The Speech-Act and Behavior-Language in Literary Activity

I

Behavior is language in the broad sense; it is a more primordial, and therefore more basic, language than ordinary language. In Chapter Twelve of his novel Resurrection, Tolstoy describes the first love between Nekhlyudov and Katyusha—that pure, hazy love just budding between a young man and a young woman: when the two of them talk in the presence of the old maidservant Matryona, they feel especially relaxed and happy. But when only the two of them are left in the room, the conversation becomes rather awkward. "At this point the eyes began to speak, and what the eyes said was something altogether different from what the lips said, and far more important than what the lips said." (1) Behavior-language (the expression of the eyes and the awkward manner) is often more credible than ordinary language; it inadvertently betrays the true self and expresses the inner heart more truly and frankly. The linguist Halliday says: "We recognize our friends by their individual habits of expression, just as we know them by their faces, voices, dress, or way of walking. A person is the meaning he expresses." (2) Behavior not only lets us recognize a friend but lets us perceive his individuality and see his inner state, because behavior is language; it expresses an individual's distinctive meaning in the most natural way.

In Russian director M. Schweitzer's film Resurrection, there is a superb set of shots depicting psychology. The film has no voice-over, and the camera is not trained on the highly expressive facial expression of the heroine Katyusha, but is focused on a metal latch-hook on the door-leaf and the back of a palm: there, on the door-leaf near the latch, that young woman's hand—stiff with tension—trembles slightly and hesitantly inches slowly toward the latch, gradually drawing near, nearer, then moving away… When the hand once again draws near the latch, it at last resolutely lifts the latch. The latch slips off the catch and drops down, and in the shot there remains only the latch swinging silently to and fro—that is Katyusha's hand. She loves Nekhlyudov deeply. When Nekhlyudov first wished, late at night, to enter her room, she hesitated. She longed for Nekhlyudov to come, and was even willing to give her whole self to him, yet she worried about the gap in status between them—after all, one is a young prince, while she is only a foster-daughter and a maidservant. She dimly senses a lurking crisis, and her inner heart is full of contradiction. Yet for the art of film, this psychological activity must be converted into a visual image, and Schweitzer keenly seized upon this maiden's hand. The hand, which originally cannot speak, yet most vividly and delicately tells of a maiden's inner turmoil, of her contradiction of both longing for and fearing sexual love. Behavior is language; it is even more expressive than ordinary language.

Connerton speaks of the importance of bodily posture and holds that power and rank are generally expressed through certain postures held relative to others. We can infer, from the way people gather together, from the postures their bodies assume relative to others, the degree of power each person possesses by rule, or believes himself to possess. For instance, when one person sits on high while those around him stand; when one person stands while all the others sit; when someone enters and everyone in the room rises—all these postures contain a definite meaning. "In all cultures much of the choreography of authority is expressed through the body. In this choreography there is a whole repertoire of identifiable postures, whereby the bearing of the upright body expresses bendings of many significances and makes many enactments of posture meaningful." (3)

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein extended the denotation of "language," enlarging it beyond ordinary language. He says: "What we call language is, first of all, the instrument of our everyday language, the instrument of our word-language; and then, on the basis of similarity or comparability with it, we call other things language too." (4) When the human's behavior contains socially shared meaning and universal communicability and enters the activity of interpersonal communication, then it is a kind of "quasi-language" or "language in the broad sense." We name it "behavior-language" rather than "body language," mainly because people have already grown accustomed to viewing and reading body language from the semiotic angle. What behavior-language stresses is dynamic behavior, not static signs and their combination or splicing. Behavior does, to be sure, possess semiotic features, yet it is not merely a sign; it is first of all ceaselessly changing bodily behavior, and semioticity is only a feature abstracted out of behavior. At the same time, the body is not merely the carrier of behavior, not merely the issuer and performer of behavior, but is unified with behavior—it is the acting, performing body, fused and melted into behavior, becoming behavior itself and its constituent element. Behavior is the very focus of our thinking.

Behavior as language is acquired by the human in the practice of life. In the process of growing up, the child acquires both ordinary language and the language of behavior. He gradually comes to understand the words his parents say, and at the same time gradually comes to understand a movement, a glance, an expression of his parents; one may even say that, before the child learns ordinary language, he can already understand behavior-language through bodily contact—behavior-language is inscribed on the human body from very early on. Compared with ordinary language, behavior-language is more basic, richer, and more delicate. The understanding of ordinary language often needs the assistance of behavior-language; that is to say, behavior-language plays the role of a "meta-language." Ordinary language is closely linked with abstract concepts; it abstracts the real world into concepts that transcend concrete time and space, thereby bringing great convenience to human communication and liberating the human from the specific socio-historical situation. Behavior-language, by contrast, is non-conceptual; it is always closely related to the concrete manner of behavior—it is a recognition of behavioral patterns, a holistic extraction of the form of behavior. Therefore behavior-language is an abstraction of an entirely different manner; one may also say that it is non-abstract and non-conceptual, yet still imagistic. Although it is not pure form, it is form combined with behavior and possesses a sense of form. Dance is a kind of behavior-language. Only, it has refined and remolded everyday behavior-language, strengthened its sense of form and beauty, and rendered it highly ritualized. The language of dance is a behavior-language that has been highly normed, formalized, and ritualized—a language that takes behavior itself as the object of feeling—and is therefore another kind of behavior-language. Everyday behavior-language lacks this strict determinacy and self-sufficiency, and its meaning is relatively vague; it is the acquisition of modes of behavior in the course of everyday activity. From the ceaselessly repeated behavior of social life, the human imperceptibly acquires behavior-language, not only forming the modes of behavior proper to the individual but also understanding the meaning of various behaviors and mastering behavior-language—and this becomes the necessary premise for reading the meaning of behavior and for interpersonal communication. Compared with ordinary language, the human's behavior-language is more ancient; it is deeply rooted in the human's body and soul and has become the human's most basic capacity—the human cannot for a moment be apart from behavior-language. Behavior-language can even transcend the national and state boundaries of ordinary language and possess a far more extensive universality and communicability.

Correspondingly, the situations to which the human's behavior pertains are not merely cognized by the human as objects of cognition, and are not always directly and closely related to linguistic concepts; at the same time, the situation is not related to behavior as a static background, but is first of all the direct extension of the human's behavior, endowed with a dynamic, vital form, and thereby personified. The world in which the human acts is first constructed as a part of the human's behavior, and is at the same time reconstructed and expanded by language. Precisely for this reason, the human's world—whether living or non-living—gives off the human's breath, flows with moist juices of life, and brims with vigorous vitality. Speaking of the perception of relics and scenes, Merleau-Ponty points out that people smoke a pipe with a pipe, eat with a spoon, summon a person with an electric bell, and so on, and that the perception of the cultural world can be verified only through the perception of human behavior and of another person. That is to say, the cultural world is always closely linked with human behavior and human activity; it is the direct extension of behavior, the abundant fruit of human activity, and therefore it speaks to us in a human manner, possesses an extraordinary sense of intimacy, and can make one linger and forget to leave. The same holds for the perception of natural scenes. "Each object gives off a human breath." (5) In "Art as Device," Shklovsky drew a distinction between "recognition" and "sensation." The key to their difference lies in this: recognition takes the differentiation of the object as its aim; it classifies the object of sensation under some concept and submits to the authority of the concept; whereas in the activity of sensation, sensuous feeling itself is the aim, and it stresses the priority of feeling. Therefore, when the activity of recognition, relying on habitual experience, achieves the aim of differentiation with the least amount of sensuous information, it thereby discards the rich connotation of the object and makes the thing degenerate into an empty concept; only when the thing appears in an unfamiliar way, drawing our attention and arousing the vitality of our senses, are our sensuous feelings liberated from the bondage of the concept—only then does the stone fully display its sensuous connotation and become a stone anew. Although the activity of sensation is interrelated with the concept and hard to peel apart from it, one cannot, after all, deny the importance of sensuous feeling, nor deny that there exists an activity of sensation that stresses the priority of sensuous feeling—and this activity is precisely the activity in which the human takes the object into himself and makes it cohere with behavior.

Speaking of painting, Wittgenstein says: "If I draw something I call a face, and then draw another, slightly different from it, you immediately know there is a difference, you recognize the expression… For example, I speak of a smile: 'It's not quite sincere.' 'Oh, nonsense, the lips moved at most a thousandth of an inch—can that be seen?' 'Yes.' 'Then it's because of a particular sequence.' But not only that—each person's reaction is different… Two faces may have the same expression; one may say they are both sad, but if I say: 'It's just this expression…'" (6) The human's perception of behavior-language is extremely fine; even the slight shift of a faint wrinkle at the corner of the mouth or eye will be felt, and its meaning will thereby change—it appears "not quite sincere." The human can recognize the same expression on entirely different faces, and can also distinguish all sorts of different expressions—the smile, the sneer, the sly smile, the mocking smile, the dry laugh, and so on—down to subtle differences that words cannot distinguish. Take the smile of the Mona Lisa: people have long since perceived from the facial expression that the Mona Lisa's smile differs from an ordinary smile, and have felt that the smile contains yet another savor, yet cannot express it in words; the many, many interpretations still have not revealed this mysterious smile. The human's perception of behavior (expression) is extremely keen and detailed; he distinctly feels that behind the smile there lurks a mystery—from this angle, behavior-language is fine; yet it cannot be clearly expounded in language, and the smile remains shrouded in mystery—from this angle, behavior-language is vague.

Since behavior is language, it possesses universal communicability; and because it is non-conceptual, it also has the feature of being vague and hazy, and is often not directly grasped by consciousness but lies at the level of the unconscious. In everyday life, the human often unconsciously acquires the various behavior-languages, unconsciously carries out specific modes of behavior, and intuitively reads the meaning of behavior. (7) The human's unconscious is mainly constituted by the memory of behavior-language. It is precisely in this sense that we can better understand Lacan's saying that the unconscious is a "language-structure." In experiments on split-brain patients (that is, those in whom most of the normal conduction between the left and right cerebral hemispheres is severed), Roger Sperry found that if a picture appears in the patient's right visual field, then, because the human's verbal function is confined to the left hemisphere, the patient can describe the picture verbally fairly normally; whereas if the picture appears in the left visual field, he cannot describe it verbally. From this, Sperry drew the conclusion that the left hemisphere, which possesses the verbal function, plays the role of an "interpreter": "only this hemisphere possesses higher-order consciousness; the other hemisphere, although it possesses various skills, has no true consciousness." (8) This means the importance of language for human consciousness: were the function of speech lost, the mere memory of behavior-language could only settle silently in the unconscious. Likewise, Fromm too points out that language is closely related to human consciousness; he holds: "Language, by its vocabulary, its grammar, and its syntax, and by the whole spirit congealed within it, determines which experiences can enter our consciousness." (9) Behavior-language needs to be combined with ordinary language—to be absorbed, condensed, and shaped by linguistic concepts—before it constitutes a clear consciousness. But behavior-language memory is, after all, language; even when it lies in the unconscious, it still possesses its own language-structure. These behavior-languages, sedimented within the human's inner heart, not only constitute the individual unconscious but, because they are jointly formed within a social group, are the result of mutual imitation, and possess shared character and universal communicability, are also the common language of a specific social group and constitute the collective unconscious of that social group. The capacity we call "intuition" is in fact the capacity to grasp behavior-language—to see the meaning of behavior directly out of the human's behavior; it understands the object without passing through linguistic concepts and without passing through consciousness and making thought and judgment. Therefore, what we call the cognitive process of "rising from the sensible to the rational" is, to a great extent, a transition from unconscious intuition to linguistic consciousness; it is a process in which language intervenes and arranges, translating the unconscious behavior-language into ordinary language and combing and recreating it by linguistic logic, making it orderly and clear—but also making it impoverished by being filtered through language.

