The Beginning of Fiction Theory and Its Modern Destiny

Ever since the birth of literature, fiction has been entangled with imagination, shadowing the footsteps of literature's development like a shadow following a form. But only on entering the modern period did the problem of literary fiction gain true importance; its connotation came to be deeply and fully expounded, and fiction was transformed from what had originally been a device of literary creation into the basic feature of literature, becoming the anthropological basis on which literature can exist.

Plato: A Distant Inspiration

Already in the period of ancient Greece, Plato had discussed the problem of literary fiction. In his view, literature and art are an imitation of reality, while reality is in turn an imitation of the Idea, so that art stands three removes from truth. And literature and art set still greater store by imitating the irrational parts such as emotion and desire. If the human's reason can still cognize reality, while the action of the irrational—emotion and desire—does the opposite, only blinding the eye of the mind, then the poet, by pandering to the inferior, irrational part of human nature, can only "produce images far removed from truth." (1) This literature that imitates the human's irrational—what Plato calls "fictive literature"—ought to be driven out of the ideal state and not permitted to break across its borders. But another kind of literature won Plato's special favor: poetry created in the state of inspiration. In this state, the poet is possessed by divine power, his mind ruled by frenzy, becoming the god's "spokesman." Frenzy "comes from possession by the Muses. It possesses a tender, chaste soul, stirs it, and leads it to a realm of exultant, soaring flight, overflowing in poems of every kind that praise the great deeds of the heroes of old, handed down as lessons for later ages. Without this frenzy of the Muses, whoever comes to knock at the door of poetry—he and his works forever stand outside the door of poetry, however much he may vainly imagine that by poetic art alone he can become a poet. His sober-minded poetry is eclipsed before the poetry of frenzy." (2)

In remote antiquity, priests and shamans bore the role of prophets; their entering the state of frenzy was regarded as the bridge communicating between the human and the god, between the human world and the noumenal world, and therefore frenzy was taken as the most honorable of fine things, able to foreknow the future—a gift of receiving the summons of the divine and the greatest happiness bestowed by Heaven, far surpassing the human's sober state. By Plato's time, the power of priests and shamans had already declined, and frenzy too began to be questioned and was divided into two kinds: one reviled as a disease, the other the possession of the divine; Plato, however, still greatly valued the poet's frenzy. This frenzy, which we today regard as irrational, was in Plato's eyes the highest reason: through the state of frenzy the soul travels with the gods, ascends to the realm beyond the heavens where the eternal "true beings" exist, and sees the noumenon of things, sees justice, virtue, and true knowledge. Frenzy lets the poet transcend the phenomenal world and enter the noumenal world, and thereby see true beauty and truth.

Frenzy makes one lose the sense of reality, lose true connection with the real world; yet it is precisely this non-real state that makes it possible for one to grasp truth. Plato's paradoxical view of literature and art, and especially his view of frenzy, long influenced Western thought on literature and art, becoming an important theoretical resource for later scholars and men of letters in expounding the fiction of literature and art and its distinctive function. Aristotle's view—that the historian describes what has already happened while the poet describes what may happen, and that poetry is more universal than history—is rooted precisely here. Kant's doctrine of aesthetic disinterestedness, Schiller's theory of play, Heidegger's reflections on poetry and thought, Sartre's "universal man," Marcuse's aesthetic utopia, and so on, all likewise attempt to reach the authentic state and truth by way of the non-real (that is, the fiction of literature and art), and their lines of thought too have an inner connection with Plato's thought.

In the Renaissance period, with the awakening of the human and the affirmation of human nature, rights, and the human's own power, the fiction of literature and art also became an important path for the human to realize his talent for self-creation. In A Defence of Poetry, Sidney boldly declared that only the poet disdains to obey the bonds of natural, social, and technical rules; inspired by his own innovative spirit, he creates brand-new images that have never existed in nature, and thereby rises into "another nature"—"fiction can sing the highest pitch of passion." (3) Only the fiction that creates excellent images delighting the temperament and possessing educational significance is the "true mark" that makes a person a poet. The development of human reason also prompted the discrimination and demarcation of objects of study. Against this background, Bacon distinguished the human's imaginative power from the understanding and the memory, holding that imaginative power is not constrained by material law and can freely make unlawful matchings or separations of things; it reshapes nature by making the appearance of things submit to the desires of the human mind, while reason makes the mind submit to the essence of things. Bacon linked poetry with imaginative power, pointing out that poetry is "feigned history," which bestows on the mind an "illusory satisfaction" that the nature of things cannot give. On this, Beardsley comments: "By distinguishing imagination and making it a special active power in its own right, Bacon opened up a new field of study." (4)

Once the human had confirmed his own power and, full of confidence, gave rein to his creativity, he rapidly changed nature and human society and ushered in the dawn of modernization. What unfolded before the human was the just-born industrial civilization, which, while propelling economic prosperity with unprecedented desire and brute force, mercilessly tore off the tender, sentimental veil of agrarian civilization, placing the human in a trap covered with strange, cold, mechanical rules. The familiar natural landscape unchanged for thousands of years, the loose mode of life, the harmonious interpersonal relations were all gone never to return; all that was solid melted away, and competition, change, turbulence, and risk became the features of the age. This was an irresistible torrent of the age, which scoured and swept away all, tore and dismembered all, remolded and distorted all—including the human self. The human, by his own power, brought about his own alienation, and with his own hands put shackles upon himself, degenerating into a vagabond who had lost his spiritual home. This is the paradox that intellectual enlightenment faced. On one hand, the human's individuality, subjectivity, and reason were extolled as never before, and writers and artists too gained independence through the printing and publication and the free sale of their works; on the other hand, desire and competition, crisis and the chaos of war became universal phenomena, so that not only was the value of the individual self hard to realize, but human survival was endangered. The human ceaselessly made cage after cage for himself, submitting to material temptation and being forced to sell off his spiritual freedom, so that the complete individual was dismantled into fragmentary pieces, and the life-infused life was exchanged for a clearly-priced labor-commodity.

