Reception Aesthetics' Journey in China: “Speaking Along,” “Speaking Toward,” and “Speaking Against the Grain”

With the rise of the “aesthetics fever” of the 1980s, China's field of literary theory achieved fairly notable results in the study, transmission, and reception of Western reception aesthetics. Reception aesthetics underwent a cross-cultural travel and took root in China. If one examines carefully the first station of reception aesthetics' “Sinicization,” (1) one finds that there mainly existed three different concrete paths and typical forms: Jin Yuanpu's “speaking along,” Long Xietao's “speaking toward,” and Zhu Liyuan's “speaking against the grain.”

I

Jin Yuanpu starts by clearing the theoretical resources, methodological principles, and lines of thinking of Western reception aesthetics, taking phenomenology and contemporary hermeneutics as the theoretical foundation for expounding reception aesthetics. He clearly combs out the theoretical origins of reception aesthetics. In his comprehensive introduction to Western reception-and-response theory, he says: “The phenomenology and contemporary hermeneutics represented by Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer constituted the chief philosophical foundation of reception-and-response theory; the poststructuralism or deconstruction represented by the late Heidegger, Barthes, Derrida, and Paul de Man also exerted an important influence on reception-and-response theory (and especially on American reader-response criticism). And the postmodern debate that arose among them bears on the fundamental problems of contemporary literary and cultural development, and therefore played a most crucial role in the theoretical orientation of reception-and-response theory.” (2) Jin Yuanpu makes a comparative discrimination of the epistemological theories of phenomenology and contemporary hermeneutics, from Descartes to Kant, and holds that this new current of thought “greatly shook the ontological status of the traditional epistemology that had once been regarded as the universally valid standard, and strove to liberate philosophy from the hegemony of scientism and logocentrism.” (3) In the horizon of contemporary hermeneutics, besides the traditional epistemology that grasps the logical with “knowing,” more important is the “apprehending” (wu) at the ontological level, and contemporary hermeneutics seeks how this ontological-level “apprehending” is possible. To this end, one must open a path of interpretation completely different from that of traditional epistemology. One may say that Jin Yuanpu's series of essays on reception aesthetics carry out their theoretical exploration precisely along the philosophical line of thought of phenomenology and contemporary hermeneutics, and go on to make theoretical exposition and extension with respect to problems in ancient Chinese literary theory. His research belongs to “speaking along.”

Long Xietao, for his part, recognized that, on the very point of stressing the integrality and experientiality of aesthetic activity, Western reception aesthetics has an inner consistency with ancient Chinese literary theory. Taking this precisely as his inspiration, and standing on Chinese experience, he adopts a mode of Chinese-Western mutual verification to construct his own “literary reading-studies.” At the same time, Long Xietao keenly realized that Western reception aesthetics has an incongruity between its ontology and its methodology. On one hand, reception aesthetics stresses the integrality, experientiality, and indeterminacy of aesthetic reception; on the other hand, its interpretation of aesthetic reception adopts the path of logical analysis. It is precisely this logical analysis that makes reception aesthetics unable to reveal aptly and intimately the subtle and marvelous places of literary appreciation and aesthetic activity, so that it misses the essence of aesthetic experience and turns the lively, mysterious activity of literary reception into a conceptual world imprisoned by language and logic. As against this, “China's traditional theory of reading and interpretation regards the textual object as a vital, spirit-filled organic whole pulsing with the rhythms of life; it greatly stresses the exploration of the various subtle and marvelous aesthetic-psychological activities in the activity of literary interpretation, and, from the angle of direct intuition and limpid transparency, reveals the characteristics and laws of the activity of literary reading and interpretation—surpassing, in the richness, vividness, and integrality of its content, the kind of pure-rational explanation of Western modern reception aesthetics that fixes its eye on ‘one twig and one leaf’ with close and tedious minuteness.” (4) Therefore, in Literary Reading-Studies, Long Xietao does his utmost to avoid the malady of the Western logical-analytic method, and adopts the mode of thinking and mode of utterance of China's traditional theory of reading and interpretation to expound literary reading-reception. A fairly notable example is his exposition of the “point of indeterminacy” and the “blank.”

