In The Gate of Fiction, Cao Wenxuan says: "To discuss the problem of time is a kind of adventure, even, one might say, a hard-scalp intervention." (1) This shows the complexity and thorniness of the time problem. A Study of Literary Time, co-authored by Ma Dakang, Ye Shixiang, and Sun Pengcheng, may be said to advance into the difficulty, facing head-on the difficult problem it sets out to solve—the problem of literary time—and this fully embodies the courage and boldness of its authors. Then, to what degree does the more-than-260,000-character A Study of Literary Time carry the research on the literary-time problem? And what is the distinctive landscape of literary time it displays? This article attempts to comb out these questions and, on this basis, to explore the existential dimensions of literary time.
I. New Progress in Literary-Time Research
The study of literary time is a topic with many theoretical difficulties that challenge academic thinking. As far as I know, abroad, research on the time problem is mostly conducted from the philosophical angle—as in the exploration of time in the philosophy of life; existentialist philosophy and the subsequent hermeneutics explore time as a concrete category closely related to human existence, such as Heidegger's Being and Time and Gadamer's The Relevance of the Beautiful. With the attention to the problem of "modernity," time has once again drawn scholars' attention. Relatively speaking, monographs that make a specialized study of literary time are few. Even Paul Ricoeur, though he made a specialized study of narrative time, touched only on one facet. (2) The narratological research perspective made the infinitely rich literary time relatively impoverished. Although monographs studying literary time have also appeared domestically, (6) monographs that use multiple methods such as phenomenology, narratology, and cultural studies to make a multidimensional, in-depth exposition of the literary-time problem can be counted on one's fingers. One may say that the authors of A Study of Literary Time began their theoretical trek from a relatively high starting point.
The monograph both makes a macro theoretical exploration of literary time and, on the micro level, makes a concrete, detailed analysis of the modes of existence of literary time within works. As the authors say in the afterword: "This monograph deepens the literary-time problem from the two aspects of ontology and rhetoric, combing out the tangled time and unfolding theoretical exploration on every level." (3) To study the literary-time problem starting from ontology and rhetoric may be said to grasp the crux of the problem: the existence of the literary ontological body endows literary time with a parasitic nature; the ontological body makes time take off its formless cloak and display its state of existence. The literary work not only provides time with a spacious, comfortable home but also gives it sufficient freedom: that is, time becomes a hypothetical existent, and this existent is not single or homogeneous; it continually changes and even changes its nature, the degree of change depending on the work's narrative structure—the application of rhetorical means—depending also on the import of language and the degree of its extensibility, and still more on the various internal and external factors of the work. All these are finely expounded in the book.
II. The Characteristics and Existential Dimensions of Literary Time
How is literary time generated? What characteristics does it have? A Study of Literary Time first solves these essential problems. The authors first analyze the literary-time problem from the angle of textual exteriority, holding that the literary text itself does not possess the manifestation of time; it has only "latent time," and the life of literary time is awakened by the reader in literary reception, its life-course completed in the reader's process of literary reception. This rejects the habitual view that regards literary time as "the author's subjective psychological time." But once the gate of the text is opened, the time internal to the text slowly occupies a position in the reader's life. Thus, the study of literary time necessarily passes over to the interior of the text. Therefore, literary time, overlooked from the dual angle of the internal and external of the literary work, displays its own characteristics. The authors comb out the phenomenon of the plural coexistence of time in literature, holding that the "inclusiveness" of literary time is embodied in a series of antinomies, in the unity of opposites of closure and openness, finitude and infinity, motion and stillness, the present and the non-present. It is precisely because of the differentiation and analysis of the manifold time-phenomena in literature that the unresolved dispute between Joseph Frank and Murray Krieger over the "spatialization of fiction" is clarified. In Spatial Form in Modern Fiction, Joseph Frank points out that fiction, as a temporal art, underwent in the modern period a transformation toward spatial form. (4) Against this, Murray Krieger raised doubts, holding: "The practice of eliminating the temporality of the literary work by constructing spatial form is a superstition of the myth of the substantial existence of discourse, an out-and-out daydream." (5) The two views are mutually opposed. In fact, they did not recognize the plurality of literary time but, standing on their respective positions, analyzed the time problem from different angles. In my view, the main battlefield of literary-time research is still within the literary work, an interiority-leaning study. This is perhaps the reason the following chapters of the monograph give weight to studying the literary-internal time problem.
"The consciousness of time in literature has a process from budding to maturity; it develops along with literature, and especially with the development of human practice, and conversely, the development and change of time-consciousness also promote the development and transformation of literature." (3) In this mutually complementary relation, it is not hard to see how far-reaching the influence of human practice, and of the time-consciousness formed in practice, is upon literary time. Therefore, the evolution of literary time is inevitably influenced by the degree of the subject's probing of the object and by the degree of the subject's questioning and reflection upon the subject. Through a brief description of how the development of human practice led to the "historicization," "virtualization," and "individualization" of the concept of time, the authors expound the self-awareness and evolution of narrative time and reveal the developmental vein and profound import of literary time. If the appearance of narrative time was for the sake of saving time, then, when the saving exceeds its own purpose, temporal rhetoric gains the initiative of play within the text, an initiative realized through the various transformations of narrative time—such as the dislocation and recombination of time-order, the design of time-difference, the adjustment of time-speed, and the interweaving of various heterogeneous times. The various uncanny faces of narrative time give literature enormous richness and expressive power, and by borrowing this colorful temporal rhetoric, the various values and meanings of literature are finally realized.
