I
In discussing what literature is, Wellek and Warren point out that, although a clear answer is hard to come by, it is most apt to restrict the term "literature" to imaginative literature. In the central zone of literature and art—the traditional literary types such as the lyric, the epic, and drama—what they handle is all a fictional world, an imagined world. And they hold that "'fictionality,' 'invention,' and 'imagination' are the salient characteristics of literature." (1) In examining the historical evolution of modern Western conceptions of literature, Widdowson also says: "I accept and retain the 'aestheticisation' defined over the past two centuries, regarding literature as an operation within the domain of the artful and artificial—for example, the 'fictive' in the broadest sense." (2) Fiction and imagination always entangle literature like a shadow following the body; yet it is precisely on this problem that endless dispute among Western scholars arises. In Poetics: A General Theory of Literary Form, David Fontaine holds that "the boundary of fiction is dynamic and continually changing with historical development." He goes on to point out that, although all attempts to give a single definition of literature take the fiction-criterion as their basis and try to extend it appropriately, supplementing it with its opposite or with other corresponding criteria, "in fact, these attempts to define through fiction are all doomed to fail, or can achieve only a relative success." Literariness exceeds fiction. (3) The boundary of fiction does indeed keep changing; in his The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser combed out the history of the semantic changes of "fiction" and "imagination" and ultimately gave up the practice of defining them.
In fact, the root of these disputes lies in confusing two senses of fiction. Making a semantic analysis of "fiction," what we see is the changing of its boundary; we cannot even define fiction, cannot make clear "fiction" itself. But when we examine it from the angle of the speech-act, we can discover that there exist two kinds of fiction, both related and yet utterly distinct: fiction as an act of "representation" or "reference," and fiction as an act of "construction." The first is fiction as an act of representation and reference—that is, the discourse's "representation" does not correspond to the facts, or the discourse "denotes" an object that does not exist in the real world (Goodman). These two formulations are in essence the same. They have the following common features. First, they both belong to the "locutionary act." Second, they can be determined to be fiction only through comparison with reality; therefore one needs, through what Searle calls the "vertical principle," to establish the connection between discourse and the real, and their speech-act model has a "word-to-world direction of fit (or non-fit)" and possesses a truth-value. Third, as for what conditions and criteria are used to measure whether a discourse's representation corresponds to reality (truthful) or departs from it (fictional)—since it is impossible to have a clear stipulation—the boundary between the truthful and the fictional is wandering and unsettled; it changes with the differences of various scholars' understandings, or with differences of subjective purpose, or with changes of theoretical horizon, and cannot finally be determined. Fourth, in the process of representation and reference, discourse has helplessly been reduced to a tool of representation and reference; it has become the "fish-trap" that one "forgets once the fish is caught." The second is fiction as an act of construction—that is, the discourse "constructs" a fictional world of linguistic signs (Genette). Its features are as follows. First, this kind of fiction belongs to the "illocutionary act." Second, constructing the fictional world is not a one-sided act of the discourse; it needs the reader's direct participation and the full cooperation of the reader's imagination to jointly construct a fictional world of linguistic signs. Third, once the constructive activity becomes the dominant act of the discourse, the "vertical principle" connecting discourse with reality is temporarily suspended, and discourse-construction is realized by reference to "horizontal conventions"; thus the connection of discourse with reality is relinquished. And so this world of linguistic signs lies in "another" dimension parallel to the real world and thereby becomes a fictional world. As for how far it resembles, corresponds to, or differs from and opposes the real world—all this has become irrelevant. Its speech-act model does not have a "word-to-world direction of fit (or non-fit)," nor can a truth-value exist. Fourth, unlike discourse in the act of representation and reference, in the activity of constructing the literary fictional world, discourse is no longer the human's tool; it becomes the human's most intimate partner, a loving companion. At this moment, the relation of human and discourse has also been transformed from an objective relation into a non-objective relation, from a real relation into a non-real relation. Losing this relation of equal cooperation and mutual generation, it would be impossible to realize the construction of the literary fictional world. This point is also the most important difference between the two kinds of fiction. Viewed thus, the two senses of fiction have a substantive difference. Fundamentally, literary fiction can only refer to the latter sense of fiction. It is precisely such a fictional world that changes the human's attitude and the relations among human, discourse, and world, letting the human gain a brand-new living space and a brand-new mode of existence; the human thereby fully exercises his creativity and undergoes rich, free experience, and the aesthetic, the literary, and the poetic are generated within this fictional world. Only in this sense does literary fiction acquire importance in the modern era and become something modern aesthetics and literary theory delight in.