Giddens made an excellent analysis of the "disembedding" mechanism in the process of social modernization, the most important of which is the disembedding function of money as a symbolic token. The "pure commodity" character of money is a tool of time-space distanciation; it makes possible the mutual exchange of commodities originally separated by time and space and effectively advances the generalization of exchange-value. It was precisely money, with its character of being extremely easy to circulate, that powerfully changed the barter mode of exchange of agrarian society, liberated producers and exchangers from the narrow, fixed relations of time and space, made large-scale social division of labor possible, rapidly disintegrated the traditional organizational forms of agrarian society, and provided the basic conditions for the development of the modern metropolis. This disembedding mechanism of money "lifts social action out of localized contexts and reorganizes social relations across great time-space distances." (5) Those intimate, stable interpersonal relations built up generation after generation collapsed; everyone became a rootless drifter, a stranger roaming the streets. Money turned the direct interaction among persons into indirect dealing by way of money, and, while enlarging the scope of the human's activity, abstracted the relations among persons into money relations, into dry quantitative relations; warmth was lost, while desire thereby ran rampant. "The method of the Enlightenment—the democratic hope of reason—promised an emancipated society, but failed to safeguard the possibility of mutual recognition among the subjects themselves in the face of the ceaselessly emerging threats of rationalization, reification, and domination." (6) The new form of civilization was like the genie in Solomon's bottle: once it had been let out, it could never be put back, but would, in accordance with its own will and desire, sweep all before it and do as it pleased. The human seemed already unable to resist the consequences brought about by his own behavior, unable to resist the negative effects swept along with social modernization; the only possibility was to construct an imagined fictional world, by which to escape reality and realize a spiritual "homecoming."

It is precisely on the basis of the need to resist real alienation that the literary fictional world increasingly drew people's attention and was granted a prominent status. However, to explore the problem of literary fiction with modern ideas still cannot, in fact, bypass the earlier aesthetics of Kant and Schiller. Although Kant's Critique of Judgment mainly explores judgment, and especially aesthetic judgment, and rarely speaks of literature and art—indeed almost never directly discusses the problem of literary fiction—they nevertheless provided extremely important theoretical resources for opening up the modern vision of the theory of literary fiction. It was precisely by taking this as the theoretical point of departure that literary fiction was transformed from what had originally been a means of literary creation and a means by which the writer realized his talent for self-creation and confirmed his self-value, into the essential feature of literature and the anthropological basis on which literature can exist.

Kant: Aesthetic Self-Discipline, an Important Resource for the Theory of Literary Fiction

As Deng Xiaomang points out, Kant established his philosophical system from an anthropological standpoint. After completing the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason and discovering the split and opposition between the human's cognitive faculty and faculty of desire, he set out from the human's organic wholeness to seek a bridge connecting these two, and thereby clarified the feature of aesthetic judgment. "It is precisely this anthropological vision that gave Kant, when he turned his gaze to aesthetics as a part of anthropology, an acuity and profundity far surpassing those of the matter-of-fact empiricist aestheticians and the rationalist aestheticians who conceived [aesthetics] apart from the human." (7)

Kant carried out this arduous undertaking by means of rigorous logical analysis. To find the middle link connecting the cognitive faculty and the faculty of desire, Kant could only refer to the traditional practice of distinguishing the three—knowing, feeling, and willing—and fix his attention on the "feeling" among them. What he had to expound and demonstrate was this: the judgment connected with the feeling of pleasure or displeasure both differs from the cognitive faculty (the understanding) and the faculty of desire (reason), and yet is related to and runs through both. Only thus is judgment an independent faculty of the human, while also communicating and connecting the originally severed cognitive faculty and faculty of desire, thereby restoring the human's organic wholeness. The critique of aesthetic judgment unfolds around this theoretical aim. And precisely in the process of gradually revealing the features of aesthetic judgment, Kant actually already gave an important theoretical ground for the problem of literary fiction.

Kant holds that the cognitive faculty relates the representation to the object through the understanding; in this process, the human's sensation points toward the object and then grasps it logically and conceptually, discovering its lawfulness. Aesthetic judgment (the judgment of taste) is entirely different: it does not relate the representation to the object, nor is it logical or conceptual, for once it were so, it would become a cognition of the object. Aesthetic judgment connects, through the imagination, with the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure; it "indicates nothing whatever in the object," but rather, in this process, "the subject feels itself as it is affected by this representation." Therefore, for aesthetic judgment, "this representation is referred wholly to the subject, under the name of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure—that is, referred to the subject's life-feeling." (8) This "life-feeling" of the subject is precisely the free activity of the imagination, the play of imagination and understanding; it is the subject's feeling of its own life-vitality, not a feeling of the object, and cannot be delimited and normed by concept and logic. Once it is normed by concept and logic, the life-feeling stiffens and dies, and is lost. This also separates aesthetic judgment from the cognitive faculty.

Because aesthetic judgment is unconcerned with the object and cannot discover its lawfulness by logic and concept, there is therefore no objective law to follow, and there can be no determinate rule by which to judge whether an object is beautiful. Aesthetic judgment is lawless. And yet it demands universal agreement on the side of pleasure and pursues the universal communicability of the judgment. Its basis can then only be sought in the subject itself; it lies in the distinctive state of mind formed by the free play of the subject's cognitive faculties: on one hand, the imagination combines the manifold of intuition; on the other, the understanding unifies the concepts that combine the representations. Such a free play of the cognitive faculties is neither limited by any determinate concept to particular cognitive rules, and yet is naturally lawful, and therefore possesses universal communicability, founding aesthetic judgment. The judgment of beauty is both lawless and lawful—it is lawfulness without law.

Sensory taste is based on the subject's direct interest-relation with the object, and all interest-relations spoil aesthetic judgment, cancelling its impartiality and thereby its universal validity. Especially when it is mixed with stimulus and excitement and takes these as the measure of its own appreciation, it forever remains "barbaric." Therefore Kant resolutely cleared sensory taste out of the gate of aesthetic judgment, keeping only pure aesthetic judgment, that is, reflective taste.

