Literary openness: A bridge across the divide between Chinese and western literary thought

Comparative Literature, Spring 2003 by Gu, Ming Dong

3) Reader-oriented openness. Theorists who uphold this notion are mostly French: Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva. Stanley Fish is an American counterpart. This radical school of openness practically leaves out the role of the author and puts emphasis on the incessant generation of meanings through the free play of the signifier in the process of reading. Barthes, for example, resolutely banishes the author from the scene of reading to the wilderness of oblivion and seeks to undo all repressive author(ity) by examining the ceaselessly slipping and sliding nature of language. Derrida also pays little attention to the role of the author as he carefully teases out warring forces of signification within the text itself.

4) Interactive openness. Theorists who hold this notion include Iser, Holland, and Eco. Iser's reception theory proposes a cooperative partnership between the text and reader. The reader is guided and limited by the text (49-50). At the same time, it is in the reader's participation necessitated by the indeterminacy of the text that he situates the text as a work of art the aesthetic of which he defines as an empty principle, a potential effect, which is realized through the interaction of the reader and text. Like Iser, Holland values the reader's independence but at the same time imposes formal and authorial limits on reading. By suggesting that the author's identity theme is inscribed in the text and can be set in interactive motion with the reader's identity theme, he even seems to approach Hirsch's position (see, especially, The Critical I). Similarly, Eco insists that an open work is constituted by the cooperative effort of both the author and reader and that reading is thus at the same time both a re-creation and a performance (The Open Work 19).

Insights into Openness in Chinese Poetics

Since I have suggested that the Chinese tradition had an early start in the inquiry into literary openness, the reader will naturally ask: "Are there such concepts as 'openness,' 'open work,' and 'open poetics' in traditional Chinese literary thought?" To this question, my answer is an unequivocal "no." If, however, he/she rephrases the question and asks, "Are there any concepts with similar implications?," the answer is "yes." Although nowhere in Chinese literary thought can we find exact counterparts to the concepts of "literary openness" or "open work," traditional Chinese literary thought comes to similar insights when discussing what might be called aesthetic suggestiveness. By surveying and reconceptualizing some key accounts of aesthetic suggestiveness in traditional Chinese literary thought, I hope to demonstrate that "literary openness" as it is understood within the Chinese tradition can be brought into a meaningful dialogue with contemporary Western literary theory.

Multivalence and polysemy are two terms frequently used in contemporary discourse on literary openness. Traditional Chinese literary thought contains terms that are virtually equivalent. In Wenxin diaolong (Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), the first comprehensive poetics in China, Liu Xie (465-522) systematically discusses the nature, function, and technique of a dual concept called yinxiu (concealed and conspicuous beauty), which comes very close to the modern idea of literary openness. In Chapter 40 he states: