Terry Eagleton holds that it is extremely difficult to draw a sharp line between literary and non-literary works. He says: “There is no such thing as a literary ‘essence’ at all. Any piece of writing may be read ‘non-pragmatically’—if that is what reading a text as literature means—just as any writing may be read ‘poetically.’” Eagleton even holds that a railway timetable, too, may be “read as literature.”[1] This view, which dissolves the boundary between the literary and the non-literary and attributes literariness wholly to subjective factors, is no doubt one-sided; yet, with slight emendation, it still contains a reasonable element. In fact the boundary between the literary and the non-literary, between poetic language and everyday language, is not absolute; the ground on which the two are distinguished can be sought neither in the text and language themselves alone nor in the subjective side alone, but lies in the intentional relation established through the interaction of the receiving subject and the object.
Virtual Intentional Relation and the Aesthetic Generation of Language
It is just as Eagleton says: the territory of literature is not rigid and unchanging, and a work’s fate is not sealed once it has been affixed with a classifying label. This is especially so for works lying on the border between the literary and the non-literary—certain chapters of the Zhuangzi or the Records of the Grand Historian, for instance—whose classification does indeed change with the shifts of the age. But the cause of this is not, as Eagleton says, that people decide it subjectively and arbitrarily; rather, with the changes of the age, people’s intentional relation to these works has historically altered.
It is the same with language. To divide everyday language from poetic language on a static view is all but impossible, for language is always in a dynamic process of generation, flux, and conversion. The same character, word, or sentence may be everyday language and may also be poetic language; the principal ground that determines its character is the intentional relation between person and language.
When a person stands in an everyday relation with language, language can hardly escape the status of a tool. A person is always habituated to using language to designate and state real objects, to explain and exchange thoughts, to express and vent feelings; in every case language is merely a tool, a means. What a person attends to is the real object, the thought, and the feeling, not language itself. Having indicated the object, explained the thought, and expressed the feeling, language vanishes; it has no independent value of its own—it is “transparent.”
There is another relation: that in which person and language stand in a free aesthetic relation—the “I–Thou” relation of which Martin Buber speaks. In this relation language is no longer a tool or a means; it becomes an independent linguistic existence, an independent and rich “Thou.” Once language becomes an independent existence, language itself becomes the centre of a person’s attention; it is no longer merely a “transparent” concept, no longer “foreshortened.” Under the person’s attention, the rich connotation of language and its “geological strata” are displayed. Roman Ingarden regarded the literary work as a “many-layered construction” comprising the stratum of word-sounds, the stratum of meaning-units, the stratum of schematized aspects, and the stratum of objects depicted in the intentional states of affairs projected by the sentences. This many-layered construction is generated with language as its point of departure, and can be generated only within the aesthetic intentional relation established with the reader. Ingarden also pointed out another mode of reading the literary work, namely non-aesthetic reading: “When we refer in thought to real objects, we go beyond the range of existence of the literary work, and at the same time the objects the work depicts disappear, to a certain degree, from the reader’s attention. They are ‘transparent,’ and so they cannot attract the ‘visual ray’ of the reader’s intention.”[2] That is to say, once the reader takes up a realistic attitude, the rich strata generated by language no longer exist; they leave the reader’s line of sight and disappear. Language is “foreshortened” and becomes a hollow, pallid concept. In genuine literary appreciation—that is, in the aesthetic relation—the language of the literary work is not “transparent.” The reader no longer attends to the objective world it designates; he attends only to the work, to the work’s linguistic world; and so, within the new intentional relation established between reader and the work’s language, the “many-layered construction” is generated and built up, the rich sensuous features of language are thereby fully displayed, and each stratum realizes its own aesthetic value and together they constitute a “polyphonic harmony.”
The aesthetic intentional relation is the virtual intentional relation. Under everyday designation, language stands in the relation “person–language–world,” in which a person cannot but first attend to real existence, to the real world that bears on his fate and his interests. This real world at every moment offers him opportunities, at every moment creates dazzling material enjoyments for him, and at every moment also conceals a crisis of existence. A person cannot but cast his gaze upon the real world, and has long been habituated to fixing his gaze firmly upon it. Language, then, is merely a medium, a passage and a window by which a person reaches the real world—the fish-trap (quan): and a fish-trap that, once the fish has been caught, no longer needs to exist and is at once discarded and forgotten. The virtual intentional relation, however, “suspends” the world, for in the virtual realm language has been stripped of its capacity to designate reality. Thereupon the relation “person–language–world” is converted into a “person–language” relation; language, too, turns from “medium” into the independent existence that a person faces, becoming the true object of his attention, becoming the “Thou” in the “I–Thou” relation, and thereby acquiring an independent value.
