1. A comparative study of the Indian poetics and the western poetics

A full Professor since 1982 and recently retired Dr Mohit K. Ray (1940-) is one of the seniormost Professors of English in the country. Apart from his rich explorations of Comparative Poetics Professor Ray has four books and a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals in India and abroad, which reflect his wide range of scholarship including Criticism, Comparative Literature, New Literatures, Canoni-cal Literature, Comparative Poetics and Translation Studies.

Professor Ray has attended and chaired sessions as an invited participant in many International Conferences, Seminars and Colloquia held in different parts of the globe—England, France, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Estonia, America, Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong, Turkey, etc.

Professor Ray has studied several languages including Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, French and German.

He has edited several anthologies of critical studies, and edits The Atlantic Critical Review, an interna-tional quarterly of global circulation. He is also at present the Chief Editor of Atlantic Publishers and Distri-butors (P) Ltd, New Delhi.

Professor Ray is associated with many international bodies such as Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, Association Internationale des Critiques Littéraires, Paris, and the SANART Association of Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Turkey.

A

Comparative

Study

of

the

Indian

Poetics

and

the

Western

Poetics

This

One

D399-1F2-5BU0

Copyrighted

material

A

Comparative

Study

of

The

Indian

Poetics

and

The

Western

Poetics

Mohit

K.

Ray

Sarup

&

Sons

New

Delhi

110002

Copyrighted

material

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A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE INDIAN

POETICS AND THE WESTERN POETICS

© Author

1st Published 2008

ISBN 978-81-7625-850-0

Printed in India

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Laser Typesetting at Chitra Computers and

Printed at Mehra Offset Printers, Delhi.

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DEDICATED

To

Professor Ramaranjan Mukherji

at whose lotus feet

I had my first lessons in Poetics

Foreword

Indian Aesthetics takes its start from the projections of Bharata in his magnificent work entitled Nātyaśāstra, and winding its course through the presentations of Bhāmaha, Dandin and Vāmana ultimately receives a full-bodied form in the writings of Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, Viśvanātha and Jagannātha. Western Aesthetics similarly takes its start from the writings of Aristotle and moving through the presentations of Coleridge, Shelley, Abercrombie and T.S. Eliot receives a full-bodied form through combination of the theories presented by all writers on Literary Criticism.

Indian Aesthetics considers Rasa as of paramount importance in poetry, and expends considerable energy in analysing the process of Aesthetic Realisation, which is experienced by the connoisseurs of poetry. While some readers analyse Rasa as being given rise to through perceptive or inferential knowledge, those who dive deep into the problem indicate that Rasa is neither perceptible nor an inferred identity, but it is to be experienced within the heart of their hearts by the connoisseurs of poetry. Bhaṭṭanāyaka gives a new turn to the entire theory of Aesthetic Realisation and floats the concept of Generalisation—a process which presents the characters and situations in their universalised forms. Abhinavagupta expands this process further and describes experience of Rasa as the process of unique confrontation between the

generalised subject and the universalized object of experience. This process of universalisation that operates in both the areas of subject and object is effected through the function of Suggestion that receives a full treatment in the hands of Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta. Ānandavardhana describes the function of suggestion as of paramount importance in poetry, and while ascertaining that experience of Rasa is effected through the operation of function of Suggestion maintains that all other elements of poetry, like the literary embellishment and diction, the technique and the mode of presentation depend on Rasa of paramount importance for their emergence and sustenance. It is said that Rasa is not implanted in poetry through combination of different poetical elements, but the poetical elements are brought into being by Rasa in its endeavour to express itself. This naturally takes us to the gateway of the Gestalt theory of Poetry, which says that Poetry is an organic whole and is incapable of being classified into component parts.

While most of the Indian theoreticians flourishing after Ānandavardhana follow the viewpoints of this great propounder of the doctrine of Suggestion, new sparks of thought are traceable in the presentations of a few theoreticians like Kuntaka and Jagannātha, who try to take a realistic view of the process relating to creation and appreciation of Poetry. Thus, Kuntaka floats the concept of Vakrokti, which is nothing but the balance existing between the music of sound and the music of sense, and asserts that though the music of sound tries to excel the music of sense in point of charmingness and vice versa, the superb poetical talent of the literary artist does not allow the one to excel the other, so that a balance between the two, namely music of sound and music of sense is maintained. A close

analysis of the viewpoints of different Indian theoreticians indicates that the function of Suggestion is of paramount importance in poetry and in a specimen of Sublime Poetry, the symbolic content is required to emerge as the idea of paramount importance, because this symbolic content does not stop at one point, and the process of symbolisation proceeds through different tiers and raises into comprehension a number of meanings. This process of unfolding of different tiers of the symbolic content by the function of suggestion continues till the Infinite is arrived at, enabling the connoisseur to experience the Bliss associated with the Absolute. It is not without reason, therefore, that while Ānandavardhana declares critical intellect as an essentiality for appreciation of Poetry, Sri Aurobindo, the greatest Saint-cum-Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, declares that apart from critical intellect what is necessary for appreciation of Poetry is spiritual eye, which enables the connoisseur to have a glimpse of the Infinite and savour the delight of Bliss associated with it.

Western Aesthetics also considers experience of Bliss as the aim of Poetry, but because of the mental set up of literary theoreticians it fails to arrive at the Infinite that constitutes the seat of Bliss and Beauty. Western theoreticians are not to be blamed for this deficiency, because the main philosophy guiding Western thinkers is the philosophy of Materialism, which is in sharp contradistinction to the philosophy of Spirituality that guides literary artists of Indian soil. Aristotle mainly discusses the external elements of Poetry and while analysing the concept of ‘Katharsis’ describes it as the method of purgation that makes the man free from the thoughts concerning his mundane existence. Aristotle, however, does not take Poetry to a higher level, and does not assert the principle that Poetry not only makes the

man free from all mundane prepositions but places him on a higher plane, reaching which he can realise his kinship with all the members of the Universe, because the Infinite is present in all. It is here that Western Aesthetics differs mainly from Indian Aesthetics, because while Indian theoreticians describe the experience of identity of the man with the Infinite as the goal of human existence, Western theoreticians put more emphasis on individuality and consider Poetry as an expression of the individuality of the artist. It is here that it is necessary to understand the distinction between ‘individuality’ and ‘personality’. While ‘individuality’ prompts the individual to remain alone, unable to experience his kinship with the members of the universe, ‘personality’ enables the man to consider himself as one, related not only to all members of humanity, but to all members of the association of the universe. It is because of this that while the individual establishes the relation of confrontation with others, ‘personality’ enables the man to enter into the hearts of others and share their joys and sorrows.

