Returning to Literary Activity: From Saussure to Austin

I

In the field of twentieth-century literary research, Saussure's influence has been quite profound. The Prague School, the Russian semiotic school, structuralism, as well as poststructuralism and deconstruction, all took Saussurean linguistics as their own theoretical resource and even their theoretical point of departure, and thereby put forward many important views. Saussurean linguistics is mainly a "synchronic study" directed at the "language system," devoted to revealing the sign-character of language. As he himself said: "The problem of language is mainly a semiological problem, and our whole argument derives its significance from this important fact. To discover the true nature of language, one must first know what it has in common with all other systems of the same order." (1) Setting out from the language-sign system, he revealed the signifier/signified structure of the linguistic sign and expounded a series of principles—the differential, arbitrary, and systematic character of the sign, the linearity of the signifier, and so on; these insights provided important inspiration, theoretical reference, and methodological tools for literary research, and powerfully advanced the linguistic turn of literary study. But although the theory Saussurean linguistics constructs, setting out from the synchronic study of language-signs, is extremely profound, what it reveals are the most general, universal, and abstract features and rules of language, and to use it to study literature inevitably involves limitations and theoretical blind spots. The theoretical results of such synchronic study of the language-sign system are often more suited to abstract analysis of static texts. Propp's analysis of the functional structure of the folktale, Greimas's semantic analysis of narrative grammar, Genette's analysis of narrative discourse, and so on, did, to be sure, achieve important results, but in essence these are all abstractions made with respect to the literary text. Even when later researchers creatively applied Saussurean linguistic theory—introducing the factor of temporality, or borrowing the bridge of historicism to re-politicize literary theory—because their point of departure was still grounded on language-semiotics, they could not fundamentally shake off the theoretical limitation.

Language is the most important, the most complex, and the most magical of human phenomena. Russian Formalism says that language "is a chameleon." (2) Qian Zhongshu says that "language and writing are 'cunning as a snake.'" (3) The complexity of language does not lie merely, as deconstruction says, in the ceaseless drift of the signifier; more important is this: language is behavior, and moreover an intricately interwoven, ever-shifting system of behavior, which keeps changing its behavioral structure and functional structure along with the changing relation between human and language. Whenever the human thinks he has grasped language, he has in fact grasped only some side or fragment of the speech-act—and a side or fragment that has been mutated, distorted, and fixated at that. The speech that is grasped is always speech that has changed in quality. Saussure was wise: he delimited his own scope of research, distinguishing "language" (langue) from "the activity of language" (parole), and studied language alone. But when literary researchers import it into the field of literary research, this is bound to create an awkwardness for Saussurean linguistic theory in literary study. As Jonathan Potter points out in discussing the limitations of language-semiotics: "Because it stresses structure ('language structure') rather than concrete use (parole), and because it examines meaning at a single point in time rather than in the process of temporal flow, it omits many important and interesting problems. Continental analysts such as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida have all proposed that some important insights of semiotics may be retained—especially its stress on latent structure—but that at the same time we must pay more attention to the use of language and to the process of change." (4)

Literature is the "experimental field" and "arena" of language; all the complexity of the speech-act finds its freest and fullest embodiment in literature. This determines that, for literary research, speech-act theory has the greater advantage.

