A literary work is, as Hough put it, a “palimpsest”—a parchment on which one text overlies another and the layers of meaning are superimposed tier upon tier. When the reader opens a book and reads a poem, he opens at the same time a great many other books, and faces simultaneously a whole series of poems; reading and appreciation are therefore no longer a closed, isolated activity. The reader cannot possibly bind himself rigidly to a single isolated text; rather he casts himself into an ocean composed of countless interrelated texts, where word generates word and text generates text, so that the activity of reading takes on an extremely complex state—and this is bound to affect the generation and realization of literary function as well.
1. The Enriching Parasite Text
Shelley once conjectured that the poets of every age contribute to one continually developing “great poem.” The history of the development of poetry is a history of mutual inheritance and mutual influence from age to age. Only by learning and understanding the poems of his predecessors can a poet carry out his own creation. This decrees that the poet's creation begins from receiving the influence of his predecessors; he cannot cast off their influence. Seen from this angle, every poet of every age seems to be writing one and the same “great poem.” At the same time, the poet must strive to break through the cage of his predecessors' influence and make his own innovation, before he can become a true poet and appear in literary history with a face of his own. That is to say, every poet is forever writing one continually developing “great poem.” The influence of literary tradition is therefore both the milk that nourishes the poet and a doom he cannot escape; the poet stands forever within the “anxiety of influence,” and the so-called “original work” of even the great poet is, when examined closely, realized only by “demonizing” the poems of his forebears. The inescapability of influence thus decrees that there must exist a bond-relation among poems, and decrees that all the variegated poems belong, in the last analysis, to one continually changing “great poem.”
As for the reader's reading, it is the same. He does not address merely one isolated poem; nor does he merely summon up, at the same time, a series of related poems that came before this poem; rather he summons up simultaneously all the other related poems he has read that came before, after, or contemporaneously with this poem. For these poems, once read, have already entered the reader's reading-horizon and been transformed into the reader's “pre-structure” and “pre-understanding”; the reader, bearing this pre-structure and pre-understanding, goes to read a given poem, and so in fact faces, whether dimly or distinctly, a great many poems mutually acting and mutually generating. Without pre-structure and pre-understanding, the reader cannot even enter into normal reading-reception, for at such a moment he has lost all “literary competence.” Bloom says in his The Anxiety of Influence: “Let us abandon the futile effort to understand any poem as an autonomous entity. Let us begin in this way: learn to read every poem as the poet's—as poet's—deliberate misreading of a precursor poem or of poetry as a whole.” To read every poem as a misreading of “poetry as a whole” means precisely to understand each poem against the background of poetry as a whole. Hence, behind every poem, a great many other poems are always implicated. Likewise, within every literary text there are always hidden a great many “parasite texts.” Reading and understanding are an understanding in which the poem is set off against “poetry as a whole,” the literary text against the “parasite text.” The action that a poem and other literary works exert upon the receiver, and further upon society, must likewise be carried out under conditions in which the poem and “poetry as a whole,” the literary text and the “parasite text,” mutually act upon each other. On this point Yip Wai-lim states it still more plainly in his essay “Secret Echoes and Mutual Evocation: The Derivation and Reciprocal Eliciting of Literary Meaning”: “To open a book and encounter one text is at the same time to open many other chapters of other books—ancient, modern, even foreign—and they present themselves together in the mind, faintly stirring there. A single voice leaps out from between the black ink and the white paper to speak to us, while other voices echo from afar, or whisper a reminder, or protest aloud, or answer in concord and stretch toward a broader space, or surge back redoubled, like a vast orchestra in which, in a performance our fleshly ear cannot hear, they converge into a flooding, dense music.” “Secret echoes and mutual evocation” may be said to sum up most aptly the feature whereby literary text and “parasite text” mutually act and mutually generate. The work that is read and appreciated can only ever be a text filled and enriched by many other “parasite texts”; it can only be a part-song of many voices, an orchestral symphony, and can by no means be a solo, a recitative, the streaming of a pure and lonely single voice.
Take, for example, our classical poetry, in which there often appears the phenomenon of adopting a fine line of a predecessor and recasting it anew with fresh meaning. In Ouyang Xiu's lyric “Pingshan Hall” (to the tune “Chaozhong Cuo”), the line “the level hills lean against the railing in the clear void; the mountain hues are there—or not” borrows directly the fine line of Wang Wei's poem “Sailing on the Han River”: “the river flows beyond heaven and earth; the mountain hues are there—or not.” On this, Pan Deyu not only raised no objection but expressed warm appreciation, holding that although Ouyang Xiu “used a predecessor's lines to make his own lyric,” he had “a fresh imagery-transformation of his own.” That is to say, Ouyang Xiu did not stiffly plagiarize his forebear, but fused the older lines into his own lyric, recasting them into a new realm—the device that Huang Tingjian later called “changing the bones and stealing the embryo.” He not only transformed the predecessor's lines into a new realm of his own creation, but also, by using identical or kindred lines, linked the two poems together. The reader, in appreciating Ouyang Xiu's “Chaozhong Cuo,” thereby summons up at the same time Wang Wei's “Sailing on the Han River,” so that the two mutually generate and mutually set each other off, greatly enlarging the realm of the lyric. Ouyang Xiu uses Wang Wei's poem while drawing it simultaneously into the horizon of his own composition, making Wang's poem an extension of his own work and a “parasite text” of it—what may be called an “enriching parasite text.”
The most typical example of intertextual linkage formed in poetry through shared words is allusion. In The Allure of Tang Poetry, Kao Yu-kung and Mei Tsu-lin say: “An allusion has two poles: one related to a present concern, one related to a historical event; the two are compared with each other, and the aim of the comparison is to display their similarity, thereby providing an occasion for the poet to describe or comment upon a present matter.” Allusion is extremely convenient and extremely free; it naturally produces a linkage between the historical text and the present text. For the poet, such linkage lets him exploit the resemblance between history and the present to describe or comment upon the present in an oblique, veiled way; for the reader, it is not merely a using of that resemblance to know and evaluate the present—it may at the same time display the differing circumstances of history and present, and so constitute a交流 between history and reality. The role of allusion is just like the hidden ancient painting beneath a layer of pigment of which Derrida speaks in Dissemination, where “reading is like an X-ray scan that discovers, beneath the surface of the upper painting, another painting concealed there—a painting by the same painter or another, who, lacking materials or in order to create a new effect, made use of an ancient prepared canvas already bearing a painting, or preserved a fragment of an earlier sketch.” The effect of the parasite text upon the original text is more than a simple addition of meaning: it expands the work into a wholly new space of meaning, and may even endow the work's meaning with the possibility of multidirectional generation, achieving a specific aesthetic effect. Li Yishan's “The Ornate Zither” uses many allusions; even if one has cleared up the source and import of every one of them, it is still hard to grasp the poem's true meaning with precision, for these allusions, coming one after another, generate meaning reciprocally and so make the poem all the more bewilderingly hazy. Allusions are continually being employed by poets, and in the process of being employed, the various emotional colorings borne by particular contexts settle layer upon layer onto the allusion, endowing it with a rich emotional connotation. At the same time, allusion thereby becomes a bond linking the various contexts. As Yip Wai-lim says: “Words and lines are so many footholds for leaping into a vast space-time and acting there. A poem is not locked within its words and lines, but is a kind of交流 that enters into the space of history.” It is not only that words and lines absorb and breed one another and draw out the rich parasite texts related to a given literary text; common archetypes and common subject matter likewise become bonds linking the text and the parasite text. In Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode,” Wordsworth's The Prelude, and Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind,” the “wind” is an extremely important common archetypal image they share. It symbolizes life, power, and inspiration; it can endow the poet with an unfettered freedom, make his passion and imagination surge forth, and set the harp of poetry ringing anew with a mysterious power descending from the heavens. The common archetypal image builds a bridge of association among originally independent poems. Hence, when the reader reads and appreciates a given poem, the linkage of the archetypal image calls forth the poetic realms of certain other poems as well, so that it is no longer a listening to the lonely harp-note of a single poet, but a symphony of harps.