While Western Aesthetics suffers from this deficiency it must be said to its credit that it has been able to present certain general truths that are in line with the truths projected by Indian Aesthetics. Thus, Longinus gives profound importance to the function of Suggestion and asserts that in the Sublime Poetry the function of Suggestion is of paramount importance and when this function of Suggestion is triggered into action it unfolds multiple tiers of meaning and implants Sublimity in the document of literary art. It is because of this that when one dives deep into Longinus he has the feeling that these happen to be the writings of Ānandavardhana, the propounder of the doctrine of Dhvani. Shelley, in his “Defence of Poetry” says the same thing and following the line of Ānandavardhana

says that the function of Suggestion converts the most ugly into the most lovely, enabling the refined reader to have experiences of Beauty. Coleridge similarly considers the function of Suggestion as of paramount importance and describes Poetry as an organic whole. At the same time he asserts that even if a single expression is dissociated from the structure of Poetry it makes the poet say something else than what he intends to say. It is refreshing to note that T.S.Eliot is the only literary artist, who dives deep into the theory of Aesthetic Realisation and floats the concept of ‘objective correlative’, that is nothing but the conglomeration of the excitant and the ensuent, the permanent and the transient moods. Eliot is influenced to a great extent by the speculations of Indian philosophers and consequently it becomes easy for him to speak of the subordination of tiny ego and emergence of expanded ego, consequential upon the experience of Beauty. It is this expansion of ego-boundary that constitutes the essence of Aesthetic Realisation.

Stephane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry, the two chief protagonists of French symbolism lay emphasis on the function of Suggestion. Both of them are of opinion that when the function of Suggestion is triggered into action it unfolds multiple tiers of meanings, investing Sublimity in the document of literary art. However, while Indian Aesthetics expresses the opinion that even ordinary expressions are endowed with the power of triggering the function of Suggestion into action, French Symbolists project the theory that separate expressions are necessary for the purpose of suggesting the symbolic, because ordinary expressions have lost their force through constant use. It is at this material point that the viewpoints of French Symbolists differ from theories propounded by Indian Aesthetics, which bestow the capacity of presenting the symbolic on even ordinary expressions employed in common usage.

Indian Aesthetics originates from the school of

Grammar and the indebtedness of literary theoreticians

to Grammar is clearly acknowledged in Dhvanyāloka.

For a clear understanding of Indian Aesthetics,

therefore, it is necessary to understand the principles of

Grammar, particularly the projections of Bhartrhari, the

great grammarian-philosopher whose linguistic

speculations stand high above the linguistic

speculations projected by all philosophers of the world.

Bhartrhari introduces the concept of Sphota which

refers to the idea of the word residing in the mind of the

user and distinguishes it from Dhvani which has got a

physical structure. It is said that Dhvani pronounced by

our speech-organs does not convey any meaning: it

simply effects revelation of the Sphota or the idea of the

word. Bhartrhari projects the theory that both the word

and the meaning are ideational in character and

consequently there is the relation of actual identity

between the word and the meaning. Bhartrhari

proceeds to say further that thought first of all arises in

the mind of the speaker and passing through different

stages it gets a full-bodied form and ultimately reveals

itself through comprehensible sound caught by the

auditory organ. Bhartrhari, thus, speaks of different

tiers through which the thought proceeds till it takes

the form of expression comprehended by the auditory

organ. Bhartrhari says further that because the thought

and the language constitute a complete whole, it is not

possible to differentiate one from the other, and

consequently the sentence is an individual whole

incapable of being classified into different components.

This theory of Bhartrhari is of profound importance not

only for the linguistic speculations of Indian

philosophers but also for the linguistic theory of the

entire world, both East and West.

Derrida projects a theory which is somewhat akin

to the theory of Sphota adumbrated by Bhartrhari and

his followers in the area of philosophy of Grammar. Derrida also says that thought is generated first in the

mind of the man and passing through different stages it ultimately expresses itself through the sound

comprehended by the auditory organ. Just as Bhartrhari differentiates the Sphota or the idea of word

from the comprehensible word, similarly, Derrida differentiates the thought from the expression, which

remain united with each other, and says that, the difference between the two is to be understood for the

proper comprehension of the nature of the word and meaning. The theory of deconstruction projected by

Derrida, however, is not to be carried out to its logical extreme, because if the words are separated from the

structure of the entire poem and an attempt is made to comprehend the thought lying behind each word, then

we will make the poet say something else than what is intended to be said by him. It is, therefore, that

Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta project the Gestalt theory of Poetry and assert that Poetry is an

organic whole incapable of being divided into component parts.

This analysis of Indian Poetics and Western Poetics indicates the vastness of the concepts and the

multiplicity of the theories adumbrated by different literary theoreticians, both Indian and Western. In order

to make a comparative study of the two systems of Poetics it is necessary to have profound penetration into

the texts on Indian Aesthetics as also on Western Aesthetics. It is not easy to find a talent, having the

competence to have this type of penetration into the Science of literary criticism as projected by Indian

theoreticians as also by Western theoreticians. Bengal is fortunate in having in Professor Mohit Kumar Ray,

Retired Professor of English, Burdwan University, such talent having profound command over both the systems

of Aesthetics—Indian and Western. In his work entitled

A Comparative Study of Indian Poetics and Western

Poetics Professor Ray has started the first chapter with

a search for the literary universal and gradually has

unfolded the theories concerning literary

embellishment, literary excellence and literary

blemishes as discussed by Indian theoreticians. The

view of Indian literary critics on the concept of Vakrokti,

that consists in maintenance of balance between the

music of sound and the music of sense appears next

and this is followed by the distinction of ‘Poetic

Naturalism’ and ‘Hyperbolic Expression’, that

constitutes the basis of all literary embellishments. As a

matter of fact, there are two ways of presenting the

Poetic Truth in a document of literary art. While in some

cases the Poetic Truth is presented as resplendent in

the light of another truth, in some cases the Poetic

Truth is allowed to shine in its own splendour. Professor

Mohit Kumar Ray makes a detailed analysis of these

two types of presentation, the first of which creates the

Oblique Poetry and the second Poetic Naturalism.