Compared with the abstractness and conceptuality of ordinary language, behavior-language has a closer, more direct connection with the human's life and emotion—for example, the human's expression is the mark of inner emotion. When we view expression from its external manifest form, it is a communicable behavior-language; and when we link expression with the human's inner feeling, it directly displays emotion, is the direct expression of emotion. Or one may say that the human's behavior is the form of life expressed in a special linguistic manner.

II

Behavior as language must have rules to follow, and these are social convention. Because behavior-language is non-conceptual and lacks clarity, the very process of acquiring behavior-language lacks precision; the behavior-language each learner acquires, and his understanding of behavior-language, involve individual selection and deviation, and this brings about the drift of modes of behavior and the blurring of the boundaries of behavior-language. But the human, as a social creature, has as one important feature social identification. This identification is not only psychological but, more importantly, in the mode of behavior. It is precisely identification that allows the various deviations to be corrected, so that they do not become boundlessly incommunicable and uncoordinated; and therein, ritual, custom, and tradition constitute the core of behavioral identification. Humankind, through these activities, norms modes of behavior, strengthens the perception of behavior-language, and consolidates the social group; social convention is built upon the foundation of group identification. "Self-definition is one of the activities of every culture. It has its own diction, a whole set of rituals and forms of authority (national festivals, moments of crisis, founding fathers, basic texts, and so on), and a familiarity with itself." (10) Social convention is both formed in the process of social identification and, conversely, ceaselessly norms social behavior, provides the basis for social identification, maintains social sameness, and becomes one important source of social cohesion. In fact, the very character of language also determines that social convention is indispensable for human behavior. So long as behavior is a kind of language, it must possess public communicability—that is, it must be "social," and is bound to be constrained by social convention.

Speaking of the mechanism by which the human brain grasps the meaning of situations, James Paul Gee points out that, fundamentally, the brain is a skilled recognizer and constructor of patterns. That is to say, the brain first of all mainly handles the flexible, changeable patterns extracted from experience, rather than highly generalized or de-contextualized rules. Therefore, "the patterns that have important significance for human thought and behavior follow a kind of 'Goldilocks principle': they are not too general and not too specific, and situated meaning is the pattern or generalization lying between the two extremes of the general and the specific." (11) The grasp of the human's behavior-language and its convention is similar. To put it more precisely, the grasp of behavioral patterns ought to be the unity of construction and of feeling, experiencing, and understanding—it is both a process of construction and a process of feeling, experiencing, and comprehending. The activity of construction links self and other, links human and world, by behavior-language, and establishes a unified relation; this is sympathy or empathy—extending from oneself to others, feeling as if in another's place. Once linguistic concepts forcefully intervene in this process, the unified whole disintegrates and is transformed into the activity of recognition and of cognition. At the same time, social convention is not some set of abstract rules; it cannot be reduced to statutes composed of linguistic concepts, but can only be exemplary, and is always unable to be peeled apart from modes of behavior. It is a generalization of behavioral patterns that is "not too general and not too specific," and is also a respect for existing behavior, a natural following of concrete behavioral exemplars, requiring no deliberate effort. "When I obey a rule, I do not choose; I obey the rule blindly." (12) Convention has already been fused into the human's behavior and inscribed upon the human's body, becoming an unconscious, natural mode of behavior. Even though new behavior may make this or that alteration to the old behavioral pattern, or even constitute a challenge to it, it still revolves around the original convention and takes the original behavior as reference; that is to say, within the social community, specific social conventions still exist among the various different behaviors, and identification has not been fundamentally shaken. This social convention—which both powerfully constrains and norms the mode of behavior of every member of the social group, and yet cannot be fully consciously perceived—is the collective unconscious of this group. Behavioral convention possesses a human commonality transcending national and state boundaries, and is not without the distinctiveness of a specific social group; it shapes the modes of behavior of a specific group and leaves the mark peculiar to this group. Compared with the mythic archetypes of Jung and Frye, social convention, as a kind of collective unconscious, can both encompass archetype theory—explaining the mythic archetype by the memory of behavior-language and by behavioral patterns—and effectively explore various social and individual psychology, and so possesses a more extensive and more profound power of theoretical interpretation. And because the human's behavior is conventional rather than in accordance with abstracted, conceptualized rules, the judgment of behavior is more suitably made in accordance with concrete conventions, and can hardly be made by a mechanical judgment based merely on a few rules—this is precisely the reason why the law of England, America, and other countries adopts "case law." Of course, the law is used to judge the boundary between "crime" and "non-crime" in behavior, whereas social convention judges the boundary between "appropriate" and "inappropriate," and at the same time also provides an important basis for ethical adjudication.

The human, in social practice, masters behavioral patterns and acquires behavior-language and its convention; this process can neither be entirely identical, as in a casting from a mold, nor established in accordance with abstract rules so as to be mutually consistent. It cannot but be influenced by the individual's life; it involves selection and reconstruction and is distinctively featured—the human's different habitus is built on this foundation. On one hand, the human's behavior is propelled by inner desire and is the expression of life itself; on the other hand, social behavior cannot but be normed by social convention. Therefore behavior-language is itself the result of the mutual adjustment and counterbalancing of life-desire and social convention; it is inscribed with the features of the individual life and the imprint left by social convention. In fact, the human's desire is originally only a diffuse existence, unable to be soberly grasped by the human himself; only when desire encounters social convention—whether by submitting to convention or by challenging convention—does it become a manner of language that can be felt, comprehended, and displayed. For each person, there always exists a tense relation between life-desire and social convention, and it is expressed through the behavior-language peculiar to the individual. Therefore, the so-called individuality is precisely a person's peculiar behavior-language; it intimates, in a personal way, the peculiar tension between the individual's life-desire and social convention. And it is precisely in this sense that individuality is both individual and social. The reading of behavior-language not only lets us understand a person's distinctive individuality but at the same time lets us see through to social convention and life itself, and further understand the attitude and manner of a specific society toward the individual life.

