ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the aesthetic characteristic of a mutually promotive relationship between the nonexistent and the existent perspective, expanding readers’ understanding of perspective as a narrative form. The author creatively introduces two opposing concepts, the “focalization” and “blind spot,” of perspective. They deepen the understanding of it as a narrative form and also make it possible to connect the perspective and the traditional aesthetic law, highlighting the mutual promotive relation of the nonexistent and the existent. The concept of internal blind spot proposed by the author helps understand the structure of narration. Narrative strategies such as “coincidence,” “misunderstanding,” and “tricks” are often used in the plots of novels. These narrative components and narration are “within the range of focalization. A blind point existing due to a limited perspective will vanish with the expansion of perspective. The story titled “Shi Wu Guan Xi Yan Cheng Qiao Huo, or The Joke about Fifteen Strings of Cash Turns into a Coincidental Misfortune” (十五贯戏言成巧祸) [hereafter “The Joke about Fifteen Strings of Cash Turns into a Coincidental Misfortune”] in Stories to Awaken the World (醒世恒言) by Feng Menglong (冯梦龙) and quite a few contemporary detective novels adopt this narrative strategy. The existence of the blind spot created a meaningful blank in the range of certainty of focalization. Since the perspective and narrator are different, researchers of narrative literature need to study the essential characteristics of various perspectives and the force adjusting the relationship between the perspective and narrator. The narrative writer releases the specter-like narrator and cuts the circle of omniscient of their own into sectors of a limited view in the text, which is called perspective. The perspective includes four types: the omniscient, the limited, the external, and the internal, which provide the writer with the angle, degree, layer, and method of depicting the world and life, respectively. Readers can grasp a literary work’s philosophical and aesthetic connotations as well as the change and originality of the literary trend. In other words, both the narrator and perspective are the narrative forms and strategies adopted by the author. Only by studying the narrator and perspective can we explore the cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic connotations of the narrative text and understand the spiritual world of the author. Connecting the “focalization” of narrative perspective with Chinese aesthetics emphasizing the mutual promotive relationship between 2the existent and nonexistent, the author improves the realm of narrative art. Chinese narratology has the same origin as Chinese culture. The system of aesthetics highlighting the mutual promotive relationship between the void and the solid and the nonexistent and the existent brought about by the philosophical views of Lao Zi, Zhuang Zi, and Zen and the aesthetic views embedded in the theories of ancient literary and painting criticism has two layers: the existent giving birth to the nonexistent and the nonexistent producing the existent. Focusing on the existent and the nonexistent is about the narrative strategy, while the existent giving birth to the nonexistent and the nonexistent producing the existent is about the aesthetic effect. The reason for focusing on the nonexistent is that it is more colorful than the existent for it includes the “Grand Existent.” The crux of both the existent giving birth to the nonexistent and the nonexistent producing the existing is focalization, which means considering narration as a complete system or procedure in a specific time and scope. Time and range supplement each other and compensate for each other’s deficiencies. Focalization is impossible if treated as being isolated or deprived of a specific time as it can only happen in a particular time and scope in the evolution of the narrative world.