The suspension of the world strips away language’s real context, and language, through the loss of context, becomes all the more indeterminate and all the more free.[3] Not only does language, through its independence, become the object of a person’s singular devotion, the “Thou” with whom he associates; through the increase of its indeterminacy and its degree of freedom it also possesses a greater appellative quality and a greater space for creation. It calls the reader to take part and to create together. It draws the reader deeply into the realm of language and, together with him, builds up the “many-layered”—indeed the boundless—sensuous world of language, a beautiful realm of freedom and a poetic space in which the human mind may be lodged.
In the virtual intentional relation, language is no longer a tool for explaining and exchanging thought, no longer a tool for expressing and venting feeling, for the virtual has stripped language of its real functions of conveyance and expression; everything is hypothetical, unverifiable. The poet no longer attends to a real object of communication but faces only language as “Thou.” He roams the ocean of language, wandering at ease, searching. Suddenly his mind is illuminated and opened by a strong light; he glimpses his soulmate, his beloved. In that very instant he and the words he has found communicate and accord with one another, surging and generating, and together build up a poetic space, a space in which he and language dwell together. Because this space is jointly built and jointly inhabited by poet and language, it is filled with human nature, human feeling, and linguistic meaning, and so it must be suffused with poetry.
Likewise, when this virtual realm draws the reader in and involves him, the reader lives within the poetic space jointly created by himself and language, forgetting real existence. The reader, too, need not attend to the author. For the reader, the work is the realm of language, an independent world independent both of the real world and of the creator. In fact, if the reader forces himself to attend to the real object the work designates, or to search out the work’s creator, the sensuous realm generated by the work’s language will shrink and vanish in an instant, and the “polyphonic harmony” will exist no more.
At root, language is metaphorical. Stone, mountain-foot, and the like—when humankind first named them, it personified the object, linked the object with the human, fused them into one, and endowed the lifeless object with life and spirit; the myriad things thus became gods, and language thereby contained myth. But once language sank to being a human tool, metaphor became an excrescence upon language. A person need not, and is unwilling to, designate things and exchange opinions by a roundabout route; this sealed the dead end of metaphor. With the automatization and habituation produced by repeated use, the myth language contained, the spirit of language, and the metaphoricity of language were day by day forgotten and shed; people no longer noticed the metaphorical character of “stone” and “mountain-foot” and the spirit they contained. Language was steamed dry, compressed into a hollow conceptual shell, a shadow clinging to a real object. In the relation “person–language–world,” linguistic metaphor necessarily tends toward “foreshortening.” But when the virtual intentional relation suspends the world, and language itself becomes the focus of a person’s attention, an existence with independent value, those forgotten metaphors, and the rich import and spirit they contain, are discovered anew and become once more the inseparable flesh and blood upon the trunk of language. Language at last returns to the state of its original naming and recovers its true countenance. It is no longer a shadow clinging to a real object, no longer tightly bound to a real object. The suspension of the world liberates language, grants it autonomy and freedom, and this provides an immense space for the generation of meaning. Language thereby becomes what Merleau-Ponty calls “authentic language,” which at last brings onstage all the “moves that have not yet been played.”[4]
It is precisely through its fiction that the literary work prepares the necessary precondition for establishing the virtual intentional relation. Hence Merleau-Ponty holds that, whether in poetry or in prose-like works of art, “words too must carry the one who speaks them and the one who is compelled to hear them into a common domain, by way of the designating power that surpasses the defined meaning of the words, by way of that silent life which has passed and continues to pass through us, by way of what Ponge happily called the ‘semantic thickness’ and Sartre the ‘sedimentation of meaning’ of words, driving the words toward a new import.”[5]
This feature of language—its conversion through the intentional relation—has made some scholars keenly aware of the ambiguity of language’s function. “In the function of language one can at once see this ambiguity: the word is both signifying and expressive. To say it is signifying is to say it contains an objective meaning, a meaning that to some degree exists outside it and requires the use of the understanding; to say it is expressive is to say it itself contains an inner meaning, a meaning that surpasses the objective meaning grasped by the understanding. The word is a sign, yet not only a sign: it states, and at the same time it shows, and what it shows is not the same as what it states.”[6] Plainly, in the relation “person–language–world” (designation) or “person–language–person” (communication), the word is signifying: it contains an objective meaning, and this meaning exists “outside it,” pointing toward the objective object. But in the virtual intentional relation, in the “person–language” relation, the word’s objective referent no longer exists, and the word’s functions of stating and communicating no longer have any value; its own inner meaning, on the other hand, is shown. The human experience, the collective unconscious, and the cultural import sedimented within the word begin to display themselves, and the word thereby acquires a semantic depth, a rich connotation that the understanding cannot grasp or exhaust.
