Textual analysis is the foundation of literary research and criticism. Any research or criticism that departs from textual analysis can only be a castle in the air, the somniloquy of one talking to himself. In the past, narratology played an important role in textual analysis; it focused on narrative form (including discourse and story) to make extremely meticulous interpretation. Postmodern narrative theory, postcolonial theory, feminist criticism, cultural poetics, and the like again broke open the closed horizon of textual research, introducing such factors as author, reader, and context, attending to the power and ideological character within literary discourse, and re-endowing literary discourse with historical content. Others—Formalist research, the New Critical “close reading,” Bakhtin's “dialogic theory,” Althusser and Macherey's “symptomatic reading,” Kristeva's “intertextuality,” discourse (or text) analysis in cultural studies (situation, mode, power, ideology), such as Thompson's mode of ideological analysis, as well as the “corpus” and computer analysis—all take part in textual analysis. Although these studies also touch upon the problem of discursive reference, on the whole the existing textual analysis still lacks a due recognition of the importance of the problem of discursive reference, and has not yet made it the subject of dedicated discussion.
Wittgenstein once proposed the proposition of the “language game.” If we first regard language as a “relational mode” between human and human, between human and world—the “mediation” by which human and human, human and world establish relations—then the referential function of language, which bears the construction of relational modes, stands out. Differing from everyday discourse, one important characteristic of the literary text lies precisely in dismantling the stability of discourse's reference to reality, attempting to construct manifold and varied referential relations, and thereby developing the referential potential of discourse, unfolding a dazzling “referential game.” The “abuse” of reference not only constitutes the foundation of the literary text, displaying the abundant potential of literary language; it is precisely through the “referential game” that literary discourse continually attempts to establish complex connections—between author and text, text and reader, text and text, and even between human and self, human and other, human and thing, human and world—letting the world display its ever-changing face and letting the human experience an infinitely rich existential experience.
1. Referential Transformation and Semantic Liberation
The human, as a social being, can only be situated within all kinds of complex social relations, and is shaped by these relations. The referential game in the literary text breaks through real social relations and constructs more complex and pluralistic relational modes—including real and unreal relations, possible and impossible relations—thereby placing the human into all manner of relational networks, providing infinite modes of existence, and effectively extending the breadth and depth of human nature. It is precisely the discursive “referential game” that greatly enriches the relations between human and human, human and world, and so nourishes human nature and brings about its richness.
In discussing historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon points out that there exist at least five aspects of reference: “intratextual reference, self-reference, intertextual reference, textualized extratextual reference, and what we might call ‘hermeneutic’ reference.” In fact, Goodman had earlier given a more specific definition of “hermeneutic reference,” namely the “relation of exemplification.” In Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman holds that art chiefly refers to reality through the “relation of exemplification.” He says: “Exemplification. Here, whether or not the symbol denotes, it symbolizes by serving as a sample of properties it literally or metaphorically possesses.” At the same time he also expounds “multiple and complex reference”: “Here, one symbol performs several interrelated and interacting referential functions.” We may therefore sum up the various kinds of linguistic reference as: intra-reference, self-reference, intertextual reference, extra-reference (including denotation and the relation of exemplification), and multiple complex reference—which together construct the intricate relational system within the literary text and between its interior and exterior.
John Searle expounded discourse-types from the angle of pragmatics. He points out that the declarative sentence has the direction of word-to-world fit, while the imperative and the promise have the direction of world-to-word fit; between them there exist “vertical rules” that link words to the real world. Fictional discourse, however, has a different logical status: “Fictional discourse should be regarded as a set of horizontal conventions that break the connections established by the vertical rules… suspending the normal requirements established by the vertical rules.” Evidently, the “vertical rules” Searle speaks of are precisely the rules that maintain language's reference to the real world (extra-reference), while the horizontal conventions suspend the vertical rules and so suspend extra-reference, opening intra-reference, self-reference, and all other kinds of reference—references that are maintained through horizontal convention.
Once discourse suspends extra-reference, its close connection with reality is severed. Discourse is no longer bound to the bedrock of reality; it gains the chance to soar freely, transcends the real world, and goes straight to construct a possible world parallel to reality, an imagined world of discursive fiction. The most fundamental characteristic of literary discourse is precisely fictionality: it temporarily suspends extra-reference and constructs a literary fictional world, thereby opening the referential potential of discourse and unfolding the referential game; self-reference, intertextual reference, intra-reference, and multiple reference are all fully activated.
Fundamentally, the intentionality of human consciousness is coordinated with the meaning-intending of language; the essence of conscious intentionality is precisely linguistic meaning-intending. When discourse turns to “self-reference,” it lets discourse itself gain “foregrounding” (Jan Mukařovský); the changeable forms and rich connotations of discourse become the focus of attention; the sounds, colors, metaphors, symbols, ironies, and various rhetorical figures contained in discourse are activated; the mysterious life latent in the word is awakened; multiple meanings gain release—just as iron is touched into gold, the word is “resurrected” (Shklovsky).
“Intertextual reference” weaves connections between text and text by means of allusion, parody, and the like, breaking the stability and finitude of the single text, constructing relations of tension among different texts, and unfolding a broader, more abundant, more variable space of meaning. Gadamer says: “Poetry does not describe or signify an existent; rather, it opens up for us the world of the divine and of the human. The statement of poetry is speculative only when it does not copy an already-existing reality, does not reproduce the appearance of the species in the order of essences, but expresses a new appearance of a new world in the imaginative mediation of poetic feeling.” Although allusion and parody both rely on intertextual reference, they have different value-orientations: allusion believes in and respects the original text, summoning it to enrich the meaning of the new text and to reinforce its own authority; parody does not put faith in the original text—on the contrary, it toys with the original text, revealing its inner contradictions. Parody is like a double-edged sword: taking the occasion of referring to the original text, it both deconstructs and subverts the meaning and value of the original and creates a new identity and new value for itself. Evidently, though both make use of intertextual reference, allusion and parody display utterly different attitudes toward tradition: peoples fond of allusion tend to stress reverence for tradition and the inheritance of tradition, even to the point of regarding tradition as an object of worship; peoples partial to parody often look upon tradition with a skeptical eye, carrying out their own creation in the very process of critiquing tradition.