Kant points out that, for aesthetic judgment, no representation of a subjective or objective purpose can serve as the ground for judging a pleasing object. If a subjective purpose is regarded as the ground of the pleasure, it inevitably carries some interest-relation and can then relate only to the faculty of desire. As for objective purposiveness, it is equally alien to aesthetic judgment, because when this objective purpose is external, it is "usefulness"—that is, it stands in an interest-relation with the object—while when it is internal, it is the "perfection" of the object. In the latter case, the concept of "what kind of thing" something ought to be becomes the cause of that thing, providing it with the rule for combining the manifold and making it attain a harmonious perfection. Therefore, even internal purpose, because it is grounded in a concept, is bound to be at variance with aesthetic judgment and to relate only to the faculty of desire.

In aesthetic judgment, the given representation is not related to the reality of the object, and so aesthetic judgment is unconcerned with matter and depends only on the mere form of the representation. Because the mere form of the given representation connects with the free play of the subject's cognitive faculties and attains a harmonious agreement of the manifold and the one—and this "one" is non-conceptual, what it should be still undetermined—this shows that it cannot be an objective purpose-concept, but can only be a certain subjective purposiveness of the representation-state in the subject. Therefore, in aesthetic judgment the given representation is, on one hand, purposeless (having neither subjective nor objective purpose), and, on the other hand, the mere form of the representation is purposive, possessing a purposiveness without purpose. From this angle, beauty is the form of purposiveness of an object. The judgment of beauty roots precisely in the consciousness of the subjective purposiveness of the representation-form; it activates the positivity and activity of the subject's cognitive faculties, yet without confining itself to determinate knowledge, being itself a pleasing feeling.

Kant's analysis of the sublime is built on the basis of his analysis of beauty and unfolds with attention to difference. Kant divides the sublime into the mathematically sublime (infinitely huge in quantity) and the dynamically sublime (immeasurably great in power), and points out that neither kind of sublime can be grasped by human sensibility; the truly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form—it is "formless." Faced with the formless sublime, the subject's understanding is powerless and can only resort to the ideas of reason; therefore the judgment of the sublime is not the free play of imagination and understanding, but rather the frustration of the cooperation of imagination and understanding, which turns instead to the ideas of reason for support. "Insofar as the imagination must necessarily expand so as to be adequate to that which is unlimited in our faculty of reason, that is, to the idea of the absolute whole, this displeasure—and thus this unpurposiveness of the imagination in its capacity—is yet represented as purposive for the ideas of reason and for the arousing of these ideas." (9) That is to say, in the judgment of beauty, the arousal and coordination of the subject's cognitive faculties possess a life-promoting feeling, whereas in the judgment of the sublime, because the cooperation of the cognitive faculties is frustrated, the life-force is for a moment blocked; only when the subject turns toward the supersensible ideas of reason and harmonizes with them, revealing this unlimited capacity of the subject, does it bring about, at a new and higher level, a more intense surge of the life-force. Therefore the sublime cannot be sought in the natural object; it exists only in the inner heart of the one who judges. If the judgment of beauty, though it originates in the subjective, still needs the imagining of the objective object as itself possessing the purposive form that arouses the subject's cognitive faculties, then the sublime belongs purely to the subjective—it cannot, and need not, rely on the imagining of the objective object.

In Kant's analysis and exposition of beauty and the sublime, we see that aesthetic judgment both differs from the cognitive faculty and the faculty of desire and, because it is lawful and purposive and harmonizes respectively with the understanding and with reason, becomes the bridge that communicates and connects the cognitive faculty with the faculty of desire, nature with freedom. At the same time, the distinctive nature of aesthetic judgment is also fully revealed.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant clearly put forward the view that aesthetic judgment is unconcerned with the reality of the object and concerns only the inner heart of the subject; and when he went on to divide art into "mechanical art" and "fine art" (the latter being what we today call "literature and art"), and to drive mechanical art out of the domain of art, he in fact already gave the basic premise for the proposition "literary fiction." So, speaking of poetic art, Kant says: "The poet ventures to make sensible the rational ideas of invisible beings—the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, and so on; or also to make sensible, in a certain completeness that surpasses the limits of experience, things of which examples are found in experience—death, envy, and all the vices, as well as love, honor, and the like—by means of an imagination that, in striving toward a maximum, emulates the precedent of reason; and these are found in no example in nature; and this is really the poetic art in which the faculty of aesthetic ideas can manifest itself in its full degree." (10) However, this still touches only on the general understanding of literary fiction; more important is the lawfulness-without-law and the purposiveness-without-purpose that Kant revealed—that is, the fundamental feature of aesthetic self-discipline. It is precisely these views that became an important resource for later scholars in expounding the problem of literary fiction. Croce went on to develop the above views of Kant. He strictly distinguished "truly aesthetic activity" from "practical activity," holding that only thus could the difficult problems of the relation of "art and utility" and "art and morality" be solved. "Art, as art, is independent of utility, of morality, and of every practical value. Without this independence, the inner value of art cannot be spoken of, and the science of aesthetics cannot be conceived, for this science requires the independence of the aesthetic fact as its necessary condition." (11) We hold that it is precisely the aesthetic self-discipline expounded by Kant that provided the most important theoretical resource for establishing the modern conception of the theory of literary fiction, endowing it with rich inspiration and thereby becoming the basis on which the poetics of fiction gained its modern theoretical character and importance. Precisely for this reason, Genette says: "Whether it appears in verse or in prose form, in narrative or dramatic mode, the typical and obvious feature of fiction lies in offering the public a non-utilitarian pleasure; since Kant we have recognized this more clearly—namely, that non-utilitarian pleasure contains the aesthetic mark. To enter the realm of fiction is equivalent to stepping out of the everyday functional field of language, the latter being characterized by a concern for the truth and sincerity that govern the rules of communication and the ethics of speech… The strange contract of mutual non-responsibility that fictional writing joins with its receiver is the complete mark of the famous aesthetic non-utility. If there exists a sole means by which language can reliably and unerringly become a work of art, that means is probably fiction." (12) And Kant's view that "beauty is the form of purposiveness of an object" provided, from another direction, an important theoretical ground for the poetics of form. But it is also precisely in these two respects that Kant met with the harshest questioning from those who came after.