Virtual Intentional Relation and the Clamour of Language
The virtual intentional relation is the gate leading to the liberation of language, and at the same time to the liberation of the mind.
Language has its own “thickness” and “depth.” From the day of its birth it is accompanied and steeped by a rich unconscious, and thereafter it continually sediments unconscious content. On the other hand, with the development of culture and the vigour of reason, the human unconscious has been ever more severely repressed. And so words too are continually normalized, combed, and pressed, then defined as dictionary meanings, emptied into hollow concepts, degenerating into a dried-up existence, while a vast quantity of unconscious content is leaked away and filtered out.
Human consciousness converses only with consciousness. In the everyday state, bound by real norms and real reason, a person cannot even converse with his own unconscious, still less attend to and experience the unconscious content sedimented within language. But in the virtual intentional relation, real norms and real laws are suspended because they have lost their ground of existence, and real reason too loses its former dignity, for the virtual realm is a realm of freedom that obeys only the code of freedom; any real norm, law, or reason here loses its efficacy altogether. When real norms, laws, and reason no longer operate, the boundary between a person’s consciousness and his unconscious dissolves and melts away with them. The virtual realm removes the barrier between person and language, removes the barrier between a person’s consciousness and his unconscious; and in the process of mutual collision and mutual generation between person and language, both person and language open themselves most fully. At this point the unconscious content slumbering within language revives and wells up; and so language is no longer a solitary monologue restricted by reason but sends forth, in its revelry, a clamour, displaying itself as a boundless space that fills the sky and the sea and embraces all things.
Wittgenstein said that art is the saying of the unsayable. In fact literature, too, is the saying of the “unsayable.” What language cannot say in the everyday state, literature says freely and to the full. Literature leads person and language together into the virtual realm and builds up the virtual intentional relation; and so the everyday-silent language begins to sing out the meaning beyond words, the resonance beyond sound, the savour beyond scene, the spirit beyond form. Speaking of Chinese poetry, Yip Wai-lim says: “In classical poetry written in literary Chinese, we find that the poet employs a distinctive flexible grammar—a highly flexible grammar that is at once attached and detached, at once directional, time-bound, and defined, and yet not directional, time-bound, or defined—resembling the ‘dissolution of distance’ spoken of earlier... so that a flexible, free relation is maintained between reader and words, and the reader stands in a ‘neither-attached-nor-detached’ middle zone, while the words, like the things of actual life, in a condition not closed off by predetermined relations and meanings, offer us a space in which we may move freely and which we may enter from different angles, letting the images therein perform before us with a visuality almost as intense as cinema’s.”[7] What Yip calls “the images performing before us with a visuality almost as intense as cinema’s” is just the virtual realm, the virtual intentional relation between reader and work. In this relation, literature and reader are at once near and far, at once joined and parted; the words evoke and elicit, opening wide the reader’s mind, and let an existence in which thing relates to thing and the whole is undivided be perfectly displayed before the reader’s sensibility. Here the virtual intentional relation abolishes the boundary between a person’s consciousness and his unconscious; only then can the evoking and eliciting of the words penetrate to the deep substratum of the mind, and only then is conceptual language generated into a rich existence, converted into a speaker who speaks of all things. It may be said that language is an appeal: however deep and broad the human mind, just so deep and broad a response it can receive. When a person breaks through all inner barriers and possesses the whole of his depth and breadth, language too attains an infinite depth and breadth.
The virtual intentional relation is also the gate leading to the primal. It abolishes the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious, making person and language remember anew the sedimented unconscious and collective unconscious—which is a return to the primal. In the virtual intentional relation, not only is the barrier within the self dissolved, but the barrier between person and language is also dissolved; language becomes “Thou,” the “Thou” in the “Thou–I” relation that can fuse into one with the person. Every blade of grass, every tree, every character and word, having been cast through with the self of author and reader, acquires spirit. In literature, every object and every word is at once Thou and I, the fusion of Thou and I. Feuerbach once pointed out: “Man originally does not separate himself from nature, and therefore does not separate nature from himself; thus he takes the sensations a natural object arouses in him directly for the qualities of the object itself.”[8] The virtual intentional relation lets person and language return to the “original” state, lets a person return to the realm of the fusion and oneness of thing and self, return to the realm where the conscious and the unconscious communicate and integrate, and lets language recall the primal age of myth and shine forth anew with the numinous and the magical.
In the virtual intentional relation, the liberation of language and that of the person are simultaneous; the degree to which a person’s inner self is opened is the degree to which the poeticity of language is disclosed. Poetic language and the person are always in a relation of response and generation; when the virtual intentional relation has dismantled all the fences of reality, language and the person stride together into the democratic republic of poetry and generate toward every possible domain.