“Intra-reference,” in turn, shifts the focus to images, figures, and scenes, causing them to set one another off and to generate one another… Precisely because discourse fully mobilizes its referential potential, the literary work becomes what Ingarden called a “polyphonic ensemble,” enjoying a “polyphonic harmony.” All the sensuous factors of literature—sound and rhythm, color, image, figure, scene, and intertext—together take part in constructing the fictional world, shaping a vivid “appeal structure.” This “appeal structure” is by no means limited to Ingarden's “points of indeterminacy” or Iser's “blanks” and “gaps”; rather, it refers to the literary text's construction, through fictional discourse, of an “other world” (Marcuse), a possible world that draws one to throw oneself into it and to live within it. Paul Ricoeur says: “In oral discourse… reference is bound by the ability to point to a reality shared by the interlocutors.” Literary discourse is different: “This reference is ruptured from the reference of everyday language. Through fiction and poetry, a new possibility of being-in-the-world is opened up within everyday reality. Fiction and poetry intend being—not in the mode of a determinate being, but in the mode of potentiality.” The literary fictional world provides the human with a brand-new existential dimension, lifts the repression of reality, excavates the potential of life, opens the secret experience of the deep unconscious, and endows the literary world with the breath of life and the luster of human nature. The reason literature can move the heart so deeply lies precisely in its touching the deep unconscious experience, where there lurks what Frye called the “archetype.” Like a vortex of enormous emotional force, it sweeps the reader up and forcibly draws him into the imagined fictional world, to experience that world in person, thereby opening the meaning beyond words, the spirit beyond form, and an infinite lingering savor. Therefore the so-called “poetic,” “literary,” and “aesthetic” begin and take root in the transformation of discursive reference. Referential transformation is the precondition by which literary language wins its own unique value: the everyday use of language tends to cause its own “foreshortening”—that is, “getting the fish and forgetting the trap”; differing from this, in the literary world the marvelous properties and rich connotations of language are most fully displayed through the referential game.
For narrative texts such as fiction, when the self-reference of narrative discourse shifts the focus of attention from the story to the discourse itself, this constitutes “meta-narration.” On one hand, it “foregrounds” the narrative character of the discourse, throwing into relief the power-relations and ideological character implicit in the discourse; on the other hand, it “alienates” (Brecht) the psychological distance between reader and story, prompting the reader to detach himself from immersion and to view the narrative coolly, thereby providing new possibilities for the reader's reflection, dissection, and critique. The self-reference of narrative discourse creates a “double vision”: while the reader attends to the story, he becomes more clearly aware of the narrator and his mode of narration, and from this is formed the overlapping, comparison, tearing, collision, and fusion among different visions, breeding richer and deeper meaning.
Differing from the self-reference of meta-narration, and also from allusion (which, by means of intertextual reference, partially conscripts the resources of other texts), “metafiction” establishes an integral connection between the new text and the original text through intertextual reference; it is a rewriting, reinterpretation, and disenchantment of the original. For instance, Coetzee's novel Foe stands in a referential relation to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee retells, in Foe, the adventure of Robinson Crusoe, rewriting Crusoe's pioneering acts as valueless toil, even as the destruction of natural ecology. Crusoe, originally possessed of a tenacious will to survive and of creativity, becomes a stubborn, enfeebled old man who has lost part of his memory, cannot recognize the truth, and is narrow of vision—the absolute master of an “independent kingdom.” The black “Friday” has had his tongue cut out, has been deprived of the power of speech, can no longer tell his own story, and becomes a shadow-like existence. Through the contrast between the two texts, the novel Foe—by means of the narration of its new protagonist Susan Barton—reveals the unreliability of the original text, silently exposes the ideological content of the original, and forcefully critiques the colonialist prejudice contained within it.
In the literary text, referential transformation is governed by what John Searle called “horizontal conventions.” These conventions include Shklovsky's “defamiliarization,” as well as the “convention” that Culler proposed from the angle of reading-reception. Culler says: “The conventions of reading guide the reader to view language in a new way, to find in language—hitherto undeveloped—certain meaningful properties, which bring the text into a set of interpretive operations different from before.” Neither writer nor reader can fail to live within tradition; both are necessarily governed by a specific literary tradition. It is precisely the “conventions” formed by custom within literary tradition that guide the author's writing, while at the same time guiding the way the reader interprets the literary text and triggering the transformation of discursive reference. These conventions include temporal settings, tropes and various rhetorical modes, stylistic features, and even the “Generic Structure Potential, GSP” (Halliday) possessed by the genre label. For example, the opening of Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The narrative discourse's distortion and nesting of time forms a sharp contrast with everyday discourse, forcing the reader from the very start to relinquish extra-reference and follow the narrator into the imagined world. Borges's “The Immortal,” however, has a completely different opening: “In early June 1929, the antiquarian Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna offered Princess Lucinge the six small quarto volumes (1715–1720) of Pope's Iliad.” Such an opening seems to have a clear extra-reference. But the text immediately describes the antiquarian thus: “It is said he was a gaunt, haggard man, with grey beard and grey eyes, of singularly vague features.” For everyday discourse and journalistic style, such description is a wholly unnecessary encumbrance; literature, on the contrary, requires concrete and vivid depiction—which is not only the mark of literary style, demanding that the reader relinquish extra-reference, but is precisely what draws the reader to imagine this character, and in turn draws the seemingly documentary discourse of the opening into the imagined world, suspending extra-reference. “What makes fictionality manifest is the heightened depiction of unverifiable details in the text and the insertion of inner thought, for no historical report can provide such a ‘reality effect.’” And the reason Bei Dao's one-character poem “Net” can become a poem lies importantly in the author's placing of this single character within his poetry collection. The specific context of the collection has already preset a “generic structure potential,” demanding that the reader adopt a poetic mode of reading; and so “Net” loses the capacity to refer to a real object and, together with the title “Life,” generates an imagined world, a fictional world symbolizing the human existential predicament. Literary convention enjoys an enormous energy, sufficient to draw the text as a whole into the imagined world.