Kant, in order to obtain pure aesthetic judgment, expelled sensory taste and other impure things; this was, to be sure, required for the realization of his own theoretical aim, but it thereby also confined aesthetic judgment within a narrow space. Once the "de-differentiated" postmodern society arrived, when the mass culture of sensory taste—pursuing the pleasant and the interesting—or Duchamp's readymade "Fountain" and Warhol's "Brillo Boxes" openly entered the temple of art, Kant's "pure aesthetics" appeared stretched thin.

Bourdieu once made a profound critique of Kant's "pure aesthetics" and of "autonomous" literature and art. He held that the meaning and value of this kind of experience of literature and art are the joint result of two mutually grounding aspects of one and the same historical mechanism: on one hand, the cultural habitus—the cultivation, through schooling and the influence of the environment, of the cultural habitus of those who partly enjoy cultural privilege; on the other hand, in order to maintain their own cultural privilege, the construction of a corresponding literary-artistic field, prompting the field gradually to become institutionalized in the process of autonomization—so that the various techniques, categories, and concepts (genres, trends, styles, and so on) that feature this field are also created in the process of autonomization. "This is a process of establishing a relatively autonomous field of production; it is precisely because of this process that the realm of pure aesthetics or pure thought becomes able to exist." But "this experience is the product of privilege, or, that is to say, the product of the special conditions of its acquisition." (13) This special experience cannot possibly be fully applicable to the infinitely diverse practice of literature and art. In Eagleton's words, this pure aesthetics is only the product of a specific ideology. Bourdieu's analysis strikes at the theoretical limit within Kant's aesthetics and reveals the socio-cultural roots contained within it. But we cannot for that reason regard it merely as the theoretical prejudice of a specific period and a specific class and simply discard it. Even in the postmodern period, we still cannot ignore the infinitely rich theoretical resources that Kant's aesthetics provides for us.

Schiller: The "Zero State" and the Priority of the Sensible

Schiller inherited Kant's aesthetic thought, yet recalled the human's natural nature that Kant had disdained, devoting himself to bridging the gap between reason and sensibility that had been rigidly severed, and intending to restore the human—who in the process of modernization and industrialization had been ground into "fragments"—back into the unified human himself. If Kant set out from anthropology to seek the bridge connecting nature and freedom, the cognitive faculty and the faculty of desire, and unexpectedly provided a theoretical foundation for the fiction of literature and art, then Schiller took the building of a moral state as his political goal in order to seek the human-nature foundation of the ideal state, and thereby recognized the importance of the fictional world of literature and art for the return to complete humanity. If the sensibility that Kant valued is confined merely to spiritual imagination and emotion, then the sensibility of which Schiller speaks expands to the human's whole sensuous life, takes in the human's natural instinct, and makes human nature the theoretical point of departure. If Kant, in seeking the mediating link connecting the cognitive faculty and the faculty of desire, took up the scalpel of understanding-analysis and coolly dissected the human as a whole, then Schiller strove to avoid the purely intellectual method and to prevent the binding of fleeting phenomena to the instruments of torture of rational rules, uniting reality with form, contingency with necessity, and sensuous passivity with spiritual freedom, and thereby completing a healthy humanity.

Schiller thought about beauty and art in response to the alienation of human nature brought about by Western society. Schiller keenly saw that, in the age in which he lived, desire occupied the dominant position, interest had become the idol of the age, all powers had to serve it, and all genius bowed down at its feet. The social division of labor, class differentiation, and disciplinary division led to a state in which "state and church, law and custom were all torn apart; enjoyment was divorced from labor, means from end, effort from reward." The human's activity was confined within some fixed domain, and the human was forcibly bound to a single lonely "fragment" within the social whole, so that the single complete subject no longer existed and the human could not develop the harmony of his existence, but made himself merely a "mark" of his class, his profession, and his disciplinary knowledge. Nature and reason, the sensuous drive and the form drive, thereby split into mutually opposed forces.

In the real world, nature and reason, the sensuous drive and the form drive, are hard to reconcile. Nature pursues diversity, while reason demands unity—these are two utterly different legislations. Corresponding to this, two opposite demands arise in the human, namely the sensuous drive and the form drive. The former, setting out from nature, demands absolute reality, pursuing the transformation of all that is merely formal into world, the transformation of what is necessary in ourselves into reality, so as to bring forth the human's rich and diverse endowments; the latter, in accordance with rational law, demands absolute formality, seeking to dissolve the existence of the world into the human's own idea, to give external things form, to make the reality outside the self submit to law, and to devote itself to making the human gain freedom and to bringing the diversity of the human's expression into a state of harmonious unity. The human is propelled by two opposite forces. And when social reality alienates the human into a "fragment" and forcibly severs these two forces, the opposition between the sensuous drive and the form drive becomes ever more intensified—irreconcilable and unbridgeable.

In order to change this state of affairs, Schiller proposed a third drive, namely the play drive, by which to coordinate the two mutually opposed forces. Schiller held that the sensuous drive wants to throw itself into the world to feel objects, and is determined by nature; the form drive wants to absorb the world into itself, giving things form, and is determined by itself to produce its own object; the play drive, for its part, "strives to feel as it itself produces, and to produce as the senses of the human feel." (14) Therefore it excludes all contingency and compulsion and combines the two drives. The play drive both produces form without violating rational rules and creates its object without departing from sensuous richness; Schiller calls it the "living form," that is, "beauty." This is to say that the form of the thing lives in our feeling, while its life takes on form in our understanding. So beauty is neither merely life nor merely form, but is living form, intimating to the human the double law of absolute formality and absolute reality. (15)

Schiller's "play" requires the playing subject to possess a distinctive state of mind: on one hand, the subject's feeling is not constrained by the determinacy of nature; on the other hand, it is also not constrained by its own rational lawfulness. That is to say, the subject must return to the state of sensuous indeterminacy and rational infinite determinability in order to take part in play, ready to receive the aesthetic object. Schiller calls this psychological state the "zero state" or the "highest state of reality." It is just like what Laozi and Zhuangzi call "cleansing the dark mirror" and "discarding the limbs and trunk, dimming the intelligence, leaving the form and casting off knowing"—the "vacant stillness" and "sitting in forgetfulness"—and also like what phenomenology calls the "aesthetic reduction." Only in such a state does the mind, by virtue of its indeterminacy, gain infinite possibility, become a truly free mind, and only then does play truly become a free activity, an activity of beauty.

But in the real world, we are always situated within intricate and complex real relations, unable to throw off the control of the various forces, desires, and utilitarian purposes, and unable to gain this zero state of mind. Therefore the play or the aesthetic of which Schiller speaks precisely requires a distinctive relation different from real relations, namely the non-real aesthetic relation. From this we can clearly understand Schiller's view of the fiction of literature and art. In the second letter of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller says: "Art must abandon reality and rise with doubled courage above need, for art is the daughter of freedom; it can take its prescription only from spiritual necessity and not from the realm of material want." (16) Schiller's saying that "art must abandon reality" does not mean that art is to discard reality and be unrelated to reality, but stresses the transcendence that art possesses and the distinctive non-real relation between art and reality. This non-real relation has neither rejected the world nor yet transcended real interest-relations; and so the subject's state of mind is in the zero state, brimming with vitality, opening toward infinite possibility, while the object appears as living form. Art is precisely the creation of this distinctive non-real relation between human and world, the aesthetic mediation between human and world; it both demands of the human a zero-state subjective mind and, setting out from the world, creates the living form. Here we see the enormous difference between Schiller and Kant: Kant attributes the source of the aesthetic wholly to the subject, whereas Schiller stresses the non-real relation between subject and object. This exploration of the aesthetic from the angle of the subject-object relation precisely became the theoretical point of departure for later phenomenological aesthetics and existential aesthetics.

"Beauty, or taste, regards all things as ends in themselves and absolutely does not permit one thing to be taken as the means of another, or one thing to be bound by another. In the aesthetic world, every natural thing is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest, and may not, even for the sake of the whole, be compelled, but must gain absolute consent." (17) Only when the human and the thing dissolve their real relation and conclude a treaty anew does the thing exist as an end in itself; the human and the natural thing are no longer bound by real interest-relations—both become free citizens and gain independent, supreme rights. In Schiller's theoretical vision, the fiction of literature and art is not far removed from the real world, but stands in a distinctive relation with the real world, namely the non-real relation. From this, both the human and the world cast off all real shackles and gain independence, and unfold a free interaction and communication. Precisely for this reason, Schiller regards beauty as the outflow of nature itself, regards art as the product of the free expression of nature, and holds that the basic law of the aesthetic realm lies in this: through freedom, to give freedom.

Against Schiller's aesthetic education, which harmonizes sensibility and reason, Eagleton and Welsch made severe criticisms. Eagleton points out: "As a progressive reform of sensation and desire, the aesthetic completes a deconstruction: the aesthetic dismantles the rule of the sensuous drive not by external coercive prohibition but from within… If reason has sufficiently weakened and sublimated the sensuous nature from within, then reason easily controls the sensuous nature—and this is precisely the aim that the aesthetic interaction between spirit and sense seeks to attain. In this sense, the aesthetic has played a necessary basic role: for reason's ultimate suppression of sensuous life, the aesthetic both promotes and rejects the coarse material of sensuous life… What Schiller calls 'aesthetic psychic regulation' actually points out the basic scheme of ideological reconstruction. The aesthetic is the hard-to-detect medium between the barbaric, coarse civil society that indulges in pure desire and the ideal of the well-ordered political state." (18) Welsch, for his part, directly calls Schiller an "anti-sensuous dogmatist," holding that Schiller "did not develop strategies for knowing and liberating sensation, but developed strategies for controlling, eliminating, and strictly managing sensation," and holding that "this is the innermost paradox of traditional aesthetics." (19) But are their criticisms of Schiller objective and fair?

The harmony of sensibility and reason and the unity of nature and freedom of which Schiller speaks are not a simple compromise and reconciliation, still less a control of sensibility by reason or a weakening of sensibility; he made his reflections and prescriptions within an examination of the historical development of the mutual relation of sensibility and reason, nature and freedom. Schiller held that, viewed from the historical generation of humanity, the function of the sensuous drive precedes the form drive; it was precisely in this process of the sensuous drive's coming first that humankind opened up the whole history of freedom. This order of development thereby determines that sensibility is the basis of reason, and nature the basis of freedom. So Schiller says: "I think the word nature is better than the word freedom, because it at the same time expresses the sensuous realm, and beauty is confined to the sensuous realm. Besides the concept of freedom, the realm of freedom is also manifested in the sensuous world." (20) Since reason is grounded in sensibility and freedom in nature, reason ought not to enslave the human's sensuous life but ought to serve it; freedom too ought not to go against nature but ought to coordinate the relation of human and nature. Yet it was precisely the history of the development of human reason that set fetters upon the human's sensuous life. When reason was honored as authority, became the center that masters all (the whole of nature, the human included), and became the judge that adjudicates all (including the human's sensuous life), the relation between the two was inverted, and the conflict between them gradually took shape. Reason willfully developed its own one-sidedness and clung to dogmatic prejudice; it not only deviated from sensuous life but became a force that harmed sensuous life. The human's free will too became a tyranny perched above nature and issuing commands to it. Sensibility and reason, nature and freedom, thereby split into irreconcilable opposites. At this point, it is precisely the fictional world of literature and art that can possibly let the human's mind return to the "zero state," return to the initial point of departure of the generation of human nature, in order to rebuild the new relation of sensibility and reason, to reaffirm the priority of the sensuous drive, to reaffirm the foundational role of sensibility for reason, and to demand that reason give up authority and serve sensuous life. The world of literature and art, by virtue of its fictionality, is no longer a world ruled by real law, and therefore no longer the place where one-sidedly developed reason exercises its own authority; on the contrary, reason must humbly and submissively serve sensuous life and give up its one-sidedness. This reason, which sets out from sensuous life and serves sensuous life, has entirely excluded coercion; it is able to harmonize fully with sensuous life, and is at the same time the healthy reason that can truly guide the development of human nature. So Schiller was always on guard against reason's "comprehensive legislation" depriving human nature, and insisted on giving nature the decisive "last word." He clearly points out: "If reason expects too much of the human, and, for the sake of a humanity (which the human still lacks, and the lack of which does no harm to his existence), even deprives the human of his animal means, then it is equivalent to depriving him of the condition of his human existence. This is equivalent to withdrawing the ladder of nature from beneath his feet before he has fixed his will as law." (21)

