The Exploration and Pursuit of the Literary Spirit: Reading Ma Dakang’s The Intoxication of Life

The aesthetic character and the function of literature have, ever since the birth of literature, been a theoretical problem over which Chinese and Western scholars have been perplexed and have argued endlessly. Many Western aestheticians—such as Kant, Schlegel, and Wilde—stressed the aesthetic of literature and rejected its functionality. Giving weight to the social function of literature, by contrast, has been the dominant tendency in our country's literary tradition. From Confucius's saying that the Songs can "stir, observe, group, and complain," through the feudal society's doctrine that "writing carries the Dao," to the educative and cognitive role that literature played after the May Fourth period in awakening the consciousness of the nation, the aesthetic and the functional have always been entangled inextricably—so much so that there has sometimes appeared the bias of over-stressing the political function of literature while neglecting its artistic quality. Since the New Era, although our country's scholars have given weight to building a bridge between the aesthetic and the functional in literature, they have lacked the rational speculation of Western scholars and have therefore been unable to reveal in theory, in a profound way, the mechanism by which the aesthetic character and the functional character of literature are mutually connected, or to reveal at root the mystery of the realization of literature's function and the source of its distinctiveness. Ma Dakang's book The Intoxication of Life gives weight to absorbing the reasonable kernel of Western scholars' rational reflection on the aesthetic and the function of literature while discarding their obstinacy; taking the phenomenological viewpoint as his theoretical starting point, and drawing on contemporary Western aesthetic and literary theories such as Russian Formalism, structuralist poetics, reception theory, hermeneutics, existentialism, and Western Marxism, he integrates them with China's theoretical reality and makes his own independent reflection, revealing the aesthetic nature of literature, the mechanism by which the aesthetic and the functional are mutually connected, and clarifying the mystery of the realization of literature's function and the source of its distinctiveness. The Intoxication of Life is not only a distinctive exploration of the literary spirit in our country's current theoretical circles but also a theoretical work rigorous in structure and quite inspiring in its method of thinking.

The Intoxication of Life's reflection on literature, rich in individual character, is manifested first in its keenly seizing the fundamental feature that literature is the product of fiction, and fully unfolding its exposition of the aesthetic nature of literature. The aesthetic is a spiritual intercourse between the reader and the literary object; literary fiction fundamentally sets the reader apart from the real situation. The intercourse between reader and literary object is therefore different from everyday intercourse: it need not be limited by the reality-principle, by real reason, or by real purpose; the subject casts off the various bondages of real utilitarian purpose and traditional custom and becomes a free subject, "always creating in the identity of a free subject, and at the same time, in the identity of a free subject, having intercourse with the aesthetic object it creates, thereby fully unfolding its own sensuous existence and developing its own sensuous existence." And because the aesthetic object is an illusory world, the object too is abstracted out of its various real connections, set apart, and suspended into a self-sufficient object. In fact it no longer exists as an "object" but turns into a free subject. Therefore the two parties to the intercourse are no longer in a "subject–object" relation but in a "subject–subject," "I–Thou" relation. In this aesthetic intercourse unfolding in the "I–Thou" mode, "every craving for possession is stilled, every obstructing mediation collapses; I open up the whole richness of my own self, and you too open up the whole richness of your own self; between I and Thou a complete intercourse and communication is realized." It is precisely in this complete, free intercourse that aesthetic pleasure quietly descends; and in this process of spiritual intercourse and the fusion of souls, the satisfaction of eros, the exercise of creativity, and the experience of freedom and the eternal are also realized, and the reader, through aesthetic creation, further deepens his own species-essence.

Literature is the art of language. Setting out again from the feature that literature is the product of fiction, the author reveals the mystery of the aesthetic transformation that literary language undergoes, thereby further clarifying the aesthetic nature of literature. The author holds that fiction makes literature a distinctive mode of dialogue and determines the establishing of the aesthetic relation between human and language and the realization of language's aesthetic transformation. The true mode of language's existence is dialogue, and literature is a distinctive mode of dialogue; because literature is fictional, it further develops dialogue and highlights the creative feature of dialogue. With a "summoning structure," it calls to and infects the reader, drawing him into this equal dialogue of "speaker and speaker," to create together a sensuous world, thereby breaking through the bondage of the single, linear concept of language, letting language penetrate the boundary of the conscious and the unconscious and become a multidimensional existence. Literary fiction estranges the world of meaning created by language from the real world, fundamentally stripping language of its referential and assertive function; language is no longer bound together with the real object but becomes a "self-sufficient" existence that does not take reality as its reference. Thereby the creative, expressive, and shaping functions of language—covered, in everyday use, by the practical function of referring to reality and conveying information—are highlighted and strengthened. Fiction also makes literary language an "insufficient" language full of blanks of meaning. Because literary fiction negates the connection between language and its objective correlate, the importance of language's conceptual meaning is relatively lowered, while its connotative meaning and emotional meaning are highlighted. The relative indeterminacy of connotative and emotional meaning needs the reader himself to experience and savor in creative participation; it is full of "blanks" that the reader needs to connect and fill, powerfully drawing the reader into the world built by language, into aesthetic creation and aesthetic experience, continually creating meaning together. Fiction both endows the existence of literary language with self-sufficiency and thereby determines the insufficiency of the meaning of literary language, thus fundamentally realizing the aesthetic transformation of language.