Already in his Aesthetic, Croce had revealed the behavioral character of language. He held: "Language is not an armory hung with ready-made weapons; nor is it a dictionary collecting a heap of abstractions; nor is it a corpse embalmed in a graveyard." "Language is a perpetual, ceaseless creation. What has once been expressed in language is not repeated, except by re-creating on the basis of what has already been created. The endlessly renewed new impressions produce continuous changes of sound and meaning, that is, endlessly renewed new expressions." Language, as a form of expression, thereby determines that the philosophy of language is the philosophy of art, is aesthetics. (5) Austin, for his part, realized still more fully that language is an extremely important kind of human behavior. "He does not regard language as a dead abstraction that can be handled like logic and mathematics, but realizes that language is a human practice," (6) and made a concrete, deep study of the speech-act. Austin says: "The more we regard the constative utterance as a speech-act, rather than as a sentence (or proposition), the more we study the speech-act as an entire system." (6) Austin's speech-act theory divides the speech-act into three levels: the locutionary act (the complete act of "saying something" according to verbal convention and possessing grammatical meaning), the illocutionary act (the act performed, in a specific context, by this discourse-act through social "convention"), and the perlocutionary act (the effect that what the speaker says produces upon the feelings, thoughts, and behavior of the listener, of the speaker himself, or of others). These three levels in turn contain many kinds of act, which constitute a complexly interwoven system of behavior. And the performance of the speech-act is in turn closely related to context and to socio-cultural convention, and requires the sincerity of the participants. This not only evades the static theoretical viewpoint that severs the human from language, re-regarding language as a vibrant, ever-shifting human activity, but also closely links speech-activity with the human, with society, and with culture, letting language return to life itself and regain its vital force. Such scholars as John Searle, Paul de Man, and Hillis Miller have further developed speech-act theory. These linguistic theories provide an effective methodological basis for our study of literary activity, and many basic problems of literary studies can thereby receive a relatively deep interpretation.

II

Researchers have always either defined literary fiction as the falsity of subject-matter, or regarded literary fiction as a non-correspondence between linguistic representation and fact; this gave rise to an endless dispute over literary fiction, and even brought about a mutual standoff and rivalry between a poetics of fiction and a poetics of form. When philosophy pointed out the relevance of human cognition to the language-sign, and New Historicism clarified the fictionality of the historical text, while the literary-creative world, on the contrary, advocated the "non-fiction novel," "documentary literature," and "historiographic metafiction," and so on, the problem of literary fiction became all the more complex.

In Fiction and Diction, Genette, from the angle of speech-act theory, redefined literary fiction as the act by which discourse "produces a fictional work" (7); that is, fiction in literature does not refer to a non-correspondence between linguistic representation and fact, but refers to literary discourse's possessing an act-capacity to construct a fictional world—an act that draws the human into the activity of discourse-construction and suspends the "vertical principle" that connects discourse with the real world. Therefore the literary world becomes "another" world parallel to the real world, a fictional discourse-world. The literary work and its discourse are neither true nor false; they have no truth-value. This dissolves the age-old dispute over literary fiction and lays a foundation for us to go on to solve other important theoretical problems of literary studies. Unfortunately, Genette did not fully realize the substantive difference between fiction as an act of representation and fiction as an act of constructing a fictional world; he did not realize the difference in intentionality between the two discourse-acts. The former is like a lie: it is still an act pointing toward the real world, only that the real referent is absent or disguised; the latter is like the telling of a story: it temporarily interrupts the discourse-reference act and, in the activity of constructing the fictional world, suspends the connection between discourse and reality. It is precisely in the activity of literary discourse's constructing a fictional world that the most fundamental feature of literature is generated. Genette was too enamored of his own original narratological standpoint, and neglected the great significance of what he had already discovered, going so far as to regard this important view merely as a supplement to the traditional conception of fiction; and in his later expositions of literary fiction—such as Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative and Metalepsis: From the Figure to Fiction—he returned once more to the traditional interpretive position.

What is more important is this: when we fully recognize that discourse is a multi-level system of behavior, recognize that literary discourse at once represents and refers and also performs and constructs, that it is an interweaving of various kinds of act, and when we view literary discourse-activity from the angle of a complex behavior-system, then it is not hard to discover the root of the various contradictory and opposed views that have always existed in literary research, and to go on to re-describe the extremely complex activity-field that literary discourse constitutes, and deeply reveal the mystery of literature.