Therefore the limitation of Schiller's aesthetics is not, as Eagleton or Welsch say, to deconstruct the human's sensuous life by means of the aesthetic and covertly manipulate sensibility, thereby paving the way for the well-ordered political state; on the contrary, it is precisely on the question of the relation of sensibility and reason, and of the role of the fiction of literature and art in rebuilding the relation of the two, that Schiller gave creative and truthful insights—only that he over-exaggerated the function of aesthetic education and regarded it as the sole path to shaping a healthy humanity and the fundamental premise for establishing the ideal state. Gadamer's evaluation is the more fitting. He points out that, since the modern era, art as the beautiful phenomenon has been opposed to reality, and art has been understood within this opposition. The opposition of appearance and reality has replaced the positive complementary relation of art and nature that had been determined since antiquity. Therefore, "wherever art rules, there the laws of beauty are in force, and the boundary of reality is broken through. This is the 'ideal kingdom,' which opposes all limitation, and also the moral constraints given by state and society. This relates to the inner shift in the ontological foundation of Schiller's aesthetics, for in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man the brilliant view at the beginning is altered in the course of its unfolding—namely, as is well known, an education through art becomes an education to art." (22) The reconciliation of reason and sensibility through the artistic fictional world is only a partial, temporary reconciliation, and the freedom that art wins is only the illusory freedom of the aesthetic kingdom, not the freedom of the real world; what it gives to reality is only a strand of fleeting twilight glimmer.

"Truth lives eternally in fiction." The fiction of which Schiller speaks is precisely the non-real relation between subject and object; through this imaginative free relation, the truth that was originally obscured by interest-relations and habitual relations may possibly shine forth anew. Schiller's keen thought turned the fiction of literature and art from Kant's pure subjectivity toward the non-real relation between subject and object, and attempted thereby to rebuild the new relation of sensibility and reason, letting the inverted relation be restored and fused anew; this approach contains a profound truth and also provided an important theoretical reference for the modern vision of the theory of literary fiction.

A New Beginning: The "Anti-Realist Nature" of Literature and Art

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two important documents drew the attention of the worlds of aesthetics and literary theory. One was Edward Bullough's "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle," published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1913; the other was Victor Shklovsky's "Art as Device," written in 1917. The former can almost be regarded as the manifesto of the poetics of fiction, while the latter became the manifesto of the Russian Formalist school. After Kant published the Critique of Judgment in 1790 and Schiller published On the Aesthetic Education of Man in 1795, both of them deeply expounding the non-utility of the aesthetic, and after more than a century of intellectual fermentation, these two articles, from different yet mutually related angles, seized respectively upon the aesthetic-psychic distance of art and the form of art in order to expound the fundamental feature of literature and art.

In his article, Bullough clearly and unmistakably proposed the "anti-realist nature of art." He says: "To declare that art is anti-realist amounts only to asserting that art is not nature, that art has never coveted the power of nature; and to asserting opposition to confusing art with nature. What this assertion stresses is the artisticity of art, and therefore the word 'artistic' and the word 'anti-realist' are synonyms—it often signifies a very conspicuous degree of artisticity." (23) It is perfectly clear that Bullough's "anti-realist nature of art" advocates distinguishing art from nature, holding that art is non-natural and non-real—that is to say, that literature and art are fictional. However, what he stresses is the subject's non-real attitude toward the object, that is, the "psychical distance" between subject and reality; and so in fact, just like Schiller, he examines the features of literature and art and reflects on aesthetic-psychic distance from the angle of the distinctive relation between subject and object.

Bullough explains psychic distance by means of Kant's "doctrine of disinterestedness." He gives the example that a great fog at sea not only hinders navigation but also arouses a special sense of insecurity and a fear of unseen danger. But if you can temporarily set aside the inconvenience the sea-fog brings and the danger it may provoke, "virtually" negating all your practical thoughts and standing aloof and transcendent in solitude, then the sea-fog too can become a source of the greatest satisfaction and enjoyment. This difference of feeling, Bullough holds, stems precisely from the effect produced by distance; it is distance that has transformed everything that affects our existence bodily or spiritually (that is, in sensation, perception, emotion, or idea). "The transforming effect of distance lies first of all in shifting the phenomenon out of the sphere of our practical or real self, in giving the phenomenon a status beyond the sphere of our personal needs and ends." (24) It is precisely from this angle that Bullough stresses that no work of art can be truly "objective," and at the same time that the work of art cannot be "subjective" either. The work of art creates a distance between us and the real object, letting us transcend real interest-relations and purpose-relations, enter into the disinterested, purposeless non-real relation, enter the aesthetic realm, and thereby change our state of existence and liberate our imagination and life-force. (25)

Shklovsky's "theory of defamiliarization" has an inner connection with Bullough's "theory of psychic distance": "The artisticity of endowing something with poetic quality is the result produced by our manner of feeling; and what we mean by an artistic work, in its narrow sense, refers to those works created by special devices whose aim is to make the work be felt, as far as possible, as a work of art." (26) The special device spoken of here is the device of "defamiliarization." Shklovsky holds that, in everyday life, the human's feeling, because of habit, has become mechanized and unconscious; the human no longer opens his mind to feel things, but merely recognizes things by empty concepts, and so the sensuous richness of things vanishes entirely. This is the so-called looking without seeing and hearing without listening. The device of defamiliarization lets things appear before the human in an abnormal way, breaking the habitual relation between human and things and reawakening the human's attention and sensibility; and so things "appear" to the human.

