poetic setting, they may be read as an attitude toward life, and their functional reach is much widened. Yu Jiaxi was rather critical of the line-picking habit:

I hold that the poem “Spring Palace Lament” takes the fair lady as a figure for the gentleman and is deep in implication. The first four lines complain without anger and fully catch the airs of the poets of the Three Hundred Poems. The middle two lines write the spring-palace scene, with “lament” already lying within. The closing lines write from the opposite side, with words spent and meaning unspent. Reading the whole, one sees the marvel; the poem cannot be sought by picking out a line. If one drops the head and tail and keeps only the “spring-warm” couplet, then the line could equally apply to a mountain temple or a thatched study; the face is still the same, but the spirit is wholly different . . . To set aside the whole poem and to praise only this couplet is the view of the vulgar; not worth speaking of. [25]

Even from the angle of the aesthetic function alone, the picked line and the whole poem already differ.

Roman Ingarden divides the literary work into four strata: sound, units of meaning, schematized aspects, and the represented objectivities within the intentional states of affairs projected by the sentences. He further holds:

In the literary work the strata are interconnected in structure and function, as the organs of an organism are interconnected. Some elements exercise function for other elements, and the concretized artwork has a chief function. [26]

The strata of a literary work bear on one another — or rather, each stratum is conditioned by the whole. This can be illustrated very well by Lev Vygotsky’s example of Bunin’s “Easy Breathing.” In the short story, Bunin slices apart the natural course of the original plot of a girl’s being killed and rearranges it. The resulting textual whole — the interplay between structural form and plot content — greatly weakens the moral-pedagogical sense of the original story and strengthens the aesthetic function. [27] That is to say, the function of the work is no longer determined by plot-content alone; it is determined by the whole as built jointly by content and form. The same goes for poetry: one cannot analyze sound, image, or symbolic implication in isolation. One can only treat them as a whole, analyze them within the mutual play of an organic whole. The function held by a part or a stratum in detachment from the textual whole becomes, with respect to the whole, often a pseudo-function.

In sum, literary function is a latent system organically built. It is conditioned by the overall structure of the text; its realization depends on the intentional relation built with the reader; and at the same time, it is a variable that changes with the changing demand for literary function on the part of human beings within concrete socio-cultural settings.