2. Literature: Dissolving the Stability of Discursive Reference
Literary discourse's suspension of extra-reference is by no means a rooting-out of extra-reference, but a dissolving of the stability of discourse's reference to reality, bringing more possibilities to reference and fully releasing discursive potential. For the human in everyday life, realizing the connection of discourse and reality through extra-reference is a deeply rooted habit; it is the bedrock of the human's real existential activity. Therefore, when reading is completed or interrupted, and the reader extricates himself from aesthetic intoxication, extra-reference is restored. But literary fiction enjoys its own privilege: it need not crawl along imitating reality, need not correspond one-to-one with reality, and therefore the extra-reference of the literary text is often no longer “denotation” but can only, by means of social convention (normativity), “exemplify” reality. Social convention is the structural element shared by the literary world and the real world, and becomes the bridge of communication between the two. For example, in reading Lu Xun's novella The True Story of Ah Q, almost every reader feels that the ghost of Ah Q is parasitic upon his own body; behind this it is precisely social convention that is at work. Social convention shapes human behavior and the human body, and sediments into the collective unconscious. Every successful literary figure is necessarily shaped with reference to social convention. The more deeply the writer grasps the conflict between social convention and the normativity of life, the more his characters possess authenticity, vividness, and depth. Therefore social convention is bound to become the bridge linking literature and reality, the basis for establishing the relation of exemplification. It is precisely because of this relation of exemplification, rather than denotation, that the literary figure no longer points to some particular real object, but exemplifies a series of social phenomena, and so enjoys a more universal significance.
In Expression and Meaning, John Searle correctly expounds the logical form of fictional discourse; at the same time, he holds that literature is merely the extension of the non-literary, with no dividing line between the two. Searle distinguishes fiction from literature, pointing out that most literary works are fictional, but not all literary works are fictional. He takes the documentary literature In Cold Blood and The Armies of the Night as examples. Although between literature and non-literature there is, as Searle says, no sharply demarcated boundary, Searle's analysis makes one error: he fails to notice that the literary text merely breaks the stability of discourse's reference to reality and opens up multiple modes of reference—it does not thoroughly abolish extra-reference. Documentary literature has multiple reference: on one hand, documentary literature takes real, determinate persons, times, places, events, and environments as textual material, and this material maintains the text's extra-reference, connecting the literary text closely to reality; on the other hand, the text also follows literary style and convention, with vivid description and specific literary rhetoric, enticing the reader to change his reading attitude, thereby temporarily suspending extra-reference and activating intra-reference and all other references, and constructing the text into an imagined world, a moving fictional world. For this very reason, documentary literature likewise enjoys fictionality. Because the documentary literary text has this dual character, its extra-reference and intra-reference constitute a relation of tension, pulling at and converting into each other: the reader is now intoxicated in the imagined world of literature, forgetting real existence; now extricated again from the imagined world, returning to reality, attending to real persons and events in real life. When the reader attends again to reality, extra-reference is restored and concretely manifested as “denotation,” referring to real persons and events in real life; the literary fictional world and the real world then constitute an “intertextual reference,” deriving richer meaning and a greater sense of nearness. Literary discourse enjoys multiple reference; but once it loses the capacity for referential transformation, loses fictionality, the text shrivels and necessarily forfeits its literariness and aesthetic quality.
There are two reasons the field of literary studies disputes literary fictionality. First, there is a misunderstanding of the original sense of “literary fiction.” Literary fiction is chiefly not a matter of judging true or false from the angle of semantics, but rather of pointing out, from the angle of pragmatics, a change in the mode of discursive reference: it transforms from extra-reference into intra-reference and other references, thereby constructing an other world, temporarily shelving the connection of discourse and reality and relinquishing the judgment of true or false. Whether the semantic content is true or false, so long as the textual discourse performs this referential transformation, it wins its freedom and goes on to take part in constructing a possible world parallel to the real world, an imagined fictional world. Of course, if the discourse's semantic content is false, this may create an obstacle to the connection of text and reality, and more easily bring about referential transformation. Second, even in the literary text, the mode of reference is continually transforming; extra-reference and intra-reference and the others are not mutually insulated—reference shifts in step with the reader's reading-intention. But supposing there were no mechanism for shelving extra-reference and realizing transformation, then the human could not be liberated from the bondage of reality, there would be no free imagination and fiction, and so no literature; the text would inevitably degenerate into dry, dull news reportage. Yet in Searle's mind, discourse enjoys an eternally unchanging logical status; he overlooks the variability of discursive reference, and at the same time confuses fiction in the semantic sense (content false) with fiction in the pragmatic sense (shelving extra-reference), thereby arriving at an erroneous conclusion.