The theory of Rasa constitutes one of the most

difficult theories in the entire arena of Aesthetics, and

since Rasa is regarded as the centre of gravity of Poetic

Art, no curious reader can avoid examining the merits

and demerits of the different theories trying to explain

the process of Aesthetic Realisation. It is to the credit of

Professor Ray that he has been able to penetrate deep

into all the theories of Aesthetic Realisation and to

discuss as to why the theories adumbrated by

Bhaṭṭanāyāka and Abhinavagupta are to be regarded as

standard Indian theories relating to attainment of

Aesthetic Experience. Professor Ray understands the

Indian viewpoint relating to Rasa, which says that Rasa

consists in unique confrontation between the

generalised subject and the universalised object of

experience. Another difficult theory projected by the

Philosophy of Grammar, as also by Indian Aesthetics is

the theory of Sphoṭa, which describes the idea of the

word as the real significant unit. It is said that the

thought is first generated in the mind of the speaker

and when he wants to express his thought he takes

recourse to word which does have physical structure of

its own. The same thing occurs in the theory of Derrida,

who also differentiates the thought from the expression,

and ultimately says that the thought and the expression

combine at a later stage to constitute the significant

word. After analysing the theories adumbrated by both

the systems Professor Ray concludes.:‘To compare the

correspondences between the Indian schools and the

Western schools is to be amazingly aware of the

immensity and profundity of the systematic study of the

Indian Aestheticians. By comparison the Western

poetics appears perfunctory in spite of occasional bright

insightful flashes that we find in Aristotle, Coleridge,

Croce or Mallarmé for that matter. The reason as to why

Indian Poetics stands far above Western poetics is that

while Indian mind is guided by the Philosophy of

Spirituality, the Western mind is guided mainly by the

Philosophy of Materialism. While Indian mind accepts

the Philosophy of Spirituality to the neglect of the

Philosophy of Materialism, the Western mind puts

greatest premium on the Philosophy of Materialism to

the utter neglect of the Philosophy of Spirituality. As a

matter of fact, all Indian artistic forms owe their genesis

to Spirituality and are intended to conduct man to the

gateway of the Good through the shady avenue of the

beautiful. Ever since man has been born as the man he

has been trying to achieve freedom and emancipation,

light and beauty, the difference between the two minds

lying in the fact that while Indian mind shows the path

of Spirituality as the path for attainment of Bliss and

Beauty, Western mind considers the path of

xvi

Materialism as the means of tasting Bliss and Beauty. It is not without reason, therefore, that Indian theories on Poetic Art are capable of being applied to all artistic forms like Dance and Music, Painting and Drama, and actually attempts are being made to evaluate all artistic forms through application of the principles enunciated by Indian Aesthetics. This does not happen in case of Western theory of literary art.

The Bibliography attached at the end of Professor Mohit Kumar Ray’s book indicates the vastness of the knowledge gathered by him through acquaintance with texts of Indian and Western Aesthetics and bears testimony to the great labour expended by him in structuring the work. I am sure the book entitled A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics is going to establish itself as one of the fundamental works on Comparative Aesthetics, providing inspiration to all future research scholars on the subject.

I congratulate Dr Mohit Kumar Ray whom I had the privilege of teaching in his Intermediate days and welcome the work to the arena of Comparative Literature and Comparative Aesthetics.

(Ramaranjan Mukherji)

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Preface

The fact that literature, though culture-bound and period-based, has a universal and timeless appeal led me to believe—and this is the hypothesis—that there must be something in a literary work, which, for lack of any better term, may be called literary universal that transcends time and space across lands and cultures. I had, accordingly a feeling that the speculations of the aestheticians of the West and of India about the locus of literariness or what constitutes literariness, though in all probability developed independently, must have many ideas in common. I say ‘in all probability’ because the role of the academic centre at Alexandria as a possible centre for transmitting Indian ideas to the West cannot be completely ruled out. Some Western scholars have, for example, tried to establish that Pythagoras, who was contemporary of Buddha, had visited India and took back the essence of Indian philosophy; so much so that Plato’s subsequent theory of the uniqueness of the eidos is said to be influenced by the Indian theory of Advaitavād. However, in course of my reading the large number of Western texts of Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Horace, Longinus, Cicero et al. I have not come across any reference in their works to Indian poetics. Nor have I found in the writings of Bharata, Daṇḍin, Bhāmaha, Udbhata, Rudraṭa, Vāmana, Kṣemendra, Mammaṭa, Ruyyaka or Kuntaka any reference to the Western poetics. Aristotle’s Poetics,

of course, was lost sight of during the Middle Ages, and

the first oriental version appears to have been made by

Abu Baschar, a Nestorian Christian from the Syrian into

Arabic, about the year 935. The Latin translation

appeared only in the thirteenth century, and first

complete Latin translation was made by Giorgio Valla in

1498 in Venice, by which time Sanskrit poetics had

practically run its course. Sanskrit poetics roughly

covers the period from second century B.C. to eleventh

century A.D. It is all the more amazing, therefore, that

great thinkers , divided by space and time and having

no cross-cultural relations, moved in the same direction

in their search for the locus of literariness , showed

similar divergent views and arrived at similar

conclusions.

It is only natural that, in due reverence to the

richness of Indian critical tradition many Western

critics have often felt the need for comparing the poetics

of the East and the West. René Wellek, the greatest

critical historian of the twentieth century and the co-

author of the seminal book, Theory of Literature (New

York, 1949) remarked: “I had for years advocated a

proper interplay between a study of national literatures,

their common tendencies, the totality of the Western

tradition […] and the ultimate ideal of a comparative

study of all literatures, including those of the farthest

East” (44).

This book arises out of the UGC Major Research

Project [(vide UGC F.-5-33/2002 (HRP), dated 09 March

2002)] on A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics

and the Western Poetics. The project was sanctioned for

three years with effect from 10 May 2002. It was

submitted to UGC on 6th May 2005. The present book

is an abridged version of the Project.