Virtual Intentional Relation and the Dialectic of Poetic Speech
The virtual intentional relation suspends reality and frees language from the status of a tool, making it a self-purposive object with independent value. The independence of language, the loss of its functions of designation and statement, seem to make it impossible for a person any longer to deal with reality through language, to encounter reality through language; the virtual intentional relation has refused reality. In fact this very refusal leads a person toward a real world truly opened to him.
In the everyday state, language stands in the relation “person–language–world.” In this relation, language, by its own discontinuity, divides and fixes the world; by its own finitude, limits and prescribes the world; and, eroded by the years, degenerates into a withered concept, so that the world loses its vigorous vitality; it even, through habituation and automatization, becomes “foreshortened,” to the point that the prejudices and fixed notions clinging to language imperceptibly distort and screen the world. When the virtual intentional relation frees language from the status of a tool, making it an independent existence, the sole object of a person’s attention, the “Thou” with whom he converses and associates, then the potential of language manifests itself. The everyday-locked language opens its whole sensuous richness, opens its unfathomable connotation. At the same time, the person too opens his own rich sensibility and his profound inner self. It is precisely in the virtual intentional relation that the most intimate and richest relation is established between person and language, and both open themselves most fully.
Gaston Bachelard says: “For the dreamer of words, certain words are ‘shells of the ocean of speech.’ In listening to certain words, just as a child hears the sea in a shell, the dreamer of words hears the clamour of a world of fantasy.”[9] Eroded by the years, the word degenerates day by day into a hollow shell, far from the sea, mixed among the sand and gravel. Only in the dreamer’s reverie, in the virtual intentional relation built by reverie, does the word revive, remember the tides anew, and hear the clamour of the sea. For the dreamer, the word is no longer a hollow shell but a sensuous world glittering with riotous colour and clamouring with the sound of the tide. To dream the word is at the same time to carry the dreamer back to the ocean of speech.
Yet person and language are, after all, rooted in reality. Once they return to the everyday real relation, the functions of designation and statement are restored. This is no longer a simple repetition, but a return, at a new level, after language has opened itself. At the same time, the person’s sensibility too has been renewed, tempered, opened. And so, when language once more leads the person toward the world, what appears before him is already a living, brand-new world, a world that has opened its own sensuous richness. That is to say, it is first the opening of the person’s sensibility and of language in the virtual intentional relation; with this opening, the world too opens to the person, the world becomes a poetic existence and opens a comprehensive intercourse between person and world. The virtual intentional relation alienates person, language, and world, displacing the real world from its connection with person and language; but in the end it returns to the person an authentic world full of vitality and poetry.
In the virtual intentional relation, to refuse is to embrace—a true embrace. Only by first refusing reality can one embrace reality, can one truly merge into reality’s embrace. Lines such as “On the apricot boughs, spring’s mood riots” or “The morning bell, beyond the clouds, is moist” do not designate any particular real object; they give us only a richly pregnant fantasy realm, a non-real sensuous world in which the visual, the auditory, and the tactile resound together, and they suddenly open the person’s senses and give him an entirely new experience. The single word “riots,” the single word “moist,” does not merely effect a transference of sensation; it seems to open the whole of a person’s sensuous richness, and this opening of sensation is hard to attain in real circumstances. “A thousand trees, ten thousand trees, the pear blossoms bloom” likewise need not designate any concrete place; it carries us only to the marvellous fantasy realm of silver flowers on iron trees, pure as ice. The lines of poetry carry the person into the virtual world and open, expand, and renew his sensibility. And so the person who has acquired a “new sensibility” can also perceive reality the better and embrace the world the more deeply. Scenic spots can seldom do without famous lines of poetry, for the virtual realm of the poem and the real scene of the famous spot open to, interpret, and generate one another. Therein it is first the virtual intentional relation that opens the person’s sensibility, and may even drive the real scene too into the virtual realm and open it toward the supernatural.