Ingarden holds that the “point of indeterminacy (blank)” is the key that distinguishes the literary work—this intentional object—from the real object. Because the literary work is a multi-layered construction—including the layers of sound, image, schematized aspects, and the object depicted in the intentional state-of-affairs projected by the sentence—and these layers together constitute an outline-like framework, requiring the reader to concretize it in the reading process: this determines that the literary work is filled with points of indeterminacy and has indeterminacy, and makes the reader's active reading-imagination possible. (5) Iser, on the basis of Ingarden's concept, goes further to propose the theory of the “blank.” He says: “The term indeterminacy refers to the gap in the sequence of the determinacy or schematized appearance of the intentional object; and the blank refers to the empty place in the whole textual system. The filling-in of the blank brings about the interaction of the textual model.” (6) The “blank” thus becomes the key element by which Iser analyzes reading-dynamics and interprets aesthetic reception. Whether Ingarden or Iser, both use logical analysis to carry out theoretical exposition and inference. Although Ingarden stresses the organic integrality of literature and the systematicity of its layers, this subjective layer-cutting of his has in fact already dismembered the integral intentional object of literature. Iser, for his part, makes a tedious logical analysis of the dynamic role of the blank in literary reading—piling up terminology, his expression cumbersome and obscure—and likewise can hardly avoid suffocating the vital, vigorous activity of literary reception. Long Xietao, however, adopts a completely different path of interpretation. He does not make excessive theoretical discrimination of concepts, but cites a great many vivid literary examples, adding apt commentary in concise language, letting the reader personally apprehend the role of the blank in the reading of the work. This practice of Long Xietao's—selecting his theoretical mainstay from Western reception aesthetics while taking China's rich ancient thought of literary reading and reception as the foundation, and emulating China's traditional mode of thinking and utterance to construct his own literary reading-studies—is “speaking toward.”

However, any paradigmatic theoretical discourse has its limitations, and ancient Chinese literary theory likewise cannot be the exception: its mode of discourse has its own peculiar characteristics and its own peculiar cultural context, which accords with ancient Chinese poetics yet is relatively estranged from contemporary literary experience. While Long Xietao stresses the return to tradition, his discussion also limits his own contemporary horizon, and to some degree blunts the capacity to interpret contemporary experience and the keen penetration of reception aesthetics.

Zhu Liyuan is the earliest scholar in China to translate works of reception aesthetics. His Reception Aesthetics chiefly interprets reception aesthetics from the epistemological angle, which differs in purport from the reception aesthetics of the Konstanz school built on the philosophical foundation of phenomenology and contemporary hermeneutics; it is a “rewriting” of reception aesthetics.

In constructing his own system of reception aesthetics, Zhu Liyuan first explores the mode of literature's existence from the ontological angle. He seeks a theoretical basis from Marxist thought, carefully discriminates Sartre's thought, and goes on to fix his eye on Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience, discovering that, although Dufrenne too regards literature and art as an intentional object, he does not deny the objective fact that the literary-artistic work—apart from the appreciating subject, apart from aesthetic perception—still exists, only existing as a thing, an entity, as a possible aesthetic object and not as a real aesthetic object. Therefore “Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience to some degree overcomes the transcendental idealism of his teacher Husserl, yet preserves phenomenology's reasonable line of thought of raising, by way of the mediation of intentionality, the unity-relation of subject and object to the ontological level, thereby resolving fairly well the ontological difficulty of literature-art and the aesthetic object, and conferring upon the subject-object relation in the aesthetic state an ontological status and significance.” (7)

Zhu Liyuan not only borrowed Dufrenne's casting-off of the transcendental idealism in Husserl's phenomenology, finding the key to resolving the ontological difficulty of literature; he also placed literary creation and reception within the process of social intercourse, employing Marx's theory of production and consumption to interpret them. Like Jauss, Zhu Liyuan too pays great attention to the historicity of literary reception; but he does not, like Jauss, always grasp Gadamer's “fusion of horizons” as the key for interpreting reception with a historical horizon, but rather transfers his affection to Marx's theory of production and consumption. This shift thoroughly changed the phenomenological and contemporary-hermeneutic foundation of reception aesthetics, and brought literary creation and reception into the horizon of the sociology of literature, treating them as a kind of “production and consumption” practice, while also laying a foundation for his use of epistemology to discuss literary reception.