What people habitually call "the contradiction between emotion and reason" contains a great misunderstanding. Viewed deeply, the contradiction is rooted in the conflict between life-desire and social convention: desire urgently pursues its own satisfaction, seeking pleasure in the natural way; whereas social convention admonishes it that one must follow a socially sanctioned manner, and this limits the direct realization of one's desire. This consciousness—shaped by social convention—of how the human ought to act is what people call "reason"; and the experience of the inner tension created by the conflict between life-desire and social convention gives rise to emotion. This contradiction receives a vivid display under Tolstoy's brush. The Nekhlyudov who first appears at his aunts' house is a young man with a hazy yearning for love. The cultivation of an aristocratic family and the discipline of campus life make him elegant in bearing and refined. When he revisits the aunts' estate, he has already grown up and is an officer. The extravagance and debauchery of the metropolis and the unrestrained dissipation of military life have formed in him another mode of behavior. Within him there exist two mutually contradictory conventions and two behavior-languages, and the original convention has already become a faint memory of the past. When he once again faces Katyusha, that pure, childlike girl cannot but reawaken his recollection of that former self, filling his inner heart with contradiction: "Nekhlyudov, like everyone, had within him two persons. One was the spiritual man, who sought the kind of happiness that brings happiness to others as well. The other was the animal man, who sought only his own personal happiness, and for the sake of this happiness was ready at any moment to sacrifice the happiness of all the world. The Petersburg life and the army life had aroused in him an extreme egoism, and during the frenzied period of this extreme egoism this animal man within him occupied the dominant position and entirely suppressed the spiritual man. But after seeing Katyusha, he again felt that former feeling for Katyusha, and at this point the spiritual man raised his head and declared his rights. During these two days before Easter, within Nekhlyudov there went on, ceaselessly, an inner struggle of which he himself was not aware." (13) Facing different fields and situations, the human enjoys different social conventions, and this brings about inner conflict, brings about behavior of utterly different styles concentrated in one body, and reveals the richness and many-sidedness of the human's character. As a great writer, Tolstoy not only displays the human's psychological conflict with extreme truth and delicacy but also gives a persuasive exposition of the root from which the contradiction is formed, shaping what Forster calls a "round character."

Because the human's behavior-language is acquired in the activity of social life, the social convention tightly attached to behavior-language is also acquired in this process. Social convention persists within cultural tradition and within everyday life; it lies at the intersection of cultural tradition and everyday interaction. If cultural tradition maintains the stability of social convention, then the changes in modes of everyday interaction prompt social convention to undergo transformation. Social convention is both constrained by social ideology and embodies the ideology of a specific society, and at the same time reacts back upon social ideology. Social ideology, precisely by covertly manipulating social convention, stabilizes or changes the human's modes of behavior, stabilizes or changes the relations among persons, and at the same time stabilizes or changes a specific social structure and social order. Changes in behavior-language are often the result of the rewriting of social convention provoked by the transformation of social ideology; therefore, in the human's behavior-language there is the imprint of the ideology of a specific society. Althusser points out that the human's ideas are the human's material behavior, which is disciplined by the ideological apparatus. (14) Viewed more concretely, ideology precisely permeates social convention, and thereby disciplines and controls human behavior and regulates social relations. "Meaning is a social act, constrained by social structure. Our habits of expression refer to the habits of expression of a group of people similar to ourselves, and this group is the reference group that defines our semiotic society." (15) This constraint upon behavior is a trackless, marrow-deep mastery; compared with the propagation of ideology through discourse, it has an incomparably enormous force.

Today, two of the most important factors are prompting social convention to undergo a major transformation. One is money, and the other is the Internet. Both of these factors possess the enormous "disembedding" function of which Giddens speaks. Money, as an instrument of time-space distanciation, frees the human from the activity of direct material exchange and liberates him from dependence on the land, makes the social division of labor possible, and enables the city to gather and expand—thereby fundamentally changing the relations of interaction among persons, and also leading to the disintegration of the original convention and the re-establishment of new social convention. By comparison, the disembedding function of the Internet is more powerful, and its change of the relations of social interaction is more rapid and thorough. Money alters interpersonal interaction merely from the angle of material exchange, extending this change step by step and progressively into every domain; whereas the Internet starts directly from interpersonal relations, comprehensively enters all social domains, rapidly renews the relations among persons, dissolves the direct interaction of person and person, and replaces it with indirect and even virtual interaction. This will, in a short time, strangle the inheritance of tradition, destroy the relatively stable social convention built up over several centuries, and reorganize social structure and order. This change will also thoroughly shake ideology's manipulation of social behavior and social convention, and will, conversely, produce a new ideology.

III

One extremely important and difficult process in literary writing is precisely to convert behavior-language into the speech-act, to convert non-conceptual language into conceptual language. These two reside respectively in the unconscious and in consciousness; they are at once interconnected and yet incommensurable. The speech-act, while vividly depicting the human's behavior, is always unable to overcome the limit of language itself. Connerton classifies the human's behavior under "incorporating practices," distinguishing it thereby from linguistic signs as "inscribing practices," and holds that signs cannot entirely replace bodily behavior. "A meaningful practice does not coincide with a sign; meaning cannot be reduced to a sign which exists on a separate 'level' outside the range of bodily activity. Habit is a knowledge, a memory of the hand and of the body; in the cultivation of habit it is precisely our body that 'understands.'" (16) Yet the author's writing cannot bypass this process of conversion; the author must convert this latent language into ordinary language, and must at the same time be able to guide the reader, in reading, to re-trigger the memory of behavior-language. The vividness and profundity of literary language depend precisely on the degree to which it can summon the human back to behavior-language and to an understanding of behavioral convention. Whether a literary work depicts a character's individuality vividly and typically depends precisely on how it reveals the individual's distinctive behavior-language. But this conversion-translation often finds it hard to find an apt linguistic equivalent, hard to find a bridge of communication, so that it cannot "speak." This is the predicament and pain of language: "When I am silent, I feel full; as I am about to open my mouth, I feel empty at the same time." (17)