The virtual intentional relation established between person and language at the same time suspends the object of communication and so severs everyday communication. In the virtual intentional relation, the reader is suspended; the poet no longer attends to the reader but wanders through the world of language, intoxicated within it, searching for the words that can open his mind and whisper to his whole soul. Likewise the poet too is suspended in reading; the reader does not attend to the author either, but concentrates solely on the independent, self-sufficient language itself, immersed in the realm of language. And so the language that in everyday communication served as a tool is no longer a tool, no longer “self-forgetting,” no longer “transparent.” The severance of communication is exactly what brings into prominence the value of language itself—its sensuous features of sound, rhythm, and colour, its metaphor, suggestion, and symbol, its conceived realm and import all fully display their charm, and the self-determining, self-purposive language becomes the language of the greatest expressive power, infectious power, and semantic depth, and thereby communicates between persons most fully. A true Peking-opera devotee, for instance, does not “watch the play” but “listens to the play.” Seated in the theatre with his eyes closed, listening intently, his whole being intoxicated in the virtual realm of the drama, he savours each aria and each enunciated word. For him, every word is a world of inexhaustible savour and unfathomable variation. It is precisely because he concentrates on the arias and the words rather than scrutinizing the actor that he at last comes to comprehend the drama and the actor most deeply.
Roland Barthes holds that in poetry “the word shines forth with infinite freedom and is ready to illuminate the countless indeterminate yet possible relations.” Every word of poetry “is an unforeseeable object, a Pandora’s box from which all the latent possibilities of language may fly out.”[10] When everyday communication is severed, although author and reader can no longer converse directly but converse and associate, each, with poetic language, yet—because in the conversation and association of poet with language and reader with language each side most fully frees itself from its own bondage and most fully opens itself—the deepest conversation and the most comprehensive intercourse are accomplished between poet and reader. This is no longer communication in the everyday sense, but a collision and communication of mind with mind at a higher level, the deepest communion of human souls; it even touches the innermost, deepest things common to humankind. The severance of everyday communication is exactly what opens the way to a true intercourse among people.
Éluard’s poem “Kill” contains lines such as these: “This is the stillness of blinded eyes / a dim and colourless / stillness of a dream that knocks about on the wall.” Viewed with everyday eyes, this is altogether illogical and incomprehensible. How does “stillness” come to have eyes? And how can it be blinded? It has no colour or lustre, still less can it knock about on a wall. Yet in the poem, when reader and work stand in the virtual intentional relation, this non-logical language brings “stillness” into prominence in an extraordinary way, so that all the person’s senses—not only hearing, but sight and touch, indeed the whole body—plainly feel the existence and the pressure of stillness. Language is a “symphony”; under everyday habitual conditions, its main melody is logical meaning, while the other “encyclopedic content” and “geological strata” exist merely as “harmony” and are even hidden in shadow. When the virtual intentional relation strips language of its functions of designation and statement, severs the direct communication between reader and author, and makes the reader concentrate his attention on language itself—and when this non-logical language further compels the reader to abandon the search for logical meaning within it—then, at that very moment, language’s “encyclopedic content” and “geological strata” free themselves from the entanglement of shadow and emerge with exceptional vividness, and the “harmony” turns into the “main melody.”
On the conversion of language, Sartre once wrote: “The language of poetry is born upon the ruins of prose. If language is indeed a betrayal, if mutual communication is truly impossible, then each word recovers its own individuality, becomes an instrument of our failure, and contains an incommunicable content. This is not to say that there is something else awaiting communication: but since communication by prose has already failed, the meaning of the word itself becomes something purely incommunicable. Thus the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable content; and the project of using these words, having been frustrated, gives way to a pure, non-utilitarian intuition of language.”[11] In the everyday state, when language becomes a “failed instrument,” we can only abandon this failed linguistic tool; only in poetry, when reader and work establish the virtual intentional relation, does this failed tool revive into a word of unique individuality, suggesting at the same time the originally incommunicable content. It may be said that in the everyday state, language stays on the surface of conversation and can hardly penetrate the soul, whereas the virtual intentional relation breaks through this limitation: through alienation, language most fully displays its whole connotation and its long-lingering savour, penetrates thoroughly to the depths of the soul, and lets the souls of persons attain a true communication and communion.
Fiction and the Virtual Intentional Relation
Fiction is the basis for establishing the virtual intentional relation, but fiction does not necessarily lead to its establishment. A lie, for instance, is fictional, yet it does not lead to the virtual intentional relation, for the lie intends to make the other party believe it true. Although it has no real designated object, it still seeks to lead the person’s intention toward an object disguised as “true,” thereby establishing an everyday intentional relation. The fictional language of a lie is therefore a tool applied to designation; it does not display itself to the person.
On the contrary, documentary fiction, biographical literature, and various kinds of non-fiction literature are grounded in fact. Yet in appreciative reading the reader likewise establishes a virtual intentional relation with the work and its language, and thereby brings about the aesthetic generation of language. In non-fiction literature, a character’s name both specifically designates a real person and is manifested as an “image,” a virtual image that attracts and intoxicates the reader. The distinctive charm of non-fiction literature lies precisely in the reader’s being able, in appreciation, to move freely between the illusory and the real, and thereby to make the virtual world and the real world supplement and generate one another, producing a distinctive reading effect.
