Reception Paradigm and Literary Function

1. The Construction of the Reception Paradigm

When Herbert Mainusch stood at the lectern and, pointing to an upended wicker chair, declared with self-satisfaction, “This is my work of art,” [1] many of his listeners were surprised and shocked. With equal startling effect, Terry Eagleton takes the same casual attitude toward literature. In his view,

any work can be read “poetically,” even a railway timetable can be read as a “literary” work — the only condition being that one reads it “non-pragmatically.” [2]

What Mainusch and Eagleton have in common is that they regard art and literature from a purely subjective standpoint. In their eyes, the intrinsic features of art and literature have been dissolved; the line between art and non-art, between literature and non-literature, has been broken; the artisticity, literariness, and poeticity that the formalists sought so assiduously no longer exist. The only thing that matters is the attitude of the appreciating subject: “I regard it as artistic activity,” or “I read it as a literary work” — this settles everything. We may refuse Mainusch’s and Eagleton’s subjective, extreme stance, yet we cannot ignore the rational kernel within their view: the particular intentional relation between subject and object determines the nature and characteristics of the subject’s activity, and likewise the possibility of the object’s functions being realized.

Between man and object there exist intentional relations of many kinds — religious, moral, cognitive, aesthetic, and so on — manifold and complex. In Psychology of Literature and Art, Zhu Guangqian speaks of the different relations between man and a flowering plum tree. Facing a plum tree, if what comes to mind is the botanical taxonomy of its species, the features of its form, and the conditions for its growth, then you stand in a scientific relation to it. If you think of buying or selling it, or of giving it to a friend, the relation becomes a practical one. Only when you gaze at it just for the sake of contemplation and delight does the relation become an aesthetic one. [3] That is, the intentional relation between man as subject and his object is not fixed or single; it is varied and changeable. As to which intentional relation actually obtains between subject and object, that is jointly conditioned by the subject, the object, and the given environmental background. [4] Because natural objects such as the plum are themselves incomparably rich in implication, and because the relation between man and object enjoys a measure of freedom, in dealing with natural objects the subjective attitude plays a decisive role in determining what kind of intentional relation will be built. Yet the intentional relation between man and object cannot but be limited by the features and functional structure of the object. Take the railway timetable: apart from Eagleton, almost no one will treat it as “literature,” for the timetable does not display a special mode of writing or a patterned arrangement, and has no aesthetic feature to speak of. This makes it hard for one to enter an aesthetic relation with the object. In fact, following Eagleton’s subjective logic, even if the timetable in front of him were taken away, he might just as well face the “nothing-there” and declare, “This is literature.” Once truth is overstepped by even one pace, error may follow. Eagleton’s emphasis on the importance of the subject in appreciation and on the active force of the subject’s attitude does contain truth; yet, when this view is pushed to its extreme, with the features of the object thrown over entirely, absurdity comes to light.

The relations between man and object are manifold; yet because, in the course of practice, man — for any given object — tends to use one attitude in dealing with it and tends to stand in one particular intentional relation with it, this builds in man a relatively stable mode of regarding the object. The wicker chair and the railway timetable are usually regarded with a practical rather than a literary-artistic attitude. Likewise, even within literary appreciation alone, in reading and appreciating poetry, novel, drama, and reportage as distinct genres, the appreciator’s mode of appreciation differs. That is, the appreciating subject possesses various reception paradigms. Toward a literary work of a particular genre or style, the appreciating subject naturally and habitually adopts the corresponding paradigm. As Roger Fowler notes in Linguistics and the Novel:

The outer shape of the text encourages the reader to form a series of expectations and hypotheses that guide the course of reading, and to discard others as irrelevant. [5]

What Fowler calls “expectations and hypotheses” is close to what we call the reception paradigm. But, in distinction from Fowler, the reception paradigm refers both to the content of the expectations and hypotheses formed by the subject in the activity of appreciation, and — more importantly — to the subject’s psychological capacity for orientation and construction. It is the precondition for the smooth building of an appropriate intentional relation with the literary object.

