From the Sacred World of Rituals to the Imaginary World of Literature and Art

Literature and art originate from primitive ritual; they, like the other spiritual activities of humankind such as religion, are inseparable from the nurturing of primitive ritual. This is by no means a denial of the decisive role of labor. From the standpoint of ultimate origin, it was precisely labor that secured the continuation of human life; labor promoted the development of the human body and senses, as well as of mind and thought, and thereby provided the most basic precondition for all manner of other activities, ritual activity itself being likewise founded upon this basis. Through labor the human being established a close relationship with nature; in order to seek the goal of coordinating this relationship, ritual activity arose. But this is not sufficient to prove that literature and art derive directly from labor; on the contrary, the intermediate link of primitive ritual must be passed through, and once this link is removed, the necessary condition for the emergence of literature and art is lost. Primitive ritual is the matrix that nurtures literature and art. Primitive ritual enriched and transformed the relationship between the human being and nature established by labor practice, and constructed a distinctive spiritual world; the many basic features of literature and art are founded upon this basis.

As early as ancient Greece, Aristotle pointed out that tragedy “developed out of the improvisations of the leaders of the dithyramb” (14). Nietzsche further elaborated the relationship between tragedy and the Dionysian rite. Jane Harrison, an important scholar of the Cambridge school in England, was deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Frazer; setting out from a large body of anthropological materials, she made a deep analysis of the relationship between art and ritual. In her view, art originates from an impulse shared by both art and ritual—namely, to display the human being’s vivid passions and longings through such means as performance, modelling, action, and adornment. This intense desire is the conviction that the life-force of nature is bound to die and revive. Not only the Osiris rites of ancient Egypt, but also such rites as the Tammuz and Adonis rites of ancient Babylon, the Attis rite of ancient Rome, and the spring festivals current throughout the world, all expressed the intense desire for death-and-rebirth and for bidding farewell to the old and welcoming the new. Such a common emotional factor caused art and ritual to be fused indistinguishably at the very beginning. It was precisely from her examination of rich anthropological materials that Harrison discovered: “For art in its early stage, in its relatively simple forms, just is ritual; ritual is the embryo and the initial form of art.” “Art does not spring directly from life itself, but from the collective appeals of the human group to the needs and desires of life—that is, from what is called ritual.” (133–34)

Although Harrison’s view that literature and art originate from ritual has met with no little doubt, the close connection between literature and art and ritual has nonetheless gained the recognition of more and more scholars. Lukács and Benjamin respectively analyzed the connection between aesthetic consciousness and primitive ritual. Frye pointed out: “In primitive societies art is very closely bound up with magic; the creative motive is attached to a more urgent purpose, the hope that one’s own products may, in ways favorable to humankind, influence the external world … The human imagination was released only through the sublation of magic.” (34–35) Setting out from a species-centric view of art, Dissanayake explored the distinctiveness of human activity, saying: “It seems to me, ethologically, defensible to look for what is peculiarly human about art in the contexts that give rise to ceremony and ritual. A very good reason for working in this area is that, unlike sexual display, ceremony and ritual are unique to humans.” (107) Meletinsky thought rather highly of the Cambridge school’s approach of investigating the roots of ancient Greek and Roman drama from ritual, and in his own mythological research discovered that the narrative poem “in its origin is bound up with the primitive ritual complex, and its connection with cult goes without saying.” (103–04) Mario Perniola, from the standpoint of etymology, made a deep inquiry into the term “work” (opera). He held: “The word ‘work’ (opera) comes from the Sanskrit àpah, meaning ‘work,’ and is related to the Vedic apah, meaning ‘religious activity,’ so that the word came to bear the sense of celebration and ritual.” (86) He further pointed out that art and the city, the artwork and the political order—these several concepts converge together upon the word “opera,” and ritual is precisely the pivot of religion and ancient Roman society.

In the poetry of the native peoples of the Americas, Gregory Nagy saw a special meaning, a value that explores ultimate return. In his view, poetry is the result of the branching-out and derivation of performance. In ritual and its principal forms, the ritual element of performance can become the best symbol. Poetry, as a branch of performance, is precisely the principal path for realizing this expression and dissolving sorrow. Poetry carries an unbroken tradition. Hence Nagy says: “Form is ritual, ritual is performance, performance is song-poetry.” (204) Ji Xianlin, on the basis of the Rigveda’s hymns of praise, entreaty, and persuasion to the gods, and the various important sacrificial prayers contained in the Yajurveda, clarified the relationship between the ancient Indian Vedic hymns and religious ritual (6).

In our own country’s ancient documents there are many records of the relationship of poetry, song, music, and dance to sacrifice and banquet rituals. The “Ancient Music” chapter of Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals says: “Of old, the music of the Getian clan was performed by three men holding ox-tails and stamping their feet while singing eight stanzas: the first called ‘Bearing the People,’ the second ‘The Dark Bird,’ the third ‘Following Grass and Trees,’ the fourth ‘Stirring the Five Grains,’ the fifth ‘Revering the Constancy of Heaven,’ the sixth ‘Attaining the Lord’s Merit,’ the seventh ‘Relying on the Virtue of Earth,’ the eighth ‘Summing the Utmost of All Things.’” (Chen Qiyou 284) Although the eight ancient songs recorded there have long been lost, with only the titles surviving, one may still infer from them that their content was the praise of ancestors, the worship of Heaven and Earth, the offering of tribute to the deities, and prayers for an abundant harvest and the flourishing of all things; it describes precisely a sacrificial ritual that was at once sung and danced. Under the conditions of low productive forces and harsh circumstances of life in primitive society, the human being could not but depend upon nature, and this in turn fostered the ritual activities of worshiping ancestors, deities, and Heaven and Earth, of praying for blessings, and of taking shelter under external powers so as to maintain one’s own survival and reproduction. In the consciousness of primitive forebears, the importance of ritual activity far exceeded that of labor and other human activities; it was precisely ritual activity that determined the success or failure of labor and other practical activities. This function of ritual endowed it with sacred value, making it a sacred space distinguished from everyday life. Precisely for this reason, the most precious sacrifices were to be offered up in ritual, and those pleasing poems, songs, music, and dances were fit only to be enjoyed by ancestors and deities in ritual. This conception influenced later ages, and so the “Great Preface” to the Book of Songs says: “The hymn is the form that praises abundant virtue, by which one announces one’s accomplishments to the spirits and the gods.” (Guo Shaoyu 63) Liu Xie’s “Hymn and Eulogy, the Ninth,” in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, inherits and elaborates the earlier view: “Of the four beginnings reaching their utmost, the hymn occupies the apex. The hymn is form; it is that by which one praises abundant virtue and describes its form. Of old, in the age of Diku, Xianhei composed hymns, singing the ‘Nine Summons’ … The hymn’s principal aim is to announce to the gods, hence its sense must be purely beautiful.” (Wang Yunxi and Zhou Feng 67) Zhu Xi went further, extending from “hymn” to “ode,” pointing out: “As for the pieces of the Odes and Hymns, they are all lyrics of the music sung at court and at the suburban and ancestral sacrifices of the Cheng-Zhou age. Their language is harmonious and dignified, their sense broad and dense; their authors were often of the company of sages, and they are therefore taken as the model and standard for ten thousand generations and cannot be altered.” (Guo Shaoyu 72–73) Besides poetry, song, music, and dance, Yang Jingting’s Record of the Capital and Wang Guowei’s An Investigation into Song and Yuan Drama respectively pointed out the connection of drama with sacrifice and with the shaman.

In the modern era, with the spread of the thought of the English Cambridge school, the question of the relationship between ritual and the origin of literature and art has drawn ever-greater attention from scholars in our country. In “The Origins of the Six Senses of Poetry,” Wang Kunwu made an exhaustive investigation of the “doctrine of the six senses” in the “Great Preface” to the Book of Songs, finely describing the developmental process from “the six poems” to “the six senses” and discriminating the changes in their meaning, and held that, among the three hundred poems, “the comparatively early works often have two features: they use the narrative mode, and they take praise-hymn as their content, with an evident ritual component.” “This shows that recitation, prayer, or hymn used in ritual was the most basic function of early poetry.” “In fact, had there been no ritual activity, then not only would there have been no compilation of the three hundred poems, but there might not even have arisen the literary form of the ‘poem.’” (248) Setting out from textual investigation of pre-Qin institutions, Zhan Ying revealed the relationship between literature and ritual, saying: “In antiquity the shaman (wu) and the invocator (zhu) were joined offices. Among the zhu-offices in the ‘Spring Offices’ of the Rites of Zhou were the Grand Invocator, the Lesser Invocator, the Mourning Invocator, and the Field Invocator; among the wu-offices were the Director of Shamans, the Male Shaman, and the Female Shaman. The shaman descended the gods by song and dance, while the invocator served the gods by literary words. The Discourses of the States holds that only the brilliant and sagely-wise first became shamans (wu and xi), and Zheng’s commentary on the Rites of Zhou says that those who possessed elegant words and command of language first became Grand Invocators. From this one knows that these two were the outstanding talents of the early people, and the wellspring of literature.” (358) Liu Zhen analyzed and discussed the manifold close connections and mutual influences among the nuo rites, nuo drama, and traditional opera (xiqu), holding that nuo drama has a broad and a narrow sense: the broad-sense nuo drama is ritual drama, while the narrow-sense nuo drama is the nuo drama that “performs a story by song and dance”—not a pure dance performance, but still an organic part of a folk sacrificial ritual. For “in the early period of humankind, when people’s consciousness and thinking were murky and dim, ritual and artistic performance, both belonging to the category of thought and spirit, were fused indistinguishably with each other; the structural character of ritual maintains a natural close connection between it and the essence of dramatic action, and at that time ritual performance and dramatic action were undivided and identical.” Through an examination of the developmental course of Chinese drama, he pointed out that the relationship of ritual and drama is embodied on two levels: “the first level, the murky period in which ritual and drama accompany and fuse with each other”; and the meaning of the second level lies in the fact that “the relationship of ritual and drama did not, with the separation of drama and ritual and drama’s advance toward selfhood and independence, completely sever its umbilical bond.” In fact, the close relationship between drama and ritual has always existed throughout history; only it is a zone easily “neglected” by people. (134–36)

Although the inner connection between literature and art and ritual has gained ever-deepening research, and has obtained no little powerful evidence in historical and cultural-anthropological research, these studies still cannot conclusively prove the view that literature and art originate from ritual activity, for any instance is finite; it cannot exhaust the question of origin, nor can it rule out the possibility that multiple sources exist.

Research into the relationship between literature and art and ritual must combine textual investigation with logical reasoning if it is to be more conducive to deepening the problem. If we place the genesis of literature and art within the process of the developmental evolution of the human spirit and analyze it there, then we can discover that, as a distinctive spiritual phenomenon of humankind, the birth of literature and art cannot do without this link of ritual activity. Although labor practice plays the ultimate role and necessarily involves multiple causes, it is ritual activity alone that truly nurtured literature and art. It was precisely ritual that opened up spiritual activity in the true sense, and that provided the decisive condition for the birth of literature and art.

In speaking of primitive ritual, Harrison held that primitive people at first had no idea or concept of “spirit”; they were utterly incapable of abstract thought, and in their minds abstraction was incongruous.① Moved within and stirred in feeling, they involuntarily dance with their hands and stamp with their feet. Such a dance often, because one among them dances with conspicuous excellence, leads to his being elevated as the leader and lead dancer; this lead dancer is the earliest “incarnation,” gradually becoming the idol of the ritual participants, and his flesh-and-blood personality provided the prototype for the later process of personification. In ritual activity, the lead dancer becomes the focus and core gathering collective passion; the whole activity revolves around him, and he becomes the soul of the ritual. His image therefore enters deeply into people’s hearts and is engraved in memory unforgotten. Year after year, this impression is continually repeated and re-presented, and at last is transformed from a real person into an image in people’s memory, becoming a spiritual creation. “It is precisely the periodic repetition of perception that makes a lasting process of abstraction and conceptualization possible.” “The periodic festival begets a god, a god who, though not immortal, can yet die and revive.” (43–44)