Literary writing must challenge this predicament. Marcuse says: "Art, at its most basic level, is recollection: it desires to reach a pre-conceptual experience and understanding. And these pre-conceptual things are reproduced in, or run counter to, the framework of the social use of experience and understanding—that is to say, these things run counter to instrumentalist reason and sensibility." (18) This "pre-conceptual experience and understanding" is precisely behavior-language memory. The human, through pre-conceptual behavior, directly relates to the world, both experiencing the world and understanding the world, and at the same time constructing his own inner soul. Behavior-language most vividly displays the human's two worlds, inner and outer, and literature cannot but use the speech-act to summon this pre-conceptual behavior-language. And so, when the author meets with difficulty in the conversion process, so that he cannot equivalently translate behavior-language directly into the speech-act, the only choice he makes is to strengthen the "illocutionary act" in the process of speech-expression—that is, a non-diction, non-conceptual speech-act—and, tracing back by a roundabout route, thereby to hint at, tease out, and induce the behavior-language stored up in the unconscious. This illocutionary act is in fact the "speech-construction act"; in its own distinctive way it mobilizes the human's imagination, awakens the human's memory of behavior-language, and, in the mutual interweaving of the two, constructs a virtual world of activity. For example, metaphor often, by a speech-strategy that both speaks of this and speaks of that, that is both not-this and not-that, creates an inner tension, arouses the human's imagination, in an instant pierces through the membrane between consciousness and the unconscious, and thereby lures and summons the behavior-language sedimented in the unconscious, creating an echo between the speech-act and behavior-language. In the speech-act there still remain many imprints of bodily behavior; the melody, rhythm, intonation, tone, color, texture, and structure of language—rather than linguistic concepts—have the most direct connection with behavior-language, and are even rooted in behavior-language from the start, and therefore have an enormous arousing effect upon the behavior-language in the unconscious and more easily produce resonance. The key to the success or failure of literary creation lies precisely in this process of conversion—in the tension constituted between the speech-act and behavior-language, in the impact force the speech-act has in arousing behavior-language memory, which makes the human, in an instant, become conscious of the originally vague, hazy unconscious content, and reveals the mystery hidden in the depths of the soul, deeply shaking the human's soul and even his body.

Halbwachs once studied the relation between aphasia and memory. He held that aphasia causes a contraction of memory, so that one cannot successfully convey to others a detailed view of the past. In milder cases of aphasia, the patient, for lack of words, cannot recount his past, and may retain only a vague, indistinct feeling of time, place, and persons. The reason is that the aphasic patient, having lost the capacity for language, has also lost the capacity to recall the past with the framework of collective memory, because "the conventions of speech constitute the most basic and at the same time most stable framework of collective memory." (19) That is to say, without language, one cannot awaken the behavior-language in the unconscious, cannot make manifest the human's memory of the past. Only by giving form to and fixing the behavior-language memory in the speech-act can behavior-language memory clearly emerge in consciousness and be spoken. In this process, the conventions or usages of speech are the indispensable framework of memory. From this angle, literary writing is a process of reshaping behavior-language memory by means of the speech-act.

In this process, words and sentences are not merely an inducement that has completed its mission once it has aroused the memory of behavior-language; rather, they interweave with behavior-language, illuminate it in turn, and mutually advance and deepen one another. The speech-act plays the role of teasing out, arousing, organizing, shaping, expanding, and deepening; behavior-language, for its part, responds to it in kind and, conversely, injects into speech-activity a full imagisticity and sensuous connotation, as well as new vitality and new driving force, jointly creating a world full of vital life. One may say that the human's imagination is precisely the territory where the speech-act and behavior-language intersect, and what people call "imagistic thinking" is precisely the psychological process in which two languages and two kinds of behavior cooperate and fuse while a tension that can never be eliminated still persists. This is no longer a simple reproduction of the original behavior-language memory, but a rediscovery and reorganization: behavior-language has already been recreated by the narrative structure and integrated into a coherent form, attracted by words and condensed into a limpid crystal, and, in a new way, mutually reflecting and fusing—thereby generating a wholly new realm and meaning, and shining with extraordinary brilliance. If, in the activity of everyday life, the speech-act and the human's real behavior interweave and entangle with each other and jointly construct the human's life-world—and, because of the finitude of the human's real behavior, this world can only be a specific finite world—then, in literary activity, the behavior-language memory stored up in the unconscious is infinite; it is mobilized to different degrees according to the different manner and intensity of the speech-act's arousing, and is by no means confined to the original memory. As a language of behavior, it can be entirely recombined and reconstructed, possessing infinite plasticity and possibility, and thereby constructs an open fictional world, a fictional world that reveals the human's inner and outer. This fictional world, constructed with the participation of behavior-language, thereby embodies the human's emotionality and vitality and shines with the light of human nature. And precisely for this reason, compared with everyday language, literary language often has a conspicuous suggestiveness, inclusiveness, and richness.