John Searle also raises another situation to deny the relation between literature and fiction. He cites the opening sentence of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace: “The happiness of happy families is all unlike, while unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way,” and points out that this sentence is not fictional discourse but serious discourse. But Searle overlooks a fact: this sentence has a double reference. It does, to be sure, state a real situation and a philosophical principle, possessing the character of serious discourse; at the same time, it takes part in the construction of the fictional world and becomes a constituent part of the novel's fictional world, itself thereby enjoying fictionality. Here Searle misapplies Austin's view and gives an erroneous interpretation of literary fictional discourse. On the whole, literary discourse likewise possesses seriousness; it obeys the logic of life.
Isenberg, too, once cited an interesting example. He said: “Imagine that in a novel we read the following sentence: ‘On the first of March, 1820, a man stood for three hours at the door of Notre-Dame de Paris.’ This sentence is not merely ink-marks or empty words; it conveys thought. It leads us before a world bustling with human affairs. Yet about the real world outside the novel, it tells us nothing (or gives us false information).” The literary text has a powerful stomach, skilled at digesting all manner of discourse-types taken into it, suspending their extra-reference and altering their original nature. The really-existing “Notre-Dame de Paris” of the real world has been transformed into a decorative symbol of the fictional world, and, together with that “man,” placed within the fictional world; the referential relation has already been transformed. Within the integral fictional context of the novel, even a seemingly real discursive statement is forced to suspend extra-reference temporarily, to shelve its direct connection to the real world, and to be drawn into the vortex formed by the fictional world. The contextual pressure created by the fictional text strips the textual discourse of its extra-referential power. Marcuse called this situation “the tyranny of aesthetic form”: “Within form the negative is ‘contained’; form is always a ‘broken,’ ‘sublimated’ opposition, which makes existing reality undergo a change of form and substance—that is, a liberation from existing reality. This change creates a self-fulfilling realm, so that art, whatever its reality or naturalness, remains the ‘other’ of reality and nature. In this realm of beauty, opposites are indeed ‘resolved,’ so that their appearance expresses the universal order to which they belong.” Whether everyday practical discourse, philosophical discourse, or even scientific discourse, so long as it enters the literary text it must submit to the “tyranny of aesthetic form,” change its identity, and become nourishment and an organic constituent of the literary fictional world. The aesthetic form of literature and art is the form of life; it stirs the echo of life, expands the space of imagination, and leads the human into a fictional world, thereby temporarily interrupting extra-reference and concentrating on the construction of an aesthetic world; and so the human opens the form of life and wins a free state of existence.
3. Soul Mountain: The Experimental Ground of the Referential Game
Once the literary text constructs a fictional world, the magic box of discourse is opened; the writer enjoys a magician-like power and can deploy at will every kind of referential mode, unfold the referential game, and set up manifold and varied relations among human and self, other, thing, world, and reader. The literary text is the experimental ground of the discursive referential game.
Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain employs the limited perspective of a character, using “I” and “you” respectively to designate the narrator; these designations (reference) embody different referential relations (refer to) and construct an extremely complex relational mode. Although “I” and “you” refer to the same narrator, the different modes of designation produce differences of narrative perspective and horizon, alter the relations among author, reader, and text, and modulate the distances among them. “I” as narrator always narrates what “I” sees, hears, feels, and thinks; “I” overlaps with the narrator and does not require the presence of “you” as a necessary condition. Generally, “I” seems able to refer directly to the “author–narrator,” possessing an epistemological “first-person authority”; across various types of self-knowledge, “I” has greater nearness and authority. But the appellation “you” can exist only relative to “I”; there must always be an “I” as mediation for “you” to appear. Whether it is “you say…,” “you think…,” or “you do…,” behind it there seems faintly to lurk another reporter, “I”; “you” cannot shake off this hidden narrator. Compared with “I,” the narrator addressed as “you” cannot but create a greater sense of estrangement in the narration. In the process of reading and interpretation, the empirical reader easily follows close behind the narration of the narrator “I,” viewing the world through “I’s” perspective, dissecting the self, even identifying with the narrator; whereas “you” always stands opposite the empirical reader, displaying “your” figure, as if “your” narration were reported by another hidden narrator “I,” inserting between the empirical reader and the narrative two narrators who shadow each other, the “manifest” and the “hidden,” so that it cannot but open a distance between the empirical reader and the narrative and split their relation. “You” is not only a narrator but also a narrated object, the reported object of the hidden narrator “I,” taking part in the unfolding of the story. And this narrated object turns out to be the narrator “I” himself, another self of “I”; “I” thus becomes the narrator-self that is viewed and reflected upon. As for “she” (he), this is the “other” outside the direct relation of “I” and “you”; the relation of “I” and “she” is indirect, while “you” and “she” stand directly opposed and in direct dialogue. One might even say that “she” (he) is in fact “you,” that is, the projection of “I.” This escapes the limitation of a single narrative perspective, interweaving the first-, second-, and third-person narrative perspectives and displaying, in all directions, the external world and the inner world. At the same time, “she” (he) is the other indispensable to the construction of social relations and of the self; only among “I,” “you,” and “she” (he) is a complete social relation constituted; only within a complete social relation can the complexity of interpersonal relations, the multiplicity of the human mind, and the inescapable predicament of life be revealed; only in the process of mutual distinction, comparison, conflict, and identification can the “self” as my own self be truly established.
In Chapter 52 of the novel, Gao Xingjian explains the relation of “I,” “you,” and “she”: “I” talking to myself is only to relieve my own loneliness. “And you are the object of my narration, a self of mine who listens to me; you are merely my shadow. As I listen to my own self, you, I let you create a she, because you, like me, also cannot bear loneliness and must seek an interlocutor. You therefore appeal to her, just as I appeal to you. She derives from you, and in turn confirms my own self. You, my interlocutor, transform my experience and imagination into the relation of you and her, while imagination and experience can no longer be told apart.” And in fact, “I” in turn becomes the shadow of “you,” and “you” becomes the shadow of “she”; “I,” “you,” and “she” intertwine and are each other's inverted reflections.