The “sound of the bell” is an archetypal image habitually used in Chinese poetry. Du Fu's “At dawn the bell, beyond the clouds, the wet cannot be climbed” (“Written on a Rainy Day at Kuizhou”); Zhang Ji's “At midnight the bell-sound reaches the traveler's boat” (“Mooring by Maple Bridge at Night”); Wang Wei's “Of ancient trees, a path with no one; deep in the hills, where is the bell?” (“Passing the Xiangji Temple”) and “At the valley mouth the sparse bell stirs, the fisher and woodman feel scarce awake” (“Written at the Wang River Estate”); and Qian Qi's “The bell-sound knocks at the white clouds” (“Inscribed on the Meditation Hall atop Lingyin Temple”)—these poetic lines, too, are often evoked reciprocally through the common archetypal image.
In Western literature, the stories of the Bible and of Greek myth are often used and reused by different authors, who create distinct works of their own from them; this, too, builds an invisible bridge among these works. M.-F. Guyard says in Comparative Literature: “The figures in the Bible—their meaning is not at all exhausted; on the contrary, they are constantly being renewed. One associates the figure of Cain with the Byronic transformations in the works of Hugo, and likewise thinks of the Satans in the works of Milton or of Carducci.” It is precisely such association that weaves the independent texts together to constitute a larger textual whole. The tradition of Don Juan is likewise used again and again in Western literature; Lu Xun discusses this at some length in “On the Power of Mara Poetry.” The Don Juan beneath Molière's pen is a “seducer of Seville”; more importantly, he is also a man who, unbound by worldly opinion, bestows favor out of “love for humanity.” Yet Hoffmann turned Don Juan into a thoroughly unworthy libertine; and Byron, for his part, wrote Don Juan as a man who “casts off convention, peers wantonly at debauchery, and mocks society to amuse himself.” The Don Juan written in Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio, in Lenau's Don Juan, and in Gluck's Don Juan, the Stone Guest are each different. Whatever the figures in the several works, once they have entered the reader's horizon, they gather and cluster in his reading, setting each other off, contrasting with each other, illuminating each other, and producing new effects. Common words, subject matter, and images weave independent literary texts into a “whole” text; and similar, kindred, or even divergent and contrary words, subject matter, and images can likewise serve to link them up. The literary text thereby comes to possess a rich, multi-leveled structure of meaning and an infinitely extending boundary, and literary function is thereby adjusted as well.
2. The Indicative Parasite Text
The parasite text formed through linkages of subject matter, motif, and word-and-line is chiefly an enriching parasite text, which expands and opens up the connotation of the original text and so alters its functional structure. In the same way, criticism of a given literary text, an author's own explanations of his text, and even an author's biography and the like will all become “parasite texts” of that literary text; these too will be taken into the overall framework of reading and appreciation and will influence the original literary text. Yet, unlike the “enriching parasite text” described above, the chief role of these parasite texts is often to indicate and to expound. They are not like the summoning of the text itself, which attracts the reader from within the text and gives him hints; rather they indicate or hint, from outside the original text, that the reader should regard the original text with a particular eye, that he should engage the literary text in a certain way—and hence these parasite texts may be called “indicative parasite texts.” Because the indicative parasite text guides the manner in which the reader engages the literary text, it inevitably influences literary function as well. The guiding and normalizing role that literary criticism plays in the reader's reading and appreciation arises, in large measure, precisely from this relation. Authoritative criticism in particular often creates an enormous contextual pressure, compelling the reader, against his will, to regard the literary text in the authority's way. For example, our critical circles once, over a fairly long period, evaluated literary works almost uniformly from the angle of socio-political and moral-ideological education; this ossified, formulaic criticism thereby became the indicative parasite text of the various literary texts, became an ossified context cast over the literary text, and at the same time created in the reader a fixed reading-psychology, so that the reader grew accustomed to seeking, simply and mechanically, the value of class struggle, political allegory, and moral instruction within the work. Conversely, a piece of criticism from the cultural angle often hints that the reader should attend first to the folk customs the work may offer and the cultural connotation it contains; and criticism that fixes upon aesthetic appraisal is more conducive to the reader's close reading and savoring of the work. If it may be said that literary works often teach people how to view the world, then criticism, to a certain degree, teaches the reader how to view the work.