Sapir says: "Language may be looked upon as an instrument capable of running a gamut of psychic uses. Its flow not only parallels that of the inner content of consciousness, but parallels it on different levels, ranging from the state of mind dominated by a particular image to the highly abstract state of mind in which the focus of attention holds only abstract concepts and their relations… Only the outer form of language is constant; its inner meaning, its psychic value or intensity, varies freely with attention or the selective interest of the mind, and—needless to say—varies, or better, is differently materialized, in the relation of the mind's general development." (20) Language can at the same time play the various high and low voice-parts; although it cannot dispense with concepts and is always connected with them, it can yet exceed concepts, penetrate into the non-conceptual realm of the unconscious, penetrate into the particular impressions of the inner heart, and mobilize the behavior-language memory in the unconscious. What we call "the savor of language" often lodges precisely at the junction of the speech-act and behavior-language; it is the resonance and symphony of the two. It cannot do without language and yet is not confined to language; it is rooted in behavior-language memory and yet is not confined to memory. This "between-the-lines meaning"—which can be perceived by consciousness yet cannot be clearly stated—is precisely the behavior-language memory aroused and illuminated by the speech-act. Because it is not itself the speech-act, it cannot be clearly expressed in language; and because it is not merely behavior-language memory but has been inspired by the speech-act, it can be perceived by consciousness. When the speech-act builds up a semantic space, it provides the occasion for the entrance of behavior-language; and at the same time, behavior-language endows the speech-act with a halo and savor, making it fuller, more abundant, and more vivid. But once language falls into habituation, automatization, and logicization, it simply flows away and forgets the behavior-language in the unconscious, and still more loses the capacity to arouse behavior-language memory, degenerating into the gaunt and shriveled operation of concepts.

The human's manner of perceiving the world has three features: first, holism—that is, the object is always perceived within a holistic situation; second, selectivity—that is, attention is focused on some one object while the rest serves as background, constituting a foreground/background relation; third, transformability—when the focus of attention turns toward another object, the foreground and background relation is reorganized. The relation between the human and language is likewise. The speech-act is an act that uses linguistic concepts; it depends on concepts and cannot do without concepts, yet is not confined to concepts—linguistic concepts cannot exhaust it. At the level of the signifier of language there still exist such sensuous factors as melody, rhythm, sound and rhyme, texture, tone, and intonation, none of which can be encompassed by the concept; therefore the speech-act is a distinctive phenomenon possessing "thickness." And the sensuous factors such as melody and rhythm are precisely also shared by behavior-language—shared in common by the speech-act and behavior-language. In the act of speech-reference, we focus our attention on linguistic concepts, foreground the function of the concept, and through the concept differentiate and recognize the object, discover its various features, and understand its connotation, so as to cognize the object; while the sensuous factors such as melody, rhythm, sound and rhyme, and intonation still lie hidden in the background and can play only an auxiliary role. The speech-construction act is otherwise: it is the active state of language as a whole, and because of its holism and dynamism, the boundary of the concept is softened and burst open, the position of the concept is weakened, while the sensuous factors such as melody, rhythm, sound and rhyme, and intonation are thrown into relief—and this at the same time touches behavior-language memory, and, through these natural bonds, interweaves and fuses the speech-act with behavior-language, communicates consciousness with the unconscious, and conversely also endows the speech-act with vitality and rich import. In the process of speech-construction, the speech-act and behavior-language respond to, generate, and fuse with one another; they gather together within the human's imagination. The speech-act elevates behavior-language, illuminates behavior-language with consciousness, endows behavior-language with clarity, and makes the human's behavior not only an object of the human's experience but also an object that can be contemplated and reflected upon. This not only expresses the individual's hazy feeling—letting that silent memory find a name and a definition—but also lets the originally submerged yet ever-tormenting painful experience find an outlet for catharsis, and even lets the common tragic experience of a society, of an age, find expression. And behavior-language, while enriching the speech-act and strengthening its holism and fluidity, also hands over to the speech-act its own breath of life and gift for performance; the two cooperate to jointly create a true, abundant, vivid world, a truly human world fit to be dwelt in.

Just as Heidegger points out, language has both concealment and disclosure. When the human attends only to the referential function of speech, the world is concealed; the world is divided, separated, and deformed by linguistic concepts, and the order of the world is reconstructed in accordance with the order of language, making the world a "world-picture," an object set in opposition to the human, while language itself thereby degenerates into an instrument mastered by the human. But when speech is in the activity of construction, it summons forth behavior-language, summons forth the human's activity and the living world closely related to that activity, links human and world through the human's behavior, and constructs a whole, unified human world—and so the world is disclosed. The world is no longer a world set in opposition to and separated from the human, and language is no longer an instrument; they themselves are bound up with the human, closely connected as water and fish. Therefore Heidegger says: "The essence of language does not consist merely in being an instrument of understanding… Language is not just one tool among the many tools the human possesses; on the contrary, only language affords the very possibility of standing in the midst of the openness of beings. Only where there is language is there world. This is to say: only where there is language is there the ever-changing domain of decision and labor, of activity and responsibility, and also the domain of arbitrariness and clamor, of decline and confusion. Only where world holds sway is there history… Language is not a disposable instrument, but rather that appropriating-event (Ereignis) which possesses the highest possibility of human being." (21) From this angle, the language of poetry is authentic language, and its value lies precisely in this: it can powerfully summon forth behavior-language memory and, in cooperation with behavior-language, let Being come forth and let the world be disclosed, jointly creating the "appropriating-event of the highest possibility" of human being.

Therefore the author and the poet ought not to slight language, and still less ought they deliberately to master language—this would suffocate the vitality of language—but ought to respect language, to listen to the whispered private murmurs beneath speech that respond to speech from afar, that behavior-language flowing in the unconscious, and to summon it forth from concealment. And precisely for this reason, modern poetry often deliberately snaps the grammatical relations and logical chains among words and establishes a leaping, strange connection, its main aim being to retard the speech-act, to restore to words the maximum freedom, to throw into relief the sensuous features of language, and to overcome the automatization of the speech-act, so as thereby to listen to, call upon, and strike against that slumbering behavior-language and summon it forth. This not only recreates the speech-act itself, endowing the speech-act with a lively, vivid performativity, but also reshapes behavior-language and remolds and reconstructs the relation between human and world. The author and the poet are even able to set up a distinctive virtual situation, a semantic space full of vitality, luring the human, in imagination, to undergo a brand-new experience in a new mode of behavior.