In Zhu Liyuan's view, “the reading and reception of literature is, fundamentally, still an epistemological problem.” At the same time, he also holds that Ingarden's The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art likewise places literary reception “within the epistemological framework for examination.” However, literary epistemology differs from general epistemology; it contains two large aspects: “One is the individual-reading aspect, which chiefly studies the psychological process and mechanism of literary reading, that is, the aesthetic-psychological aspect of literary reading; the other is the group-reception aspect, which chiefly explores the social-communicative activity of literature and its characteristics, that is, the literary-sociological aspect of literature.” (8) And so Reception Aesthetics expounds the epistemology of literary reception in two dedicated chapters, from the psychological and the social angle respectively. Evidently, relative to the Konstanz school, Zhu Liyuan's reception aesthetics carries out a creative “misreading”; one may call it “speaking against the grain.”

Zhu Liyuan's “speaking against the grain” has important value; in fact, his Reception Aesthetics produced an extremely broad influence within China. Although the epistemological theoretical horizon of the work is at odds with the reception aesthetics of the Konstanz school, so long as there exist rational and cognitive factors in the activity of reading, the reception theory he constructs has its reason for existence.

Looking one layer deeper, Piaget's genetic epistemology has in fact already leapt out of the framework of pure speculative philosophy and is no longer imprisoned by traditional epistemology. He proposes the concept of “schema (cognitive structure)” and uses the “assimilation–accommodation” model to explain the change of cognitive structure, interpreting the mutual action of subject and environment in the process of cognitive development. Therefore the cognitive construction he expounds is no longer limited to grasping the object with epistemological “knowing,” but also contains the more complex content of experiential activity and the like. Zhu Liyuan's reception theory, built on the foundation of Piaget's genetic epistemology, naturally makes up for the deficiency of traditional epistemology, while also lending his own reception aesthetics a coloring of rationalism. His “speaking against the grain,” as one branch of “Sinicized” reception theory, properly has its value. However, the object of Piaget's genetic-epistemological research is, after all, chiefly cognitive development, and not aesthetic-experiential activity; therefore, using the genetic-epistemological paradigm to interpret aesthetic reception, though it can explain many problems, can hardly avoid a certain deviation. For, generally speaking, aesthetic reception is a latently-conventionalized experiential process, and not cognitive development, still less a purposeful learning process. The reception-aesthetic theoretical paradigm Zhu Liyuan constructs is more apt for interpreting the problem of aesthetic cognition in literary reception—especially the reception of literature and art that has appreciative difficulty and resistance, such as literary translation-reading and the appreciation of formally-unfamiliar modern and contemporary literary-artistic works—for, because these works and the reception-subject have an obstacle between them, one must, through learning, eliminate the experiential gap before one can go on to deep experience; and this is precisely where genetic epistemology has its scope to act.

If we further notice that reception aesthetics is chiefly theoretical research aimed at literary reception, then we cannot but discover that literary reception is by no means pure aesthetic experience, but the interweaving of many kinds of complex activity such as “stirring, observing, grouping, and grievance” (xing, guan, qun, yuan); and so Zhu Liyuan's reception theory can, on not a few planes, make effective interpretation of literary reception.

The various phenomena of the transmission of Western reception aesthetics in China, set out above, give us an important enlightenment: any cross-cultural reception ought to be diversified—it can be “speaking along,” “speaking toward,” and also “speaking against the grain.” So long as it is serious, earnest academic exploration, so long as it can effectively interpret literary activity within a certain range, it has its legitimacy. Only thus can it produce extremely abundant results. And the diversified reception, in turn, often depends on the complexity and changeability of the reception-background and on the differences in the receivers' own theoretical standpoint and theoretical horizon (fore-structure); it is precisely the different reception-backgrounds and the individuals' peculiar theoretical standpoints and horizons that determine their different understandings, interpretations, and remakings of reception aesthetics.