Besides using various rhetorical means, the time-change internal to the literary work is also related to literary genre and the content to be expressed. Chapters three through six of the monograph mainly study the various time-forms of literary works of different genres and contents, exploring and expounding the literary-time problem from the angles of nostalgia, the mundane and worldly, tragedy, and the postmodern.
Literature is at root nostalgic. Taking literary works such as Xiao Hong's Tales of Hulan River, Daudet's Letters from My Windmill, Naipaul's Miguel Street, and Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow as analytic samples, the authors deeply probe the state of existence of time in nostalgic literature and the root of this state, and reveal the distinctiveness of nostalgic literature: a dual time-flow, a dual subjective horizon, and a dual orientation of time-value. At the same time, they bring nostalgia into discussion under the context of modernity and consumer society and make a prediction about the future development of nostalgic literature. But nostalgia is not merely a special bond connecting the relation of literature and time; once nostalgia is displayed in a work, it itself takes on a distinctive meaning: nostalgic literature is the human's effort to face directly the complexity of the "time–value" structure and to question and reflect upon the "time–value" order; and it is precisely through literary nostalgia, as an important path, that the human resists the ceaseless passing of time.
The mundane time in literature should, to some degree, also be regarded as a path for resisting the ceaseless passing of time; but "mundane time is itself a huge trap, and the positive depiction of the time of mundane life is both a breakthrough and fraught with enormous ideological misgivings." (3) Through an analysis of the time problem in the works of Lu Xun, Chi Li, and Zhang Ailing, the authors let us see the connection between ideology and literary time and the manifest forms of ideological misgivings. The problem of tragedy has always drawn scholars' attention; the monograph makes a theoretical exploration and outline of the temporal structure of tragedy. The authors distinguish tragic time from Heidegger's "being-toward-death," highlight the distinctive meaning of tragedy, and arrive at many innovative, speculative, and original views, such as: tragic time is a time-form in which life-time is displaced toward sacred time; the temporal expression of tragedy presents, in the mode of the "present," a "past" drawn along by the "future"; tragedy is an important path by which the human intends to inquire into the eternal through death. The authors also, through analyzing the various interpretations of "eternity" through the ages, raise doubts about the classic definition of tragedy, holding that once "historical necessity" replaces "the necessity of fate," tragic time is enveloped in light, or at least joined to a "bright tail," and tragedy thereby changes its nature. In the postmodern context, the time problem in literature appears branching, complex, and chaotic, sometimes even hard to comb out. Through discussing and contrasting the fundamental characteristics of time in the modern context, the authors deepen the understanding of the literary-time problem under the postmodern cultural context, including its origin and current state. Through analyzing the literary works of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and others, they seek a breakthrough for the problem of time-redemption, in order to give time a brand-new form and to reveal the cultural connotation and historical significance with which time is rich in this process.
Literary time is generated in the process of reading; therefore, to truly experience and understand literary time, one must start from a "close reading" of works. The monograph's "close reading" of the works of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, and Wang Zengqi may be said to enter into them and yet emerge from them, minute and detailed yet grand in vision, revealing the mystery of literary space-time within the interpretive circle. We know that the language style of Lu Xun's fiction differs greatly from that of Wang Zengqi's fiction. The language of Lu Xun's fiction is more philosophical and enlightening, so the time generated by the flow of language is relatively slow, the temporal quality of the imagery created by language and of the movement of imagery is relatively thick and dense, and the time experienced by the characters has a relatively mixed quality, sometimes not lacking in contradiction. Conversely, the aesthetic conception rich in the language of Wang Zengqi's fiction is relatively leisurely and luminous; the many short sentences make the time generated by the language-flow relatively brisk, the temporal quality of the imagery created by language and of the movement of imagery relatively warm and long, and the time experienced by the characters relatively intimate and perceptible. Seizing the space-time problem, the monograph makes a fresh re-reading of works from an angle long overlooked, displaying many writers' little-known inner secrets and the distinctiveness of their creation.
III. Conclusion
The various chapters of the monograph are each self-contained yet mutually cross and merge, letting us hear a polyphonic temporal movement and see several existential dimensions of literary time. In my view, the book also has shortcomings in carrying out its theoretical speculation and exploration, manifested concretely as follows. First, studying the literary-time problem from the angle of literary ontology, it does not make a further tracking exploration of the evolution of literature—for example, research on the time problem of hypertexts such as network literature. Second, the exposition of the relation between literary time and ideology is not yet thorough enough. Literary works inevitably become entangled with ideology; in different political contexts, literary time gains a new role; the foundation of this generation, the laws of its forms, and the historical-cultural significance it bears are all worth in-depth exploration. Third, the writer's creative individuality is another dimension of literary time's existence—one may say it is a total dimension by which literary time exists, because the literary time in any literary work is constructed by the writer, and the understanding of time and the essential import of life in a literary work is inseparable from the grasp of the writer's creative individuality and temporal experience.
The problem of literary time is a rather complex theoretical difficulty; the monograph uses the "method of mutual illumination" to display this complexity, as far as possible, on every level, so that the sparks of thought about literary-time research are "fused" into a well-arranged whole, and we can, through cross-reference reading of the various chapters, gain profound and meaningful inspiration. In sum, this book, with the light of a part, "illuminates" a portion of the hidden level that literary-time research possesses as a whole, and in this partial "illumination" expands the space of literary-time research, letting us seem to see the shadow of literary time, its gradually clarifying outline. I believe that this A Study of Literary Time, by authors content with a corner of Jiangnan, will surely play an important role in future literary-time research—a role that has only just come on stage.