The primary source of inspiration for this Project

was my teacher, Professor Ramaranjan Mukherji, the

most erudite Sanskrit scholar I have ever come across and who initiated me to Aesthetics in 1955 and later introduced me to the fascinating world of Sanskrit Poetics. I am still under the spell he cast on me more than half a century ago.

Professor Mukherji, former Chacellor of Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapith, Tirupati, is a living legend in the domain of Sanskrit scholarship in India and abroad, and also a person known for his legendary magnanimity. Words fail me in expressing my gratitude to him, for affectionately writing a luminous Foreword to this book.

My interest in Comparative Poetics was further reinforced by S.C. Sengupta, primarily a great Shakespearean scholar and Rabindra Kumar Dasgupta, an eminent comparatist of international standing.

As I started reading the Sanskrit texts and commentaries on them I was struck as much by the subtle nuances of critical thinking of the great thinkers and theoreticians like Bharata, Dandin, Kṣemendra, Ānandavardhana and others as by the insightful commentaries on them by great Sanskrit scholars like S.K. De, S.N. Dasgupta, Krishna Chaitanya, Ramaranjan Mukherji, P.C. Lahiri, V. Raghavan, J.L. Masson, M.V. Patwardhan, Krisna Rayan, V.K. Gokak, R.S. Pathak, Kapil Kapoor, R.C. Dwivedi, Kalipada Giri, V.Y. Kantak, A.P. Dani and many others. I have heavily drawn on them and have used their insights in developing my thesis by restructuring their ideas into a new discourse. I am greatly indebted to them. No less indebted am I to the wonderful staff of the National Library which I visited umpteen times in course of these three years, and which has been the main source of my reading materials, both primary and secondary. I am immensely indebted to the staff of the central library, Burdman University in general and Sri Gautam Datta in

particular for the help and cooperation I received during

the tenure of the project.

I also gratefully acknowledge the service I have

received from the staff of the library of Jawaharlal

Nehru University which I occasionally visited during my

visits to Delhi. However, my deepest gratitude is to the

University Grants Commission for the generous support

without which the Project could not have been

undertaken at all, and in this connection I should also

like to keep on record my gratitude to the experts of the

concerned panel for the confidence evinced in me. I had

occasion to discuss these essays with my junior

colleague Professor Rama Kundu who assiduously went

through the manuscript and made many valuable

suggestions; I am grateful to her. I am also grateful to

my wife and children for giving me ample leisure and

freedom necessary for any scholarly pursuit. I owe a

debt of gratitude to Prabhat Sharma of Sarup & Sons,

New Delhi, for taking interest in the book and for seeing

it through the Press.

And, finally I alone am responsible for the various

mistakes and lapses that may be there in the book.

Mohit K. Ray

Retired Professor of English

Burdwan University, Burdwan - 713 104

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the following books and journals for using my articles published in these.

Comparative Poetics. Eds. Claudio Guillen of Harvard University. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1985.

Historical and Cultural Contexts of Linguistic and Literary Phenomenon.Guelph: University of Guelph, Canada.1989.

Forces of Vision. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1994.

Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 1995:2. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1995.

Literary Theory and Criticism Eds. A.P. Dani and V.M.Madge. Delhi: Pencraft International. 1998.

Interliteraria 3. Tartu: University of Tartu, Estonia, 1998.

Classical Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. A.P. Dani and V.M. Madge. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001.

Merope Anno XIII N. 32. 65123 Pescra. Italy, 2001.

SECL Studies in English and Comparative Literature.Vol. 20. Salzburg:University of Salzburg, 2004.

Grove. No.12, 2005. Jaen (Spain): University of Jaen, 2005.

Contents

Foreword

vii

Preface

xvii

Acknowledgements

xxi

1. Introduction: Search for the Literary Universal 1

2. Alamkāra and the Rhetorical School

14

3. Indian Theory of Guna and Doṣa, in Kāvyasārira, and Stylistics and the Western Theory of Form

45

4. Vakrokti and Oblique Poetry

80

5. Svabhāvokti and Statement Poetry

96

6. Aucitya and Decorum

104

7. Dhvani and Suggestion

114

8. Rasa and Pleasure

132

9. Indian Theory of Sphoṭa and Derrida's Theory of Écriture

157

10. Imitation: Bharata and Aristotle

167

11. Conclusion

179

Bibliography

186

Index

194

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1

Introduction: Search for

the Literary Universal

There is no doubt about the fact that literature is

essentially culture-bound, in the sense that a particular

culture produces a particular kind of literature, as it is

equally true, that the culture of a particular country at

a particular point of space and time is reflected in the

literature produced by that country. In other words, just

by reading the ancient European classics of Aeschylus,

Sophocles or Euripides we can form an idea about the

Greek culture of the time. To read Antigone is to

understand the importance of the burial of the dead as

a religious ritual. We learn their notions of the Dyke, the

Nemesis and the supreme importance of God and the

various gods and goddesses in the lives of the Greek

people. Similarly by reading Homer we can have a fairly

correct idea of the culture that prevailed in Greece at his

time, including the cultural heritage enshrined in the

great epics in the actions of the various characters and

the situations described. We can have an idea of their

values, their priorities and the dominant ideas that

prevailed in Greece of his time. The same is true about

the Roman literature. To read Plautus or Terence or

Seneca, or Virgil or Theocritus, or Bion or Moschus is to

have an idea of the different facets of the Roman culture.