In Soul Mountain, the “I” and “you” who are one and the same narrator unfold two parallel travel routes. “You,” in the course of travel, happen to hear someone speak of “Soul Mountain,” and so begin a journey to seek it. While “you” are searching out the road to Soul Mountain, “I,” having undergone an upheaval, am misdiagnosed by a “doctor” with “lung cancer,” only to discover that death has played a joke—and so I awaken at last to the freshness of life, flee the polluted environment, wander along the Yangtze, go among the folk, return to nature, and seek out a real, solid life. “I” and “you” each begin a journey of seeking. As the first-person perspective, “I” naturally need not narrate my own appearance and character, but can project “my” state of mind and feeling through depictions of various landscapes, anecdotes, and experiences, displaying the inner world. It is precisely in the separate narrations of “I” and “you” that it becomes possible to open the mystery of human nature from the differing angles of body and spirit, on multiple strata. “I’s” narration touches more on natural landscape, local customs, anecdotes and trifles, geography and natural history, cultural remains, and the lower strata of society, interwoven with childhood memory and ballad-legend. To experience the meaning of life, “I” seek in personal experience, seek in historical documents, seek in religious ritual, seek in folk legend, seek in childhood memory and imagination… attempting to construct all manner of spiritual connections. “You,” however, on the way to Soul Mountain, happen upon “she,” and, to escape solitude and loneliness, cannot help falling into the abyss of love and lust. “You” and “she” test, confide in, attract, entwine with, and merge into each other, and also misunderstand, estrange, weary of, resent, and guard against each other, finally coming to separation. The human cannot do without the other, and yet inevitably produces contradiction and conflict with the other. Moreover, the other's gaze alone suffices to strip me of my freedom. The other is, in the end, a “prison”—this is the predicament of life that cannot be escaped. “You” finally discover that the so-called “Soul Mountain” is no Buddhist holy land either, but only a stubborn stone called “Soul Cliff” at which women pray for offspring.
If “I” seek the truth of life, treading every ancient town and small village, every wild mountain and ridge, really and solidly experiencing life and apprehending life, then “you” are the adventurer seeking Soul Mountain, seeking the holy land, seeking a place of spiritual repose—a spiritual seeker who seeks the self and confirms the self. Yet Soul Mountain is only an illusory goal, a goal with no destination that one sets for oneself. On the very road of spiritual adventure, “you” and “she” sink deep into the mire of lust. You travel together to seek Soul Mountain. But as the fire of love and desire is extinguished, misunderstanding arises between “you” and “she,” the conflict sharpens, and the spiritual journey to seek Soul Mountain thereby ends. It is as though spiritual exploration always takes lust as its companion and motive force, the two being inseparable. Without human desire, the self too would come to naught. The human is not a complete being; he is always in a state of lack. Only with lack is there desire, is there pursuit, and only thus can the spiritual journey be advanced. The extinguishing of desire is the cessation of spiritual pursuit.
If “I’s” narration intends to dissolve distance, to lead the reader to appreciate natural scenery in person, to witness the myriad states of human life, and to throw into relief the subjectivity of the self, then “you” as narrator deliberately manufactures a fissure between text and reader, in order to display the love and lust that have been rendered unconscious, attempting to dissect as clearly as possible the mutual attraction and repulsion, fusion and refusal, between “you” and “she,” between consciousness and the unconscious, between the rational and the non-rational. “You's” narration is always bound up with desire, wild men, female ghosts, witches, bandit-women, lepers, nightmares, death—touching the human's “dark corners” and referring to the unfathomable unconscious. The relation of “I” and “you” then intimates the relation of spirit and flesh, of the self-subject and the unconscious. From the angle of self-consciousness, “you” is the unconscious other, only the shadow of “I,” an unfathomable abyss, an “other” opposed to “I.” Yet since unconscious instinct originally belongs to the body, while the conscious self is a spiritual construction in the process of social intercourse and linguistic exchange—the self being able only to lodge in the body, to root in the body, to follow the body, taking the body's presence and actual participation as its starting point—“I” in turn is transformed into the shadow of “you,” a flickering, illusory shadow, and “you” becomes the substance of “I”; the so-called “self” is precisely the “alienated” form of the individual's body.
Benveniste holds that human subjectivity is constructed in language. He says: “Language, so to speak, provides many ‘empty’ forms, which each speaker, in exercising discourse, appropriates and relates to his ‘person,’ at the same time defining himself as I and his interlocutor as you. The instance of discourse thus constitutes all the coordinates that define the subject.” But in Soul Mountain, the personal pronouns present an anomalous situation, the coordinates undergoing shift and disorder: “I” and “you” are no longer two real interlocutors, but two sides split off from the narrator's “self,” thereby dissolving the stability and integrity of the subject, deconstructing the identity of the “self,” destroying the myth of the self-subject, and opening a split, open, unfinished “my own self.” As one and the same narrator, “I” and “you” are one body, yet split into mutually independent, dialoguing others; the two constitute a complex referential relation. “You” is the object of “I’s” gaze, the object of reflection and dissection, and yet “I” can never understand “you”—even projecting the “shadow” into the text as an object of analysis, “I” cannot thoroughly know “you.” “You” resists “I,” flees “I’s” control; and in turn, “you” sweeps “I” up in the vortex of love and desire, drowns “I,” makes “I” dizzy and unable to extricate himself. As Gao Xingjian says, “you” is “a self of mine who listens to me; you are merely my shadow.” “You” and “I” are at once one body and yet split; they go separate ways, and yet set off, cross, and answer each other. “You” is the independent “your own self” external to “I,” and yet in fact belongs to “my own self.” It is precisely in the intercourse and dialogue of “I,” “you,” “she,” and “he” that one intricately interwoven, overlapping, many-colored world-picture after another is woven out, and that the dim, profound, and contradictory “my own self” is mirrored. When the author decomposes the narrator into “I” and “you,” attempting thereby to know my own self better, in fact he can obtain only a faintly-discernible, self-divided so-called “subject.” And who can know my own self from his own shadow?