IV

The language used by the act of literary writing is acquired by the author in the activities of everyday life and reading. In this process, the author gradually grasps the conventions of literary language—a behavioral convention in a special domain, which we call "cultural convention." This convention is not grammar; it cannot be acquired by setting up clear, abstract rules and transmitting the rules, but is a mastery of the habits of the speech-act. This is a living, ever-changing speech-act that cannot be delimited by stiff, abstract rules and can only be acquired through concrete exemplars—through reading literary classics, imperceptibly acquiring modes of the speech-act, or, one may say, comprehending the conventions of the formal patterns of literary language. Therefore cultural convention is itself something that cannot be generalized and explained by any abstract rule; it can even not be "spoken." From this angle, cultural convention is not a rule in the ordinary sense; it is exemplary rather than conceptual or abstract—it is the rule of the non-ruled, which can only be comprehended and grasped in the concrete practice of the speech-act, just as, in Dream of the Red Chamber, when Daiyu teaches Xiangling to write poetry, she can only let her gain it through thoroughly reading poems, and cannot transmit a few mechanical rules or a secret formula for writing.

Susanne Langer says: "This kind of manifold connection between some individual component and the overall structure, which one sees in a poem, makes the poem display a feature resembling that of an organic structure. This proves that a work of art, like a living organism, is inviolable: if one insists on separating its various constituent components, it is no longer what it was—and the whole image vanishes along with it." (22) The organicity of literature and art stems from the vitality embodied in behavior itself. The complexity and diversity of the forms of life determine that no abstract rule can delimit it. Therefore, for literature and art, those abstract rules—such as meter, counterpoint, harmony, perspective, texture, and so on—are not the most important, and are not even indispensable. Meter only prescribes for metrical verse; without meter, it can still be good poetry. From this angle, for literature and art, "game" is a clumsy metaphor. The game stresses abstract rules; one may say it is the abstract rules that determine the game and differentiate the nature and category of the game. Literature and art, as a special kind of behavior, cannot do without the constraint of convention or usage, but may precisely break free of the various abstract rules. These rules only set certain temporary requirements for literature and art, endowing the literature and art of a certain period or a certain type with features, yet they cannot determine literature and art themselves. Any abstract rule harbors the latent crisis of making literature and art tend toward rigidity. A rule ought to help the expression of behavior-language, ought to help the expression of life; yet in fact it cannot avoid constituting a constraint upon the ever-changing behavior-language and forms of life, and may for this reason be discarded. Unlike "rigid" abstract rules, convention or usage, because it is exemplary, is relatively soft and elastic; it endows literature and art with communicability, and at the same time keeps for literature and art that vitality and vigor of behavior itself, maintaining the free nature of literature and art.

Literary language has two main sources: first, and foremost, the literary classics, including the literary classics of both China and the West—this is acquired by the reader in the process of reading literary classics and is the inheritance of the literary tradition; second, everyday life—this is acquired in everyday conversation and everyday communication. These two resources are both distinct and interrelated and intercommunicating. On one hand, because the two—literary language and everyday discourse—reside respectively in the two different fields of literature and everyday life, they enjoy different conventions. Everyday discourse itself belongs to the whole of the human's everyday behavior and follows the same system of social convention as everyday behavior; whereas literary language resides in a special field, inherits the tradition of literature itself, and its convention is bound to differ from everyday discourse. On the other hand, language acquired in everyday life is often used in the dialogue of narrative works, appearing as direct quotation—though it needs to be recast before it can merge into the overall context of the work. More importantly, in order to realize linguistic innovation, one most effective channel for the author is to draw nourishment from everyday discourse, and thereby to break the old cultural convention and recreate literary language. Because literary language separates itself off from everyday life, distinguishes itself from everyday language, and grows increasingly estranged from behavior-language, it slowly loses the capacity to summon behavior-language memory and loses its affinity for the human; everyday discourse, by contrast, because it enjoys the same system of convention as everyday behavior and has a natural intimate connection with everyday behavior, once it has been remolded, recast, and incorporated into literary language, becomes—against the overall background of the tension-relation constituted between the new literary language and behavior-language memory—an effective bridge of communication, and exerts a stronger summoning force upon behavior-language memory.

Because literature encourages innovation, the process by which the individual acquires linguistic forms and cultural convention possesses more selectability and creative space, and the direction of selection and deviation also has more divergence; with the accumulation of days and months, literature thereby breeds the phenomenon that Wittgenstein calls "family resemblance." Cultural convention is the bond that holds this "family" together. One of the reasons for the ever-changing variety of literary forms lies precisely in this: cultural convention is not an abstract rule; it can be imitated, inherited, and remolded from different angles and in different ways, and the new literary forms thereby generated, although they ceaselessly breed and shift, nevertheless—because of the this-or-that, direct or indirect connections among them—still constitute a literary "family." At the same time, convention itself is also inevitably in a ceaseless process of generation, decay, differentiation, and migration. Between the continuity and rupture of cultural convention, the boundaries of literary genres begin to form; but this differentiation can only be relative, and its boundaries are vague and ever-shifting. The acquisition and evolution of artistic forms and conventions should be viewed in the same way.

The author's individual learning of literary language and his acquisition of cultural convention are influenced by his individuality. He always sets out from his own individuality to make selections and reshapings of linguistic forms and cultural convention. Because individuality is a person's distinctive behavior-language, the result of the mutual adjustment of the individual life and social convention, therefore, reflected in the style of literary language, it is the interaction among the three—the individual life, social convention, and cultural convention—that is, the interaction among the individual life, social convention and ideology, and literary tradition and cultural convention. (23) Literary style cannot be discerned merely on the basis of the frequency of use of certain words; more important is the special "flavor" embodied in the speech-act, and this is precisely brought about by the tension among the above three. It is precisely in this sense that Bernstein says: "Every language has many ways of speaking and frameworks of coherence, and… these ways of speaking, these linguistic forms or codes themselves, change with changes in the forms of social relations." (24) For example, in the period of the May Fourth enlightenment movement, the individuality of the literate was liberated, and the constraint of the old social convention upon the individual began to be broken through; this at the same time set a new demand upon literary language—to abandon classical Chinese and its conventions, and to seek from the vernacular of the folk a mode of expression closer to life—and thereby brewed the trend of the times. Conversely, once literary language and its convention meet with transformation, and thereby create a new semantic space, it will also summon forth the behavior-language in the unconscious in a new way, and further bring about a new conflict between the individual life and social convention, giving the individual life the opportunity to gain fuller expression. The ceaseless renewal of literary style and literary form stems precisely from the tension among the three—the individual life, social convention, and cultural convention—and is the result of the ceaseless adjustment of the relation among the three.