Defamiliarization indeed increases the difficulty of perception, thereby arousing the human's attention to feel the defamiliarized artistic form and throwing into relief the sense of form of the work of art. The poetics of form takes this as its theoretical point of departure. But at the same time, what is more important is that defamiliarization also changes the habitual relation between human and object, and further changes the human's state of existence. It is not, as Shklovsky held, a matter of prolonging the time of feeling and taking feeling alone as the aim. In fact, increasing the difficulty of perception is meant to cut off the daily-habitual mode of recognition and to turn instead to feeling the world in another, wholly different way, with an open mind—including its sound, color, image, and all its other elements; in the instant of blocking the habitual narrow relation between human and world, it simultaneously opens up another thoroughfare, letting human and world unfold a free, comprehensive interaction, letting the human enter, from finite, determinate real existence, into an infinite, ceaselessly generating free space. Defamiliarization creates experiential distance; it lets art provide an experience wholly different from that of everyday life, opening a distance from everyday experience, and thereby transcending the habitual utilitarian-purpose relation with the real world—and so it prepares the conditions for gaining aesthetic-psychic distance and constitutes a non-real aesthetic relation with the defamiliarized object. (27) This too leads to the poetics of fiction.

In the minds of Bullough and Shklovsky there lurks a notion shared by many modern scholars: that what is called "normal" in everyday real life has in fact long since been alienated and become a "false" existence, and that this alienation has, moreover, become commonplace and a matter of course; therefore, only when art appears in an "abnormal," "strange," "fictional" way can it truly reach true existence. Only by severing its everyday relations with the real world and establishing non-everyday, non-real relations can literature and art possibly throw off the bondage of utilitarian purposes and realize true freedom. Clive Bell once pointed out: "Art itself takes us from the realm of human practical activity into the higher realm of the aesthetic. At this moment, we are temporarily isolated from human interests, our expectations and memories are suppressed, and we are thereby raised to a height above life." (28) In his view, art is only "significant form" unrelated to life. Bakhtin's view is sharper. Speaking of the grotesque style in literature and art, he says: "In fact, the grotesque style, including the Romantic grotesque style, reveals the possibility of an entirely different world, another world-order, another life-system. It transcends the illusory (false) uniqueness, indisputability, and unshakability of the existing world… The existing world suddenly turns into an alien world… precisely because the possibility of a truly own world, the world of the golden age and of carnival truth, is revealed. The human returns to himself. The destruction of the existing world is for the sake of rebirth and renewal. The world both dies and is born." (29) In Bakhtin's eyes, the everyday-life world is alien, already distorted by real power and stained by habit, whereas the Romantic grotesque world is the "truly own world" and the "world of truth." Precisely for this reason, Bradley says: "Poetry, by its nature, is not a part of the real world, not a copy of it (in the sense in which we usually understand it), but the world itself—a complete, independent, self-governing world; in order to grasp it completely, one needs to enter this world, to obey its laws, and temporarily to abandon the requirements, purposes, and special conditions to which we are accustomed in another world, namely the real world." (30) Writers and artists are often regarded as the "saviors" of the present world, undertaking the heavy task of rescuing the present world from its fall and leading humanity back to Eden. Ransom too regarded fiction as the domain peculiar to literature and art; he pointed out, not without humor: "On every poem that looks like a poem there is a sign that reads: this road does not lead directly to action; it is fictional. Art always intends to create a 'beautiful distance' between object and subject, and art declares, until it is hoarse, that it is not history… If jealous science succeeds in making the domain of history its own forbidden preserve, it will not thereby eliminate the various arts, for they reappear in a domain that may be called real (real), though slightly different from actuality. There the arts function with far less interference, while at the same time they are almost as faithful to the phenomenal world as history." (31)

Since the modern era, the human's yearning for individual independence, subjectivity, and creativity has formed a sharp conflict with social reality's deprivation of the human's various spiritual needs, its suppression of the human, and its alienation of human nature; and so the fiction of literature and art becomes another mode of the human's existence, and the sense of independence and freedom and the full play of creative talent that it gives the human increasingly become an important psychological compensation for the human and a place in which to lodge his hopes. At the same time, stressing the fictionality of literature and art so as to throw off the instability of reality also becomes the common pursuit of scholars. This is precisely why Bullough, Shklovsky, and many other modern scholars could form a resonance with Kant's aesthetics and Schiller's aesthetics, stress the independence and autonomy of literature and art, and pin their hopes on the fiction of literature and art to realize this ideal.

Eagleton incisively pointed out that the rise of modern aesthetics and the philosophy of art is by no means accidental: it is in this period that, from the works of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Coleridge, and others, we inherited the contemporary concept of "aesthetic experience" and the concept of the specialness of the work. Formerly, men and women wrote poems, performed plays, and painted for various purposes, or read, watched, and visited for various purposes; now these activities began to take on a new meaning, namely the supposition of the existence of an unchanging object called "art," which most people held to be a product "wholly divorced from social life." He further points out: "If literature no longer has any obvious function—if the author is no longer a traditional figure employed by the court, the church, or some aristocratic patron—then this fact can be turned into an advantage of literature. The whole point of 'creative' writing is that it is useless yet brilliant, 'an end in itself,' nobly free of any filthy social purpose… Art is freed from the material practice, social relations, and ideological meaning in which it is often entangled, and is raised to the status of a solitary idol." (32) The paradox is that it is precisely this fiction, this solitary literature and art that seems to have been freed from concrete desire, utility, and purpose, that thereby breaks through the limitations of class, stratum, and the individual, becomes the spiritual food that everyone can share and by which everyone can cultivate himself, and is revered as "a constituent factor in the building of national consciousness and national identity against the background of a heterogeneous industrial, urban, class society," honored by Charles Kingsley as "the autobiography of a nation." (33)