Although these two senses of fiction differ, they are mutually connected and can convert into each other. For example, fiction in the referential sense—because the real object denoted is absent—may lead us to give up the act of denoting reality with discourse and turn instead into the activity of discourse-construction. Conversely, the free character of the act of discourse-construction often leads the constructed product to be possibly nonexistent in the real world, or not to correspond to a real object, and thereby to become fiction in the referential sense. The connection that exists between the two makes it easy to confuse the two different kinds of fiction. One might almost say that the root of all Western scholars' disputes over literary fiction lies in confusing two kinds of fiction of different senses and different natures.
In The Fictive and the Imaginary, the work specially exploring the problem of literary fiction, Iser is full of contradictions. On one hand, he interprets fiction as a boundary-crossing act—that is, fiction is in fact a discursive performance that, through "selection" and "combination," constructs a new literary world; on the other hand, Iser again treats fiction as a kind of representation and reference, so that its criteria and boundary cannot be determined. As Fontaine laments, the boundary of fiction is dynamic and changing. Iser even, without clearly defining fiction and imagination, forcibly splits fiction and imagination apart in order to establish his "triadic unity" of the real, the fictive, and the imaginary as a conception of literature; whereas in fact his distinction between fiction and imagination "still cannot form a clear picture." (4) The reason for his error also lies in not distinguishing two senses of fiction. Fiction as a discursive referential act—because the real object is absent and needs no intervention of imagination—is naturally different from imagination; but fiction as a discursive constructive act is one with imagination. This is the activity in which literary discourse, by its illocutionary force, invites the human to unfold imagination and jointly construct a world of linguistic signs; fiction and imagination are merely two facets of one and the same act-process: from the angle of the speech-act, this is the act of fiction; while from the angle of the human's psychological capacity, it is imagination—the two mutually merging and in fact inseparable.
Searle's contradiction likewise stems from viewing literary fiction through fiction in the referential sense. In interpreting the logical status of fictional discourse, on one hand he holds that utterances such as "Once upon a time there was a distant kingdom, where there was a wise king who had a beautiful daughter…" are an imitation of everyday performative discourse; it replaces, with "horizontal conventions," the "vertical principle" connecting language with the real, breaks the connection of word and world established by the vertical principle, and suspends the referential capacity of discourse. Clearly, the "imitation" spoken of here is in fact the discourse's constructive act, only that Searle regards it as a "pretended" performative. Yet when he uses the non-fiction novels In Cold Blood and The Armies of the Night as examples to expound the view that literature is not equivalent to fiction and that the two concepts of literature and fiction intersect, Searle again clearly interprets fiction as referring to a nonexistent object. In fact, the constructive act and the referential act of literary discourse are two acts that serve as each other's background: when we participate in the discourse's constructive act and immerse ourselves in the world this discourse constructs, we have already separated from the real world; we live in "another" fictional world constructed by discourse and temporarily interrupt reference, suspending reality. And when we transcend this discursive world, the referential function of discourse comes into play again, and we compare and refer the work's world to the real world. The whole activity of writing or reading is interwoven with the conversion of foreground–background relations among different speech-acts, interwoven with ceaseless boundary-crossing. In sum, literary discourse is a system possessing multiple acts, and the literary work is generated within the tension of various speech-acts that are both cooperative and conflictual. Among these, constructiveness (fictionality) is the most salient feature of the literary speech-act; what makes literature literature is precisely that the writer, by adopting various strategies, makes the constructiveness of the work's discourse a dominant function.
The constructiveness of literary discourse invites the author or reader to participate in the activity of constructing the discursive world, and at the same time, by its "illocutionary force," draws the author or reader into this discourse-constructed world, regulating the way they intervene in the fictional world, their relation to this world, and their position within it. In this fictional world, we share another life utterly different from real life and feel all sorts of love, hate, and passion; we are at once a participant full of passion and a calm bystander. Only this personal participation lets us truly experience the rare gift that literature brings to humanity, lets us appreciate the bearing of literature, grasp the rich meaning of literature, and discover the existence of the aesthetic, the literary, the poetic. Apart from this participation, the constructive act of literary discourse withers, the literary fictional world fades, and literature is left with only a lifeless, dead "text." The aesthetic, the literary, and the poetic can then be found nowhere else.
II
In the speech-act system, the constructive act and the referential act are mutually background and do not cancel each other. The writer, to be sure, adopts various strategies to strengthen the constructiveness of literary discourse and its illocutionary force, and thereby to enhance the work's infectious power, yet has not thereby stripped away the referentiality of discourse. The constructive act and the referential act are often mutually interwoven, ceaselessly crossing boundaries. Apart from non-fiction literature, whose referentiality can be almost wholly restored, ordinary literary works—because of their overall fictional context—make discourse lose its direct denoting capacity; such works always defer the referential act and change the target and mode of reference. More clearly put, this is no longer discourse "denoting," but referring to reality by means of a certain isomorphic relation between the discursive construct and reality—through the "as-if" structure Vaihinger spoke of, and the "exemplification relation" Goodman spoke of (5)—and thereby realizing the aim of social critique. The criticality of literature toward reality depends mainly on the isomorphic relation between the literary fictional world and the real world; the intelligibility, credibility, and truthfulness of literature also depend on this isomorphic relation.