Literary activity cannot do without experience. We call participation in the activities of everyday life "experience," and at the same time we also call literary appreciation "experience." Their common point lies precisely in this: both involve behavior-language—it is the human's behavior unfolding in the world, tightly linking human and world, letting the human merge into the world, understand the world, and construct the world—and the manner of merging and the manner of understanding in the two are similar. The difference lies in this: life-experience is the process in which real behavior is truly carried out in the real world, whereas literary experience is the re-arousing of behavior-language memory and the unfolding of virtual behavior in the imagined world; because it constructs another fictional world and lives within this fictional world, it cannot but concentrate on this imagined world and on behavior itself. The true meaning of literary experience lies precisely in this: literature, by means of the speech-act, awakens the human's memory of behavior-language. The reason we stress the importance of experience for literary creation, and stress the experiential character of literary reading, is precisely that it directly bears upon the capacity to grasp behavior-language and the capacity to convert it.

Literary experience is the process of arousing the language of behavior, and thereby unfolding imagination, by way of reading the language of the work; it is the process in which the reader mobilizes his own behavior-language memory and constructs and throws himself into the fictional world. He personally experiences the vitality of behavior, comprehends behavioral convention, and further comprehends the most basic structural feature of a society. The degree to which a work converts behavior-language into the speech-act, the force with which it reveals behavior-language and the depth with which it reveals behavioral convention, is an important measure of the quality of the work.

Just as the human, situated in different domains, automatically selects modes of behavior and adjusts modes of behavior—for example, public space, the professional post, the family, private space, the masked ball, the carnival square, the center of a riot, and so on—the individual makes utterly different selections among the various behavioral conventions according to the different fields, always naturally tending toward the direction of the least constraint, and standing in a different tense relation with convention. Literature, for its part, provides the human with a special field and gives the human a distinctive experience. The distinctiveness of literary experience lies in this: with its peculiar structural feature, it endows the reader with a double attitude. On one hand, the reader conceives the world of literature in accordance with the behavior-language and convention of a specific society, and understands the behaviors, events, and society that occur in accordance with behavior-language and convention. On the other hand, because this world is fictional—as if a private space had been set up for the reader—all conventions become void and lose their norming force upon the reader himself, and thereby the reader's sensuous life is liberated. Speaking of the human's activity of memory, Halbwachs points out: in memory, we can not only stroll at leisure among the various different groups, walking from one group to another, but also, even when we keep them company in quiet contemplation, we do not feel the constraint coming from others as intensely as in a real situation. The reason lies precisely in this: "the persons we remember no longer exist, or have already left us, near or far, and in our eyes represent only a dead society—or at least a society very different from the one in which we now live, a society in which most of the taboos and prohibitions of that bygone society have now been laid aside." (25) If, in memory, taboos and prohibitions have already lost their norming force upon the one who recalls, then, in the imagined world of literature, those social conventions can only constitute a constraint upon the behavior of the work's characters—they are the basis on which the reader imagines events and constructs the world, and the object of contemplation, experience, and understanding—but cannot constrain the reader himself, and the reader thereby gains a new freedom. It is precisely this liberation that provides the reader with a more humane standpoint, more in keeping with the natural state of life, and opens a distance between the reader and the social convention revealed by the work. The convention to which the reader had already grown accustomed in everyday life now stands thrown into relief before the reader, constituting a sharp confrontation with his sensuous life, and is thereby examined, exposed, and criticized—thus providing an effective path for the realization of poetic justice. Literary reading is a process in which the reader both "enters within" and "stands without," ceaselessly transitioning and wandering; the ceaselessly changing fields make the reader cannot but face the various different behavioral conventions and stand in a different tense relation with them. Fiction endows the reader with a distinctive, ever-shifting field of activity, and also endows the reader with a ceaselessly changing mode of existence and mode of behavior, and therefore endows him with a distinctive standpoint for critiquing ideology.

Speaking of the poetic wisdom of primitive peoples, Vico held that primitive people had no capacity for reasoning, yet were full of vigorous sensory power and lively imaginative power, and that poetry was their innate capacity. But civilized people are different: this capacity has already degenerated, the reason being that "what separates the mind from the senses is precisely those abstract thoughts corresponding to those abstract words that are so abundant in our modern languages." (26) In fact, the sensory power and imaginative power of which Vico speaks are precisely the capacity for behavior-language. For primitive people, behavior-language was the more developed and effective language; it was precisely behavior-language that endowed them with poetic wisdom. With the development of humankind's linguistic capacity, the capacity for abstract thinking also developed, and behavior-language gradually lost its importance in the activity of communication; and because it lies in an auxiliary position and an unconscious state, it is more easily forgotten by the human. Only literature, in order to recover the vitality of language and poetic wisdom, has always kept behavior-language in mind and ardently summoned it.

Speech is behavior, and behavior is language. One may even say that speech is a special kind of behavior, while behavior is the more basic language. When speech becomes the human's distinctive behavior, it wins its own freedom and profundity, but for this reason also loses the original sense of closeness and the sense of life. Literature, for its part, attempts to combine the speech-act with behavior-language and to keep the double advantage anew. Literature can do without neither the speech-act nor behavior-language; it is the convergence and fusion of the two, and therefore it encompasses the human and the human's world, encompasses the whole history of the human, and lets us examine and ponder all of this from the standpoint of humanity and human nature.