Looked at more deeply, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is in itself blurred. In deconstructionist theory the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is dissolved. Hence the concept of the “virtual intentional relation” can more aptly account for the poetic phenomenon. It is on this basis that the present essay stresses the concept of the “virtual intentional relation” rather than “fiction.” And the present essay does not agree with deconstruction’s account of literary language in terms of “the endless slippage of the signified.” Although deconstruction holds that language cannot reach the real object and so sets the real object aside, this is still a process of language continually pointing toward the real object—only, lacking a definite “address,” it cannot be delivered. The virtual intention, by contrast, cuts off this process, abolishes the very aim of realization and the dimension of realization, and unfolds, on a wholly different dimension, the process of sensuous “concretization” of which Iser speaks. Plainly, deconstruction, for all its novelty, is in fact still a continuation, by inertia, of the traditional Western conception of language as cognition; whereas the view of the “virtual intentional relation” points out theoretically the multiple relations between person and language and explains the changes in the character and function of language brought about by changes in the intentional relation.
In What Is Literature?, Sartre says: “In fact, the poet has once and for all withdrawn from language as an instrument; he has chosen, once for all, the poetic attitude, which regards words as things and not as signs. For the sign has an ambiguity: one may freely pass through it as through a pane of glass to pursue the thing it signifies, or one may turn one’s gaze upon the fact of the sign and regard it as a thing. The one who speaks passes beyond the words and draws near to objects; the poet does not reach the words. For the former, the word is a servant in his employ; for the latter, the word has not yet been tamed. For the one who speaks, the word is a useful convention, an instrument that gradually wears out and is to be discarded once it can no longer be used; for the poet, words are natural things that grow naturally upon the earth like trees and grasses.”[12] Here Sartre regards language precisely from the angle of change rather than stasis, and holds that the cause that brings about the change of language lies in the poet’s attitude toward the word—the relation between poet and word. Which relation, then, can let the poet withdraw from “language as instrument”? Plainly the most effective path is the virtual intentional relation. In this relation the instrumentality of language is stripped away at the root. The virtual intentional relation lets person and language return to the primal state; and so language becomes once more the “thing” the poet faces directly, becomes the “untamed natural thing.” The poet no longer passes through the word, as through a pane of glass, to pursue the designated object of the real world.
At the same time, to propose the “virtual intentional relation” in place of “fiction” makes it possible to account for changes in a work’s character. Terry Eagleton points out: “A work may begin by existing as history or philosophy and later gradually come to be ranked as literature; or it may begin as literature and later, because of its archaeological significance, come to be valued.”[13] The change of a work is the conversion of the character of language; the two are simultaneous. When a historical work is reclassified as literature, language at the same time undergoes a poetic conversion. The cause of this change lies in the change of the intentional relation. Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian was formerly read as history—“to examine the boundary between Heaven and man, to comprehend the changes from antiquity to the present” was its essential aim, and people always consulted it for historical events and the succession of human affairs. Whether the historical materials were accurate, whether the narration was precise, whether the causal inferences were reasonable—these were the criteria by which it was judged. In such an intentional relation, the poetic features of the work’s language were repressed and could not be fully displayed. With the passage of the years, the work’s historical context gradually became unfamiliar, distant, forgotten; the content the work states seemed to evolve into a remote, illusory dream; the intentional relation between reader and work changed as well, and so the Records of the Grand Historian became not merely a historical source but also a thing appreciated as literature—that is, as a virtual object. In the virtual intentional relation, the work’s vivid language shines more brightly than before and is the more striking.
Croce says: “If we take a page of a novel and set it beside a page of history, we shall find in this page and that the same or similar words, similar diction or sound-rhythm, similar descriptions of images: in this way no major difference can be seen between the two. Yet in the page of a novel the image exists within an intuitive unity, maintaining its place within that intuitive unity by its own power, and this intuitive unity also makes concrete a particular feeling; in the page of history the image is moved by some invisible clue, merely supposed and supposable, and it is precisely from this clue, not from intuition and fancy, that it gains consistency and unity.”[14] The same words and sentences are utterly different in a novel and in history. The novel, by its fiction, leads the reader to establish a virtual intentional relation with the work’s language and thereby liberates language and revives its vital force. For a historical work, the vividness and the emotional quality of language become a dispensable excrescence; the sensibility and feeling that language might contain are repressed in the cold reading of history, and so “in the page of history the centre is a cold current, which has the power to extinguish or weaken every spark that could kindle the blazing fire of poetry, and the power, too, to make the thread of thought resist the kindling of the spark, or to rescue it from the flames.”[15]
Not only do the same words take on different aspects in works of different kinds; even the same word in the same work may, through the change of the intentional relation brought by the passage of time, undergo a poetic conversion. Certain words and phrases formerly inconspicuous and overlooked suddenly become radiant in a new horizon. Plainly, it is the virtual intentional relation, not fiction, that determines the poetic change of language.