The reception paradigm of literary appreciation is formed gradually in the practice of life, and especially in the practice of literary appreciation. The most typical case is the developmental process by which a child acquires the capacity to receive stories. Such children’s stories often have an obvious marker: they begin with “Once upon a time . . .” This deliberately places the story on the temporal background of the remote past, creating a distance and signaling to the child that the story is to be regarded with a fictional rather than a real attitude. Yet even so, children who have only recently encountered such stories still find it hard to distinguish the line between the real and the fictional; they go on asking, again and again, what became of the protagonist, what his present situation is. With the development of intelligence and increasing contact with stories of various kinds, the experience the child gains from listening to or reading stories accumulates and is internalized into a particular reception paradigm. So when the child meets a new story, he can respond correctly with ease and tell fictional story from real event without difficulty. Plainly, it is precisely the “literary activity” that places the child in a “special” intentional relation with the literary object — one distinct from everyday life — and gradually cultivates in him the psychological capacity for orientation in literary reading, and builds up his literary reception paradigm.

To distinguish the fictional from the fact — or, to put it another way, to be able to maintain with the literary object what Edward Bullough called “psychical distance” — is only the most preliminary capacity for literary reception. With the development of the practice of literary appreciation, the child gradually learns to tell apart various literary genres and styles, to regard the object in different ways accordingly — that is, gradually to differentiate his reception paradigms.

The literary reader, through contact with literary works, also internally grasps various sign-conventions, so that he can read string after string of sentences as poems with form and meaning or as novels with form and meaning. [6]

Of course, compared with children’s stories, novels and other literary phenomena are far more complex; some works lack fixed or obvious markers. Even so, the moment the reader takes up a work, he can still tell from its distinctive narrative mode and rhetorical features what kind of work it is, and enter the activity of appreciation with the corresponding reception paradigm. As Jauss notes:

A literary work, even when newly published, is not an absolutely new work in an information vacuum. On the contrary, through prefigurations — both overt and hidden signals, familiar features and implicit indications — it makes the reader incline toward a quite definite mode of reception. [7]

Poetry, for its part, has obvious external features: line-arrangement, rhyme and meter, distinctive use of bi-xing comparison and evocation, all give the reader a definite signal.

Because the scope of individual reading and appreciation differs greatly, individual differences in the reception paradigm are inevitable. In addition, each individual’s inner needs and various other personal conditions all heavily influence and disturb psychological orientation, and so influence the individual’s reception paradigm. This results not only in individual differences across paradigms, but also in the changeability of one individual’s paradigm under different times and conditions. Yet for a given society and historical moment, the relatively stable socio-cultural background, the mutual literary and cultural intercourse, and especially the literary fashions of particular periods, exert great pressure on each individual, so as to produce a kind of receptive set. Literary education, moreover, often molds the individual according to a relatively stable formula. As a result, beneath the individual characters of paradigms, a relatively unified common quality also persists.

2. The “Interaction” of the Reception Paradigm and Literary Function

That the subject builds a reception paradigm appropriate to the literary object is the precondition for the realization of the literary function. Gadamer holds that hermeneutic understanding is constrained by the pre-understanding (Vorverständnis) that arises out of the hermeneutic situation. Starting from his pre-understanding, the subject reads the literary work, and so inevitably forms the hermeneutic circle. [8] Gadamer’s notion of “pre-understanding” is put forward primarily with respect to the interpretation of meaning; literary reception is not limited to the interpretation of meaning, but is built on the basis of interpretation and experience, and so is likewise bound to be constrained by the appreciator’s reception paradigm. If the subject lacks an appropriate reception paradigm — or if the subject’s reception paradigm deviates from the functional structure of the literary object — appreciation is blocked, or it goes astray. The reader who has no understanding of modern Western fiction may, when first encountering Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy of the French nouveau roman, find them incomprehensible and be at a loss. The Western reader who does not know Chinese tonal patterns or allusion cannot fully take in the prosodic beauty and rich implication of Chinese classical shi and ci poetry. To speak of our own past: the Han Confucians over-stressed the social function of literature; their reading of the Book of Songs was either to praise or to satirize, and often looked narrow and forced — for which later ages have mocked them. Guo Shaoyu offers a fine explanation of the bias of Han Confucian poetics, holding that

the Han people were influenced by the riddling speech of the day, by the “fair woman and fragrant grass” device of the Li Sao, by the satire-encomium of the rhapsodists, by the Kingly Way, and by the use of the Three Hundred Poems as remonstrance documents — and so they felt that only by seeking the difficult could they “meet the will with the meaning.” [9]

That is, these influences shaped the distinctive reception paradigm of the Han Confucians, and this uniform paradigm did not match the actual features of the poems, and so distorted their poetic meaning. On the surface, the Han Confucians seem to have stressed the pedagogic and the socially critical functions of poetry, but this stress was bought at the price of effacing the aesthetic function; and the social function as they construed it had, in fact, also deviated from the actual functional features of the poem itself — having forced what was their subjective conjecture onto the object.