As the above analysis points out, literary discourse is not only representation but also a constructive act: it constructs a literary fictional world and invites the human to participate in this discourse-construction and to live within this fictional world. One may say that this is the most important and most characteristic act of literary discourse. Heidegger's regarding literature and art as the home of the human's poetic dwelling, and Marcuse's calling literature and art the aesthetic dimension of the human's free existence, a dimension of humanity's return, both stem from this constructive act of literary discourse. Literary discourse creates a fictional discourse-world, an "alien world" different from the real world. From the angle of this constructive act of literary discourse, the independence of literature and aesthetic autonomy find their basis. In this independent, fictional, sensuous world, real repression is removed, the authority of reason is overturned, and utilitarian purposes—having lost their practical significance—are suspended; and so the human's sensation, imagination, consciousness, unconscious, vital force, and creativity are all most fully excavated and brought into play. Discourse-activity and the human's life-activity merge together most harmoniously, mutually illuminating and mutually generating one another; it touches the human's entire world of experience, and even the deepest soul and the collective memory of the race. The conceptual hard shell and the finitude of discourse itself are at last broken; discourse begins to create toward the realm of the infinite and the transcendent. The human's world, too, is at last opened up, and a world full of the sense of life and of metaphysical meaning unfolds before the human's eyes. Aestheticity, literariness, and poeticity are generated precisely in the process of literary discourse's constructing a fictional world. From this angle, Kant's autonomy-aesthetics is not without basis, and is not entirely outdated.

On the other hand, from the angle of discourse as an act of representation and reference, the vertical connection between literature and reality is once again displayed. Although the reference act of literary discourse is delayed, and the way and target of its referring to reality are changed, it is not cancelled. Literature therefore becomes a representation of reality, a special window through which we observe real society. Thus the social-cognitive function and the critical function of literature are necessarily not to be ignored.

The self-referential act of discourse, in turn, throws into relief the features of discourse itself, making discourse-form the focus of human attention, and thereby giving rise to the study of discourse-form. Shklovsky's so-called "defamiliarized" language and the poetic function of language expounded by Jakobson stress precisely the self-reference of language, which lets the rhythm and meter of language, and other sensuous information, come to appearance. Only, literariness and poeticity are not some inherent feature existing within language, and these claims about literariness and poeticity have been questioned by later scholars. After analyzing the various views of literariness, Jonathan Culler pointed out: "If we confine the literariness-effect of a text within the category of the manifestation of linguistic devices, we still run into an enormous obstacle, because all these factors or devices may appear elsewhere, in non-literary texts." (8) Moreover, from the angle of discourse-narration, the self-reference of discourse in turn constitutes meta-narration. Yet when we connect the speech-act with context and socio-cultural convention, discourse-power and the relation of discourse to politics and ideology can in turn be revealed. This is precisely the work Foucault did. Discourse exists and operates within social life; not only is it covered with the stains of politics and ideology, but it is also an effective tool for exercising the power of some person or group—and the successful exercise of power must in turn rely on a specific context and on socio-cultural convention.

Besides the above categories of discourse-act, there exist in literary discourse many other acts, which interweave and fuse into a system of discourse-acts. Literature dwells precisely within the tension-field constituted by discourse-acts that either mutually depend on and reinforce one another, or mutually conflict with and check one another. The author can use writing strategies to regulate the structure and operation of this discourse-act system—for example, Brecht's "alienation effect" and Booth's "rhetorical strategy"—and the reader likewise has the power to change the structure and operation of this behavior-system, yet neither of them has absolute control. The reason literature possesses an eternal charm, an inexhaustible and unutterable meaning, and can be read ever anew, lies precisely in this tension-field's being full of mutually opposed factors: it is a ceaselessly shifting behavior-system, and this provides an infinitely vast space for literary interpretation. As for the concrete researcher, because he is situated in a specific socio-cultural context, the pressure created by that context and the "pre-understanding" brought by his theoretical lineage may both lead him to attend to only some one side of the discourse-act system, thereby producing contradictions and conflicts among the various conceptions of literature.

It is precisely because discourse is itself a complex and changeable behavior-system, and because, in the overall functioning of the discourse-acts, each act is no longer the form it has when we analyze it in isolation—they have all undergone mutation within the symbiotic, changeable behavior-system, and have bred new factors within the tension-field of the discourse-acts—that we find it very hard to give a determinate answer concerning the total appearance of literary discourse. We are often able to grasp only some one side of the discourse-act, to analyze some one side—and a side that has lost its original appearance at that. One may therefore say that the views put forward by Kant and other predecessors are both right and not right. Even applying Foucault's discourse theory to literary analysis has in fact already simplified the relation between literary discourse and power.