II

At the beginning of the New Era, with the opening of China's national gate, all manner of Western cultural currents of thought came thick and fast. But the influence of “Leftist” thought had not yet been thoroughly cleared away, and the shadow of the notion of “the struggle between two lines” had still not entirely dissipated; such philosophical currents as Western phenomenology, contemporary hermeneutics, and existentialism, bearing on their bodies the unwashed labels of idealism and irrationalism, were more or less tinged with the suspicion of being “alien elements.” At this juncture of the alternation of old and new thought, when the embers of the line-struggle still smoldered, Zhu Liyuan—as a theorist who took the construction of Marxist aesthetics as his own charge—could hardly transfer his own aesthetic standpoint onto so “problematic” a theoretical base-point, for that would very likely become an adventure of forfeiting the standpoint and identity he already possessed. He could not but proceed from his own practical aesthetic view, and, knowingly or unknowingly, made a creative misreading of reception aesthetics. It is precisely this shift—using epistemology to remake reception aesthetics, conferring on it a stable and legitimate new identity, an identity according with the theoretical “fore-structure” that contemporary Chinese education has standardized and constructed—that made reception aesthetics get transmitted and applied swiftly and indisputably within China's literary research. This too is precisely the important reason why, among all the “Sinicized” reception aesthetics, Zhu Liyuan's Reception Aesthetics became the most broadly influential work. As Said pointed out in discussing the relation of inheritance between Williams and Lukács and Goldmann: “No reading is neutral or innocent; by the same token, every text and every reader is, to some degree, the product of a theoretical standpoint, no matter how implicit or unconscious that standpoint may be.” (9) Zhu Liyuan's theoretical standpoint determined his peculiar mode of reading Western reception aesthetics, and also determined the rationalist character of his own Reception Aesthetics.

On the other hand, ever since reception aesthetics was born of the Konstanz school, it has been broadly transmitted in various countries and has continually undergone variation—for instance, the former Soviet Union's Mehlauer made a new interpretation of reception aesthetics from the angle of reflection-theory. This, perhaps, built a theoretical bridge for Zhu Liyuan's construction of his own reception aesthetics.

Zhu Liyuan's deep interest in reception aesthetics was by no means merely because it is a newly-arisen theory of the twentieth century; its cause is closely bound up with his theoretical standpoint. Zhu Liyuan greatly values the social, political, and cultural background out of which reception aesthetics arose. He holds that the nightmare of the Second World War once made stability the universal demand of postwar German society, and the depoliticizing tendency for a time held overwhelming advantage. Correspondingly, the “stylistic-critical school,” which opposed using political and economic experiential reality to interpret literary works, arose. Entering the 1960s, with the intensification of global turbulence and the sharpening of domestic contradictions, social reality and politics again became the focus of people's attention, and philosophical and literary-artistic currents of thought also swiftly showed a “repoliticizing” tendency. The reception aesthetics represented by Jauss made its effort in response: they combined the literary text with the historical eye, saw therein the liberating force of literary intercourse, and on this basis stressed the reorganization of humanistic research and the advocacy of the critical role of literary education. As Goldmann, who wrote the English-edition preface to Jauss's Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, says: “He [Jauss] greatly values the historical model that Marxism provides. Even though, because Marxism relies on economic determinism, he has reservations about it, he nonetheless launched, among literary researchers, a debate on the value of the Marxist view of history.” (10) It should be said that it is precisely the unique charm of this cultural-political standpoint of reception aesthetics that drew Zhu Liyuan's attention and prompted him to make theoretical exploration, introduction, and transmission of reception aesthetics.

Jin Yuanpu's research on reception aesthetics began with translating Jauss's Toward an Aesthetics of Reception and Holub's Reception Theory; then he translated Iser's recondite The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response—this provided him a beginning that drew nearer to the source of reception aesthetics, and also became the research topic of his doctoral dissertation on hermeneutics. At that time the hermeneutic masters Heidegger and Gadamer had already swept across China's scholarly world; the academic path of pursuing a doctoral degree, and the open scholarly atmosphere of the time, prompted him to trace the origins of hermeneutics and reception aesthetics. For a young scholar who at that time had touched on theoretical research for not long and had not yet fixed his own theoretical base-point, he no longer needed, like Zhu Liyuan, to face a hard choice.