Again, when we read the stories of Charlemagne, or

Roman de la Rose we at once realize the importance of

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the values that the French cherished. We learn about the medieval knight-errantry and the values that it cultivated, from the stories of the Arthurian romances. But what is more important is that a literary work is produced at a particular point of time incorporating in it the culture of the time. Thus the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata or the Ramayana embodies the essentials of the Indian culture of the time, although as epics of growth these two epics cover a long period of Indian culture. It is impossible to appreciate the poetry of Tulasidas or Kabir or the Bhajans of Meera without an awareness of the Bhakti movement that swept the North India in the fifteenth century, as it is not possible to understand and enjoy Milton’s Paradise Lost without having an idea of Christianity in general and the Bible in particular. Similarly, the poems and plays based on the life and teachings of the Buddha, such as Tagore’s Natīr Pūjā or a poem like “Pūjārini”, cannot be appreciated without some knowledge of the Buddhist cult that dominated the Indian culture for a long time. The same is true about any literature of any country of any time. It is the cultural base of a country at a particular point of space and time that produces the superstructure of literature. A literary work, while incorporating the culture of the time, is also frozen in a particular space and time. But the paradox is that readers of different countries, of different cultures, of different religions and beliefs, of different ideologies, of different passions and prejudices do appreciate literatures of other countries, other cultures, other religions, other beliefs, other ideologies, immaterial of the fact whether a literary work was produced centuries ago, or only a year before, whether it was produced by the neighboring country or a country situated on the other side of the globe. This leads us to the conclusion that there is something in these literary works produced across continents and

centuries, that has an appeal, which is both timeless and universal.

But the more basic question is: what is literature? and, then, what constitutes literariness? Our main concern is poetry, but poetry is only one form of literature. So literature is the genus and poetry is the species. So, in order to understand, the true nature of poetry it is first necessary to understand what is literature? Language is the tool of literature as it is a means of communication. But communications can be of different kinds. When one is interested in giving just an information such as two plus two make four we do not consider it as a literary expression. But the moment a person tries to say something in a beautiful and charming manner we have a feeling that he is engaged in a literary enterprise. It is not always that a writer can say something in a memorable manner, but when he does succeed he has produced literature, howsoever small or however little its value may be. Matthew Arnold said in his Essays in Criticism that literature is the record of the ‘best that is known and thought in the world’. It is also true that not many people do deliberately try to produce literature but the records of their thoughts and experiences describing certain situations, real or imaginary, contain in them immense literary value. Such were the writings of Winston Churchill whose writings on the Second World War brought him the highest literary award, the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rousseau’s Confessions or De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater are regarded as literary works. In fact a literary artist is more concerned with interpreting himself rather than in revealing himself to others. None of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins was published during his lifetime. It was only some twenty years after his death when` his friend Robert Bridges brought out an edition of his poems in

1918 that the world became aware of the rich storehouse of literary wealth that the poems contained. It is possible also, then, that a writer produces some of the finest specimens of literature in blissful ignorance of the fact that his private thoughts and feelings expressed in some poems may be publicly shared, enjoyed and immensely valued. But most writers, however, write with a target reader who, they believe, would appreciate the world view that they present, their philosophies of life and the stories they tell to communicate the fabrics of their visions. They try to express themselves in a way which they think would help their readers to understand them best. Literature thus can be defined as an art by which expression is achieved in language. But literature is not a one-sided affair. It is sometimes said that a poet talks to himself; we simply overhear him. If that were so then the poet could later burn his poems or bury them or tear them off, but he does not do so. He publishes them unless, as in the case of Hopkins, his feelings that as a priest he should not indulge in writing poetry make him refrain from publishing them. If we believe that literature is produced by the writer for the sake of his own pleasure we are taking an extremely subjective point of view. Again, if we hold that literature is produced with a definite aim of propagating certain ideas, as in propaganda literature, which is meant for the readers as consumers, we are taking an objective view, or at least we are over-emphasizing the objective element which leads to one form of realism in which the substance exhibited is the most important thing. It would be much safer to say that literature is communication. On one side is the writer and on the other side is the reader and they are connected by the literary work. In Marxist terms the writer is the producer, the literary work is the product and the reader is the consumer. Communication is, thus, the

fundamental thing in literature. If there is no communication there is no literature. The product may be there but if I do not know how to use it, it has ceased to be a product for me. For me it is a useless stuff. There could be some fine poetry written in old Chinese. But if I do not understand the language, for me it is only a body of meaningless sounds. In other words any literary work written in a language which is not known to the reader, fails for that reader as a literary work, simply because no communication has been established.

The art consists in the establishment of communication between the author living or dead, and the reader. Communication is thus the most important thing. In fact, until a certain relation has been established between the mind and the mood of the writer, his individual experience distilled into a condition where it can be publicly enjoyed by the reader we cannot really say that a literary work has been produced. The work must produce some reaction in the reader, must transport him to the world that the writer is trying to present and produce some meaning for the reader which he may accept or reject depending on his personal passions and prejudices. Otherwise it remains just a dull and drab account of an experience. Oscar Wilde rightly remarked that 'the meaning of any beautiful created thing is as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.' Wilde even went further to assert that 'it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings and makes it marvelous for us'. The idea of beauty naturally brings in the idea of aesthetics. When we say about a book that the book is not literature we generally mean that it has no aesthetic value. And, by the same token, when we call a book of history, such as Churchill's, literature we mean that it has great aesthetic value.

6

A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

In the first place, therefore, we must distinguish between literature and scientific writings which are concerned only with scientific facts or interpretation of scientific facts where the writer uses language not for its aesthetic value but for a logical, purely intellectual exposition of matters leading to certain conclusions or establishments of certain facts: utilitarian writings or writings which are done only to further one's commercial interests or for the business of earning a living describing an electric bulb or a new product, for example. Thus both the scientific writings and utilitarian writings are outside the purview of literature, because they are mainly concerned with information, and neither with imagination nor with emotion. Literature, then, consists of those imaginative writings in which the writers exploit the resources of language and the evocative powers of words for the expression of various kinds of experience. Literature, therefore, may be described as a kind of imaginative writing, because it is only through the faculty of imagination that a writer can scan all sorts of his experiences, sift them and recreate some of them into a verbal artifact.

If literature is communication of a special kind, language is the means of that communication. The language of scientific writings is informative with very definite denotation and connotation. But the language of literature is emotive; it has a feeling content. This is, however, true about all literary forms: novel, poetry, drama, belles lettres and personal essays for that matter. But since we are concerned with poetry we must bear in mind the distinction between poetry and other kinds of literary forms like fiction or drama or a short story. Basically, the difference, as Coleridge pointed out in Biographia Literaria, is that in a poem the total value of the poem is more than the summation of the value of its parts. In a novel every chapter is a link to the next chapter; in a story the description of every incident leads

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to another incident or situation, and its value consists mainly in the function it serves in building up the chain of events leading to the final conclusion. In other words, no chapter, no incident is complete in itself. But in poetry every line is complete in itself, and the end is pleasure. So the language of poetry has to be different from the language used in other literary forms, because it is in and through the language that the poem comes into being. It is the language that subsumes the meaning and the music, the denotation and the connotation, the symbols and the images, the thought-content and the feeling-content, the sonic and the semantic, etc.

