Catharsis:
The Efficacy of Literary Communication
As is often observed, Western realism is a bourgeois art form that succeeds by appealing to its readers' sense of historical and social identity. René Wellek has noticed, in connection with the nineteenth-century realist novel, the importance of such historical upheavals as the industrial revolution, which brought a new awareness of history—
"the far greater consciousness that man is a being living in society rather than a moral being facing God"—as well as a "change in the interpretation of nature which shifts from the deistic, purposeful, even though mechanistic world of the eighteenth century to the far more unhuman, inhuman order of deterministic nineteenth-century science."[24] At the most fundamental level, realist fiction assumes a shared sense of historical progression: both author and reader conceive of the events related in the text as particular, discrete occurrences plotted on a linear temporal course—that same temporal course, in fact, that encompasses all our lives and that we call history. This particularity of events is no more than a pretense, as the theorists of realism themselves concede in their discussion of "typicality," where they indirectly acknowledge the conventionalized and even allegorical nature of realist fiction. Through the notion of types, realism is opened to the transmission of general truths (i.e. ideology) and the encyclopedic portrayal of social reality. Realist fiction, like all narrative art forms, thus presents itself in part as a kind of instruction or teaching,[25] yet unlike a fable, parable, or religious allegory, it is never the transparent vessel of its message. To read a work of realism as a straightforward roman à thèse , reducing the text's content to its schematic ideological message, is to overlook the unique creative tensions that inform it. Realist fiction is forever at pains to distinguish its use of language from more dogmatic or discursive usages, often through slighting references to such language and the texts that embody it (we shall examine some of these as they occur in May Fourth fiction, but examples from Western realism are equally abundant). For however conventionalized the events portrayed in realist fiction, the text's claim to capture and relay a specific, unrepeatable slice of life remains crucial to its effectiveness: the text refers its authority to the external world by this means, thereby appearing not to be applying its structures of meaning to the world, but to have discovered them there.
One way that realism persuades us of the particularity of its content is the inclusion of apparently nonfunctional details that contribute descriptive richness to the work but seem to contribute nothing to its instructional purpose. Roland Barthes, in his essay on the "reality effect," cites a passage in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" in which a piano
[24] René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism , p. 254.
[25] On narrative as instruction see Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du roman , pp. 21–22.
is described as supporting "under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons." The barometer appears to be a "futile" detail, telling us nothing of relevance to the human drama for which we read the story. Even such details, however, are not purely mimetic but serve as signs enunciating the text's desire to align itself with the category of the Real. They communicate a sense of tangible reality, Barthes argues, because of their "resistance to meaning," which "confirms the great mythic opposition of the true-to-life (the lifelike) and the intelligible ." In the ideology of the modern age "reference to the 'concrete' . . . is always brandished like a weapon against meaning."[26] Details like Flaubert's barometer are therefore pivotal to our understanding of realism's truth claim: although they may appear random or arbitrary, their opacity invites our indulgence in the "pure fascination of the image"[27] and thereby persuades us of the authenticity of the world represented in the fiction.
But if the Real made itself felt in the text at no more than this local level, it would be experienced only as a supplement to the thematic intentions of the work. The Real has instead a more powerful formal role to play in the text as the agent of demystification . Like the mimetic details discussed above, the demystifying agent resists orderly absorption into the world of the fiction, and its irruption signifies the destabilizing presence of chaos, chance, and the arbitrary. Certain recognizable topoi , consisting largely of those unassimilable elements of nature that confound the efforts of the imagination to reorder the world, may be recognized as the primary demystifying agents in realist fiction: hunger, violence, disease, sexual desire, death. All exert powerful constraints on the subject and significantly operate directly on his or her physical being. In realist metaphysics it is always the body that is accorded substantiality, and as the list indicates, it is above all those features of the natural world that invasively trespass the imagined autonomy of the body that achieve status as emblems of the Real. Since their very materiality empowers them, all such agents appear in their essence to be closed off to language, which is powerless to avert the threat they represent to the body. In a sense, the text itself, as a linguistic construct, is helpless before them; perceived as external to language, the Real and its agents are finally unrepresentable and can
[26] Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language , p. 146.
[27] Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production , p. 58.
at best be pointed to. Not their direct representation, but their effect on the world of the fiction—the spectacle of demystification—constitutes the work. The Real is thus experienced in the text on one level as resistance and limitation and on a more profound level as the threat of indeterminacy of meaning—as the "unnameable."[28]
While the introjection of the Real into the world of the fiction serves the necessary function of prying the critical mind loose from the hold of tradition and thus creating a privileged platform of observation, its presence as the unnameable would appear to threaten disrupting the work's formal stability. The spectacle of demystification is, after all, one of pure negativity, which unchecked could lead only to self-destruction and the dissolution of the aesthetic experience. But the production of an art work is an assertive act, however disguised or hesitant, that entails the creation of an objectively binding meaning; pure negation can never serve as the sole support of a creative act.[29] The use of the Real to induce disillusionment must therefore be seen as only the critical first part of its role in realist fiction. The text would, in the strategic rhetoric of the mode, go on to capture the Real, to contain or domesticate it. But such terminology suggests that internalization—and hence domination—of the Real may better be understood as its banishment; at moments of closure the text projects the Real, with its threat of indeterminacy and chaos, back into the external world and thus reconstitutes itself as a stable system of meaning. Doing so amounts to the text's reestablishing a linguistic reign over the world, to its redefining the Real as the benign product of human endeavor, as determinate language. But in fact, with this gesture of banishment the text revives the distinction between the internal world of the fiction and the external world of the Real and its agents.