Soul Mountain tells of a spiritual journey to seek the meaning of life; yet life has no ultimate goal and meaning—it is not like the Soul Mountain in “your” mind, waiting for one to seek it and climb it. Soul Mountain is blurred and bewildering; it seems to entice “you” from ahead, but the moment “you” climb to the summit, the longed-for vanishes utterly—it is only an illusion of the mind. The journey, too, must at last end; “I” cannot but return again to that polluted metropolis, embedded in the long-foreordained track of life. From this angle, the meaning of life is nothingness. But the author is no nihilist: in the very process of seeking, a broad folk society is unfolded; one associates with and comes to know Qiang elders, Yi singers, Miao girls, charcoal-burners, archaeological team members, forest rangers, road-maintenance workers, Daoist nuns, monastery abbots… witnessing and experiencing all manner of different lives. These different experiences already retain their own purposes of living and embody the meaning of life; and the meaning of the human is itself congealed within ordinary life, faintly present, half-real, half-illusory. There is no extrinsic value set by others; it is formless and traceless, and cannot be explained in summarizing words.
Ever since its birth, language has, by its relative independence, set up the human spirit and distinguished spirit from body. This split state does indeed create an incurable anxiety, yet it releases the spirit from the flesh, brings freedom to the spirit, and creates the possibility of realizing transcendence. And so linguistic reference not only establishes all manner of relational modes between human and nature, but can set up a foothold outside the body and thereby establish an objective relation with the body and with the self—so as to investigate the body, reflect upon the self, and reflect upon the meaning of life. At the same time, it also enables the human to depart from the body, depart from his locale, roam the eight wildernesses in spirit, begin a boundless spiritual journey, and even seek an “Archimedean point” beyond the earth. “We always stand at a foothold in the cosmos beyond the earth to deal with nature. Although we do not actually stand where Archimedes wished to stand (dos moi pou stō), being, by the human condition, confined to the earth, we have nonetheless found a way to act upon the earth from within earthly nature—as if we could handle it from outside the earth, from an Archimedean point.” It is precisely the relative independence of language that endows humankind with an extraordinary capacity, enabling it to transcend the body, transcend society, transcend nature—to look back upon the earth and upon humankind itself, and to reconstruct relations, from beyond the earth, from any subjectively-set position. The various relations constructed by linguistic reference confer upon the human the possibility of metaphysical thinking: wherever language extends its feelers, there the human's thinking arrives. And so, whether the infinitely distant cosmos or the unfathomably deep black-box of the mind, both become objects of the human's inquiry and questioning.
Roberto Esposito says: “In order to be able to judge itself, the subject must separate from itself, taking on the double role of judge and accused.” Language, as a system of distinction, enjoys the power of demarcation and constitutes the precondition of reflection. Without reflection there is no human self-subjectivity, and reflection requires precisely that language find a foothold outside the human himself, by which to look back upon the human himself. Soul Mountain makes use of just this property of language, shifting the foothold of thought outside one's own body, and even outside the self-subject, and splitting the individual into “I,” “you,” and “she”—so as to rethink the self and its meaning, to re-examine, understand, and critique real life, and to construct a free space and a new Archimedean point. And when the relations constructed by linguistic reference themselves meet with dissolution, when the referential capacity of language is doubted, the world and the self-subject are deconstructed, and move toward the end of metaphysics.
4. The Traveler: The Thematization of Reference
In postmodern fiction, attention to reference even becomes one of the themes of the work; such works not only use manifold referential forms to present the rich connotations of the work, but also thematize referential form itself. The Italian writer Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (hereafter The Traveler) may be called a paragon. In it, the clear boundary of the “world–work” distinction, customary in everyday habit, is reconstructed by the diversified referential modes of the literary text. One might say the literary text is an enchanted world, what Eco called the “woods of Loisy.”
Differing from the relatively stable reference of the narrators “I” and “you” in Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, the narrators designated “you” and “I” in Calvino's The Traveler have a more complex referential relation. In The Traveler, our customary relational mode is thoroughly reconstructed.
The Traveler is a work of double-line narration. This narrative form is not rare; Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain belongs to the type—its double-line narration consists of two clear story-lines, equal at the narrative level, with characters and events each within their own story-level, the two lines finally converging together. In another type of double-line work, the two threads are unequal—for instance, Boccaccio's Decameron: one is the framing story (a group of young people, fleeing the plague, gather at a country villa and tell stories to pass the time); the other is the story as concrete plot (the different, mutually unrelated stories the young men and women tell, which do not affect the development of the frame-level), that is, the frame-level and the story-level are separate and have a primary-secondary distinction. On the surface, The Traveler is closer to the Decameron model. The novel tells of a male reader (“you”) reading a novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by “Italo Calvino.” For various reasons his reading is always interrupted; in order to read and finish the book he goes through a thousand trials, and what he finds is always another book—he reads the openings of ten utterly different novels and never finds the original one. Finally the frame-level and the story-level gradually fuse, the two lines merging into one. “Male reader, this turbulent journey of yours should long since have come to shore.” In the process of seeking the book, “you” come to know the woman reader Ludmilla through reading, and at last realize: “Must every novel have a beginning and an ending? In olden times novels ended in only two ways: having passed through trials, the hero and heroine either married or both died.” And so “you” suddenly decide to marry Ludmilla, preparing to finish reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveler in the double bed, and the novel ends here. Yet differing from the Decameron model, in The Traveler the story of the frame-level itself is independent and self-sufficient, its content full and brilliant; in weight, frame-level and story-level share the honors equally, so the frame-level is not merely of functional value in organizing different story-fragments. Moreover, the boundary between frame-level and story-level is consciously crossed and finally gradually fused, the two hard to tell apart, so that The Traveler differs from the Decameron model and approaches the Soul Mountain model. Evidently, The Traveler is a new type distinct from both of the two common models.