Defamiliarization and the Virtual Intentional Relation
Russian Formalism once studied poetic language quite deeply. It divided language into “practical language” and “poetic language,” holding that practical language has an external practical purpose and is a tool of communication, whereas poetic language has no external purpose, takes itself as its purpose, and possesses independent value. The present essay agrees with the Formalist summary of the poetic features of language, but proposes emendations to the Formalist view on three points. First, it breaks the boundary between practical and poetic language, regarding the two as mutually convertible rather than rigidly fixed. Second, Russian Formalism, under the influence of Saussure’s “signifier/signified” theory, often one-sidedly stressed the phonic value of poetic language, proposing that “poetic language takes sound as its purpose” and that “poetic language aims at euphonic words, at transrational speech”;[16] the present essay holds, rather, that poetic language contains a whole series of sensuous qualia—sound, sense, image, idea, conceived realm, savour—and is a process of sensuous unfolding and value-generation. Third, Russian Formalism held that the principal path to realizing the value of poetic language lies in “defamiliarization,” a deviation from and violation of linguistic convention. Through deformation and deviation, it breaks the automatization of perception and concentrates attention on language itself, so that language acquires its own independent value; hence “poetry is impeded, distorted speech.”[17] The present essay agrees with the important role of defamiliarization in language’s attaining poeticity, but holds at the same time that the most fundamental cause of poetic conversion lies in the virtual intentional relation. Defamiliarization, by its novelty, can indeed attract the reader’s attention and bring itself into the foreground; but it does not, like the virtual intentional relation, fundamentally suspend reality, alienate language from reality, free it from habit, and grant it thorough liberation. Moreover, defamiliarization cannot fully account for the veneration of the natural-and-plain style in the Chinese literary tradition. That is to say, defamiliarization is not the necessary precondition for the poetic conversion of language.
In fact, it is not defamiliarization first of all; on the contrary, it is the familiar, habitual literary forms and paradigms—of poetry, fiction, and the like—that lead the reader to read with a “literary” attitude, that is, to establish a virtual intentional relation with the work’s language; and in this intentional relation, whether the language is unfamiliar or plain, it undergoes aesthetic generation and becomes poetic language. It is also precisely within the virtual intentional relation that the defamiliarizing device appears especially dazzling and its novel features are more fully displayed; conversely, the defamiliarizing device thereby draws the reader the more powerfully into the realm of language, into the virtual realm. Here there is an aesthetic circle: the virtual intentional relation lets the defamiliarizing device be fully displayed; the display of the defamiliarizing device further draws the reader deeply into the virtual realm. It is precisely in this circle that the potential of language is continually exercised; the “encyclopedic” connotation stored within words, and the emotional import, cultural import, and collective unconscious sedimented within language, are progressively excavated; and so the reader is intoxicated in the converging resonance of language, sinking deep into the pool of language that fuses conscious and unconscious content, sinking into the boundless depths of life, sinking into the ancient primal import of myth.
The defamiliarization of language exercises its fullest role only within the virtual intentional relation. The defamiliarization of language tends in two directions and has many devices. The first is the pursuit of the singular and the precipitous—such as Huang Shangu’s use of “perilous” rhymes and his search for perilous realms. By violating the existing metre, conceived realm, or habitual usage of words, it opens a new vista for poetic creation. “Transforming the embryo and exchanging the bone” (duotai huangu) is a defamiliarizing device: it uses the defamiliarization of context to make words and allusions that had grown dull through overuse glow with fresh life, turning “iron” into “gold.” The second is the pursuit of the colloquial and the plain. The Qing scholar Liu Xizai greatly esteemed works that are plain and natural; he regarded “easy in ordinary words, hard in extraordinary words” as “the first gate of poetry,” and “easy in extraordinary words, hard in ordinary words” as “the second gate of poetry.”[18] In the Chinese literary tradition the natural-and-plain style of language is the most prized, and plainness, blandness, and naturalness are often regarded as the highest realm.
