Among the many literary currents and schools of twentieth-century Western thought, humanism and scientism may be said to be two great camps mutually opposed and mutually exclusive. Between them there exist not only differences of mode of thought and of research method, but differences of research domain as well. If humanism studies “Being,” then scientism studies “beings.”
The two hold utterly distinct views of the essence of literature. Scientism (such as formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, narratology, and the like) regards the literary work as a determinate “object” constituted by language; on this basis, it strives, by the methods of scientific logical analysis, to reveal the linguistic features, structural features, and other properties of literature. Although literature may and should be “polysemous,” this “polysemy” too is determined by the structural and semantic features of the text, and can still be subjected to scientific analysis and delimitation. For humanism, by contrast, literature becomes the mode of the human's existence, the human's spiritual home, a dimension in which the human can freely lodge. It is precisely in literature that the human can exist freely and create freely; it is precisely in literature that the human casts off the various masks fixed upon himself in real life, suspends all manner of established notions, norms, and utilitarian aims, is restored to a primordial state of existence, and at last lets the whole of his sensuous richness be displayed. Literature is both the space of human existence and existence itself. As “Being,” literature cannot be spoken, still less subjected to scientific analysis. What speech utters is, after all, a finite object; and the premise of scientific analysis is likewise, first of all, to regard literature as a determinate “object,” a “being.” But once literature becomes a spoken-of, analyzed “object,” a “being,” it has thereby turned into a “being” rather than “Being” itself. Just as Heidegger said, “Being” is like a beam of clarifying light; what it illuminates is “beings,” while “Being” itself is concealed and lost within “beings.”
Seen from this angle, it is not merely that “poetry has no exhaustive gloss” and “writing has no fixed interpretation”; rather, poetry and prose are simply unsayable and uninterpretable. For any interpretation is a delimitation of the living, flowing, infinitely-unfolding literature, and so fundamentally distorts literature. Literature does not simultaneously hold within it all the various interpretations; it fundamentally cannot be interpreted, and no interpretation is equal to literature itself, and therefore none can be truly correct. This is precisely what is meant by “to pursue the limitless with the limited is perilous indeed!”
Heidegger is cunning enough: he treats Hölderlin's poetry not by the method of analysis but by the method of description. Moreover, his description is not ordinary description, but poetic description. Ordinary description still gives the reader a certain determinate object—namely, a “being”; only poetic description lures the reader into experience, and thereby, within experience, apprehends literature and apprehends “Being.” The comprehension of literature has this one path alone—“experience.” Yet although Heidegger, by poetic description, guides the reader into experience, he in fact only leads the reader toward a text he himself has re-created; with his own text he secretly substitutes for Hölderlin's text, and it remains, from the original text, separated by a layer.
Compared with Heidegger, it is rather the traditional Chinese criticism of “commentary and marginalia” (pingdian) that possesses more humanistic features. Since any analysis is a butchering of the work's life, and any interpretation an attempt to ossify the living body, to limit and even to replace the reader's infinitely rich experience, then quite naturally analysis ought to be rejected, and interpretation ought to be strictly confined to the mere annotation of individual words and phrases. Therefore, with respect to the work as a whole, commentary-criticism does not attempt to explain anything; it only points, only exclaims in admiration, helping the reader to plunge into the work and steep himself within it, to taste and apprehend it for himself. Clearly, this commentary-criticism—which avoids the critic's conjecture and stresses the reader's personal experience—is founded precisely upon a full understanding of the humanistic features of literature.
Scientism strives, with an objective attitude, to delimit the features by which literary language differs from everyday language—the distinction between metaphor and metonymy; the pursuit of defamiliarization, poeticity, and literariness—and from concrete works to abstract and generalize the most general structural patterns, even going on to analyze in detail the phonological patterning of poetry and the narrative modalities of narrative works. However rigorous and scientific these cool, meticulous dissections may be, they precisely leave out the soul of the literary work and strangle the work's vitality. And humanism, in order to emphasize the life-features of literature, is in turn forced to abandon scientific analysis, and can finally only face the work and keep silent. That is to say, humanism, in order to safeguard the poetic existence of literature, can in the end do so only at the price of canceling its own existence. It either beats about the bush and speaks of everything but the point, and thus cannot cut directly into the work itself; or else it simply sets up no verbal apparatus at all, and thus inevitably forfeits every possibility of entering the work. For humanism, to abandon the study of the literary work—to do nothing and to hold one's tongue—is, on the contrary, the most fitting literary attitude. Literary study seems unable to make its own choice within this mutually-opposed dilemma. Not until the rise of reception theory was this impasse at last broken. Within the new framework of reception theory, scientism and humanism finally gained the possibility of coordination.