Comparatively, in The Traveler the frame-level narrator “you” has a relatively coherent experience, leading us to follow “your” movements in seeking the missing books, witnessing all manner of characters, and dealing with all manner of ancient, unfamiliar languages. Differing from this, since the events narrated by the story-level “I” are mutually unrelated—whether touching on a fog-like, elusive secret organization, or the bloody combat between two feuding families, or prisoners in a clifftop prison plotting an escape, or telling of politics, revolution, espionage, and conspiracy, or revealing deviant love, eroticism, and lust, or even Gospel-like parable—they are like “that kind of novel that only narrates, telling one story after another, without wishing to impose on you any worldview, merely letting you see the winding process of the story's unfolding, as one sees a tree grow, sees its branches and leaves interlace,” leading respectively to one broken time-space after another and conferring on us all manner of existential experiences we cannot live through in person.
The novel's subtlety lies further in the following. First, the frame-level narrator is “you,” while the story-level narrator is “I.” “You” is both “reader” and “narrator”: it is the “reader” narrating his own reading-state, mood, wish, and experience, and his search for the complete version of the book The Traveler; while “I” is the “narrator” of the story-level, the one who experiences the story in person or its protagonist. From the angle of real personal relations, “I” is near and “you” is distant. But from the angle of textual structure, “you” is at the frame-level while “I” is at the story-level and becomes the “object” organized and reported by the frame; therefore, for author and reader alike, the story-level narrator “I” appears, on the contrary, more estranged. This dislocation makes the original near-far relation complex, resets the relation of the actual empirical reader to the various roles in the work, makes it impossible to locate directly, and requires that one re-confirm one's own position amid the entanglement.
Second, the “I” in the story-level does not have a stable designation, even in the self-reference within the work: the ten “I's” in the ten novels seem to have a secret connection, and yet are by no means the same: “I could have become many ‘I's,’ linking up with the ‘I's’ of others, dressing up as many ‘I's’ both distinct and connected.” This indeterminacy of the reference of “I” can be seen in works such as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, only not so extreme as in Calvino.
Third, this “I” is not confined to the interior of the “play-within-a-play” but actively interacts with “you.” In the first story, Calvino writes, not without provocation: “I am the protagonist of the novel… The protagonist of the novel is named ‘I,’ and apart from this you know nothing about this character…” “…Beware! This is the way to attract you, drawing you step by step into the trap without your knowing it. This is a snare. Perhaps the author has not yet thought it through, just like you, the reader.” Here “you” refers both to the frame-level protagonist (the reader) cum narrator and points to the reader at the empirical level; this indeterminacy and plurality of reference leads us into a complex and ambiguous predicament. This consciousness of “transgression” runs through the whole novel and constitutes multiple transgressions: the “reader” transgresses into the frame-level to become its narrator and protagonist, and then transgresses into the story-level to interact with “I,” this “I” being both the protagonist of the story-level and concurrently the “author–narrator.” For example, in the second story: “a careful reader like you must have noticed this from the first page: although you admire the precision of this novel, you feel you cannot grasp the essential.” This is one side of the matter—“I” going to establish a connection with “you,” observing “your” reading experience. On the other side, this “you” in the frame-level is also a traveler recounting his own experience, seeking the complete story of the novel, and contriving to draw near the author “I”—this is “your” transformation toward “I.”
Fourth, if the preceding point is still more a matter of the mutual reference between the “you” and “I” within the work, opening up the “frame-level” and the “story-level,” then the frame-level “you” points still more strongly toward the empirical-level “you” (the reader). The “you” in The Traveler is a male reader, and a “general reader” at that. “For the male reader I have not given a character-trait, nor an exact preference: he can be an accidental and eclectic reader.” Such a “you” is then not only a character in the work but also a summons to the “you” at the empirical level, a real empirical reader. “This book has all along been very careful to let the reader reading this book be able to enter the role and identify with the ‘reader’ in the novel, and therefore has not given him a name.” The original mode of reference either, like reflection-theory, established a connection between language and world, or, like coherence-theory, established connection within language; but in the novel the boundary of these two connective modes is broken, a more complex referential mode is set up, and intricate connections are established simultaneously between “language–language” and “language–world.”
Fifth, this “you” is both male reader and female reader. In one passage, Calvino describes this in a meta-narrative way: “Woman reader, what on earth do you look like? This novel narrated in the second person refers not only to you, the male reader (you may be the brother or stand-in of the hypocritical ‘I’), but also to you, the woman reader. From the second chapter you appear in the third person, because for a novel to be a novel, there must be a third person, there must be something happening between the second-person male and the third-person female…” “You” too is indeterminate: it can split, and can also shift and change. The different modes of reference can be viewed both as reference to the same object and, in the unpredictable referential game, as evolving into a myriad references.