Contrary to the habit of always linking theoretical problems to politics, and then dividing them into the mutually opposed “two ideological camps,” the literary-theory circles of the early 1990s were more willing to detach all theory from politics—remaking what had originally been regarded as serious ideological-political struggle into an equal contention among academic schools, even into the natural succession of theoretical paradigms—“depoliticizing” theory. In the essay “The Rise of Reader-Centrism,” Jin Yuanpu says: “Viewed from the logical development of literary theory and criticism, after the Western contemporary literary-critical paradigm broke through the bias of author-centrism, it fell again into the strange circle of text-centrism's self-sufficiency and self-regulation. Theory demands a breakthrough, and a breakthrough must select the most apt point of breakthrough. Viewed from the history of theoretical development, in the operational chain of author–text–reader in literature, the one historically least studied and most needing to be filled-in is evidently the reader. To put it simply, the inner demand and overall orientation of theory's own development is to move toward the reader.” (11) In Jin Yuanpu's view, the various theories are not a struggle of different cultural powers, still less an ideological-political struggle; rather, they are mutual equal dialogue, debate, and fusion, and they change and succeed one another in step with the inner demands and logic of culture itself. Thus Jin Yuanpu's theoretical choice is no longer the choice of a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, Marxist or anti-Marxist line and standpoint, but merely a light and ordinary “theoretical-paradigm” succession—a new theoretical shift following “author-centrism” and “text-centrism”; the identification with phenomenology and contemporary hermeneutics, and the consequent opening of the gate of reception aesthetics, thereby also gained legitimacy, and even became a fashionable move that responds to the inner demands of theoretical development and follows the changes of theory.

Meaningfully, as the translator of Jauss's Toward an Aesthetics of Reception, Jin Yuanpu nonetheless additionally took from Thomas Kuhn's theoretical armory the “view of scientific developmental paradigms,” directly remaking it into his own “view of theoretical developmental paradigms,” and used this as the point of departure for “reader-centrism.” This practice of his runs precisely counter to Jauss's purport in “reception history.” One of Jauss's aims in establishing reception history was to break the closed history of formalist literary formal-evolution, and, by means of the reader, to introduce a historical horizon, combining literary-historical research with social history; whereas Jin Yuanpu's “view of theoretical developmental paradigms” returns to the formalist theoretical standpoint that Jauss criticized, and holds that the development of theoretical paradigms merely obeys inner demands, is the necessary outcome of theory's inner logic, and dismantles the connection of theoretical development with the general process of history, letting the vital, history-horizoned reception stand aside. Is this, after all, accidental negligence, an unconscious misreading of Jauss, or a specific cultural context's distorting and screening of his theoretical horizon—or is it, after all, a deliberate theoretical strategy? Between Jauss and Kuhn, Jin Yuanpu chose Kuhn, yet abandoned the Jauss into whom he had poured more heart's blood, abandoned the very essence of Jauss's reception theory—the most impactful challenge to the formalist view of literary history. (12)

From the mid-1990s on, China's literary-theory circles unfolded a discussion of literary theory's “aphasia.” At that time, Cao Shunqing put forward a sharp critique of contemporary Chinese literary theory: “Why does China's modern and contemporary literary world have no theory of its own, no voice of its own? The basic reason is that we have contracted a severe aphasia. We fundamentally have no set of literary-theoretical discourse of our own, no set of academic rules of expression, communication, and interpretation peculiar to ourselves. Once we leave Western literary-theoretical discourse, we are almost unable to speak—a living academic ‘mute.’” (13) Although the two sides disputed and could not agree on whether contemporary Chinese literary theory was, after all, “aphasic,” this thereby triggered an emphasis on ancient Chinese literary theory, and the thesis of “the modern transformation of ancient literary theory” was raised to a prominent position in the construction of literary theory. Ji Xianlin too wrote to call out: “We literary theorists must change our tune; we must thoroughly cast off the shackles of Western literary theory, return to ourselves, carefully examine and interpret the traditional terminology we have used for several thousand years, and, on this foundation, construct our own discourse system; and then come back to face Western literary theory—whether ancient or modern—analyze it, take its essence, and make it serve me.” (14)