III

Setting out from speech-act theory, we can also discover why literary research increasingly deviates from literary practice. In fact, between literary research and literary activity there exists an unavoidable rupture and even gulf.

Whether in literary creation or in reading and appreciation, literary discourse is a matter of many acts unfolding as a whole and functioning in concert, while also interweaving with, influencing, generating, and constraining one another; they constitute the "literary" work as a whole and display literature's actual mode of existence. What Kant calls "aestheticity" or what Formalism calls "literariness" is generated precisely in the process of the unfolding of the literary discourse-acts. Once we view literature with the gaze of "research," the discourse-act system disintegrates and is distorted. It often degenerates into some single act, and is most easily simplified into the discourse-representation act, because discourse-representation is the "locutionary act," and it is inscribed directly upon the literal surface. In this way, we naturally can only notice the semiotic features of discourse, and naturally incline toward Saussurean linguistic theory; or we attend to the relation of discourse-representation to context and socio-cultural convention, and become enamored of Foucault's discourse theory; or we attend only to the real social phenomena to which discourse refers, while discourse itself is "foreshortened" and the discourse-act has already gone into hiding. In the horizon of literary "research," the most important and most characteristic act of literary discourse—the constructive act—has withered and been lost. The discourse-construction act is an "illocutionary act"; it requires the human's "intimate, gapless" cooperation. In the activity of discourse constructing a world, the human and discourse mutually attract, cooperate with, and fuse into one another, jointly unfolding, and creating an imagined fictional world. This is an intersubjective relation established between the human and discourse, and it is the most vital, the richest, and the most creative state of the human and discourse. But "research" requires us to adopt an objective, cool stance, to keep a distance from discourse, and to treat discourse as the "object" of research—that is, as the "other"; what it loses is precisely the most important act of literary discourse, the constructive act. These analyses distort and prune the discourse-act system and depart from the reality of literary activity, and thereby also cancel the aestheticity and literariness of literature. This is precisely the theoretical trap of which literary research must beware.

The scholar-style intellectual game has indeed turned literary research into a kind of learned intellectual game. De Man had already vaguely sensed the danger contained in literary research; he criticized: "Against the background of French historical criticism and thematic criticism, the demystifying power that semiotics possesses is quite considerable. This shows that, if one uncritically submits to the authority of signification, then the perception of the literary dimension of speech will be largely effaced." (9) In fact, what the researcher grasps is only an unimportant and fixated side of literary discourse, and no longer the discourse-act system that is vividly unfolding and generating. One may say that what research attends to is neither the literary work (which is constructed by the discourse-act system) nor "living" literary discourse ("living" discourse being a behavior-system); it is only a thing that is neither fish nor fowl.

The literary text is open; it provides the reader with infinitely diverse ways of entering and interpreting the text. Structuralist, poststructuralist, deconstructive, and various other readings of the text have important value for expanding the space of textual understanding and broadening the theoretical horizon. But this scholar-style intellectual game may precisely lead to the loss of what is peculiar to literature, the loss of literature's most precious and irreplaceable value, so much so that we leave "literature" behind. In fact, deconstructive reading can be applied to the reading of any genre, only that the literary text is less constrained by logic and so provides a broader, freer space for deconstructive reading. Abrams once criticized the "double game" that Derrida plays. In interpreting literary works, Derrida deliberately violates cultural convention and ingeniously startles with his utterances; yet in order to ensure that his views are accepted by the reader, he cannot but conform to cultural convention—he plays a "double game" by a "double rule." Even so, as an interpretive strategy, it brings an enormous impact upon the monolithic, author-intention-centered interpretive paradigm and conception, and therefore still has important value. Its problem lies in this: this manner of reading equally cancels the structural features that the literary discourse-act system ought to have, and dismantles the activity by which discourse constructs a fictional world, thereby cancelling aestheticity and literariness.