This method of revealing the aesthetic nature of literature, starting from "fiction" and from the angles of spiritual intercourse, dialogue of minds, and the aesthetic transformation of language, provides a new perspective for exploring the essence of the literary spirit. That is to say, it regards literature as a mode of human existence, as the human's spiritual home. In this Eden of literature, the human exists in his authentic face and feels and creates freely and at ease. Only in the realm of literature can the human realize a true communication with the world and with his own mind. This theory, on the surface, seems to suspend literature, intending to build an illusory castle in the air and to seek a spiritual refuge. In fact it is not so: the author does not reject the social function of literature but, from yet another new perspective, connects the aesthetic with the function. Then, how are the aesthetic and the function connected, and what is the mechanism of their mutual connection? This is another distinctive insight the book offers.

Literary fiction makes language a self-sufficient existence that does not refer to reality, and the aesthetic sets the reader and the work apart from reality. Yet the reader, after all, is a person who lives in real society and participates in social practice; although in the immediacy of the aesthetic he is intoxicated in an aesthetic world other-existent to reality, he cannot finally leave or cast off the real world. Once aesthetic activity ceases, he immediately returns to the real state, both appraising the work with reality as reference and re-viewing reality with the work as reference. The world of the work is likewise so: although suspended in the immediacy of the aesthetic, having relinquished its relation to reality, literature, after all, originates in reality, originates in social life, and cannot fundamentally reject reference to reality. The author calls this an "alienated reference." Here, the author integrates the Marxist view of practice and the literary view that "literature originates in social life," thereby guaranteeing the objectivity and a certain depth of the theory. It is precisely "alienated reference" that unifies the aesthetic character and the functional character of literature. "'Alienated reference' both moves the reader into the fictional world and estranges him from tradition and from reality, creating distance, and at the same time does not sever the reader's connection with tradition and with real society." Aesthetic alienation lets the reader cast off the bondage of tradition and reality; all the conventions, prejudices, and traditions of real society lose their effect in the aesthetic world, and the reader faces the world in his authentic face and gains a sensuous liberation. Aesthetic alienation not only suspends the human's various habitual views in the real situation but also guides the reader to face the world with a new eye and in a new way. When he returns to reality, he participates in reality as a renewed "self" freed from the bondage of notions. "This is the participation, in a reality to some degree 'unconcealed' and 'opened,' of a person whose sensibility has been honed and expanded; it is the human's more intimate, more comprehensive participation in reality, and so the various functions of literature are fully realized in this renewed participation"—thereby attaining the unity of the aesthetic and the function of literature.

After establishing these basic views, the author, from the aspects of intentional relation, defamiliarization, the structure of the literary text, and the reader's reception paradigm, comprehensively discusses the structure of literary function, its generation and realization, and its derivative changes. From the aspects of fiction, literary strategy, and aesthetic intercourse, he expounds the distinctiveness of literary function and sums up the functional system of literature. In making these expositions, the author carries out a "broad reading" of the various theories of the aesthetic and the function of literature in Chinese and Western aesthetics and literary studies, absorbing their reasonable kernels and integrating them, making his own choices, reflections, and seekings, and, standing at the height of history and the age, discarding their obstinacy and pointing out their insufficiencies. His views are fresh without being extreme; his argument is both lively and nimble, and steady and down-to-earth. Holding a balanced position while seeking completeness and novelty is yet another feature this work displays.