In this respect, Iser's contribution cannot be effaced. Setting out from the study of literary language and textual structure, he goes on to regard literature as a text full of “blanks” and “points of indeterminacy.” Readers possessing different horizons and pre-understandings will, in their interaction with the not-yet-determined text, naturally arrive at different concretizations. That is to say, the aesthetic object—that “intermediary” constructed through the appreciator's interaction with the literary text—is forever indeterminate. It is continually generating and concretizing, so that the meaning-laden, spiritual, mind-suffused realm thereby formed remains likewise a flowing, ever-shifting “indeterminate thing,” still in the midst of ceaseless generation. Plainly, from Iser's theory of the “blank” one may naturally extend an extremely profound proposition: the “blank” determines the text's generating-toward-the-human, that is, the human's generating-toward-the-text. Although the literary text possesses structure, it is no longer a fixed, closed, lifeless structure, but a poetic open ground within which the human can fully and freely unfold himself and manifest his authentic state. Literature thereby becomes the “home” in which the human poetically dwells.
Unlike reader-response criticism, which sets aside the study of the text and one-sidedly emphasizes the reader's subjective attitude, Iser arduously walks a middle road, striving to fuse scientism with humanism. On one hand he does not neglect the scientific analysis of text and language; on the other hand he introduces the dimension of the reader. This builds a bridge of mutual communication between scientism and humanism. It should be said that his theory of the “blank” is precisely the fruit of a scientific analysis of literary language and the literary text carried out under the illumination of the humanistic spirit. Therefore the major contribution of Iser's theory lies not merely in its having proposed new insights; more importantly, it lies in its having broken through the boundary between scientism and humanism, dissolved the limitations of each side, and opened up a new road for literary study. His study of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, the essay “The Reader as a Component of the Realist Novel,” is a famous exemplar of the study of literary works. In that essay Iser absorbed the achievements of narratology while at the same time always combining them with the reader's reception; within the new horizon of reception theory he endowed narratology with new meaning, and thereby gave a penetrating exposition of the aesthetic effect of Vanity Fair.
And yet this new attempt also frequently lands Iser in an awkward position, causing him to waver between scientism and humanism. When he stresses the pole of the reader, he is often unable fully to absorb the achievements of scientism; yet once he concentrates upon the literary text, he again overrates the determining role of textual structure and depreciates the reader's free choice. Even in the most creative theory of the “blank,” Iser has his obvious limitations. The “blank” is, in the end, reduced merely to a means of forming context and of endowing the text with coherence and with the meaning of coherence; it does no more than stimulate the reader's imagination. That is, the “blank” is downgraded into a mechanism, a function, regulating the reader's reading-existence, and Iser never reveals from within it the most fundamental aesthetic value that is intimately bound up with the human's existence: it is precisely because of the existence of the “blank” that literature becomes a territory in which the human can freely lodge, becomes the most meaningful and most future-laden mode of human existence. This is perhaps because the cage of Western scientism caused Iser to halt at the very threshold of his insight into truth, and so to let it slip through his fingers. Nonetheless, Iser's theory is, after all, exceedingly suggestive; it has greatly expanded the horizon of literary study.
First, Iser has pointed out to us a path for re-fashioning, within the framework of reception theory, the formalist, New-Critical, and structuralist modes of literary study. We may, from the angle of the reader's interaction with the literary text, re-interpret defamiliarization, metaphor, and metonymy, as well as the various achievements of the study of literary language and of narratology, and clarify the role they play in regulating the human's mode of interacting with literature—and, in particular, inquire deeply into just how they open up for humankind the road toward the free kingdom of the aesthetic. If we enlarge the horizon yet further, may we then introduce the dimension of the author, linking the author with the literary text and with literary language? Freud's psychoanalysis of literature may perhaps furnish a reference for this. Or, going one layer deeper, we may place the literary text within the author, the reader, and indeed the whole cultural background, and study it there, thereby achieving a new synthesis. To move toward a new synthesis, we must by no means crave only the new, doggedly running along behind the literary currents of the West; rather, we must earnestly study and sum up all the achievements attained by the various literary currents and schools of East and West, absorb their rational kernel, and, within a new theoretical horizon, re-fashion and re-cast them. Only on this foundation can we truly move toward a new synthesis. And this is bound to open up a brand-new prospect for literary study.