We do not hold that scholar-style reading is intolerable; we only point out that it does not accord with literary practice. For what the reader faces is the work, not the text; so long as it is reading and appreciation, we can only face the work. The text is merely the object of the researcher's analysis, not the object of the reader's appreciation. It is precisely in the reader's reading-and-appreciating activity that all the acts of literary discourse unfold and jointly generate the literary work. But in the horizon of scholar-style reading, the work degenerates anew into a lifeless text, and what it loses is precisely literature and literariness. This is the very reason why, in the hundred years since Russian Formalism proposed "literariness," we have never found any determinate literariness. In the process of searching for literariness, we often feel that certain linguistic-form factors are related to literariness, yet we are unable to confirm them as literariness; and the reason lies precisely in this: in the process by which the literary discourse-acts construct a fictional world, these factors participate in the concerted functioning of the discourse-acts and jointly generate a vivid fictional world full of color and sound, letting us truly and concretely undergo the "literary" experience and feel the existence of literariness; but when we search carefully within the text or the discourse, the fictional world has already withered and disintegrated, and literariness too has gone into hiding. These really-existing linguistic-form factors are not in themselves literariness; they jointly participate in producing literariness, and even the features of these linguistic-form factors themselves are fully released by this fictional world and made to shine with extraordinary brilliance. In Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative, Genette analyzed one by one the order, speed, frequency, mood, and voice of a work's narration, yet was never able to find the factor that distinguishes the two kinds of narrative, and could not help lamenting in disappointment: "Not all the 'marks' of fiction belong to the category of narratology, first of all because they do not all belong to the category of the text: a more common—and perhaps increasingly common—situation is that a fictional text is marked by paratextual features, which can let the reader avoid any misunderstanding; the genre-mark 'novel' on the title-page or cover is but one instance among many paratextual marks." (10) Literariness arises in the wake of the activity by which literary discourse constructs a fictional world; it is a generative, processual category, and not an objective, determinate one. Literariness is built upon utopia.

IV

The intellectual game of scholars leads not only to the "de-aestheticization" and "de-literarization" of literature, but is also the root of the "dehumanization" of literature. Eliot early on put forward the doctrine of the "impersonality" of poetry, and Gasset clamored for the "dehumanization" of art. In Gasset's eyes, the human is nature, and the humanization of art is a clumsy pursuit of verisimilitude that disturbs pure aesthetic appreciation. The artist, on the contrary, should attempt to distort reality and break its human face—that is, to "dehumanize." Likewise, poetry, because it carries humanizing content, has long been unable to take a step, like a deflated balloon tangled at the edge of a tree or the corner of an eave, battered all over. "Therefore the ordinary man and the poet are also incompatible. The destiny of the ordinary man is to walk to the end of his own road of life, whereas the task of the poet is creation, fiction. This is the true essence of being a poet. The poet adds to the already-existing real world an illusory continent, making the world more vast." (11) Clearly, the theoretical background of Gasset's so-called "dehumanization" is still Kantian pure aesthetics, and it is of one lineage with Edward Bullough's advocacy of the "anti-realist nature of literature." But the "dehumanization" in current literary research is utterly different from this; it is built on the basis of the linguistic turn of literature. Saussure's linguistics and Foucault's discourse theory both regard language as an independent existence. Language is a sign-system, bound to the "collective ballast," not something that individual will can shake. Within the language-sign system there is simply no place for the human. These excellent insights all powerfully helped bring about the linguistic turn of philosophy, aesthetics, and literature. At the same time, they also expelled the human from the horizon of literature, because language as an independent existence need not obey any individual. Language no longer takes its orders from the human. On the contrary, "before we have uttered even the slightest bit of speech, we are already ruled and frozen by language." (12) It is not the human who speaks language, but the human who speaks in the wake of language—indeed, it is language that speaks the human.