Because the literary object is limitlessly rich, and because the literary text is indeterminate, the text becomes a literary work as object of appreciation only when concretized by the reader. So, even for the same literary text, different reception paradigms among appreciators will realize different functions. After examining the differing evaluations of Shakespeare by critics of various periods, Nicol Smith, editor of Shakespeare Criticism, notes:

When a critic expounds an artwork, he often falls into the danger of finding himself within it . . . of searching out his own favorite preconceptions. [10]

Of Shakespeare, the modern Western response can be summed up in Helen Gardner’s words:

In the great works of the past we are bound to find depictions of the human condition, expressions of human fear and anxiety, and proofs of the human being’s possession or lack of faith and value. Yet, just as in seeking happiness and health, when men consciously seek out the usefulness of such works, they hardly find it. Our age has a peculiar consciousness of the irrationality and disorder of life, and so it views sin as illness rather than as deliberately chosen evil; it has no interest in the idea of the hero. Our response to Shakespearean tragedy differs from that of Johnson, Coleridge, or Bradley. [11]

Smith and Gardner do not speak directly in terms of reception paradigm and literary function, but from their words we can see that, because temporal and individual differences in literary reception paradigms exist, temporal and individual differences in the way and degree in which literary functions are realized are inevitable. In modern Western literary ideas, literature is no longer the fruit of human reason; it is, on the contrary, an object of sensuous intuition created by intuition — a “black box” in which the human instinctual desires repressed by social rationality and abandoned in everyday life seethe and tumble. The change in the conception of literature has brought changes in the psychological orientation and reception paradigms of the subject, so that the pedagogic and the social-critical functions originally carried by literary works are no longer fully realized; other functions, formerly overlooked, come to be realized instead.

The transformation of the reception paradigm not only alters the realization of the various functions of one and the same literary work; the change in the subject’s functional demand on the literary object — embodied in the transformation of the paradigm — also, in turn, forms a social-need pressure that bears upon the writer and the poet, forcing them to adjust their creation, so that literary texts with new functional structures may meet the changed reception paradigm and the changed demand. The Greek tragedies, for example, contain deep concern for moral action and undisguised didactic teaching; the tragic plots embody moral ideas, and the characters and the chorus directly debate moral questions and pronounce moral judgments. To the ancient Greeks, all this was a matter of course. But in modern society, with the high development of individuality and independence, the literary reception paradigm has changed. Appreciators almost can no longer tolerate undisguised didactic teaching in a literary work. This is because

whoever begins to instruct others builds a step between himself and the one he instructs. [12]

The author (the instructor), as the holder of “truth,” stands proudly atop the step, while the appreciator (the instructed) sits below. This inequality at once arouses, in the appreciator of independent personality, psychological wariness and defense, even disdain for the object and outright refusal to accept it. The change of the reception paradigm forces the writer to hide his views, to hide his tendency.

The unprecedented flourishing of American nonfiction in the 1960s is also a strong witness. At that time, social crisis, unrest, and the deaths brought by the Vietnam War filled the American mind with a foreboding feeling. People paid even more attention than before to the shifts and turns of social reality, and this attention inevitably influenced the psychology of literary reading and brought a change in the reception paradigm. Accordingly, the creation of nonfiction work that fused the techniques of the novelist with faithful, objective reporting also surged. Within magazine content the proportion between nonfiction and fictional story shifted from the ratio of two to one in the 1950s to one to two — so much so that some people exclaimed that

the novel is dead. [13]

Compared with the novel, the functional structure of nonfiction has plainly changed: its capacity directly and faithfully to reflect reality and to intervene in it has been greatly strengthened, and this is inseparable from the change in the reader’s reception paradigm. As Culler puts it:

Literary effects depend on these reading conventions, and literary revolution begins precisely when new reading conventions replace the old. [6]

On the one side, the literary reception paradigm influences and conditions the realization of literary function and at the same time drives literary development and transformation. On the other side, literary development and the adjustment of literary functional structure constantly break the established reception paradigm and reshape it, so that an “interactive” relation between reception paradigm and literary functional structure is built up.