Seen from this angle, criticism fixed upon a single authority is in fact unfavorable to reading and appreciation, for the contextual pressure it creates often carries a coercive force; it more or less robs the reader of free engagement with the work, restricts within one fixed direction the infinitely rich relations the work may possess with the reader, makes the work's rich potential single and impoverished and may even distort it, and often expounds the work's limitless connotation with a determinate critical language. But when criticism is no longer a single verdict and instead becomes a multidirectional free exploration, forming a situation of equal contention, these parasite texts then provide the literary text with a flowing, multidirectional, multi-leveled context; this guarantees a free relation between the reader and the literary text, and at the same time allows the many functions of the text to be fully realized. As Frye holds: “The critic's own preference for the study of one context does not mean a kind of exclusivity; to criticize a work in different ways is to supplement one another continually, not to contradict one another.” In this respect the Chinese tradition of the annotative and the point-and-comment styles of study has its decided advantages. Annotation provides clues toward the enriching parasite text, so as to constitute the交流 among texts; the point-and-comment style, for its part, avoids the critic's arbitrary, conjectural assertions, relinquishes the effort to set down determinate definitions and expositions of the work's limitless connotation, and only points, only exclaims in admiration, helping the reader to plunge into the work's realm, to steep himself within it, to experience it in person, to savor it minutely, and to apprehend it for himself. This thereby provides the conditions for fully unearthing the reader's potential and the work's potential.
Compared with other indicative parasite texts, an author's biography and an author's own explanations of his work are often more authoritative still. Although Anglo-American New Criticism strove to sever the connection between work and author, holding that work and authorial intention have no direct relation, and that the meaning of a literary work is determined by linguistic rules rather than by authorial intention or the author's statement of his own intention, in the end they were unable thereby to banish the author. In “The Intentional Fallacy,” Wimsatt and Beardsley point out: “The poem belongs neither to the critic nor to the author (it is detached from the author at the moment of its birth and goes wandering about the world, beyond the author's power to control or prescribe its meaning); the poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, and language is a peculiar public property; it takes humankind as its object, and this too is a problem of public knowledge.” Language is “a public possession.” The literary text, existing as language, must therefore cast off the author's monopoly and turn into public property. The reader interprets the text only according to the conventional interpretation of language, and need not, trembling with anxiety, fear that his understanding has turned its back on the author's intention; the influence the reader receives, too, is built upon the foundation of his own understanding and experience, and is by no means a simple realization, undiminished and unaltered, of the author's intention. Once the literary text is born, it is detached from the author and has obtained its own independence.
And yet this is not the whole of the matter. On one hand, the literary text indeed possesses independence, and the reader's understanding has the freedom of needing to take no account of authorial intention; on the other hand, the independence of the literary text can only be relative, for the understanding of any text cannot dispense with a concrete context, and the author's life experience and the author's own explanations of his work often come to be an important constitutive part of the literary text's context. To appreciate Su Shi's “Cave-Immortal Song” or Jiang Kui's “Cui-Tower Air,” for example, almost no one will set aside the poet's prefatory note and understand the lyric in isolation. Conversely, an understanding that departs from the poet's explanation is always sure to invite dispute. In fact, the author always stands stubbornly behind the “son” he is regarded as having borne and created in person, chattering and pointing, and far from setting up no verbal apparatus and idly drawing on his pipe in the distance. The work is the author's creation, and it is precisely this relation that makes the reader willing, gladly and of his own accord, to grant the author the authority of interpretation. Moreover, the author's knowledge and beliefs and other external evidence likewise exert a coercive force upon the associations called forth by certain words or images, making it possible for them to become part of the text's meaning. Therefore the literary text has both its relative independence—once the author has finished his creation, the text exists detached from him, and will be placed continually within new, changing contexts to be read and understood—and, at the same time, within the context constituted by all the parasite texts, the author's own views still remain forever an important constitutive element, exerting a conspicuous role; for the author's beliefs, emotions, and intentions are plainly bound