Yet Austin's speech-act theory recalls the human; in his theoretical paradigm, the "participant" becomes a necessary factor. As Saussure said: "The individual is always its master; this we call speech (parole)." (1) Speech, as a special kind of act, can first of all be only the human's act, and only secondarily an interpersonal speech-act; it is not only issued by the human and acts upon and influences the human, but is itself the human's act. The speech-act interweaves with the human's other acts and most effectively organizes human activity. Therefore language is at once independent, and yet this independence is not absolute: in its concrete use it is always entangled with the human and deeply marked with the human's breath and the features of the human's style. Apart from the human, language can only dry up into a lifeless zombie, or congeal into a brutal tool of ideological propaganda, or degenerate into a purposelessly drifting ghost; it is no longer the living human's language. In the modern horizon of the linguistic turn, language haughtily plays the tyrant; it is split off from the human and from the human's life, and so the author can stand aloof from literature with folded arms, and the reader's reading too becomes an "affective fallacy." The author is dead, and the reader has died in turn. On this, Abrams comments rather sharply: "In this reading age of ours, the first agent in the act of literary communication is the author. To one who is no longer a novice, it is always amusing to see recent authors of books and articles proudly declaring their own death. 'It is time,' says Michel Foucault, 'for criticism and philosophy to acknowledge the disappearance or death of the author.' 'Like convention,' is Roland Barthes's formulation, 'the author too is dead: his civil status, his existence as a biological organism, have both vanished.' This death-notice extends further to the reader, and even to humanity itself, which has been debased to the point of being an illusion produced by the language-game—or, in Foucault's words, the human has been debased into 'a fold in our knowledge,' destined 'to disappear the moment knowledge finds a new form.' Accordingly, as these new-style essays on reading have it, the author has dissolved into the work itself, the reader has dissolved into reading-as-such, and what is affected, and what reading-as-such engages, is not any literary work but text, writing. Gradually, the text forges its own identity as a purposive utterance about humanity and human concerns, and even its uniqueness becomes a mere episode in an all-encompassing textuality—as Edward Said evaluates it, it has merged into a 'linguistic high sea.' Accordingly, the 'influence' traditionally said to obtain between author and author is also de-individualized, becoming 'intertextuality,' a kind of echo among ownerless strings of signs." (13) Language as a sign-system does indeed have independence, autonomy, and opacity, whereas speech as an act is a chameleon: it is cunning as a snake, and is always mutually entangled with the human, never able to leave the human. Saussure, Foucault, Barthes, and Said all deeply revealed the semiotic features of language, but they omitted the behavioral feature of speech, omitted the feature of the speech-act as the human's act—and this is precisely the most important feature of literary discourse.

Here, what we stress is "literary discourse." For instrumental discourse such as official documents and scientific-technical texts, the semiotic feature is often the more important one; literary discourse, by contrast, by various strategies strengthens its own act-capacity, and especially the discourse-construction act and the illocutionary force. When we stress only the semiotic feature of literary discourse, the human is bound to be expelled from the text, and literary theory will inevitably leave literature and head toward error. Jonathan Culler says: "Once the conscious subject is stripped of its role as the source of meaning—once meaning is explained according to a system of norms that the conscious subject cannot grasp—the self and consciousness are no longer one and the same thing. As the various interpersonal systems that operate through the subject replace the function of the subject, the subject 'dissolves.' The human sciences at first took the human as the object of knowledge, but as these sciences developed, it turned out that 'man' disappeared in structuralist analysis." (14) Mark Currie, with respect to Derrida, comments: "Language is material activity—not only because language is to be understood as the written material imprint that exists apart from the brain, but also because the structures of text and language are (to use a word Derrida avoids) reified, or turned into material things or activities in the world. The significance of this doing is to liberate meaning from the duality of brain and matter; and the strategy for achieving this aim is to undo the bondage between language and consciousness, and thereby to present language in its material form: as writing, as recording, as technology, as externality, and so on—and Derrida has always done exactly this." (15) Language has stolen an unprecedented honor and become the power-core of the network of the world; the place of the human is thereby replaced, and the subject is exiled.