Sixth, Chapters Eight and Eleven of the novel are anomalies distinct from the other chapters. Chapter Eight no longer leads into the story-level through the narrating frame of “you” (the reader), but narrates in the form of the author's “diary selection.” The woman reader directly becomes the “she” in the author “I's” diary; each day before he begins writing, the author observes her through a telescope. “I hope this effort of mine in writing will be able to express that woman reader's breathing and her utterly natural reading, to express how words, sifted through her attention—that is, after this brief detention—are absorbed by her thought, become images in her mind, become an inner illusion possessed by her alone and incommunicable to others.” Since the reader's reading not only influences the writing but governs the writer's hand, becoming the source of “I's” writing, should “I” then efface himself in the writing, “let the writing belong to what ought to be written, let narration become the act narrated by no one”? For this very reason, the ten stories in the novel are utterly different in style, and it is hard to catch information about the author's personal style—or rather, the author, having written one passage, always negates himself, effaces himself, and begins anew. Chapter Eleven loses the trace of the story-level: in the dialogue of “you” (the reader) with seven other readers, it reports the different reading modes and experiences of different readers. These two chapters seem to reveal the novel's true intent: it does not care about telling stories, but tells of the relation between “I” and “you,” author and reader—even tells of the event of “how the reader reads.” The reader not only doubles as narrator but becomes the true protagonist of the novel; the relation of author and reader is inverted.
The Traveler is a “meta-narrative novel.” The quality it presents is not unique to it, but presents in a polarized way the narrative quality that the literary text possesses. Through the analysis of the personal-pronoun referential game in The Traveler, we see that a literary text is not only multi-leveled internally (such as frame-level and story-level), and that the boundaries between these different levels are mobile; the literary text and the empirical level are also drawn into the referential game, thereby constituting a referential game on different planes—among the various elements and levels within the text, and between the text's interior and the external world.
Moreover, this novel is also a rather ironic postmodern “metafiction.” The story of the novel's frame-level is structured entirely according to the formula of the traditional novel: there is a hero and heroine; the thing they both cherish is always lost midway for various reasons; and so the journey of seeking begins, undergoing every kind of frustration and bewilderment, peril or joy; the lost thing is finally recovered, and the two protagonists are happily united. But at the story-level there are always only beginnings: the ten stories differ in style, not one of them complete, as though the world were broken—it has only a beginning, and forever no ending. The structural contrast between frame-level and story-level constitutes a striking ironic effect; it both deconstructs Calvino's own novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and establishes a “relation of exemplification” with the narrative mode of all traditional novels, humorously mocking the narrative formula of the traditional novel and pointing out its alienation from, and incapacity before, real experience. And in the setting of the narrators' persons, the frame-level narrator is “you” while the story-level narrator is, on the contrary, “I”—which again opens a distance between the empirical reader and the frame-level, making the narrative frame an object of scrutiny and judgment. From this angle, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is not merely a meta-narrative novel but a metafiction, a novel that refers to, interprets, and questions all traditional novelistic models.
From the angle of the referential game, the novel can broadly be divided into three levels, mutually distinct yet interwoven: the first is the construction of a literary fictional world through referential transformation; the second belongs to the referential game within the fictional world; the third is the fictional world's summoning, through the referential game, of a response at the empirical level. Because fiction abolishes the limitations imposed on the mode of reference, confers autonomous power upon it, releases infinite possibilities, and unfolds a free referential game, it constructs extremely rich and varied relational modes within and beyond the fictional world. The plural “I,” the split “you,” the inter-permeation of “you–I,” and the various complex designations of the narrator in The Traveler unfold, respectively, plural worlds that differ and yet mirror each other, making the referential game present a dazzling face and the text acquire an ever richer and more plural meaning.
5. Conclusion
The foundation of language is first of all the “establishment of relations,” not merely “conceptualization.” The relational modes between human and self, others, the myriad things of the world, and God, as well as between flesh and soul, are in the end all established by way of language. As a material existence, the human is originally within the world, within relations—only that this is still a holistic, undivided relation; only language can both tear the whole apart, manufacturing fissures, and, with language itself as mediation, re-establish objective relations, constructing complex and varied relational modes. From this the human transcends out of the undivided, integral world and becomes the sole being possessed of spirit. Scientific thinking and artistic thinking alike cannot do without the human's use of language to expand relational systems and shape various relational modes.
The human can only exist within various relational modes; he is the sum of social relations. These relational modes are constructed not merely by bodily contact and intercourse; only through linguistic construction can they become spiritual connections, and within this linguistic reference plays an important role. Language is not only the representation of real relations; it also shapes real relations, endows these relations with a specific spiritual mode, and confers meaning upon life. Searle persuasively expounded how declarative speech-acts construct social institutions and shape the forms of social civilization. In fact, in the process by which language constructs social institutions and forms of civilization, and disciplines human behavior and modes of existence, the act of reference plays an important role. While language refers to reality and sets up relational modes, it also determines the spiritual relational modes between human and human, human and society, human and nature, fixes these relational modes, and gradually internalizes them into the social unconscious. “In the experience of language, the human is constituted as a speaking being… For the speaking human, at a certain moment the world suddenly becomes meaningful, and the relation of signifier and signified is produced at that very moment.” The literary text, in turn, changes, reshapes, and reflects upon all manner of real relations through the referential game, sets off and exposes the unreasonable factors within real relations, dissolves and subverts all manner of unreasonable real relational modes, and confers meaning anew upon life. The human's real existence cannot but be governed by real relations; the literary text, however, confers supreme power upon linguistic reference, freely constructs rich and varied spiritual connections, thereby greatly expanding the human's existential space and modes of existence and promoting the all-round development of the human.
(This article was abridged on publication; among its sections, the first draft of Part Four, “The Traveler: The Thematization of Reference,” was written by Dr. Huang Jiaguang.)