With the expulsion of the Real, the aesthetic response generated by realism reveals its similarity to the experience of catharsis that Aristotle believed tragedy instilled in its audience. Realism, like tragedy, performs a ritualistic purgation of the reader's emotions, specifically sympathetic identification with the figures portrayed (pity) and revulsion from the events represented (terror). Certainly much of the aesthetic satisfaction to be derived from realism depends on the arousal
[28] George Levine takes the creation of Frankenstein as the model of realism's flirtation with the "unnameable." See The Realistic Imagination , especially pp. 28–29.
[29] In this connection see Hans Robert Jauss's critique of Theodor Adorno's "aesthetics of negativity" in Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics , pp. 13–21.
and subsequent evacuation of these powerful emotions. But in the reception of the mode, what use is made of this experience? Rousseau was perhaps the first to complain that the cathartic capacity of art operated to maintain the status quo, that its effect was "limited to intensifying and not changing the established morals."[30] Like an act of sacrifice, the ritualistic rehearsal of the subdual of chaos and the inauguration of social order serves only to reaffirm that order and excuse the violence of its creation. Unlike more didactic forms of narrative, which may end with a moral injunction to alter one's actions and thereby change the world, realism would appear to lead only to a private experience of reconciliation with inalterable realities.
Aristotle developed his doctrine of catharsis, it will be remembered, in response to Plato's condemnation of Poetry as mere imitation of the world of appearances. Poetry, in Plato's view, inevitably gravitated toward the "imitation of calamity and recollection of sorrow," thereby stimulating an irrational pity that spreads from poet to audience as if by contagion.[31] In his defense of the arts, Aristotle argues that Poetry, through the cathartic purging of pity and terror, in the end serves to reinstate the higher claims of reason (and philosophy) in the human community.[32] Chinese aesthetic philosophers, lacking a theory of mimesis, likewise found the defense implied in the notion of catharsis unnecessary. Just as the literary artifact stands in a different relation to the referent in the Chinese tradition, so too is the work's connection to the emotional life of both author and reader perceived differently. Poetry is for the Chinese not a mediated objective correlative that, however skillfully the author employs the technique of his or her art, remains the weak shadow of a private subjectivity; it is rather a clear vessel through which stream emotions that are thought to be essentially shared and public. As the manifestation of communal and univer-
[30] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Politics and the Arts. Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre," quoted in ibid., p. 105.
[31] Calamity is, for Plato, the natural subject of imitation, since "the wise and calm temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when imitated." See The Dialogues of Plato, The Republic , book 10, p. 481.
[32] It is worth observing that both Plato and Aristotle discuss mimesis in an essentially ethical context. In fact, for Aristotle the actions imitated in a work of literature are the object of a priori ethical judgments: "The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad—the diversities of human character being nearly always derivative from this primary distinction" (The Poetics , p. 224). With this ethical concern Plato and Aristotle show a stronger kinship with early Chinese theoreticians than do later Western thinkers, who generally discuss the problem of mimesis in purely epistemological terms.
sally available human emotions rather than private, antisocial passions, poetry is thought to tap directly the fundamental human instincts, which, at least in the dominant Mencian branch of Confucianism, are believed to be benign and social. No contradiction follows from the simultaneous advocacy of the investigation of principle in things and an emotive theory of literature because emotion (qing ) and principle
The high value accorded poetry in the Chinese tradition is evidenced in Confucius's high praise for the Shi jing
[33] Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind , pp. 246–47.
[34] James J. Y. Liu writes:
The pragmatic concept of literature remained practically sacrosanct, so that critics who basically believed in other concepts rarely dared to repudiate it openly, but paid lip service to it while actually focusing attention on other concepts, or interpreted Confucius's words in such a way as to lend support to nonpragmatic theories, or simply kept silent about the pragmatic concept while developing others. (Chinese Theories of Literature , p. 111)
rhetoric are skills; the Way and virtue are realities."[35] As the vehicle of the Dao, literature was not a tool for the creation or discovery of new truths but a channel for the transmission of "realities," by which is meant the fundamental moral principles that underlie civilization.