Below, taking the section "Defamiliarization and the Structure of Literary Function" as a glimpse of the leopard through a tube, let us see how the author carries out his sublation, in pursuit of completeness and novelty, so that his views attain a certain historical and theoretical depth. For the Russian Formalist theorist Shklovsky, defamiliarization is the guarantee that literature gains its literariness and the autonomy of its aesthetic function. For Brecht, by contrast, defamiliarization is stressed as the path for realizing the cognitive function, the social-critical function, and the educative function. The author holds that their theories contain a contradiction and opposition, but that each has its reasonable points and its bias. How is the contradiction in their theories to be explained? The author draws inspiration from Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. In that book, Booth proposes that there may exist multiple distance-relations between the reader and the object of appreciation—distances of value, of the moral, of the cognitive, of the aesthetic, of the bodily. Therefore the author holds that the distance which defamiliarization forms between the object of appreciation and the subject's experience may be aesthetic, but may also be socio-historical, or moral, or cognitive. When defamiliarization creates an aesthetic distance between the object of appreciation and the subject, drawing the subject's attention with a new artistic form and the like, the subject first notices the features of the artistic form and savors from them the rich import the new form contains, thereby realizing the aesthetic function. When defamiliarization is used to stress the moral distance between a social phenomenon bearing moral-ethical significance and the subject, the moral-educative function of the work is realized. And the defamiliarization of historical events, complex social phenomena, or value-notions creates a cognitive distance and a value-distance between subject and object, pushing the cognitive object and the value-object to the foreground position and realizing the cognitive function and the value-function. Thus the contradiction and opposition between Shklovsky and Brecht become suddenly clear. The author points out that Shklovsky inclines toward the defamiliarization of artistic form, which can make the formal features of the literary sign stand out, pushing them to the most foreground position and making them the center of attention; therefore his research is confined to artistic quality and the aesthetic function, confined to stressing literature's own value while neglecting its social function. Brecht stresses the defamiliarization of "social function," making the moral significance, the social-critical significance, and the cognitive significance contained in the "social gesture" stand out, thereby realizing literature's cognitive function, social-critical function, and educative function; but Brecht's defamiliarization has the bias of over-stressing political and other extra-artistic ends. The distance the author speaks of also differs from Bullough's "distance theory": Bullough's distance theory is a kind of "aesthetic psychical distance"—art transforms and reshapes reality, making art distinct from and other than reality, so that the appreciator too treats the artistic object with an attitude different from his attitude toward everyday life; this is a non-real aesthetic-psychological attitude. The distance the author speaks of both contains the meaning of Bullough's "aesthetic psychical distance" and refers to cognitive distance, moral distance, and so on. The author holds that Bullough's stressing of the necessity of the "distance" of the artwork is correct, but that, setting out from the necessary distance, Bullough rejects functions other than the aesthetic and on this basis opposes the relation of art to real life, thereby falling again into one-sidedness. Defamiliarization both creates the "aesthetic psychical distance" of which Bullough speaks, making the appreciator treat the literary object with a non-real attitude, and, because of the different means of defamiliarization, creates cognitive distance, moral and value distance, and so on, highlighting and stressing certain of these distances and leading to the realization of the corresponding literary functions. In this choosing and sublating, the author makes his own original reflection, proposes views rich in penetrating insight on the structure of literary function, and makes a substantive contribution to the study of literary function.

As another example, in expounding the functional system of literature, on the basis of summing up predecessors' expositions of the series of aesthetic functions, the author has his own original discovery. He holds that the series of literature's cognitive functions in fact encompasses two kinds of qualitatively distinct functions: one kind is the aesthetic-cognitive function, which must pass through the aesthetic mediation and merge with the aesthetic function; the other is heterogeneous to the aesthetic. As for the functional system of literature, the author sums it up thus: the various functions of literature are a system-structure with hierarchical-level relations. The aesthetic is the first-level "core function." Around this core, there unfold in sequence the series of functions of aesthetic cognition, emotional education, communication, and so on; these functions must pass through the aesthetic mediation and are moreover merged and assimilated by the aesthetic function, which the author calls "sub-functions." Others, such as historical cognition, moral admonition, political propaganda, and innuendo-suggestion, because they are heterogeneous to the aesthetic function, are the middle bridge by which literature attempts to break through its own boundary in order to connect with other domains of human activity; these the author calls "marginal functions." This division of the author's runs through his basic view of the mutual connection of the aesthetic and the function: he regards the aesthetic function as the core, yet does not reject the other social functions of literature, but divides them, according to whether they take the aesthetic as mediation and whether they merge with the aesthetic function, into sub-functions and marginal functions. Divided thus, with clear ranks and distinct levels, it also gains practical guiding significance for correctly handling, in literary creation, the relation between the aesthetic and the social functions.