up with the words and lines he uses, and the connotation of these words and lines, together with the relation between the associations the author derives from them and his beliefs, emotions, and intentions, is extremely close. Mao Dun's explanation of the writing-motive of Midnight, for instance, once caused readers and researchers, over a fairly long period, to concentrate their attention upon the socio-political content of the work, highlighting and strengthening the socio-political import of Midnight. In “Draft of ‘Title Still Undetermined’ (Seven),” Lu Xun says: “There is in the world a so-called method of ‘discussing the matter on its own terms,’ and one may now discuss a poem on the poem's own terms—or one may say this too is unobjectionable. But I always think that if one is to discuss a piece of writing, it is best to take account of the whole piece, and to take account of the author as a whole man, as well as of the social state in which he stood; only so is it relatively reliable. Otherwise it is all too easy to talk in one's sleep.” This method of discussing a piece of writing is likewise founded upon the conviction of the close relation between author and work. All the author's other works, and even the author as a whole man and the social environment of the author's life, will become parasite texts of the work being read, become a context it ought not to be parted from, and guide our reading and understanding. In Lu Xun's view, only within this complete context, constituted by the author as a whole man, by his entire body of work, and even by the social background, can the understanding and evaluation made of the work be a correct understanding and evaluation.
Western psychoanalytic criticism, for its part, attaches importance to the author and his life and experience from another angle. Freud especially valued the author's childhood experience, and set out from the development of the author's childhood instincts and the repression he underwent to analyze literary works. Mordell likewise holds, in The Erotic Motive in Literature, that the literary work is the expression of the author's individual person and represents the author's whole personality: “His past and present, his joys and sufferings, have all entered into the process of creation, and this process has also recorded his secret cravings and his most private feelings; it is the revelation of his struggle and his despair, the outlet for his emotion—though he has striven to repress it, it still flows on unchecked. Its beginning lies plainly in the early life he has long forgotten.” Therefore Mordell always interprets literary works in combination with the author's life. In his view, Charlotte Brontë's unrequited love for her married older teacher, Héger, left, in the anxiety it provoked, traces in her works Jane Eyre and Villette that could not be wiped away, and lent the works their autobiographical coloring; and in Renan's Life of Jesus, Mordell read out the irresolute, world-indifferent personality—averse to intimate friendship, harboring hostility toward the Semitic peoples—that Renan projected onto the figure of Jesus.
Of course, our dividing parasite texts into enriching parasite texts and indicative parasite texts is a division made with respect to their principal feature. In fact, a parasite text often combines both features at once: the enriching parasite text, too, has its indicating and hinting function, while the indicative parasite text, too, can often blend into the original text and become a factor enriching it. Whatever feature predominates in a given parasite text, they always adhere around the literary text, constituting, like a halo, the indispensable context of the literary text. The literary text can by no means come into the world all alone and isolated; at the moment of its birth it is already accompanied by countless parasite texts, and in the course of the literary text's transmission it continually attaches to itself ever more new parasite texts. This seems to be the inescapable destiny born with the literary text. It may be said that to absorb parasite texts continually is one salient feature of the literary text. The literary text is full of blanks and indeterminate factors, and this is precisely what provides extremely favorable conditions for its absorption of parasite texts; while continually absorbing and admitting parasite texts, the literary text thereby designs for itself a flowing, changing context, so that its own meaning is continually renewed in new contexts and literary function is continually newly excavated and expanded, and it thus forever keeps fresh its own vitality and charm. The scientific text is otherwise: the scientific text itself contains the context it requires, and in respect of contextual constitution it is self-sufficient, with no need to borrow an external context. Its meaning, too, often does not change with the change of external conditions; and hence the interpretation of the scientific text is always determinate and unchanging. The connection between the literary text and its parasite texts is, moreover, realized through the reader; that is to say, the parasite texts of the literary text ought to be ones the reader knows and is familiar with. The reader's range of reading and range of knowledge determine the range of parasite texts he is able to call forth. This is precisely the important reason why one and the same literary text produces different reading-effects for different readers.