In the West, classical mimetic theories, post-Cartesian epistemological attitudes, and nineteenth-century ideas about history combined to forge an evolutionary view of artistic development, which was endorsed by the promoters of realism and is still current today: new artistic forms are continuously generated in an effort to more nearly approach an ever-elusive external reality. Lacking a theory of mimesis, Chinese aesthetics developed a tenacious classicism; at least within the dominant Confucian tradition, the literati universally proclaimed the canon defined by Confucius to be the final repository of human wisdom and judged later works by the degree to which they approximated the spirit or form of the classics. From this classicism followed a taste for textual hermeneutics, which placed the burden on the interpreter to complete through study the meaning suggested by the text. The object of such study was to recover comprehension of the expressive situation that produced the text or, more profoundly, of the network of principles that operate through the text and of which it is a manifestation. Where an interpretive disturbance was recognized, it was imputed not to a representational inadequacy inherent in the text but to the inability of the interpreter to fully apprehend the significance of an abundantly sufficient text.[36]
Later generations of critics have accorded respectability to those genres of literary production modeled on the Five Classics. Of the
[35] Quoted in ibid., p. 114.
[36] It will rightly be objected here that both the Western and Chinese traditions are more complex than my argument allows, that I have limited my argument to Greek and Confucian schools of thought, ignoring Christian and Taoist alternatives within the two traditions. It is true that Christianity encouraged a hermeneutical tradition in some ways similar to Confucian classicism and that Chinese Taoists often showed a suspicion of language and linguistic attempts to grasp reality that seems at odds with my characterization of Chinese faith in linguistic manifestations of reality. But Christian thinkers share with the Greeks the notion of an ideal world behind or beyond the phenomenal world and transcending it; the arts, since their media are irredeemably a part of the phenomenal world, can at best hope to mimic what small part of the transcendent world is available to human understanding. Neither Taoists nor Confucians, however, sought to repudiate the phenomenal world through transcendence: for both, truth was immanent in the world. Confucians sought to live according to the principles that patterned the world, whereas Taoists sought a holistic perception of the world as it existed before it was differentiated into patterns by language. Language was suspect to the Taoists precisely because it was the instrument of that differentiation.
canonical works, only the historical writings, of which there are two, raise issues of narrativity and the representation of human actions in time. The first of these, Shu jing
Aristotle in his Poetics disparages the historian as nothing more than an imitator of the particular phenomena of the world of appearances, or "the thing that has been," while defending the poet, who calculates what is probable given certain universal truths and describes instead "the thing that might be."[38] As we have seen, in China history itself served the exemplary function Aristotle attributes to epic and
[38] Aristotle, The Poetics , pp. 234–35.
drama and as a result an independent raison d'être was never generated for fictive narrative forms. China's lack of an epic tradition[39] and the shackling of the Chinese mythmaking imagination, for which Confucian rationalism is frequently blamed,[40] left history the only indigenous model for narrative writing; not until the Tang dynasty (and then only after the arrival of extensive cultural influences from India) did fiction become fully differentiated from history. The uncertain bibliographical treatment traditionally accorded xiaoshuo
Despite this taint of spuriousness and triviality, Chinese fiction became increasingly autonomous and sophisticated over the course of the centuries and even found its champions. Yet in the eyes of most critics, Chinese fiction never shed the didacticism of its historiographical and philosophical models. C. T. Hsia, for example, has frequently observed the moralistic strain in Chinese vernacular literature
[39] See Jaroslev Prusek[*] , "History and Epics in China and in the West," in Prusek, Chinese History and Literature , pp. 17–34.
[40] See Zhang Haishan, "'Zi bu yu guai, li, luan, shen' pingyi."
[42] See Kenneth J. Dewoskin, "The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction," in Andrew H. Plaks, Chinese Narrative , pp. 45–66.
and lamented the failure of traditional criticism to discover "the therapeutic value of popular fiction in providing a vicarious outlet for a reader's repressed desires."[43] But as Hsia has also pointed out, some works of traditional fiction explore "repressed desires" with remarkable sophistication,[44] and it could further be argued that some, particularly from the late Ming and after, achieve powerful cathartic effects through the evocation of Taoist and Buddhist notions of transcendence. It is beyond the scope of this study to consider such works, but we may observe that where cathartic effects are achieved, they generally coexist with more secular, instructional aims. The ending of Gao E's
In summary, there are several points of marked contrast between the internal operation of realism and traditional Chinese aesthetic assumptions. Realism predicates for the author an autonomous platform of objective observation, a station that in theory is similar to that of the social scientist, and it operates on its readers through catharsis, by arousing and then purging the unpleasant emotions of pity and terror from their minds. In contrast, traditional Chinese literary theory was dominated by a notion of literature as the spontaneous expression of the author's emotional life; even when a place for observation was found in literary composition, it was understood as only a stage in a process of ethical cultivation. Moreover, the Chinese had no notion of catharsis and generally assumed that fiction (if not all literature) should serve didactic purposes. At both the creative and receptive ends, then, realism presented the Chinese with a fundamentally new model of aesthetic experience.
The term realism was introduced into China in two stages, first in
[43] C. T. Hsia, "Yen Fu and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao," p. 226.
[44] C. T. Hsia, "Society and Self in the Chinese Short Story," in his book The Classic Chinese Novel , pp. 299–321, especially pp. 307–8.
the context of the late Qing crusade for national restoration
Before going on to consider the theoretical arguments advanced both for and against realism by Chinese intellectuals, it is worth stopping to consider for a moment Lu Xun's facetious definition of the
term in "The Tablet": "To write largely about others
