On the Uniqueness of Literary Time

“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; but if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I am at a loss.” —Augustine

1

Everyone undergoes time and is familiar with time; yet once one tries to understand it deeply, time becomes hidden. Compared with the time within which we live, literary time is more bewildering and elusive, and it is precisely for this reason that it draws us to seek it out without cease.

Literary time is not objective physical time, because a literary work of any form is unable to reproduce objective physical time, just as it is unable to transpose the objective world into the work unaltered. Even if a historical method records every single moment, what it grasps is still the dead “husk” of time, while the living, never-resting time itself is lost. “The departed are like this—not ceasing day or night.” The continuous, ceaseless time permeates the world and is embodied in the movement and change of the material world; moreover, time itself is the process and rhythm of the movement and change of the material world. It can neither be stripped away from the material world and expressed separately in a literary work—for once stripped away, it becomes empty nothingness and no longer exists—nor be cut out together with the material world and taken into the work, for the time thus cut out is no longer the original time; it is severed from history, no longer belongs to history, and, together with the objective object, changes its very quality in an instant. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus has a famous saying: “One cannot step twice into the same river.” From the angle of the material world, this saying stresses the ceaseless movement of the material world; from the angle of time, it stresses the continuous flowing-away of time—time waits for no one, and once gone never returns; no path (including the path of literature and art) can let a person face the same time twice.

Literary time is also not the author's experience of objective physical time. Since the literary work cannot reproduce objective physical time, then there cannot exist an experience of this physical time either. Experience and the object experienced are like shadow following form, equally inseparable. The sighs voiced in works—such as “life is short and bitter” and the like—or the various other so-called experiences, are in fact only a retelling of the experience of time, and often a summarizing, generalizing retelling. The vagueness, fluidity, and richness of the individual's experience of time, once generalized, combed, and fixed by words, lose their original aspect and become a pale concept, swallowing up the rich, living monologue or the intermittent, broken dream-murmur, no longer so abundant and vivid as the original, no longer experience itself.

Some call literary time the author's subjective psychological time; this claim too is inappropriate. Indeed, literary time is gestated through the author's mind, embodies the author's subjectivity, is permeated with the author's notion of time, and contains the author's understanding of time; but this time is by no means the author's subjective psychological time. Even stream-of-consciousness fiction is so. The stream-of-consciousness novelist tries to exclude the constraint of reason, letting consciousness and the subconscious surge freely and turn naturally into writing. Yet in this very process of consciousness turning into a verbal stream, the original psychological time has already wholly changed—as the phenomenological aesthetician Dufrenne says: “However that may be... the technique the novelist uses to express a living time is all in vain.” [1] The author can neither reproduce objective physical time nor reproduce his own subjective psychological time; moreover, the literary text itself does not inherently contain temporality. As a literary text in the form of words, it will not automatically display an inner dimension of time. Only in the reader's reading process does literary time begin to be generated, to unfold, and at the same time to be experienced by the reader. But this also differs from the reader's experience of time in dream, memory, and other purely subjective psychological activities, because literary time must, after all, be governed by the prior features of the literary text.

A literary work is an independent world; it is not equal to the objective world or the subjective psychological world. As an independent world, it has its own unique time. The literary work is a living whole, and as the living whole unfolds itself, literary time unfolds along with it. More concretely, literary time is generated in the reading process, co-participated in and unfolded and displayed together with the reader; before the work is read by the reader—that is, while it is still text—it has only “latent time.”

2

The literary text, as a material existence, likewise cannot escape the fate of history. Once the text is written, it may be printed and published and widely circulated; or it may be merely a handwritten copy resting in lonely quiet in a study; or one day it may suddenly suffer banning and destruction; or after a long period of obscurity it may be rediscovered—in short, it inevitably enters history and plays out its own tragicomedy. But the temporality this history contains is only the temporality external to the literary text, not the time internal to the literary work. The time of the literary work can only be the time of the display-process of the aesthetic object generated through the reading of the text. This time is a unique time separated and made independent from the historical flow, the time of another independent world alien to the objective material world. Once one enters literary reading, history seems thereby to come to a halt; the reader forgets the flowing-away of the time of the surrounding world and undergoes and experiences this novel time the aesthetic world possesses. In this independent aesthetic world, time gains a wholly new meaning and value—or one may say, in the literary aesthetic world, time refinds the self it had lost in the real world.