What needs to be supplemented is this: this lead dancer should at the same time be the lead singer; because he is the core of the ritual participants’ attention, there gathers upon him also the participants’ ardent expectations and wishes. As the ritual is periodically repeated, the real person is gradually forgotten, and this image that gathers the participants’ expectations and wishes gradually transforms into an abstract idea, a deity invested with the participants’ expectations and wishes. What must be emphasized is that only within the “collective” activity of primitive ritual can this transformation occur. In this song-and-dance ritual activity, the participants’ emotions infect one another and rouse one another, and thereby construct a whirlpool of passion and force. It is precisely in this whirlpool that each participant’s emotions and desires are magnified manyfold, the everyday threshold of perception is broken through, and everything in the ritual space is thereby transformed; the image of that lead dancer (lead singer) is also transformed from an ordinary object into an “extraordinary” object—an “extraordinary” object that, once one leaves the collective ritual activity, leaves this space, can no longer be perceived, experienced, or understood. In the course of the periodic repetition of ritual activity, on the one hand the representation of this lead dancer (lead singer) is abstracted, and on the other hand it is continually strengthened and “made extraordinary”; the deity is thereby born, and the ritual space thereby becomes sacred space. Apart from the collective activity of ritual, this transformation absolutely could not occur.② This lead dancer (lead singer) is at once the “human being” of everyday life and the extraordinary “non-human” of ritual activity; and for primitive people who think according to the law of participation, this is at once natural and mysterious.

Wang Guowei’s An Investigation into Song and Yuan Drama traces the origin of Chinese opera: “In antiquity, sacrifice must have its shi (impersonator of the dead). The shi of the ancestral temple was acted by a son or younger brother. As for the sacrifices to Heaven, Earth, and the hundred spirits, whether or not a shi was used cannot be examined, but the ‘Discourse of Jin’ says: ‘When Jin sacrificed at the Xia suburb, it used Dong Bo as the shi.’ Then a shi was indeed used even for non-ancestral-temple sacrifices. The ling of the Nine Songs was probably one who, being a shaman, also served the use of a shi. The Chu lyrics call the shaman ling and call the god ling as well; for among the assembled shamans there must have been one who imaged the god’s clothing, appearance, and movements, and was regarded as that on which the god relied and rested—hence he was called ling, or ling-bao. The ‘Lord of the East’ says: ‘I think of the ling-bao, worthy and fair.’ Wang Yi’s commentary glosses ling as bao and bao as ‘at peace.’ I suspect that the ling-bao of the Chu lyrics and the shen-bao of the Book of Songs are both alternative names for the shi.” (5)

The “shi of the ancestral temple” proposed by Wang Guowei is the one in the sacrificial ritual who is made up by a son or younger brother into the image of the ancestor. At first the “shi” was made up by the descendants of the dead, and later was taken over by a professionalized “shaman”; hence it is said that, “being a shaman, he also served the use of a shi.” “Shi” is “ling,” which is also “shaman.” Thus shaman, ling, ancestor, and deity are interconnected. From this we may infer that the earliest ritual activity was chiefly the offering of memorial sacrifice to ancestors. For primitive forebears, death was the most momentous event, and the continuation of life the most urgent need; they attempted, through rituals of death-and-rebirth, to realize the continuance of life. Hence the chief object of sacrifice in early ritual activity was precisely the ancestor—that is, the “shi” made up by sons and younger brothers. As the days passed and ritual was periodically repeated, the memory of the ancestor grew gradually blurred, and many “merits,” “virtues,” and “graces,” together with the longings for the many forebears, were all imposed upon the “shi”; that “shi” who made up the ancestor thereby became the extraordinary “non-human.” That in bronze inscriptions the Shang people’s “Lord on High” is glossed as the heavenly thearch combined with the ancestral spirit, the first ancestor of the Yin people, may serve as a further proof. At this point we may make a further supplement to Harrison’s view: that lead dancer of the ritual was not only at the same time the lead singer; he was the “shi” of which ancient China spoke—that is, the impersonator of the ancestor—only that later he was also used to represent deities.

The appearance of the professionalized “shaman” was a key factor. Even under the participatory action of primitive thought, people could after all hardly take the “son or younger brother” with whom they were daily familiar, cheek by jowl and thoroughly acquainted, as a “shen” to be experienced; they could only regard him as the reincarnation of an ancestor. Only when an originally strange “outsider” of unknown provenance—a professional shaman—by his “professionalized” practiced dance-postures and chants, and because he “imaged the god’s clothing, appearance, and movements,” could be regarded by ritual participants as another unknowable possessing extraordinary power, distinct from the ancestor—namely, the deity. To the ritual participants, he appeared in ritual in a concrete, perceptible image, and roused an intoxicated experience untouchable in everyday life; yet he was also unknowable, for people did not know his comings and goings, did not know who he really was, did not know why he had such magical power. This being at once perceptible and unknowable is the “shen” (deity); the representation and idea of the deity thereby sprouted, and further linked up with such things as “Heaven,” “Earth,” and “ghost” that rendered the human senses powerless or were unreachably remote. Around the deity, the ritual space too was gradually constructed as sacred space. To adapt Eliade’s words, the appearance of the “shen” led to the interruption of the homogeneity of space and became a manifestation of an absolute reality, a fixed point of sacralization, and the order of the world was established on this basis. From then on, deity worship and ancestor (ancestral-spirit) worship, though still closely linked, gradually became distinguished.

In analyzing primitive magic, Frazer pointed out: the primitive person “belongs to the past, is subject to the souls of his ancestors. The shades of his ancestors seem to rule him with a rod of iron; he must obey those unwritten laws.” (51) In the minds of primitive people, ancestors had an irreplaceable priority and an inexpungeable influence. This phenomenon both determined that primitive ritual must first take ancestors as its object of sacrifice, and also showed that ancestral sacrifice had already engraved this sacrificed one deeply in primitive people’s hearts; the ancestor already possessed a deity-like awe-inspiring power, and moreover showed that, before deity worship arose, ancestor worship already had deep-rooted foundations. That the concept of the deity originates from ancestral sacrifice can also be verified in the Indian epic. Blackburn’s research pointed out that the central belief of the Indian epic lies in chanting the story of the hero and thereby summoning him as a deity. “In local tradition, the event of death functions as the ‘generative point’ of the story. It leads to deification, leads to cult, leads to ritual—and thus finally leads to narrative, a narrative performed in accompaniment with ritual, so as to summon the descent of the dead one’s soul.” (quoted in Nagy 65)

What needs to be pointed out is that here, like Harrison, we use such concepts as “dance” and “song,” yet they are still far from being used in the modern sense; they do not belong to literature and art in the modern sense, but are only some collective, regular behavioral patterns—or, to adopt Ye Lang’s formulation, may be called “primitive image-symbol activities.”