The life of literature lies in renewal. This is not only because any new work offers the reader a new horizon and demands that the appreciator build a corresponding reception paradigm, but also because the activity of reading itself needs a motive force. In the course of reading and appreciation, the subject keeps putting forward expectations and hypotheses, while the text keeps breaking the subject’s expectations and hypotheses with a new horizon, forcing the subject to adjust his reception paradigm and luring him to set out from a new paradigm and to form new expectations and hypotheses anew. If reading were only the confirmation of the reader’s expectations and hypotheses, the work would lose all freshness and allure, and the reading itself would, lacking motive force, become lifeless and impossible to carry on. As Gombrich points out:

We pay attention only when we are expecting something; we look only when some imbalance — the gap between our expectation and the incoming information — draws our attention. [14]

So, from the standpoint of the dynamics of reading, the process of appreciation itself is the process of constantly adjusting and changing the subject’s literary reception paradigm.

The macroscopic view of literary development tells us, similarly, that literary genres and textual structures are constantly generating themselves and never standing still. Between literature and non-literature, between different literary genres, and between different textual structures, there is ceaseless collision, differentiation, and fusion, giving rise to new genres and new textual structures. This differentiation and fusion inevitably brings change to the literary functional structure. For the reader, the change of functional structure is plainly a challenge to the existing reception paradigm: only by adjusting the existing paradigm and adapting to the new textual structure can the reader appreciate the object and let literary function be realized fully. As Marx said, art produces a public that understands art and beauty; literary development is bound to drive the transformation of the appreciator’s reception paradigm. Fowler too makes this point in Linguistics and the Novel:

In the grammar of the novel as in the grammar of poetry, the efficacy of new principles of formal organization is felt in the reader’s experience as a shock to the existing system of forms with which he is intimately familiar; the new system may then be absorbed as norm. [15]

3. The Suspension and Reconstruction of the Reception Paradigm

The reception paradigm provides the conditions for the smooth realization of literary function and stands in an interactive relation with literary functional structure. Yet on the whole, with respect to literary innovation and to the subject’s continual disclosure of new potentialities in the literary object during appreciation, it often carries a conservative character. Because the reception paradigm is historically formed, it stands under the shadow of a particular historical tradition; it is limited by the individual’s disposition, life experience, accumulation of reading, and the particular socio-cultural atmosphere; its own evolution often can be only linear, a gradual change inheriting from the prior step. By comparison with literary activity, whose telos is innovation, it may — because of its own relative stability — refuse to receive, or even ignore, novel works far removed from itself. It may thus become a passive, conservative force.

Within literary appreciation, when the intentional relation between the appreciating subject and the literary object is guided and bound by the reception paradigm, the intentional relations he can build with the object must also be limited. He is often confined to certain particular intentional relations, attending only to certain functional features of the object and overlooking or even discarding others; or, owing to the limitations of his reception paradigm, he cannot fully draw out the potential the work contains, so that the literary object — originally limitlessly rich and a composite of many possible functions — becomes monotonous and impoverished, and the literary reception comes out one-sided and shallow. We may borrow a metaphor from D. T. Suzuki: the reception paradigm is also like a net; however finely woven, once it is hauled up, much has already slipped through the meshes.

To dispel the biases and the limitations on the realization of literary function that the reception paradigm causes in literary interpretation, Western hermeneutics holds that one must shake off all manner of preconceptions — that is, the subject’s existing reception paradigm must be placed within brackets, suspended, so that the appreciator faces the literary object with a pure and unblemished mind. In ancient China, this corresponds to Laozi’s “cleansing the dark mirror” (dichu xuanjian) and to Zhuangzi’s “fasting of the mind” (xinzhai) and “sitting in oblivion” (zuowang). The teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi were mainly concerned with the awakened grasp of the abstract and limitless Dao. Zong Bing of the Southern dynasties linked “image” (xiang) to “Dao” and directly proposed, with respect to aesthetic activity, “clearing the breast and savoring the image” (chenghuai weixiang). Su Shi of the Song, in his poem “Sending Off Master Canliao,” has the lines, “Stillness — therefore all motions are seen; emptiness — therefore the ten thousand realms come in.” All of this not only points out that, in apprehending the Dao and in aesthetic activity, one must hold a state of quiet of mind different from the everyday, but also stresses the need to “leave the form and abandon knowledge” (lixing quzhi) — that is, to suspend all rational cognition, sensuous experience, and inner desire, and to let the mind enter a state of empty stillness. Excluding reason, experience, and desire is at the same time the suspension of the reception paradigm: the subject is freed from the bondage of the paradigm and stands in an extraordinarily free relation with the object of appreciation.