In the real world, because objective physical time always permeates the movement and change of the material world and attaches to the material world, the human often measures and marks the flow of time according to the movement and change of material objects, and so there is “scaled time,” and he takes scaled time to be the only true time, while the “stream of time” [2] is neglected and forgotten. Even the experience of the stream of time always cannot dispense with concrete material interests and utilitarian aims. To sigh, idling and doing nothing, at the vain casting-away of light and shadow, or to feel the fullness of life because of achievement and merit—all these are to take the experience of utilitarian things outside time in place of the experience of time, to measure the value of life and the value of time by the value of external things. Time becomes a “soap bubble”; it needs some other thing to fill it and prop it up before it can show forth a multicolored existence. Even so, what people actually perceive and experience is still concrete things and utilitarian aims, while time quietly vanishes.

Compared with the objective real world, time in the literary world is truly made manifest, and possesses a far more important status and value. Of course, the world of the work—especially the time in narrative works—is likewise always closely related to events and plot; but because of the aesthetic-distancing effect, these events and plot lose their directness in real life and are placed at a certain distance, and this vacates a slot for the appearance of literary time. In the literary world, time begins to play a fairly important role and to express its own “true color” anew. It is precisely for this reason that the rhythm and melody embodying temporality appear so prominent in poetic works, so conspicuous to the ear; and it is precisely for this reason that the novelist has a time-consciousness more self-conscious and more intense than usual, so values the mode of expressing time, and racks his brains to design flashback, prolepsis, the interlacing of time, the re-melting of time-value, and so on.

Gadamer once spoke of two basic experiences of time. The first is the “empty experience of time”—the time experienced in the human's everyday practical attitude, the “time for the sake of something,” that is, the time the human himself divides and himself disposes of. When the human is bored, time is experienced, in chaotic and disordered repetition, as an unbearable emptiness; and conversely, busyness too is an emptiness—that is, there is never any time, and one ceaselessly attempts to do something, ceaselessly grasps at something to fill this busy emptiness. “Extreme boredom and extreme busyness determine the position of time in the same way: time is filled up with emptiness or with some kind of thing. Time here is experienced as something that must be ‘driven away,’ or has already been driven away, and not as something experienced as time.” The second is “the time that belongs to one.” In Gadamer's view, this time has the deepest kinship with festival and with art. [3] In festival and in art, people no longer reckon time, no longer think to dispose of time, but throw themselves wholly into it, letting the fully aroused life undergo every moment, every instant. Here there is neither the empty boredom nor the empty busyness; every instant is full and makes one forget weariness; every instant embodies the activity of life itself. Time has wholly merged with life, unfolding together with it, galloping together with it. Time truly becomes “the time that belongs to one” and gains a meaning and value equal to life. Literary time is precisely such a “time that belongs to one.” It no longer needs to be measured, no longer needs to be filled with external things; time itself is overflowed by life, itself embodies the creation and the rhythm of life. From this angle, the experience of literary time is also the experience of life.

3

Literary time is generated in the reading process; only when the reader participates in the work and co-creates the aesthetic object, and the static text is activated into a living work, is literary time thereby generated, unfolded, and made manifest. That is to say, literary time is formed in the aesthetic-creation process in which the reader participates; it is the co-creation of the reader; it unfolds with the unfolding of life-creation activity, and ends with the completion of life-creation activity; therefore literary time is in fact the process of life-activity, and at the same time the symbol of the value of life.

Because literary time is generated in the mutual action of text and reader, it must necessarily relate at once to both text and reader. First, the literary text has latent time; it provides, in a prior way, a basic framework for literary time. One may say the literary text fixes the basic direction and rough pattern for the generation of the work, and the text's latent time presets a relatively free interval for the generation of literary time. Readers may each be different; the speed and mode of their reading-appreciation differ; even one and the same reader may adopt different modes and speeds, making the work's time show an extremely rich and varied aspect. But because the literary text priorly possesses latent time, and because of the governing effect of this latent time, although different readers and different readings have vastly differing experiences of the work's literary time, the text's latent time always, to a certain degree, regulates the generation and experience of literary time, and presets a relatively free interval for the literary time of a particular work. Second, from the reader's angle, although the differing individual temperaments, cultural cultivation, and reading habits of different readers affect the generation of literary time, the accumulation of human culture and the common cultural tradition—and the literary education, formed over the long term, that embodies common reading-norms—all imperceptibly cultivate and shape the reader, forming a relatively stable, commonality-rich reception-paradigm. It is precisely this commonality-rich reception-paradigm that provides assurance and limitation for the generation and experience of the literary time of a particular work.

4

A further feature of literary time is that it is the time of an independent, alien world, and its most basic feature is “closure.” Literary time, like any living body, has a complete closed interval from arising, through unfolding, to ending—that is, it has closure. Objective physical time is open; it extends infinitely toward both past and future at once; you may set an extremely remote past or future point, but beyond it there is always a still more remote time-segment, forever inexhaustible. Literary time, by contrast, has its own starting point and end point; within this time-interval the literary work unfolds its own process of movement and process of growth. This feature distinguishes the literary work from lifeless material existence and from various psychological phenomena, and makes it become what Susanne Langer called “living form.” When the reader enters reading-appreciation, he transcends objective physical time and no longer experiences the flow of this physical time; for him, what is truly undergone and experienced is the time of the literary world that does not connect with the objective stream of time—that is, from this moment literary time begins. It summons the reader to throw himself wholly into it and to unfold together the living life-process, and through this life-creation activity makes every moment full of life's tension and passion.

Because literary time is formed and unfolded in the reader's life-creation process, it is itself the fruit of life-creation and a mode of life-existence, and so it has the richness and life-meaning that objective time cannot have, and makes objective time pale by comparison. At the same time, because every moment of literary time is overflowed by life's passion, it truly becomes the human's own time, and the objective world's stream of time can only be forced to retreat into the background. The closure of literary time provides a self-sufficient interval for human existence; it is precisely in this closed region that the human's life most fully shares the freedom of creation, the passion of love, and the joy of the spirit; and it is precisely in this region that the human's existence is most his own existence. Closure cuts out and lifts up the time of the literary world from the ceaseless objective stream of time, and so reserves a moist field for the freedom of the human's mind, for the human's authentic existence and spiritual development. In this region every instant is truly one's own; there is no external aim and no external pressure; every instant is intoxicating; the human ceaselessly discovers the mystery of life-existence, fully experiences the joy of life-creation, and shares the abundance of life itself. It is precisely in this sense that literary time is more intimate to the human's nature than objective physical time, and has an irreplaceable special value—and only thus, on the road of bustling about for a living, does the human still need from time to time to lodge in reading, so that his spirit may be comforted and his heart-field moistened.

The closure of literary time at the same time manifests itself as the completeness of time. Here completeness does not refer merely to having a start and an end, but means that literary time unfolds according to the rhythm of life, manifesting a complete process of life-activity and process of life's growth; its stretching and slackening of tension likewise run according to the rhythm of life, and so it is the symbol of life.

The starting point of literary time is the starting point of the reader's reading and entry into the work-world; but its end point is not the end point of literary reading. Rather, after the words have ended, time often continues for a while—this is the aesthetic after-effect stage, or “aftertaste.” What we usually call “the lingering sound that does not cease,” “the fragrance that fills the mouth,” refers precisely to the after-effect of the aesthetic and the extension of literary time. The end of the words is not the end of literary time; so long as the situation the work has created still deeply moves the reader and makes the reader linger within the work's realm, literary time has not yet ended. From this angle, the more flavor-rich the work, the longer its literary time extends.

In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer points out that the human's fear of space is the very root of artistic creation. He says: “These peoples, troubled by the chaotic connection and the ever-changing external world, gave rise to a great need for stability; the possibility of obtaining happiness that they sought in art lies not in immersing themselves in external things, nor in savoring themselves through external things, but in extracting the single thing of the external world from the false contingency of its ever-changing constancy and, by means of a nearly abstract form, making it eternal; in this way they found a place of rest in the flux of phenomena.” [4] The fear of which Worringer speaks is, from a deeper-level cause, still the fear of time. Time never rests; it flows on continuously, ungraspable, irreversible; it makes the human go toward aging and death, makes all things in the world change irreversibly; and its mysterious face is more fearful than changing space. As Broch said: “Because what people are always doing is to try to erase time, to sublate time, and this sublating effect is precisely space.” [5] By spatializing time, one obtains inner peace. Yet space is still mysterious and fearful, and so one resorts to abstraction, abstracting it into a relatively stable spatial form. Compared with objective entities, abstract form has a kind of super-temporality or atemporality; it seems to approach Plato's eternal “Idea.”

Another path to overcoming the fear of time is to cut off the continuous flowing-away of objective time and create a literary-artistic world that can be contemplated again and again, experiencing the closed time of literary art. What people call “the great enterprise of writing that endures through the ages,” “hiding it away in a famous mountain to transmit to posterity,” likewise contains the intention of overcoming the fear of time. Although literary time is likewise flowing, because it is closed it can be undergone and experienced again and again; and although each new undergoing and experiencing changes somewhat, compared with the flow of objective time that never returns, it is stable amid change. Even if one views objective time from the notion of primitive cyclicity, the cycle of objective time is mysterious and unknowable, whereas literary-artistic time is, after all, intimate, and amid the “seemingly once-familiar” it continually forms new experiences. And the extension of literary time after the words end likewise displays, from another side, the human's fear of objective time and his attachment to a stable, intimate, own literary time.

5

Yet another feature of literary time is “present-ness.” In discussing the question of the temporality of the aesthetic, Gadamer points out: “However that may be, the existence of the artwork is always related to contemporaneity. This contemporaneity constitutes the essence of ‘being present at.’ Contemporaneity does not refer to the simultaneity of aesthetic consciousness, because that simultaneity refers to the simultaneous existence and simultaneous validity, within one consciousness, of various objects of aesthetic feeling. By contrast, ‘contemporaneity’ here means that something unique and unrepeatable tells itself to us; however remote its source, in its self-statement it gains a full present-ness.” [6] The “contemporaneity” of which Gadamer speaks means gaining a “full present-ness” through “being present at”—that is, the “present-ness” of which this paper speaks. True artistic appreciation and literary reading must be a wholehearted throwing-in, a “being present at.” The appreciator, the reader, transcends out of the real historical process and enters into the realm and the time of literary art, into the intoxication of self-forgetting. Whether remote historical stories or fantasies about the future, all are undergone and experienced as a “full present.” [7] The appreciator, the reader, has separated from reality and lives in person within “history” or “the future,” and yet this “history” or “future,” for the appreciator and reader, is again the “present” currently going on. That is, in literary-artistic time the dividing-line of past, present, and future vanishes; the only thing left is the “now”; everything is happening, being undergone; whether a historical event of thousands of years ago or a future of thousands of years hence, all are, in the process of appreciation-reading, transformed into the “now.”

Of course, strictly speaking, every moment in the reading process is likewise continually transforming from the present into the past, while the present in turn transforms out of the future. But the past, present, and future here no longer have the boundary-line and meaning they have on the real historical time-axis; they merely unfold a complete present flowing-process of reading, still displaying “full present-ness.” Take a copy of Dream of the Red Chamber: apart from the scholar who still stubbornly insists on treating it as history to investigate, which reader has not himself become Jia Baoyu or Lin Daiyu, shedding tears over the tragedy of the fictional protagonists and taking the troubles within the novel as his own troubles? Where is there still any boundary between past and present? The present-ness of literary time at the same time makes the reader enter the realm of the eternal and experience the eternity of life, for the existence within literature is always embodied as present existence. Here there is neither past nor future; here the three dimensions of time—past, present, future—are condensed into the present, and so the reader, too, transcends the change of time and experiences the eternal existence.

On the present-ness of the aesthetic there is one point Gadamer does not state clearly—namely, that he confuses two different times: literary time and the time of the events narrated within the literary work. Literary time can only be present; it is always generated and unfolded along with present reading. The time of the events narrated in the literary work, however, may originally be past or present or future. Therefore present-ness in fact refers to the powerful assimilative force of literary time, which, with a mighty power, assimilates the time of the events narrated in the work and forcibly sweeps it into the present world of literary time. As Marcuse says: “In the form of the work, the real environment is placed in another dimension, and here the given reality represents itself as a present existence.” [8]

Present-ness has an important significance: it can eliminate the reader's sense of estrangement from the work. Past and future are no longer objects separated from the reader by an unfillable, huge gulf of time; the moment he enters reading-appreciation, the gap of time vanishes and distance vanishes; past and future become things happening at his side, the living, own life that establishes with him a close, inseparable emotional bond—even if it is again strange, it becomes intimate and approachable. It is precisely present-ness that lets the work's powerful infectious force be brought into play, and it is precisely present-ness that lets the reader experience the events of various alien times and alien places as personal undergoing, and thereby obtain the rich nourishment that ordinary historical cognition can never obtain. For historical cognition can never truly enter history; it can only forever view history as a strange object from afar, watching the flowers from across the river; whereas the present-ness of literary time draws out the estrangement between the two, lets the reader personally immerse himself in the historical situation the work creates, and turns viewing-from-afar into personal undergoing. Thereupon, whether the remote past or the future, the realm becomes the reader's own field, “dwellable and roamable.” One may even say that if there were no present-ness of literary time, the reader could not obtain the enjoyment of aesthetic intoxication, because the events the work narrates are always at a time different from the reader's reading; aesthetic intoxication must turn the “different time” into the “same time,” into the “present,” before one can be said truly to have entered the realm of the mutual forgetting and mutual fusion of self and thing. From this point, the present-ness of literary time is in fact a due meaning of literary-aesthetic generation, and one of the necessary premises of literature's very existence. [9]

Just as poetic thinking originates from primitive thinking, the present-ness of literary time is, too, a relic of primitive thinking, a wondrous gift bestowed on us by our ancestors. In Primitive Mentality, Lévy-Bruhl quotes a passage reported by Leenhardt: “What we Europeans call the past is connected with the present, and the present is again connected with the future. But these people [primitive tribes] believe that life is constituted by two continuous and mutually containing existences... For them, time is in fact not divided as we see it.” [10] That is to say, primitive man cannot yet divide past, present, and future; for primitive man this division is meaningless, and primitive thinking, whose feature is the law of participation, does not require a clear consciousness of time-segments as its support. Lévi-Strauss, analyzing the rituals of the tribes of central Australia, likewise holds that commemorative and mourning rituals in fact presuppose that a transition between past and present is possible; such rituals “manifest themselves in history, but they still rely upon contemporaneity, for the very fact of holding the ritual is equivalent to turning the past into the present.” [11] From the obscure period of the undividedness of self and thing and of time and space, the human developed to the later primitive thinking, in which the notion of time first budded. This notion of time is still hazy and cyclical: life and death can transform into each other, and time goes round and round and repeats. Since time continually cycles, there is no past, present, and future in the strict sense, for within the circle the past is also the future and the present is also the past. Only with the gradual formation of logical thinking does the human begin to view, know, and explore the myriad things of the world with a linear cause-and-effect view; the division of past, present, and future becomes indispensable, and only then gradually grows clear and becomes the axis-line and framework indispensable to the human's experiencing and knowing the world. One may say that the division of past, present, and future grows clearer by the day with the development of logical thinking, while in poetic thinking there is still treasured the primal experience of time contained in primitive thinking, and it is therefore richer and more mysterious than ordinary physical time and psychological time.

6

“Inclusiveness” is yet another feature of literary time. That is to say, within the time-process of the literary-aesthetic unfolding there is contained the temporality of the narrated object, and this time may not coincide with literary time—may even be mutually contradictory and opposed to it—thereby causing the contradictory movement of the time of the literary work. This contradictory movement makes the reader's experience of time appear extremely rich and colorful.

First is the contradictory movement of closure and openness, of the finite and the infinite. Literary time is governed by the length of the text, or by its latent time; it is closed and finite, whereas the time of the narrated object can be open and infinite. It is precisely this opposed contradiction that makes a work of short length and tight time likewise able to “take in and breathe out the millennia,” and the strong contrast between the brief literary time and the infinitely extending time of the narrated object necessarily intensifies the reader's experience of time. Chen Zi'ang's “Song on Climbing the Youzhou Terrace,” for instance, with its short form and brief literary time, contains a boundless time-space; the tension produced by this highly condensed concentration strikes, with enormous impact, the reader's experience of time and space, deeply moves the reader's soul, and thereby produces a profound emotion.

The inclusiveness of literary time also provides the possibility for an opposition between the movement and the stillness of time within the work. Literary time always moves and flows along with the aesthetic unfolding; it cannot be still—once it stops moving, the aesthetic activity also comes to a halt. The aesthetic is forever processual, and literary time is forever moving. On the other hand, the author often makes use of the inclusiveness of literary time, trying to overcome the temporality of the narrated object and to create a relatively static literary object and scene. In Four Quartets, for example, Eliot tries to dissolve time into the spatial form he creates, seeking the “still point of the turning world.” Twentieth-century modern writers, too, generally display a renunciation of time and sequence and a preference for space and structure; they often adopt “juxtaposition,” “repetition,” and other techniques to realize the spatial weaving of word-images, thereby canceling temporal sequence and halting the time-movement of the narrated object. In what Joseph Frank called “an artwork erected as a monument to the individual's conquest of time” [12]—In Search of Lost Time—Proust often grasps the “visual instant” of the object, and these extremely brief visual instants make us unable to perceive the movement of the object and the flowing of time; and the author juxtaposes these instant-images, so that “through this juxtaposition of past and present... history becomes non-history. Time is no longer recognized as the process of objective cause-and-effect relations, nor does it have clearly demarcated, distinct periods; the present becomes a continuous unity that eliminates all the various distinctions between past and present... Past and present come to be understood in a spatial sense, contained within an endless unity. Although this unity may also stress surface differences, yet, owing to the method of juxtaposition, it cancels any sense of temporal sequence.” [13]

To Frank's argument Murray Krieger raised a sharp objection. In Krieger's view, however strong the instantaneous illusion we may hold toward the static balance of language, one still cannot but acknowledge the basic constitutive role that temporality plays in language and experience; the practice that thinks to eliminate the temporality of literary works by constructing a spatial form is in fact a superstition of the myth of linguistic existence, a downright daydream. [14] Krieger's insight is sound: however that may be, language cannot escape temporality; even by adopting all manner of means and trying every way to create a spatial form, they still cannot create a spatial existence, cannot turn a time-art into a space-art. The work's literary time always operates with language, generating and running and flowing along with the unfolding of aesthetic reading. Yet Krieger neglected that, besides the work's literary time, there also exists the temporality of the narrated object; this time both merges with and separates from literary time. The author can indeed, through unique techniques, create spatial visual images so as to solidify the flowing change of the narrated object and gain a relatively static illusion of time. Thereupon, within the literary work, there is constituted an opposed co-existence of the flowing, passing literary time and the statically condensed time of the narrated object, which makes the stillness of the narrated object's time all the more conspicuous.