Since literature is a fictional world, how, then, is this isomorphic relation formed? Clearly, the "imitation theory," "reflection theory," or "typification theory" (refining, concentrating) habitually used in the past is unpersuasive. As Plato pointed out, imitation is always inferior and clumsy; it cannot grant literature a powerful criticality. As for the "reflection theory," what exactly should be reflected, and how—this too remains elusive and vague. The refining and concentrating of typification is also merely a patchwork-style synthesis; the so-called revealing of the essence and law of real society is likewise too abstract, hard for one to grasp. None of these formulations can truly solve the problem of literary truthfulness. We hold that the key to the literary fictional world's establishing an isomorphic relation with the real world lies in "social convention," and that literary truthfulness depends on the work's discovery and revelation of social convention.
In interpreting speech-act theory, Austin proposed the concept of "social convention" and held that it is precisely social convention that sets the rules of behavior for those participating in verbal activity, enabling the speech-act to be smoothly realized. In fact, social convention not only sets the rules for the speech-act; it at the same time sets the rules for all the behavior of all people living in this society. The whole society runs under the regulation of social convention. These social conventions do not exist in the manner of "legal articles" but are a relatively broad, fuzzy mechanism of behavioral constraint, acquired and internalized by people in everyday life, deeply embedded in the human heart, and deep-rootedly becoming the human's unconscious. This is an enormous, invisible force; it not only leads the human by the nose but lets the human be unaware of it and willingly led by this invisible "other"—and only the less it is noticed, the more powerful it is. This is a social existence, a social "object," yet hidden deep within the heart of every social person. This is precisely the "norm" (ju) in the often-quoted phrase "following the heart's desire without overstepping the norm." The ideology of a certain social stratum acquires the function of integrating, coordinating, and ruling society only when it is transformed into social convention.
Once literature constructs its own fictional world by reference to social convention, an isomorphic relation is formed between it and the real world. Therefore, the truthfulness of literature is not the truthfulness of discourse "denoting," not the one-to-one correspondence of discursive description with the real object; it is neither imitation and reflection nor so-called typification; its root lies in revealing social convention. It is precisely social convention that secretly governs human behavior, governs the intercourse among people, and thereby organizes the whole society. One may say that social convention is the most basic, most hidden organizing principle of a society. Literature, as the study of the human, can be understood and acknowledged by readers only when it organizes human intercourse and organizes linguistic works according to social convention. The objects a work describes may be a monkey (Sun Wukong), a pig (Zhu Bajie), a beetle (Gregor); yet so long as it follows social convention and describes the behavior of these objects and organizes their relations of intercourse according to social convention, it becomes a readable, trustworthy literary work that gives a sense of truth and can move the heart. Social convention is the foundation on which literature acquires intelligibility, credibility, and truthfulness.
A character's certain "isolated" rule-breaking behaviors that go against feeling and reason do not destroy the work as a whole. For example, Sun Wukong somersaulting 108,000 li in one bound (Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West), or an "American" born in the nineteenth century being able to travel back to sixth-century Arthurian Britain (Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)—these extremely exaggerated boundary-crossing acts, apart from adding a fantastic or absurd color to the work, have no other negative effect. Compared with the individual's isolated behavior, interpersonal intercourse is more important, because these acts of intercourse—conversation, dispute, socializing, falling in love, cooperation, contradiction, conflict, and so on—often play the role of a bond organizing social relations and the structure of the literary work, and are an important structural factor in establishing an isomorphic relation between the literary world and the real world; for this reason they are inevitably subject to stricter constraint by social convention.
In analyzing human behavior, Potter and Wetherell proposed the concept of "social competence," using it to designate the competence constituted by a body of knowledge of social rules—a concept very close to Austin's internalized "social convention." Potter and Wetherell hold: "Social competence sets the range of acts people can perform in social occasions and determines accordingly which will be regarded as appropriate exercises of behavior." "To know how to act on this occasion," "to know which behaviors are appropriate and which are inappropriate." They further distinguish these rules into two basic categories: one is "regulative rules," used to guide behavior into the appropriate track; the other is "interpretative rules," which enable people to endow actions and events with meaning. (6) If regulative rules set the range and mode of action for the human, interpretative rules, by revealing the meaning of behavior, let the actor, while performing, at the same time experience his own meaning, and thereby either strengthen and solidify, or influence and change, the actor's will and subsequent behavior. For others present, it may also be that, by sharing some of these meanings and according to the evaluation that social convention makes of the behavior, interpersonal relations of intercourse are thereby influenced and changed. The reader's reading of a literary work is, to some degree, often also a performance and experience carried out in accordance with social convention; at the same time, he can transcend these conventions, take behavior and social convention as the object of scrutiny, and rely on interpretative rules to understand and evaluate the meaning of behavior and grasp the meaning of the work. From this angle, understanding a literary work is not only understanding the words; more important is grasping the interpretative rules of social convention and understanding the meaning of behavior. To make a social-historical critique of a literary work is mainly to analyze and critique the social convention behind the behavior.
Aristotle said that history describes what has happened, the poet describes what may happen, and poetry is more universal than history. The reason lies precisely in literature's profoundly revealing social convention; these social conventions determine not only how people of the past and present act but also how people of the future may act, and why the human cannot but act thus. Social convention is more universal in significance, and the universality of literature stems from the universal validity of social convention. The more profoundly literature reveals those social conventions that are hard to be noticed yet powerfully govern human behavior, laying them bare before the reader's eyes, the more it possesses truthfulness and criticality.
The conflict between the human and society is in essence mainly the conflict between human desire and social convention. Human desire is the motive force of human behavior; setting out from individual private interest, it propels human behavior. Social convention, in the manner inherent to society, regulates human behavior, forcing the human to act thus; this manifests not only as an external conflict among people but at the same time constitutes a profound internal conflict of the self. From the individual angle, driven by desire, the human continually tries to violate social convention, to break through the bondage of convention, and to try to fully realize his own desire; while social convention mercilessly suppresses it, regulates it, and even forcibly extinguishes it, bringing human behavior back into convention. It is precisely the conflict between the two that displays something both richly varied and changeful and possessed of a certain regularity. In a literary work, a character-image is shaped mainly not through the depiction of appearance; more important is its being displayed through what he "does" and "how he does it"—that is, through his behavior. Therefore the conflict or compromise between the desire that determines a character's behavior and social convention is the most important latent factor a work needs to earnestly dig out. When Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina, he had not thought of Anna's death; yet the novel ultimately could not but let her walk step by step toward death. The necessary logic in this is rooted in the conflict between individual desire and social convention. The literary work is precisely to reveal the conflict between desire and social convention hidden behind what superficially seems a conflict between the individual and the other, or the individual's self-conflict, and to push the conflict between the two to the sharpest degree—until both are displayed, bloody, before the reader's eyes. The so-called literary type (the typical) is precisely an image that profoundly reveals this conflict.
Social convention is historically formed; politics, ethnicity, ethics and morality, culture, and even economic relations are all congealed within social convention and are respectively realized through social convention's constraint on human behavior. Therefore the social convention of a given society is not a coordinated, unified whole; it itself, owing to the differentiation of era, region, stratum, and social group, has fissures and, in a particular society, constitutes different orders of rank, further constituting different "circles of intercourse," or "fields" (Bourdieu)—which makes the various contradictions and conflicts manifest more intricately and with more ups and downs. The reason the operation of social power is hidden and hard to discover is that the various powers are exercised and realized mainly through social convention; it is implicit within social convention. Therefore the main critical function of literature lies in this: exposing how the various powers hidden in social convention actually operate, making them clear to all. Social convention is both relatively stable, transmitted and continued, and in ceaseless differentiation, fusion, and change. But even at moments of great social upheaval, although social convention is impacted and offended, partly loses its validity, and leads to the mass appearance of convention-violating behavior—like the ancients' saying that "the rites collapse and music decays," "the morals decline day by day," "people's hearts are not as in old times"—it can still, on the whole, barely function; otherwise society would collapse and disintegrate. And for these rule-breaking phenomena too, we can make sense of them only by borrowing their relation to social convention. This, however, is not what the present article sets out to expound.
Thus we can reinterpret the distinctive relation between the fictionality and the truthfulness of literature: literary discourse, by its constructive act, displays a literary fictional world, giving the human enormous infectious power; at the same time, because it grasps the real social convention, it establishes an isomorphic relation with the real world and refers to reality through the "exemplification relation," thereby acquiring truthfulness and criticality. "Literary discourse itself, in the manner of illusion, prescribes and projects the presence of the 'real.'" (7)
Unlike social convention, cultural convention is a latent convention for organizing literary language or other artistic forms; it is acquired by the human in the process of learning literary language or other arts, similar to what Culler calls "conventions." Therefore literary writing and reading need both to refer to social convention and to follow cultural convention, and the two are often entangled together. And for a writer who dares to innovate, consciously challenging cultural convention and breaking through the constraint of cultural convention may precisely become an important path for him to establish his own distinctive style.
The fictionality and truthfulness of literature remain the fundamental problems of literary theory; only by clarifying this problem can we truly grasp the essence of literature and thereby give literary theory a solid theoretical foundation.