Yet when language operates as a concrete, functioning discourse-act, it once again becomes the human's act. Especially when literary discourse functions as an act of constructing a fictional world, it is bound to invite the human to participate jointly in the creation, to entangle and fuse with the human, and to gestate the human and subjectivity—and so it returns once more to the human himself. As Blanchot says: "In a certain sense, the book needs the reader in order to become a statue, needs the reader in order to affirm to itself something authorless and readerless. What reading gives it, first of all, is not a more human reality; but neither does reading turn the book into something inhuman, some 'object,' a pure, dense, singular style, that deep fruit which the sun cannot ripen… The essence of reading—its specificity—illuminates the special meaning of the verb 'make' in the sentence 'reading makes the work become a work.'" (16) Benveniste, for his part, says: "Language makes subjectivity possible, because it always contains linguistic forms suited to the expression of subjectivity; and discourse triggers the manifestation of subjectivity, because it is composed of discrete instances. Language may be said to provide a number of 'empty' forms, which each speaker who uses discourse appropriates and relates to his own 'person,' while at the same time he defines himself as I and defines his interlocutor as you. The instance of discourse thus constitutes all the coordinates that serve to define the subject." (17) Austin's theory is precisely an interpretation directed at the speech-act system; it reveals the concrete, dynamic operating rules of speech, reveals the essential feature of speech as the human's act, and combines the speech-act system with concrete context and socio-cultural convention. It therefore provides us with the possibility of avoiding theoretical traps and lets us come closer to the true face of literary activity. Viewing literature from the angle of Austin's speech-act theory, we find that literary discourse is not merely a sign, nor is it merely used for "representation" and "reference," but is a multi-level "behavior-system"; these acts interweave with, influence, conflict with, adapt to, and fuse with one another, and together with the human jointly construct a vibrant, vital literary work. The literary discourse-act both achieves literature's own distinctive character and is always linked with the human and related to the real-life context and socio-cultural convention in which it is situated, communicating with and influencing real-life activity in its own peculiar way. From this angle, for literary research, speech-act theory has a relatively effective interpretive power.

V

The object of study of Austin's speech-act theory is everyday discourse; he held that literary discourse lacks the principle of sincerity, that its acts are void, and on this ground he excluded literary discourse from the study of the speech-act. In fact, the research approach of Austin's speech-act theory precisely provides an important reference for literary study.

We may divide literary discourse into three major categories: narrative discourse, direct quotation, and indirect quotation. For narrative literature, narrative discourse is often the main body of the work's discourse. It is precisely the narrative discourse-act that constructs the fictional world of literature; with its "illocutionary force," it attracts the human to participate jointly in the construction, and regulates the relation between the human and discourse, the way the human enters the literary world, and the way the human feels and experiences literary events. Narrative discourse at the same time performs acts in a dual direction: inwardly it operates within the fictional world and becomes the constructive force and a constituent part of the fictional world; outwardly it acts upon the reader, influencing the reader's reading-attitude, mode of participation, and even mode of existence; and it fuses the acts in the two directions together. The illocutionary force that narrative discourse possesses, and the actual effect it produces, are often the joint result of style and discourse-manner, narrative strategy, and rhetorical strategy together with context and cultural convention, and also the result of the reader's cooperation. Direct quotation refers mainly to the directly quoted speech-acts of the work's characters. It is performed only within the fictional world and is carried out with reference to the social context and the social convention peculiar to the spatiotemporal setting the work has established. These discourse-acts knot up the colorful and many-postured relations among persons and fill the literary fictional world with complex, intricate interpersonal interaction. Austin's speech-act theory can be directly applied to the analysis of the acts of direct quotation; only that the validity of these acts must be confined within the literary fictional world, and cannot transcend the fictional world and effectively enter the real world. It is precisely for this reason that Austin held it to be hypocritical and void. Since direct quotation mainly displays the act-interaction among the work's characters, and since its mode of action has already been described by the author in accordance with the established context, social convention, and the characters' personalities, the reader is not the direct target of the discourse-performance and retains only the status of a bystander, and therefore his interaction with direct quotation differs from his pattern of interaction with narrative discourse. Indirect quotation lies between narrative discourse and direct quotation: besides being similar to direct quotation, it also possesses the features of narrative discourse. Meta-narration or metalepsis likewise performs discourse-acts in their own peculiar way: often they do not participate in constructing the fictional world but, on the contrary, disturb and even distort or dismantle the fictional world, bringing about an interchange of the background and foreground relations of the narration, intending to manipulate the reader's reading, to change the relation between reader and discourse, to strengthen the self-consciousness of the narration, and to return to the narrative act itself. Still, we may classify these under narrative discourse. Whatever the discourse-act, it cannot be detached from context and from social convention or cultural convention; these provide credibility and intelligibility for the literary world, ensure the smooth proceeding of literary communication, and sustain the transmission of the literary work from generation to generation.