Now that we have separated poetry from scientific writings, utilitarian writings and other literary forms we have to call attention to another important aspect of poetry before we proceed further. Poetry is not just a language in, whatever peculiar ways we may use that language. It is, like music, painting, dance and sculpture, is a theme of aesthetics. In other words, a poem is an aesthetic object and is governed by various aesthetic criteria such as harmony, intensity, depth, structural tension, etc. It is evident that a literary theory which emphasizes the uniqueness of the literary object and analyzes it in terms of its inner consistency of parts is confined to the area of aesthetic judgment.

So, aesthetically speaking or looking at a poem as an aesthetic object, one can say that a poem has no extra-territorial loyalty. But one major difference between poetry and other forms of art—music, painting, dance and sculpture, for example—is that other forms of art can exist without the use of any language, but a poem cannot, because in addition to being an aesthetic object it is also a cognitive discourse. As an aesthetic object its meanings are immanent and intransitive rather than immediately referential as is the language of

science. But at the same time it is a cognitive object and, therefore, it is bound to say something; it is referential and it does reveal something of the external world. So a poem is at once non-referential in terms of its inviolable context and referential in terms of the outside world from which it can never be completely alienated. The claim that literature has cognitive value can be broadly divided into three groups according to the cognitive theories involved: the predication theory, the revelation theory and the intuitive theory.

According to the predication theory a poem is a verbal discourse in which statements are either made or implied. Let us take a few examples :

(i) The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace...

(Byron, Don Juan Canto I)

(ii) Amen stuck in my throat.

(Macbeth)

(iii) I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

("Ode to the West Wind")

(iv) ... it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

(Macbeth)

The first excerpt refers to a supposedly existing past situation, and one can ascertain its historical validity. It is also possible to examine the historical validity of the second statement by looking up Holinshed's Chronicle, although we must hasten to add that there is a difference between the historical truth and poetic truth. We shall take up this issue at the proper time. Suffice it to say for the time being that

poetry is not bound by history. In Poetics Aristotle made it absolutely clear how poetry is superior to both history and philosophy. About the third statement, we can also examine its historical validity in the light of the available biographical data about Shelley, although the finding can never be conclusive, because it is a figurative statement. The fourth statement, however, does not refer to any really existing thing. And there is no way to determine whether the statement is historically true or even true within the framework of the drama itself. We must again hasten to add that the truth or falsity of the reports or statements in these cases have little bearing on the poetic value of the lines quoted above. In terms of the thought content or as cognitive discourse the fourth statement can also be called a thesis. The thesis or philosophy or idea may be more or less coherent as in the case of The Divine Comedy or The Faerie Queene, or it may be more or less complex as in the case of “The Waste Land” or “Sailing to Byzantium”. Is the poetic value independent of the value of the thesis? Critics like Sidney, Arnold and Babbitt would advocate that the cognitive value and the poetic value are inextricably interlinked. This might be true about all moral critics, because moral value of literature is a function of cognitive value. Some critics like Eliot would hold that the cognitive value and the poetic value are theoretically separable, but a work cannot be great unless its cognitive value is also of supreme importance. The revelation theory claims that a work of art, through the concrete particular, reveals the universal. One can show, for example, that by portraying the pangs of separation of the Yaksha, Kālidāsa portrays a universal feeling. The idea can be traced back to Aristotle about whose theory of Imitation Butcher writes: ‘Imitation is the expression of the concrete thing under an image which answers to its true idea. To seize the universal, and to reproduce it in simple and sensuous form is not

to reflect a reality already familiar through sense perception; rather it is a rivalry of nature, a completion of her unfulfilled purposes, a correction of her failures' (Butcher 154).

Another major claim for the cognitive value of literature is based on the intuitive theory. The intuitionists hold that there is a kind of knowledge of nonconceptual form which is immediately intuited by a special faculty usually called the imagination. The peculiarity of the intuitive knowledge is that it cannot be communicated in the form of a logical proposition. When Croce talks about the impossibility of ever rendering in logical terms the full effect of poetry he is actually thinking in terms of the intuitive theory. Croce writes :

'The critic does not offer as his completed judgment either intuitive remakings or logical equivalents of poetry but does something very different: he gives a characterization of it. This characterization is properly based on the content of poetry, the sentiment that the poem has amplified by transference to the poetic atmosphere. The object of this investigation… is human reality in its completeness, in all its infinite subdivisions'. (Croce 637)

While discussing the nature of literature Jacque Maritain also writes:

'The fine arts aim at producing, by the object they make, joy or delight in the mind through the intuition of the senses. Such joy is not the simple act of knowing, the joy of possessing knowledge or having truth. Such joy, therefore, presupposes knowledge, and the more knowledge there is, the more things given to the mind, the greater will be the possibility of joy. For this reason art, as ordered to beauty, never stops at all events when its object permits it as shapes or colours or sounds or words,

considered in themselves as things but considers them also as making known something other than themselves, that is to say as symbols. And the thing symbolized can be in turn a symbol, and the more charged with symbolism the more immense, the richer and higher will be the possibility of joy or beauty'. (Maritain 31)

Then there is the question of moral value of poetry. A poem, it is claimed, must have a moral value. What exactly is meant by moral value is difficult to decide. It may mean, for example, that the process of writing a poem is a moral act It may also mean that the experience of reading a poem has, can have, or should have an effect on human acts. When Sidney says that the writer through his portraits of Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus, Tydeus and Rinaldo 'doth not only teach and move to truth, but teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent truth' (Sidney 37), he is actually emphasizing the moral value of a poem or literature for that matter. When Beardsley pleads that 'the aesthetic experience resolves tensions and quiets destructive impulses' (Beardsley 575) he is actually describing an indirect moral effect. It may be argued possibly that a greater aesthetic value would necessarily imply a greater capacity for occasioning such indirect moral effects, although the converse of the proposition may not always be true. As long as we subscribe to the view that poetry is knowledge we have to admit that it illuminates life and thus aids the reader in sitting in judgment over life. Morality in literature is, at bottom, criticism of life. A great work of art has to be morally right. The Divine Comedy is a case in point. The greatness of the poem is as much due to its aesthetic richness as to the philosophy enunciated in it.