This transformation that occurred in primitive ritual was, for humankind, exceedingly important: it opened up the human being’s true spiritual space. If, before the appearance of the concept of the deity, ritual activity and the primitive image-symbol activities of dance and song contained within it remained on the whole at the level of bodily perception, then, after the deity was born, all this acquired an entirely different significance: it was linked with the deity and thereby acquired a new spiritual dimension, and this took a key step in the process of the transformation of primitive image-symbol activity into literature and art. Although these primitive image-symbol activities may still have been imitations of such behaviors as labor, hunting, and war, as well as exclamations, shouts, and cries, yet because they were linked with the deity they possessed a spiritual orientation and had already transcended all manner of everyday activities. Although it was not yet literature and art in the modern sense, it was set apart from the other practical activities of humankind. These dance, song, and other primitive image-symbol activities linked with the deity no longer merely brought ritual participants bodily pleasure and revelry; at the same time, because they were linked, communicated, and fused with the deity, they possessed sacred value and transcendence, bringing the human being a brand-new experience and spiritual consolation and joy. The union with the deity finally led to the union of the human being’s body, senses, and spirit. The relationship between the human being and the world was thereby greatly expanded; the world was for the human being no longer merely a material object—it at the same time opened up another vast, void spiritual space.

From the foregoing analysis one can see that primitive thought, characterized by the law of participation, itself also has a long process of development and evolution. From the thing-thing participation and self-thing participation of the first dawn of chaos, it extended further into the participation of the intuitive representation of the objective object with the subjective, abstract spiritual image. From a large body of anthropological materials Lévy-Bruhl saw that, for primitive thought, there scarcely exists what we call the cause of a phenomenon; its pre-connection establishes without hesitation the direct transition from a certain sense-impression to a certain invisible power. “Strictly speaking, one cannot even say that what happens requires explanation, for at the very moment a thing happens, prelogical thought immediately forms a representation of the invisible influence manifesting itself in this way. In fact, for the primitive, the world around him is the language used by spirits and by spirits speaking. Primitive thought does not remember when it learned this language; the pre-connection of its collective representations makes this language entirely a natural thing.” (375)

According to the pre-connection of the collective representations built up by the law of participation of primitive thought, as Lévy-Bruhl says it is indeed “a natural thing”; yet the connection of a certain sense-impression with the representation of an invisible power (the deity) must take as its precondition the perception of, and the establishment of a representation of, that invisible power (the deity), and primitive ritual activity provided precisely the best occasion for rehearsing and learning this. Ritual makes what was originally invisible into a concrete, perceptible image, into a sense-object shared by the ritual participants; primitive thought learned this language of communicating with the deity precisely in the course of the unfolding of ritual activity.

In “The Worship of Number,” Pang Pu made a deep investigation of “dance” (舞) from the standpoint of paleography. He held that dance (舞), shaman (巫), and nothingness/seeking (无) were originally one body. The pictograph of “dance” (舞) represents the image of a person holding an ox-tail or thatch and dancing. The ancients danced not for amusement but for the seeking of blessings: praying for an abundant harvest, they imitated the movements of farming; praying for a great catch in the hunt, they imitated the movements of the prey. These movements were called “dance” (舞), which is also “seeking” (无). The objects to which “dance” was offered—the various deities—being invisible, could not have their form made clear, and so were also represented by “nothingness” (无). One skilled at dancing, skilled at divining the joy and anger of the object “wu” (无, the deity), was gradually, by this special skill, called “shaman” (巫). Hence he says: “The reason the shaman is called shaman is originally that he was charged with dealing with ‘wu.’ And what is ‘wu’? Originally it was the deity that ‘dance’ courted and pleased.” (11–12) As human practice developed, primitive thought gradually tended toward disintegration, and primitive ritual activity declined. The various primitive image-symbol activities originally contained within ritual activity and fused into one with it—since they themselves at once possessed the functions of entertaining the gods and entertaining people—after they left ritual likewise circulated among the folk, and because they were no longer strictly bound by ritual, instead developed rapidly. In this process, because they had left the sacred space of ritual and because the idea of the deity had grown faint, the position occupied by the deity in these activities was also left vacant; the deity became a presence-in-absence, leaving behind only a blurred, void shadow. After the deity departed, the original sacredness of such image-symbol activities as “dance” also grew daily fainter, transforming into what Benjamin called the “aura”—a murky, metaphysical spiritual connotation, a “wu” (nothingness) without a deity. One may say that religion is the activity by which the human being deals with the deity through ritual, while such activities as “dance,” abandoned by the deity, are the human being’s dealing, by way of them, with “wu” (nothingness), dealing with the boundless spiritual world. Between the human being and the world a wholly new relationship was established.

Marx said: “The totality, when it appears in the head as a thought-totality, is a product of the thinking head, which grasps the world in the only way open to it, a way differing from the artistic, religious, and practical-spiritual grasping of the world.” (Lu Meilin 170–71) The human being’s mode of grasping the world, and the relationship between the human being and the world, are differentiated along with the differentiation of the domains of human activity; differentiation brings the diversity of modes of grasping and of modes of connection. Ritual activity, in a most powerful way, precisely promoted this differentiation, demarcating from the everyday-life world a distinctive sacred space, and likewise made the various primitive image-symbol activities in ritual into the human being’s distinctive sacred way of dealing with the deity. This sacred relationship between the human being and the deity later evolved into the new relationship of the human being dealing with “wu” (nothingness), which we call the “virtual intentional relationship”; the indeterminate imaginative space thereby created we call the “fictional world”—a void, infinite spiritual world utterly different from the real world. This fictional world became the ideal abode of literature and art. It is precisely for this reason that “fiction” has all along enjoyed the favor of Western scholars and was called by Wellek the “central” feature of literature.

In the above we have discussed only one most crucial factor in the transformation of primitive image-symbol activity into literature-and-art activity; this is still not sufficient to clarify this concrete process of transformation. Besides the birth and departure of the deity, another important cause is the differentiation of the participants in ritual activity and the appearance of the spectator (the audience).

In Ancient Art and Ritual, Harrison made a meticulous examination of the ancient Greek theatre. She discovered that the spatial relationship between the orchestra (the chorus’s dancing-ground) and the spectators’ seats continually changed over time, and in this process the position of the spectators’ seats grew ever more prominent, until at last it became the spiritual center of the whole theatre. The essence of this change precisely intimates that the spectator was differentiated out from the participants and gradually became an indispensable constituent part of ritual activity, and that this finally led to the transformation of ritual into art. She says: “For the Greeks, the spectator was a wholly new element; for, because there were spectators, the dance changed from an activity in which people jointly participated into an object for people to watch from afar, into a kind of magnificent spectacle. Formerly all were participants and worshippers; now most of them became onlookers—they watched, they listened, but no longer did. It is precisely this wholly new attitude of the onlooker that drew a boundary line between ritual and art. What was originally something you yourself took part in, your own doings, now became drama; drama is still doing, but it is estranged from your own action.” (82)

Edward Shaughnessy (Xia Hanyi), from the standpoint of form, language, and content, compared the earliest poems of the Book of Songs—composed roughly in the first century of the Western Zhou dynasty—with the poems composed in the mid-Western Zhou (about the latter half of the tenth century BC). He held that one very important change among them is this: in the mid-Western Zhou poems there no longer appear first- or second-person pronouns; instead, the third-person pronoun “qi” (其, “his/their”) is used to refer to the participants in the rite, their activities, and their ancestors and deities. This change intimates that ritual activity was constituted not only by the participants (worshippers, supplicants) and the objects undergoing worship and supplication (deities, ancestors), but that there had also appeared a third party—the spectator—and that these spectators had already become an important constituent part of ritual activity, an audience that the ritual chanting could not but face. That is to say, the poetry-chanting in ritual was no longer merely offered to the deities but was at the same time for the spectators to “appreciate.” The aim of chanting changed from the single deity to taking the spectators into account as well, and the importance of the spectators had already manifested itself. In order to adapt to this change, in order to respect the spectators, to let the spectators understand clearly and not confuse the expression, the third-person “qi” inevitably appeared. The change of person displays the change of the dialogic structure from “two-term” to “three-term.” This shows that the earliest poems were prayers sung and danced by collective participants in ritual, their function and meaning inseparable from the rite; the mid-Western Zhou poems, however, described another, different rite—namely, the chanting performed by a professional priest before an assembled audience of guests. From the comparison of these two kinds of poetry, “one can make out a parallel evolution of poetic form of expression and ritual performance: from collective participation to the separation of priest and spectator, from chorus to the separation of poet and spectator. Taking this separation as the starting point, Chinese poetry developed from the domain of ‘ritual’ to the domain of true literature.” (26)

Both Harrison and Shaughnessy keenly saw the importance of the appearance of the spectator for the transformation of ritual image-symbol activity into literature-and-art activity; yet they did not clarify why the spectator was differentiated out from the ritual participants. As for the reasons, there are chiefly three. The first is that, with the multiplication of population and the growth of the tribe, organizing all members to participate in ritual became, under the limitation of such conditions as activity-space, in fact no longer possible. The second—and the most important—is that, with the strengthening of the concept of deity worship and the high importance attached to ritual activity (“the great affairs of the state lie in sacrifice and warfare”), there inevitably arose a higher technical demand upon ritual and upon the song-dance and other image-symbol activities within it, which naturally led to the professionalization of performance: not only was the “shi” impersonated by a special person, but the song and dance too had to be undertaken by well-trained specialists, and the rest could only become onlookers. The third is that the concentration of power stabilized the professional troupe—once the rudiment of the “state” was formed, the ritual performers correspondingly acquired “official posts,” became members of the power group, and each had his charge. Thus the spectators, as the “audience” of ritual activity, were formed. In addition, the annexation and fusion of different tribes brought new modes of ritual activity, which also made a portion of people unavoidably become onlookers.

This differentiation was again crucial for the transformation of primitive image-symbol into literature and art. Formerly, although ritual song and dance brought people pleasure, these feelings were almost entirely submerged in the ritual-worship mood, substantially resembling religious experience, and the aesthetic was only a latent factor. Once the participant became a spectator, even though in watching he was intoxicated and from time to time uttered shouts to add to the fun, he had nonetheless irreversibly opened a distance from the ritual song and dance: he could no longer directly take part in the performance, and spatial distance and psychological distance jointly brought about a change—the “transformation by distance.” As Bullough said: “The transforming effect of distance lies first of all in transferring the object out of the sphere of our practical or real self, in giving the phenomenon a standing beyond the sphere of our personal needs and ends.” (M. Rader 421–22) As an onlooker at ritual, although he still embraced reverence for the deity and still silently prayed for the realization of his ends, he was after all no longer directly performing for and communicating with the deity; he was only a spectator, and therefore no longer clung to practical ends; watching gave him the occasion to germinate a detached attitude, and the aesthetic seized the chance to come on stage.

As for ritual itself, it is chiefly the entertaining of the gods, while at the same time, because the participant’s bodily activity and emotional activity bring pleasure, it possesses the factor of entertaining people. The emergence of the onlooker promoted the differentiation of entertaining the gods and entertaining people. As a participant, he could not but throw himself body and soul into the activity of revering and entertaining the gods, completely forgetting his own existence, still less having leisure to attend to his own feelings; “onlooking,” however, let the spectator’s “self” come present once more, and the self’s feelings too began to receive attention, and made primitive image-symbol activity into an object “watched” and experienced by the “self.” “Watching” is profanation; the originally pure mood of worship begins to receive challenge and exclusion;③ the lofty deity, too, unawares descends into Martin Buber’s “Thou”—a “Thou” no longer felt as awe-inspiring but felt as kind and lovable, laughable and lamentable—thereby constructing the “I–Thou” relationship. Thus the aesthetic relationship appeared, the aesthetic factor grew, and finally led to the transformation of “worship” into “appreciation,” led to the transformation of ritual image-symbol activity into literature-and-art activity. The differentiation of performer and onlooker is the key step in this transformation; primitive image-symbol activity formally set out on the course of developing toward literature and art, and in later days separated out from ritual to become literature and art in the true sense. Hence Wen Yiduo says: “These gods—actually the shamans ‘employed’ by the gods—each according to his own identity performed in turn small stories of differing degrees, sorrowful and lovely, or tragic and heroic; the situation was much like the performance of plays in the temples of recent ages. The only difference is that, at that time, the play was performed by the lesser gods for the great god to watch, and the people who took part in the sacrifice got the chance to watch the spectacle by the grace of the great god; now, the shaman who specially served as the agent of the lesser gods has become a professional actor, and because the shi-sacrifice system was abolished, the great god is merely a ‘clay-and-wood’ idol who cannot understand the play, so the crowd simply pushed him aside, themselves seized the playhouse, and became the formal audience.” (268)

Richard Schechner, from the standpoint of performance studies, further pointed out: “When distance is needed between the audience and the performers, theatre comes into being. … The evidence that theatre is generated from ritual through the transformation procedure—the evidence by which the participants, by performing an efficacious activity, are transformed into performers whose activity is for the entertainment of an audience—is to be found not only in ancient or medieval documents. The phenomenon of ritual transforming into theatre is occurring today.” (171)

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim recounted the Intichiuma rites held by the Arunta people: along the devout pilgrimage road, the road the worshippers walk is the one trodden by the heroes of the Alcheringa age; the place where the worshippers stop to hold the rite is the place where the ancestors once lingered, were glorious, and there returned their souls to the earth. All these arouse recollection in the hearts of the ritual participants. Apart from using gestures and movements, they often chant sacred songs concerning the ancestors’ deeds. Durkheim held that these movements and chants already possess the form of drama and other arts; because the priest is acted by the descendant of the ancestor, he is at once the descendant of the ancestor and the incarnation of the ancestor, imitating the ancestor’s postures—only that he has not yet, like an actor, played the role of the ancestor; his role is still himself. “To further strengthen the representational character of the rite, it suffices merely to bring into relief the duality of priest and ancestor, and this is precisely the case of the Warramunga tribe. Even among the Arunta, there are, in at least one Intichiuma, certain persons who have no mythic ancestral lineage with the clan’s ancestor and yet represent the ancestor; thus in the rite there appears a dramatic performance in the precise sense—this is the Intichiuma of the emu clan.” (357–58) That the priest in ritual (the ancestor-impersonator) shifts from a descendant having a blood relationship with the ancestor to a professional having no mythic lineage of transmission is an important change: namely, the cleft between him and the “ancestor” he plays widened—he is at once the priest and one playing the ancestor of “another,” and there exists a marked “duality” between the two roles. He distinctly feels that he is playing a personage utterly unrelated to him; his every move must obtain the recognition of that tribe; he is conscious that this is merely performance, a performance no different from dramatic performance. The strengthening of performativity, from another side, impels the transformation of ritual image-symbol activity into literature and art.

Besides the above causes, the centralization and concentration of ritual must also lead to the decline of ritual activity and the development of literature and art. When the common people were deprived of the right to participate in ritual, the activity that originally, by way of ritual, continually fixed and strengthened the concept of the deity now became estranged from the common people. This situation, joined with the human cognition continually developing in labor practice, jointly promoted the fading of the concept of the deity, and thereby emptied out the foundation of ritual’s existence, dooming ritual to decline and clearing a space for the survival of literature and art.

The “Lü Punishments” chapter of the Book of Documents records: “Chiyou first made disorder, which spread to the common people, none not robbers and bandits, owls and traitors, seizing and plundering, deceitful and rapacious. … The Sovereign Thearch, pitying the innocent among the multitudes condemned, requited the cruel with awe, cut off and exterminated the Miao people, leaving them no posterity below. He then ordered Chong and Li to cut off the communication between Earth and Heaven, so that there were no descents.” (Chen Shuguo 129) What is called “cutting off the communication of Heaven and Earth” is because the Miao people originally had the phenomenon of “humans and gods intermingling.” Their sacrificial rite was one in which all members of the tribe collectively participated, and every participant might communicate with the deity, thereby causing the chaotic situation of “humans and gods intermingling.” This was greatly different from the sacrificial rite of the Han people, and so the thearch, to punish them, forbade the ritual mode of the Miao tribe, ordering Chong to take charge of Heaven and Li to take charge of Earth, and severing Heaven from Earth. Its essence is a kind of reform, unifying the Miao people by means of the Han people’s ritual system. The “Discourses of Chu” in the Discourses of the States has a similar record: “King Zhao asked Guan Shefu: ‘What the Book of Zhou calls Chong and Li actually causing Heaven and Earth not to communicate—what does it mean? Had it not been so, would the people have been able to ascend to Heaven?’ He replied: ‘It does not mean this. In antiquity, the people and the gods did not intermingle. … When it came to the decline of Shaohao, the Nine Li threw virtue into disorder; the people and the gods were intermingled and could not be classified. Each person performed sacrifice; every household had its shamans and recorders, with no fidelity or substance. The people were impoverished by sacrifice and yet did not know its blessings. Offerings were made without measure; the people and the gods occupied the same rank. The people profaned the solemn covenants and had no awe or majesty. The gods grew familiar with the people’s ways and did not purify their conduct. Fine harvests did not descend; there was nothing with which to make offerings. Calamities arrived again and again, and none could exhaust their vital force. Zhuanxu received this charge, and so ordered Chong, the Director of the South, to take charge of Heaven so as to gather the gods, and ordered Li, the Director of Fire, to take charge of Earth so as to gather the people, restoring the old constancy, with no mutual encroachment or profanation. This is called cutting off the communication of Earth and Heaven.’” (Zuo Qiuming 274–75)

Seen through the eyes of the Han people, the Nine Li’s “people and gods intermingled,” “every household having shamans and recorders,” “people and gods occupying the same rank,” and “the gods growing familiar with the people’s ways” violated the order of the Way of Heaven and ought to be sternly rectified; Chong and Li were to govern them separately, blocking the communication of Heaven and Earth. This is precisely the centralization and concentration of ritual activity.

When ritual activity became the privilege of the few, when the great majority lost the chance to participate in ritual, the entertaining-people song-dance and other image-symbol activities in ritual activity scattered one after another; they drifted among the folk and thereby gained free development. Just as, after the Reformation in the West, the churches cleared away idols, pictures, and all sorts of images, forcing images to flow toward the folk and enter private dwellings, and on the contrary promoting the dissemination of images, so the poetry, song, music, and dance that had left ritual likewise multiplied rapidly. Having turned their backs on ritual, and thereby having renounced the gods and ancestors, the ritual image-symbol activities now, justifiably and with new identities as poetry, song, music, and drama, circulated through the world; they changed their original solemn countenance and became approachable, though they still bore the shadow of the deity and were wreathed in an aura that could not be wiped away—yet they were now genuinely for the entertaining of people rather than the entertaining of the gods. Even if in later days they were again collected, incorporated, and applied to ritual (the ballads in the Book of Songs partly collected from the folk and used in ritual; the many nuo plays in nuo rites), nonetheless, because the power of the deity declined and the position of the human being rose, the need to entertain people overwhelmed the need to entertain the gods, and the transformation of ritual image-symbol activity into literature and art became an unstoppable trend.

In addition, the generalization of ritual—its extension and derivation from ancestral and deity sacrifices to such rituals as banquets for guests, causing the absence of the sacred in ritual—is likewise an important cause of the metamorphosis of ritual image-symbol activity into the people-entertaining activity of literature and art. On this point Li Chunqing offered a fine interpretation: “From speech in the human-god relationship to speech in the ruler-minister relationship, and further to speech among different individuals, different groups, and even different feudal states in aristocratic society, poetry passed through a process of evolution from sacred discourse to political discourse, and further to rhetorical discourse marking identity, dignity, and wisdom. In this process, the function of poetry was continually changing, yet it always referred to a certain spiritual value and existed as the ‘sign’ of this spiritual value closely bound up with the aristocratic mode of life.” (20) What should be pointed out is that this poetry circulating among the aristocracy and the ballads sunk among the folk were likewise destined to part ways; owing to the differences in the groups of people entertained, the two unfolded a dynamic and complex relationship of mutual distinction and mutual influence and intermingling.

Literature and art were nurtured into being by ritual activity; they were originally used to deal with the deity, to communicate with the deity, and so even later, when Socrates spoke of poets, he still often compared them with shamans and priests. In his view, only when, like a shaman or priest, inspiration descends, can the poet speak on the god’s behalf, possess true creative power, and glimpse the truth of the celestial realm; as for those poems written merely by imitation, not produced by inspiration through possession by a deity, they are of the lower sort and ought to be expelled from the ideal state. This is precisely the reason for Socrates’s contradictory attitude toward poetry. From this we can also glimpse the traces of the ritual hymn declining into the worldly poem.

Because literature and art were born by way of ritual and were originally linked with the deity, they ought therefore to belong to the sacred world and not to the mundane real world. Durkheim pointed out: “Strictly speaking, the world of sacred things is a distinctive world. … Since all the characteristics of the sacred world stand in opposition to the profane world, one must necessarily treat the sacred world in its own particular way. When we have to enter into relation with the things that constitute the sacred world, if we use the gestures, language, and attitudes employed in dealing with ordinary things, we shall not understand the nature of sacred things, and shall cause a certain confusion of non-sacred things with sacred things.” (299)

Ritual activity demarcated itself from everyday-life activity and thereby became a sacred space; every thing and act within this space was sacred. It is precisely the sacralization of things and acts that gave things and acts a meaning beyond their own representation and made them into symbolic signs. Likewise, ritual image-symbol activity too, precisely because it was linked with the deity, possessed sacred meaning and contained symbolic connotation. When those image-symbol activities detached from the ritual background and, as literature and art, wandered among the folk, they were thereby abandoned by the deity; they now served the human being, served the human being living in the real, secular world, and because they renounced the function of entertaining the gods, the feature of entertaining people grew the more prominent and salient. Yet the relationship between the human being and literature and art is after all different from the relationships established by other practical activities. In the sacred world of ritual, the relationship between the human being and the ritual object was already far from the everyday relationship; it pointed to the non-real “wu” (deity); and when the deity departed and left a vacancy, the relationship between the human being and literature and art could only point to the “wu” (nothingness) of the void, and thereby established the virtual intentional relationship and constructed a non-real fictional world. The deity’s departure freed the human being from spiritual oppression; the human being could now be subject neither to the deity nor to the norms of reality, and therefore the fictional world of literature and art became precisely a free world for the human being unconfined by anything, a meaning-world still wreathed in aura, a world fit for poetic dwelling. One may say that, without the nurturing of ritual, the human heart could only crawl upon the ground of reality and could not realize true soaring; it was precisely ritual that brought literature and art—and humankind too—a vast spiritual world, dooming literature and art to an unalterable spiritual orientation, so that even though the pressure of money makes it continually sink toward the worldly and the entertaining, it will never abandon its spiritual yearning.

On the one hand, literature and art separated out from ritual; on the other hand, they continued to use the forms originally possessed by ritual image-symbol. These forms originally served to match the sacredness of ritual, markers demarcating the sacred world of ritual from the everyday-life world; now, after detaching from ritual and transforming into the forms of literature and art, they still retained their original demarcating function, making the space of literature and art into “another world” distinct from everyday life—a fictional aesthetic world, Marcuse’s “alien world.” These forms are precisely the markers that lead us into the fictional alien world of literature and art, that is, the aesthetic world; we call them “aesthetic forms.” The reason aesthetic form possesses what Marcuse called “despotic power” lies precisely in its having inherited, from the matrix of ritual, the demarcating function; as a kind of marker, it displays the difference between the fictional world and the real world of literature and art, and at the same time leads us into this fictional aesthetic world—precisely here, everything undergoes aesthetic transformation and radiates an unrepressed, vigorous vitality.

Victor Turner made a deep study of ritual liminality, pointing out: “Symbolically, all the attributes that in the structured social order distinguish the categories and groups from one another here (i.e., in the liminal phase of ritual) reach a unity. The neophyte is merely an entity in the process of transition, without status, without identity.” (103–04) The ritual process is a special interval; it constructs the liminal phase, in which the individual no longer bears the identity and role of real life but becomes “an entity in the process of transition”—or, one may say, he realizes the phenomenological “reduction,” becoming a flowing, changing, indeterminate, transitional existence. On this point, Rabelais’s depiction of folk festivals is a good illustration. In the carnival (ritual), no one’s identity is fixed, and may even be entirely inverted. Peng Zhaorong summed up ritual theory, saying that the “symbolism” of ritual has three points: “(1) It is an indeterminate time-space. (2) In the liminal period, the recipient of the rite enters a kind of sacred ritual time-space, in a kind of intermediate state, and the classifications of secular society temporarily cease to exist. (3) In the secular social structure, rank, identity, and status disappear.” (196) In fact, the reason ritual created the liminal phase fundamentally lies in the presence of the deity and the construction, around the deity, of a sacred world; this world is another world fundamentally different from the everyday-life world, and it re-established an order of the deity different from the real order. In this transitional moment of conversion from the everyday real order to the sacred order of ritual, a blank zone appeared, in which everything was transformed and was precisely in the midst of transformation and generation; thus it also became a new beginning, a departure from the indeterminate, pure point of origin toward the sacred, a transitional state of death and rebirth, alternation and renewal. The ritual venue, the rigorous ritual program, the shaman’s arts, as well as the song, dance, music, and drama, all jointly created a sacred atmosphere, constructed a sacred time-space, a liminal phase distinct from everyday life, thereby constituting a kind of psychological induction—so long as you step into this time-space, you are infected, you share in the sacred, you become another “self.”