But the question is to what degree this suspension can really go; can one truly bracket every psychological paradigm? In fact, this can only be a wish. For to suspend every reception paradigm, one must first clear away every content of consciousness and of the unconscious. Otherwise, so long as even a fragment of psychological content remains, the subject’s activity of appreciation is influenced by that fragment and shows tendency and selectivity — that is, shows a particular reception paradigm. And to clear away all psychological content is impossible; or, even if possible, the mind, having become a “blank slate,” would have lost every psychological capacity, to say nothing of the capacity for appreciation and the realization of literary function. One must say: suspension, the cleansing of the dark mirror, the fasting of the mind, sitting in oblivion, and empty stillness are all bounded. They mainly mean to put within brackets the direct utilitarian aim and the logical-thinking modes of everyday life, so that the subject’s reception paradigm is not directly disturbed by the utilitarian aim and the logical structure and so does not deviate from aesthetic activity. As Xu Fuguan’s analysis of Zhuangzi has it:

Zhuangzi’s “leaving the form” (lixing), like Laozi’s “no-desire,” is not the root-level negation of desire; rather, it means not to let desire be amplified by the push of knowledge, lest desire spill out of each thing’s allotted nature. Desire that lies within nature Zhuangzi regards as nature itself, and acknowledges it likewise.

Zhuangzi’s “forgetting-knowledge” is voiced in the face of the intellectuals of his day. So the ground of his “forgetting-knowledge” is still some measure of knowledge. Although he often takes “the undifferentiated chaos” (hundun) as the way of describing forgetting-knowledge, his forgetting-knowledge is not the same as the so-called hundun of common parlance. Otherwise the isolated features of perception, once isolated, could not be unfolded. [16]

At the same time, suspension and empty stillness do, to some degree, dissolve the congealed state of the reception paradigm and bring about a fluidity and plasticity in the subject’s paradigm, so that in the activity of appreciation the subject does not keep clinging to one limited angle, does not stay fixed in one particular intentional relation. This in turn opens up the possibility for the subject to avoid bias and fixed opinion, to interpret the literary object continually from new angles, to disclose its latent functions — and the possibility, when facing a wholly new literary object, of smoothly building a new reception paradigm so that the various functions of the literary object can be realized.

The suspension of the subject’s established reception paradigm and the construction of a new one depend partly on the subject himself — Mainusch and Eagleton, cited above, are examples — but more often arise out of the pressure and the lure of the literary object. Because literary appreciation is a two-way activity of construction between subject and object, and because the reception paradigm is the fruit of this two-way construction, the suspension of the existing paradigm and the rebuilding of paradigm are often conditioned by the literary object. Take Finnegans Wake (James Joyce), called a great and difficult work in literary history, and the postmodernist works that intentionally make themselves hard to read: the appearance of these works lands the reader’s existing paradigm in a powerless predicament. He has no choice but to suspend his paradigm and seek out and build a new one. It is like the Chan use of the kōan in seeking awakened understanding: the disciple is driven into a corner from which there is no retreat and must turn completely around. To resolve the kōan,

one must no longer think with the head, but with the belly. [17]

That is, the prior experience and paradigm must be suspended and a new path sought.

In sum, the realization of literary function cannot do without the reception paradigm that the appreciating subject builds; yet the established paradigm often brings about limitations in the realization of literary function. To draw out the potential of the literary work fully, and to adapt to literary innovation, the established paradigm must be suspended. On the surface this looks contradictory, but it is unified within the whole of literary appreciation — and so the dialectical relation between reception paradigm and literary function comes to light.