The key issue, then, is that since a poem is both an aesthetic object and a cognitive discourse with moral

values embedded in it, and the end is either delight (Aristotle) or rasa (Bharata) or instruction and delight (Horace), it is difficult to decide what constitutes the locus of literariness or the poesis of a poem.

The problem becomes all the more fascinating when we consider—as we stated in the beginning—that literature is cultur-specific. Yet our experience bears testimony to the fact that we enjoy literature produced in a different culture across space and time. This naturally means that in spite of specific differences there is some generic similarity in all the literatures of the world. There is a hard core the presence of which makes one work an authentic literature, or a poem an authentic poem. It is this undefined core which may be described, for lack of any better term the literary universal. But what is the nature of that literary universal?

It is this question that has engaged the critical attention of poeticians of the highest order both in the West and in India. If the European literature is more than two thousand years old, the Indian intellectual tradition also dates back to the second century B.C. In both India and the West great aestheticians have tried to examine the nature of literature, its ontology and the secret of its appeal. They have tried to define in their own ways the nature of poetry and what constitutes literariness or the poesis of a poem. The notion of the literary universal and its timelessness implies that there must be affinities between the Western thinkers and the Indian thinkers down the centuries in regard to these problems.

Indian Poetics developed into eight schools: Rasa, Alamkāra, Riti, Guṇa/Doṣa, Vakrokti, Svabhāvokti, Aucitya and Dhvani. The cross-currents and overlappings notwithstanding these eight schools represent eight different approaches to poetry

depending on their understanding of what constitutes literariness. Seen in the light of these theories Western

critical approaches seem to have an interesting affinity with many of them. Some of the central issues related to

the process of literary creation, expression and reception can possibly be better understood in the light

of Indian poetics.

Broadly speaking there is a common agreement that the end of poetry is pleasure derived out of the

aesthetics of a poem, although for the Horatian school the end is not just pleasure, but pleasure with

instruction. There is also a common agreement that a poem is a verbal artifact where everything happens or is

made to happen through language. So the central issue is the relation between the end and the means. What is

the nature of the aesthetic pleasure and how to use the language to achieve the end effectively and successfully?

Different schools have different views regarding this. If the Rīti school focuses on the style and Vakrokti on

deviation and obliquity, the Aucitya school believes in propriety in the use of language and the Dhvani school

believes that the poetic language should be used in such a way that it should be suggestive and not just

statement, and so on and so forth.

It is amazing to see how the Western thinkers, mainly from Aristotle to the present, have also thought

on these lines that have engaged the attention of the Indian thinkers beginning with Bharata.

2

Alamkāra and the Rhetorical School

What constitutes literariness has been a perennial problem that has baffled the poeticians down the ages both in India and the West. In Indian poetics the earliest and possibly the most sustained school that identified the locus of literariness in the ornamentation of the figures of speech is the Alamkāra school. The exponents of this school held that the mode of figurative expression, grammatical accuracy and the sweetness of sound constitute literariness. This does not mean that the Alamkārikas ignored the role of meaning in a poetical statement. In fact Bhāmaha, the first important exponent of the Alamkāra school, points out that there are many figures of speech such as arthāntaranyās, vibhāvana, etc., which are amenable to multiple meanings. Bhāmaha in his Kāvyālamkāra formulates different topics of Poetics not casually or incidentally as does Bharata but makes a very systematic study of what he considered as important elements for embellishment of poetry and the creation of rasa. Although the idea of Alamkāra had been in existence not only in Bharata but even before him which he used in his treatise on drama and dramaturgy, it is Bhāmaha who separated poetry from dramaturgy and focused entirely on poetry and the roles of the figures of speech in creating its literariness. De writes in this connection that “the general doctrine of

this Alamkāra-system is almost coextensive with what appears to have been the original standpoint of the Alamkāra-śāstra itself as an objective, empirical, and more or less mechanical discipline; for, despite the previous or synchronous existence of a system which elaborated the idea of Rasa in the service of the drama, there is nothing to contradict the hypothesis, that Sanskrit Poetics started apparently from some theory of embellishment (alamkāra) which took into consideration the whole domain of poetic figures and confined its energies to elaboration of more or less mechanical formulas with reference to the technique of expression" (De 33-34). The early speculations about poetry, like the speculations about painting, were confined to casual attention to different elements of poetry. But a serious consideration of what constitutes poetry does not arise until Vāmana and later the Dhvanikāra appeared on the scene. Bhāmaha and later Dandin confined themselves mainly to what they called Kāvyasarira or the body of poetry, suggesting, by implication though, the existence of the soul of poetry as well, which may be called Kāvyātmā. De tells us that the metaphorical expression Kāvyasarira, with its implied Kāvyātmā, plays an important part in Sanskrit Poetics throughout its history. These two early poeticians, however were seriously concerned with the advantages of verbal arrangement with due regard to the expression of sense, or in other words, the correspondence between the sound and the sense with charming rhetorical ornamentation.

The two important factors that go to make up the Kāvyasarira or the body of poetry are śabda and artha - śabdārthasahitau kāvyam, and the Alamkāras or the poetic figures of speech that decorate these words and meanings are believed to be the essential sign of poetry. They believed, in other words, that poetry consists of a

verbal composition which will have a definite sense and

it must be presented in a charming manner with the

help of various rhetorical devices or figures of speech.

Bhāmaha states that since a poem is composed of both

words and meanings two kinds of figures of speech come

into operation. He says:

rupakādin alamkāram bāhyamacakṣate pare/

supām tinām ca vyutpattim vācām vāñchanty alamkrtim//

tad etad āhuḥ sauśabdyam nārtha-vyutpattir idṛśī/

śabdābhidheyālamkāra-bhedād iṣṭam dvayāṃ tu nah//

Roughly it means, as De would translate it. ‘Others

regard metaphor and the like to be external ornaments.