Rudolf Arnheim once analyzed the time-experience of suspense in film thus: “In film, suspense is often created through the inconsistency between the maintained static visual scene and the time that still goes on toward the final moment,” the movement and the stillness of time together constituting “an anxiety-causing contrast.” [15] In literary works, too, such a situation appears—that is, the author intentionally inserts static description into the development of suspense, contrasting the flow of literary time with the stillness of the scene, so as to create that unique atmosphere of “tense stillness.” Goncharov's Oblomov creates a special effect through the speed-difference between the work's literary time and the time of the narrated object. The author spends lengthy passages slowly describing Oblomov's near-static life upon the bed; for these descriptions, the reader on one hand experiences the flowing of literary time, and on the other hand realizes the stillness and non-advance of the life narrated; and the contrast of the two times sets off ever more the dull, idle boredom of Oblomov's life, producing an unusually heavy sense of oppression, suffocation, and irony.

Order and disorder are another pair of contradictions provided by the inclusiveness of literary time. Literary time is always generated along with the unfolding of reading-appreciation, and so it must be ordered, whereas the time of the narrated object can be disordered. The author can wholly disregard the objective process of events, arbitrarily smash and scramble their sequence and recombine them anew, and this constitutes the contradictory opposition between the ordered literary time and the disordered time of the narrated object it contains. Under the effect of this contradictory movement, the human's inherent cause-and-effect cognition of these events is dissolved, and he is thereby led to reinterpret events and the world afresh, or even to abandon his interpretation of the world altogether and let the world directly present its disordered aspect before the human.

Moreover, the inclusiveness of literary time also manifests itself in the contradiction of the present and the non-present. Considered in itself, literary time is embodied as the present aesthetic-generation process; it can forever only be present, and moreover literary time, with a huge assimilative force, draws the narrated object into the present state—whatever the tense of the narrated object, be it past, present, or future, it will be required, in the aesthetic-reading process, to be experienced as present. But this is one side of the problem; on the other side, the author often adopts all manner of narrative strategies—such as the use of linguistic tense, the marking of concrete time, the emphasis upon backgrounds with epochal features, and the frequent switching of time-perspective—to resist the assimilation of the narrated object's time by literary time, deliberately manufacturing time-distance, making the reader often swing between present and past, future. If “present-ness” strives to eliminate the time-distance between reader and the world of the work, then “inclusiveness” provides the possibility for the existence and regulation of time-distance, and thereby opens a new dimension for aesthetic experience.

7

The uniqueness of literary time also manifests itself as a dual individuality. Because the literary text is the product of the author's creation, gestated by the author's whole life, the text's latent time in fact becomes the symbol of the rhythm of the author's life-movement and necessarily bears the author's individual imprint. The literary time of the work is the concretization of the text's latent time and is governed by it. On the other hand, the work's literary time is also the result of the reader's co-participation in creation; different readers all throw themselves into literary reading in their own ways and make the work's literary time generate in the reader's individual way. Thereupon literary time also bears a dual individual feature—the individuality of the author and the individuality of the reader.

The human's experience of time and the human's notion of time always bear subjectivity; they inevitably bear the individual's imprint. The individuality of literary time is not the individuality of experience, but is itself gestated by the author's individual mind and generated by the reader's co-creation. Author and reader both participate in the creation and re-creation of literary time, and both leave their own individual feature upon literary time. From the side of creation, the author's continuous or intermittent flow of thought and feeling, the blazing or the gentleness of his passion, the urgency or the ease of his linguistic habit, all directly govern the latent time of the literary text; from the side of reading-appreciation, the reader's emotional individuality, his reading habits, the degree of his sensitivity to language, and even his reading mood and state of mind, all likewise affect the generation of the work's literary time out of the text's latent time, and therefore the individual feature of literary time is extremely vivid.

Although literary time has its unique features, it is still closely related to the human's experience of objective physical time and closely related to the human's subjective psychological time. Whether the author's creative process endows the text with latent time, or the reader concretizes the text's latent time into the work's literary time, both are bound up with the human's everyday experience of time by a thousand threads and ten thousand strands, and both bear the imprint of the human's everyday experience of time; one may even say they are built upon the foundation of the human's everyday experience of time—only that in literary time there is accumulated the human's deeper, more primal experience of time, and it is therefore richer and more mysterious than ordinary physical time and psychological time.