As for this dispute over literary-theory aphasia, some scholars hold that it is an evil brewed by “May Fourth” anti-traditionalism, that anti-traditionalism caused the rupture of tradition, the crisis of cultural identity, and so led to the present cultural anxiety. This view is evidently too simplistic and too arbitrary, but this is not something the present article must examine in detail. Here it need only be pointed out that the reform of the economic system—and especially the enormous impact of the market economy on the original system of social values—and the resulting pluralization of social thought and culture, forced people to hasten to seek an effective solution. The return to tradition, the excavation from traditional thought of connotations possessing universal value, naturally became an important choice among them; remaking a new value-system by way of continuing history and returning to tradition seemed also to gain legitimacy more easily. It is precisely such an intellectual atmosphere that prompted the emphasis on, and study of, the traditional cultural heritage, and the literary-theory circles' re-recognition and re-positioning of the status of ancient Chinese literary theory. This background precisely constitutes the concrete context in which Long Xietao wrote Literary Reading-Studies; relative to the driving force constituted by the demands of literary theory's own development, the pressure of this context plays a far greater role. Under the pressure and enticement of this context, Long Xietao's choice of theoretical standpoint has a clearer native consciousness. For him, the return to tradition, the return to the classical, remaking reception aesthetics with a Chinese standpoint and mode, naturally became an effective strategy for introducing Western theory so that it could land smoothly on native soil. His own “national-learning” (guoxue) foundation also provided a favorable condition for his choice. One may even say that, in this dispute over literary-theory “aphasia,” Ji Xianlin's theory of Chinese-Western cultural and Chinese-Western thought-difference directly inspired Long Xietao, (15) prompting him to resist of his own accord the malady of logical thinking existing in Western reception aesthetics.

Surveying the three typical forms in the “Sinicization” process of reception aesthetics, we can see both the complex and winding route of theoretical travel and the rich and varied remaking-variation, and at the same time illuminate the complexity and changeability of the contemporary Chinese theoretical environment. From Zhu Liyuan to Jin Yuanpu and Long Xietao, their practice of receiving and interpreting Western theory vividly displays the general orientation of the changes in China's New-Era theoretical environment: the careful, limited opening at the beginning of the New Era, with attention also paid to political consideration; the bold opening and taking-in of the early 1990s; and the emphasis, from the mid-1990s on, on the return to the native and the traditional. Of course, the above three different social-cultural contexts are by no means sharply separated; in fact they are always mutually interwoven and overlapping, only showing some dominant characteristic in a specific period. This endows scholars who have different theoretical horizons with a certain relative autonomy: their choice of theoretical standpoint often gains contextual support from theory. And for a serious scholar, contextual pressure perhaps just compels him to construct his own theory therein and to form his own peculiar characteristics.

Any theoretical discourse, in the process of transmission and reception, is always inevitably reinterpreted within a specific context, undergoes variation, and gains confirmation of identity in multiple dialogue. Only when it can, in combination with a new context, make effective interpretation of new real experience, can it truly take root, and can it possibly grow in a new way, toward a new direction. However, theory's transmission and reception cannot do without a healthy environmental ecology, and reception aesthetics' journey in China precisely and vividly illustrates this. In discussing the methodology of the human sciences, Bakhtin says: “In the human sciences, accuracy lies precisely in overcoming the otherness of the other's thing, yet without turning it into purely one's own thing (the substitution of all kinds of properties, its modernization, so that one cannot see the other's thing, etc.).” (16) The “accuracy” Bakhtin speaks of is aimed at this aspect of the understanding and interpretation of theory; it requires “overcoming the otherness of the other's thing,” “yet without turning it into purely one's own thing”—that is, truly reading the other, accurately understanding the other, and still recognizing the other as other, all along preserving the “outsidedness (exotopy)” of the theory-receiver. Only then can one speak of removing the dross, taking the essence, and making it serve me. Relative to the “accuracy” of understanding and interpretation, theoretical travel has a still more important aspect, which is “creativity.” If one takes understanding and interpretation merely as the starting point of engaging in creation, then one may entirely, from it, merely draw enlightenment and cast a new term—that is, one should turn it into “purely one's own thing.”