In the vision of Western modern theory, the fictionality of literature and art is closely related to independence, aestheticity, literariness, and artisticity, and fictionality is the most basic feature. Literature and art, by virtue of their fictionality, distinguish themselves from the real world and gain an independent character; and because they are freed from the entanglement of real interest-relations, the autonomous aesthetic taste of which Kant speaks begins, and literariness and artisticity in fact lodge precisely within the aesthetic relation. Of course, the above features were all successively questioned; but even so, the problem of fiction was still valued by many aestheticians and literary theorists, and under their respective interpretations it unfolded toward different theoretical dimensions. Only upon the arrival of the postmodern—with the revelation of the relation of discourse and power, postcolonialism's analysis of colonial culture, feminism's attack on patriarchal politics, New Historicism's deconstruction of the boundary between literature and history—all of this caused the modern theory of fiction to fall into a full-line rout, without any power to fight back. The ivory tower built by the modern aestheticians and literary theorists is being demolished. When literature is once again placed within the socio-historical context and examined, when literature's entanglement with cultural politics is fully revealed, and even the difference between the literary text and the historical text is vanishing, then the modern significance possessed by fictionality too seems to have come to nothing. The independence of literature and aesthetic autonomy are discarded like worn-out shoes amid the clamor of many theoretical voices, while the relation of literature to power, politics, and ideology is thrown into relief. Fiction and the aesthetic are no longer monopolized by literature and art; reality has been covered over by the illusory "simulacra" of which Baudrillard speaks, and everyday life too has been aestheticized. Faced with the fundamental changes that literature and art have undergone since the 1960s, Danto laments: should art "experience be aesthetic? Once upon a time this was a matter of course. The work of art was believed to be mainly an object created in order to give pleasure to those who contemplated it. This may still happen, but it is no longer universal—in fact, it is no longer typical." (34) Carroll, for his part, holds that a necessary clarification should be made of those charges that reduce the theory of art to the theory of beauty, and says: "It seems obvious that the theory of beauty differs sharply from the theory of art. There may be a point of intersection between the two… and yet a criterion of beauty that is at least prima facie plausible, such as disinterest, can hardly be the prescriptive aim of intentionally formed works or of any kind of work of art, nor can it be used to demarcate the boundary of a reasonable inquiry into the theory of art." (35)

However, one clearly should not give an either/or answer to this. Even today, Frye's comprehensive method of examining literature from many angles still has important reference value for solving the problem of literary fiction. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye expounds the view that literary language is both "centripetal" and "centrifugal": literary language has a duality—inwardly it constructs a literary fictional world and attracts the reader, letting the reader live in this imagined fictional world, and the independence of literature and aesthetic autonomy stem from the centripetal feature of literary language; at the same time, outwardly it describes the real world, and so literature comes to be closely related to reality, the independence of literature and aesthetic autonomy are thereby challenged, while criticalness directed at social reality becomes a salient function of literature. We hold that it is precisely because literary language possesses the double feature of being "centripetal" and "centrifugal" that the criticalness of the literary work differs from a blunt and direct manifesto: it invites the reader to submerge himself in the literary fictional world, to undergo an aesthetic baptism, and to some degree to break free of interest-relations, so as to view reality and criticize reality with a broader vision and a more penetrating gaze. Literature is formed precisely in this tension-field constituted by the "centripetal" and the "centrifugal," and the complexity of literature stems precisely from this tension-field.

To expound this by borrowing speech-act theory is more persuasive. Discourse itself is a behavior-system, possessing multiplicity and multidirectionality: it both constructs an independent discourse-world and represents and refers to the real world, while at the same time possessing self-reference. The constructiveness of discourse is precisely what Frye calls the centripetal; when researchers concentrate on the constructiveness of discourse, the fictionality, independence, and aestheticity of literature are revealed. The representation and reference of discourse are precisely the centrifugal; when researchers fix their attention on the reality that discourse represents and refers to, the cognitive function and critical function of literature appear. Self-reference, for its part, throws into relief the feature of discourse itself, and the study of literary form and narratology takes this as its point of departure; and when researchers go on to attend to the relation of discourse to power and ideology, postmodern narratology and the many "post-" theories find their dwelling place. The multiplicity of the discourse-act determines the many-sidedness of literary character, and at the same time determines the multi-dimensionality of the methods of literary research.

In the postmodern period, the whole of social culture, including literature and art, has undergone a major change—this is what Jameson calls "de-differentiation": on one hand, the commodity economy, with an aggressiveness hard to resist, colonizes culture, politics, and every other domain, imposing the laws of commodity exchange upon every domain and manipulating every domain; on the other hand, culture and art, by means of electronic media, the Internet, and various modern techniques of reproduction, penetrate the economic, political, and other domains, reshaping commodities with their own images and scattering the phantoms of signs into every corner of social life. And so the cries of the end of aesthetics, the end of art, the end of literature, the end of history, and the sinking of reality rise and fall, one after another, without cease. This state of affairs cannot but bring new changes to literature and art and their study. First, faced with the crisis that arrives with the breaking of boundaries, literature, in order to protect itself, ceaselessly breeds such neither-fish-nor-fowl variants as the "non-fiction novel," "historiographic metafiction," and "spoken-language poetry." These literary phenomena break through the traditional fences of literature and seem already to have filled in the gulf between fiction and non-fiction, the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. If so, the problem of literary fiction loses its meaning. Second, the contextual pressure constituted by the differing social cultures and spiritual atmospheres of different eras is also bound to drive researchers to attend more to some corresponding side of literature. If in the modern period men of letters and scholars could still hold up the shield of literary fiction to resist the commodity's alienation of the human, then in the postmodern period, because the commodity has already conquered all and long since made the human prostrate himself in total submission before the commodity's gaudy posture, that utopian kind of resistance of the modern period seems no longer advisable, and so one can only turn instead to small-scale, piecemeal work—looking, indeed, more like Ah Q, enthusiastically busying himself with cleaning up literature's own political scars.

Yet even so, we hold that the problem of literary fiction still has contemporary significance. Viewed from the structure of the discourse-act system and the nature of literary discourse, even "non-fiction" cannot in fact do without "fiction"; "poetry" and "truth" are always entangled together, as inseparable as glue and lacquer, within discursive activity—only that the boundary between them has become relatively blurred and the transition has become traceless, just as Featherstone points out: "Consumer culture has a stronger capacity, namely that it can rapidly switch the rules, participating in the various kinds of experience with an 'as-if' attitude, and then turning to test the techniques for realizing the illusion, almost without any nostalgic loss." (36) This state of reality demands all the more urgently that we make a deep inquiry into the problem of literary fiction.