This liminal situation likewise exists in the fictional world of literature and art. In the fictional world of literature and art, all manner of forms point in one direction: to create an aesthetic atmosphere, to construct a fictional aesthetic world. Here the established systems and orders, including the order of the deity, are all overthrown; any norm of reality loses its force. Fiction empties this world of its solid, determinate things and cancels all manner of real powers and narrow utilitarian ends, letting everything be in flux and change. By comparison, ritual space is a sacred world that established the order of the deity; the fictional world of literature and art, however, by virtue of its voidness and infinity, becomes a free world, in which the magic of language, the human being’s imagination, emotion, and the unconscious—and even the whole of the human heart—obtain liberation. What the fiction of literature and art constructs is a world that fully displays the life of the human being; the subtle places of life that lie hidden and unshown, the things repressed, forgotten, and occluded, as well as every fold of life, all obtain display; therefore it is also the world of beauty, and because it issued from the sacred world of ritual, it forever embraces the memory of, and the longing for, the sacred. For the human being who walks into the fictional world of literature and art, this is also a kind of new birth, a new departure, an advance toward freedom, toward the ought-to-be state of life, toward the higher realm of self-renewal. Entering the fictional world of literature and art is just like entering the sacred world of ritual: “Each beginning is a repetition of the original beginning, when for the first time the cosmos saw the light.” (26) Hence Aristotle praised tragedy for possessing the function of “catharsis.” Sartre held that the fictional realm of literature and art possesses transcendence; it makes the human being into “universal man.” Santayana said: “The chief privilege of beauty lies in synthesizing the various impulses of the self, concentrating them on a single focus, fixing them on a single image; thereupon a great peace descends upon that tumultuous kingdom.” (160) Nietzsche, from yet another angle, interpreted the boon that the fiction of literature and art bestows upon humankind: “Dionysian art, too, wants to convince us of the eternal delight of existence; only we are to seek this delight not in phenomena but behind phenomena. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for sorrowful destruction; we are forced to gaze into the terrors of individual existence—yet we need not be paralyzed: a metaphysical solace tears us momentarily out of the bustle of changing figures. For brief moments we truly become the primordial being itself, and feel its unbridled craving and joy in existence.” (71)

Unlike the sacred world of ritual, which stresses the order of the deity—a compulsory order brooking no doubt and unalterable—the fictional world of literature and art, by its voidness and infinity, dissolves all manner of solidified orders, questions all manner of external orders from life itself, and challenges all manner of powers; it obeys only the command of life, that is, the order of beauty. The dissolution of external order lets the human being truly return to his own life, return to human nature rather than divinity, and experience the rebirth of the human being. If the sacred world of ritual, after “reducing” the human being to an indeterminate, transitional existence, attempts to remold the human being according to the will and order of the deity, then the fictional world of literature and art attends only to the human being himself; it lets the human being metamorphose from a determined social “role” into a free, autonomous “I myself,” lets all the human being’s latent abilities and qualities grow, lets the human being continually transcend his own fixed boundaries, shake off the bondage of necessity, and open toward the infinite world and the unfinished future. In sum, fiction, by its indeterminacy, provides the human being with the possibility of all-round development, letting the human being become a vibrant, creative, aesthetic human being. Seen from this angle, it is again a contempt and mockery of the real order and the sacred order.

After the fictional world of literature and art was differentiated out from the sacred world of ritual, the chief object with which it dealt was no longer the deity but the human being of the everyday-life world; this in turn linked it with the secular world, and so it became also a bridge connecting the sacred world and the secular world. It lies between the sacred world and the secular world, within the tension constituted by the two worlds. Although it is an independent world, it cannot but be influenced by these two worlds; it wavers between the two: it both yearns to return to the sacred world and continually sinks toward the secular world; it both leads the human being to spy upon the sacred and approach the sacred, and tempts the human being to indulge in the senses and give free rein to sensual pleasure. Especially after the intervention of money, whether in content or in form, we see the more its helpless traces of “degradation”: in content, it metamorphosed from deities and heroes into ordinary mortals, and so the solemn epic “hymn” evolved into the vulgar “telling”;④ the plots full of suspense and peripeteia cast for tragedy by that original ritual story of death-and-rebirth, and the dramatic quality produced by intense conflict,⑤ also faded with the passage of time and the change of the audience’s taste, until even the plot itself gradually receded; in other formal factors such as literary language, we cannot but see this change—although it still tenaciously safeguards its own distinctiveness, it already differs greatly from the form of primitive image-symbol activity, and “mutation” produces what Wittgenstein called the phenomenon of “family resemblance.” Literature and art forever pour out a confiding of the “past,” longing to restore the vibrant existence-state of the gods, longing to return to the sacred beginning at the world’s first creation; yet they also helplessly flow with nostalgia and melancholy. In sum, all manner of mutations cannot but be determined by the change of the tension-structure. Aesthetic form and the fiction of literature and art themselves, as well as their demarcating function, are also changing: in the modern period they were complacent and self-satisfied, seeming to become the overlord ruling this territory of literature and art; while thereafter their capacity too finally grew daily exhausted.

Literature and art did not on this account return to the sacred world of ritual, but were submerged in the everyday-life world, a mediocre world without passion and sublimity. Because the fictional world of literature and art connects the sacred world and the secular world, and is influenced by the tension constituted by the two and thereby possesses the features of both sides, research into it can and should be unfolded respectively from the two angles—the metaphysical and the historical, empirical-analytic—and no single perspective can glimpse the whole; but these already exceed the main purport of the present topic.