Here there exist two levels of defamiliarization. The first is that, relative to everyday language, defamiliarization is the violation by literary language of everyday linguistic habit. The second is that, with respect to literary language itself, in seeking defamiliarization one may either continually pursue novelty or return to the colloquial and the plain. Because the innovativeness of art compels the language of poetry and of other literary works continually to pursue novelty, and in the long course of development to form its own features gradually, the introduction of colloquial and plain words into literary works appears, on the contrary, fresh. Speaking of Xie Lingyun’s lines “By the pond, spring grasses grow; in the garden willows, the singing birds change,” Mr. Xu Shuofang once offered an excellent explanation. He held that the poetic scene of the time was full of ornate, over-carved poetry, and so this fresh and natural work appeared most distinctive and won much attention and praise. Xu Shuofang’s view is most discerning and unintentionally coincides with the Russian Formalist view of the evolution of literary form. But the problem is that not only at that time, but after the poetic style had changed several times, people still especially esteemed natural-and-plain works and still held the natural and plain to be a notch above the novel—and this is hard to explain by the theory of defamiliarization.
In fact, although colloquial and plain language is close to everyday language, once it enters the virtual intentional relation it likewise undergoes aesthetic conversion; and because it is plain and natural, it is the closer to the person, the more able to penetrate the person’s mind without obstruction and to move the person’s feeling. For humankind, plain and natural language, like the human being, is rooted in the source of human history; the realm of the plain and natural is truly the spiritual homeland of the person. It is for this very reason that plain and natural language is the more favoured in literary creation.
Going a level deeper, we may also find a ground in the human being’s contradictory attitude toward nature. Worringer pointed out two opposed human tendencies toward nature: empathy and abstraction. “The urge to empathy is conditioned by that happy, pantheistic relation of intimacy between man and the outer world, while the urge to abstraction is the product of the great inner unease that the outer world arouses in man.”[19] The natural world changes in an instant and abounds in perils, making a person harbour a great psychical dread of natural space. A person builds himself a house, setting himself apart from nature; builds city walls and fortresses, distancing himself from nature; puts on clothing, separating himself from nature; and with adornment and ornament, sets himself off from nature. Culture is the “artificial thing” that separates man from nature; layer upon layer, culture sediments down, tightly wrapping the person and cutting him off from nature, seeking to set up for him an artificial “cosy nest” free of external threat. On the other hand, a person can never sever the umbilical cord that links him with nature; he forever longs for nature, forever longs for the natural womb that bred humankind, and yearns to return to that womb. And so a person must from time to time leave the city to receive the natural scene, and continually sings the praises of pastoral life; he opens doors and cuts windows in his house, leaving himself a passage to nature; he leaves a collar-opening in his clothing, the better to spy out and listen to nature; and naked on the seashore he bathes in the sunlight and the tides; while adornment, and indeed the whole of culture, from time to time adjusts its own style and in the end inclines toward the imitation of nature. The Huainanzi, in its “Taizu” chapter, says: “What people live by is clothing and food. Yet were a man imprisoned in a dark chamber, though you nourished him on the finest meats and clothed him in patterned silk, he could not be happy—for his eyes would see nothing, his ears hear nothing. Were a crack or hole opened so that he glimpsed the falling rain, he would sigh with delight; how much more if a door and window were thrown open so that out of darkness he saw the light! To see light out of darkness still makes one rejoice without restraint; how much more to leave the room and sit in the hall and behold the light of sun and moon! To behold the light of sun and moon brings boundless joy; how much more to climb Mount Tai, tread its stone altars, and gaze over the eight wastes—seeing the heavens like a canopy, the rivers like a girdle, and all the myriad things between! Would not such joy be great indeed?”[20] A person can never escape nature, can never forget nature. The return to nature is an eternal impulse in the depths of the human mind. And language most fully embodies the person’s contradictory attitude toward nature. Language, by its conceptual abstraction, makes a person gradually distance himself from nature, permanently setting up the linguistic “medium” between person and nature; yet language also gathers person and nature together, for the naming activity of language is a process of the humanization of nature—in calling forth the name of a natural object, a person at the same time imprints and fuses himself into that natural object. Language itself is the converging of person and nature. Poetic language especially opens nature, lets a person truly return to nature, return to the poetic earth, beneath the sacred sky, among the myriad natural things. It is precisely because two opposed tendencies forever exist in human nature and in language that, while language develops toward the pole of artificial-intelligence language, computer language, and mathematical language, poetic language remains an indispensable spiritual supplement for the person, preserving for him the thoroughfare back to nature when he is far from it—and the farther a person is from nature, the more precious it appears. And in poetic language, the natural realm created and opened by plain and natural language is precisely the natural womb for which humankind forever yearns and to which it forever clings.
Human history is precisely a continual process of advancing and returning. While engaged in the activity of real existence, a person always reserves for himself another, other-existing world, and in this virtual intention brings about the poetic generation of language, thereby also preserving for himself an effective path back to nature and back to the primal. And it is precisely in this process that language has formed its own multiplicity and multidirectionality.