The choice of the mode of the literary discourse-act is closely related to the author's writing intention. John Searle says: "By intentionally uttering something that carries a certain set of conditions of satisfaction—those specified by the essential condition of this speech-act—I have already endowed this utterance with intentionality and therefore necessarily expressed the corresponding mental state… It is precisely by performing an utterance-act carrying a certain set of intentions that the utterance-act is transformed into an illocutionary act, and intentionality is thereby imposed upon the utterance." (18) Although the author cannot fully control the performance of the discourse-act, he always strives, in accordance with his intention, to use narrative style and strategy to adjust the discourse-acts so as to realize his own writing purpose. And the writing intention is often the result of the mutual influence between the author as an individual and his existential state and the social fashion; it is most concentratedly embodied in the readership the author posits. Sartre once expounded the importance of the reader for the author's choice of discourse-act. He held that, at the moment the author determines his own readership, he also determines himself; he must choose his own discourse and his whole writing-act in accordance with the reader. For the author, the public is an expectation, a vacuum waiting to be filled, a "wish" in both the literal and the figurative sense. The public summons the author, raises a query to the author's freedom, and the author must make a response to it.

Sartre incisively analyzed the writing of the American Black writer Wright. Sartre said that if we saw only Wright's existential condition—saw that he was a "Negro" who had migrated from the American South to the North—we would suppose that Wright could only describe Blacks, or Whites as seen through Black eyes; or that he had absorbed White culture from the outside and, through his own writing, demonstrated the alienation of the Black race within American society. But if we note the readership Wright posited for himself—readers who are neither White racists nor illiterate Black peasants, and likewise neither European nor Asian readers, but cultured Blacks of the American North and kind-hearted Whites—then he must face these readers and write for them. His writing-act and his choice of discourse must all be directed at these readers. Yet Black readers and White readers are precisely two different readerships. With Black readers, Wright shares the same childhood, the same difficulties, the same emotions; he need not spell things out, and they understand. As for White readers, however kind-hearted they may be, they always represent "another person" to the Black writer; they have entirely different experiences and must make an enormous effort before they can understand the Black condition. And Wright intends to implicate these White readers as well, to make them weigh their own responsibility, to arouse their indignation, and to make them feel ashamed. "So each of Wright's books contains what Baudelaire called a 'simultaneous double demand'; every word points to two backgrounds; two forces are applied simultaneously to each sentence, endowing his narration with an incomparable tension… Wright wrote for a readership split into two parts, and he managed both to maintain and to transcend this split. He turned this split into the very reason for creating a work of art." (19) The discourse-act of the literary work operates between author and reader; it is the bridge that connects and communicates between author and reader. The reader determines the author's choice of discourse-mode, and at the same time the work's discourse-mode screens his readers. The author cannot but consider how to choose and adjust his own discourse so as to bring the effect of the discourse-act into play with maximum efficiency, and to win his "actual readership" and "potential readership."

Speech-act theory not only endows us with a powerful tool for interpreting the inner mode of operation of literature, but also links literary activity with the human's social-life practice, letting us see clearly the various different act-modes of discourse and the important value these hold for the human.

Of course, our stressing the importance of Austin is by no means a wish to discard Saussure, Foucault, and other related research, but a stress on taking Austin's speech-act theory as the methodological basis: it provides us with a most basic point of observation and a way of reasoning about problems. At the same time, we should broadly absorb Saussurean linguistics, Foucault's discourse theory, Bakhtin's metalinguistics, and many other existing research results, and value the appropriateness and complementarity among the various theories, thereby returning to the literary scene and returning to literary activity.