They postulate that grammatical correctness adorns

speech and call it excellence of language (implying that)

there is no such corresponding correctness of sense. We,

however, accept two kinds of ornaments, referring

respectively to word and sense’ (De 37–38). The

statement or credo, if you would call it so, leads to the

consideration of two kinds of figures of speech:

Śabdalāmkāra and Arthālamkāra. Bhāmaha discusses

at length with illustrations the poetic figures of

Alamkāras and devotes two chapters consisting of some

one hundred and fifty verses. The whole subject is

treated conclusively in terms of logical and grammatical

correctness of poetry, respectively. If we leave aside

these two requirements and the Doṣas the only thing of

supreme importance, for Bhāmaha, is the Alamkāra or

the poetic figure, and he defines 43 (39+4) subvarieties

of Alamkāra. However, different poeticians have

advanced different number of Alamkāras, and, again

what is Alamkāra for one is Vakrokti for another. In

Vāmana, for example, Vakrokti appears not as a verbal

figure or śabdalāmkāra but a figure based on

arthalāṃkāra, and he defines it as a metaphorical mode

of utterance based on transference of sense. Udbhaṭa,

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for that mater, distinguishes three varieties of Anuprāsa. Rudraṭa who, despite his being influenced by the Rasa theory is a major exponent of the Alamkāra school as he devotes ten chapters on Alamkāra, which constitute the major bulk of the book and his thesis. To Udbhaṭa's limited number of poetic figures Rudraṭa adds nearly thirty more independent figures.

Ruyyaka classified Alamkāras into seven classes on the basis of their content, on the basis of how meaning is constituted; sādrśya, virodha, śṛnkhalābadha-tarkanyāya, lokanyāya, kāvyanyāya, and guḍhārtha pratiti, and Mammaṭa lists sixty one figures and groups them into seven types. The whole situation and the relation between Alamkāra and the locus of literariness has been neatly summed up by Kapoor. Kapoor writes, 'It is this conception of literary language as referentially figurative, that makes Alamkāra—theory so interesting for the contemporary Western theory of metaphor. In the West too, the word, metaphor, in its restricted sense refers to a figure of speech (rūpaka) but in its wider sense it stands for the principle of figurativeness in language with its problematic of interpretation. One can talk properly of the metaphoric mode of which the metaphor is a typical realization. Metaphor is the primary figure of speech in the West, for it is an instance of general cognitive processes at their most creative or speculative. The Western mind nourished by Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning distinctly prefers the inferential epistemology—hence, the preoccupation with metaphor and the prestige of the metaphoric processes of not only cognition but also expression. [...] to the Indian mind perceptible similarity has greater epistemological value and [...] the grammar of language is bound to constrain the creativity of the metaphor. In the history of one civilization itself, phases of the metaphoric and the visible mode seem to alternate. In England, for instance, the Elizabethan age, in fact, the entire Renaissance

period—was more given to metaphoric thinking and expression. So was the Romantic Age. But the late 17th and the 18th centuries distrusted the metaphor. Even within the Western world, the British, being empiricist and pragmatic, tend to be less speculative than the continental thinkers and in the early 19th century, the Romantic poets were obviously inspired by German Idealism in their fervour for the symbolic and the metaphoric mode when they began to talk of, the still, sad music of humanity/whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. But the Romantic phase in the history of English literature must be seen only as an episode in the advancement of ‘reason’ and the latter of the 19th century and the modern age are extremely suspicious of the metaphoric mode. However, the 19th century Europe which spawned so many new ideologies and new systems, owned its creative impulse to its dissatisfaction with the concrete, with what was visible, to its urge to see resemblances where none was visible, and to invest the visible and the concrete with a quality of unknowability and nebulosity. Nietzsche (1844–1900) was the high-priest of this creed of cosmic flux and chaos, a man nevertheless with great faith in man’s ability to create both meaning and order; he argued that metaphor was ‘a proof of the strength of spirit, to be able to leap over what lies before our feet and grasp after what lies far away. Nietzsche was responsible for questioning the distinction between literal and figurative meaning thereby arguing that all language is rhetorical’ (In Khuswawa 193–94)

Before we take up Aristotle and the Rhetorical school in detail it may be worthwhile to look at the Western concept of metaphor and the evolution of its history in the context of the Alamkāra.

The Alamkāra in its finest manifestation has an affinity with the Western concept of metaphor. Metaphor

is generally regarded as a condensed verbal item in

which an idea or an image or a symbol attains a

vividness and complexity through its inseparable

association with their ideas or symbols or images. There

has been so much speculations about the nature and

function of metaphor that it is well-nigh impossible to

give any precise definition of metaphor. The nature of

the metaphorical relations of the ideas, images, etc. has

been variously described in terms of comparison,

contrast, analogy, similarity, identity, tension, collision,

fusion, etc. The opinions about the function of metaphor

in poetry also widely vary. According to some critics,

metaphors distinguish poetic language from ordinary

language. The metaphorical mode of utterance is

basically different from the logical or the discursive

mode and it is the use of metaphor that elevates the

ordinary language to the condition of a poetic language.

The metaphor is traditionally believed to e a figure of

speech, a linguistic device of ornamentation or

decoration or what the Indian aestheticians would call

an Alamkār. The view that metaphor is a trope can be

traced back to Aristotle. In Poetics Aristotle says that a

metaphor consists in giving a thing a name which

belongs to something else. This transference, according

to Aristotle, can be from genus to species or from species

to genus on grounds of analogy. The grammarians have

identified some of the transferences as some particular

figures like metonymy, synecdoche, etc. But it is

doubtful whether they truly conform to the division

suggested by Aristotle. Anyway the Roman rhetoricians

have always insisted on Aristotle's authority on the

element of harmony or congruity in the metaphorical

elements, and they also insist that there must be some

visual clarity about the effectiveness of the metaphor. In

other words when a metaphor is used the points of

similarity between the item or image or idea mentioned

and the corresponding item or the image or the idea that

it is intended to evoke should be instantaneous and spontaneous. This is the reason why George Campbell wrote in Philosophy of Rhetoric (1841) that in metaphor the sole relation is one of resemblance. There have also been heard sometimes some dissident voices. Locke, for example, held that metaphor is an ‘improper’ connection of terms and is decorative but inexact alternative to what could be stated more clearly and precisely in the form of a logical discourse. He also held that metaphor evinces insincerity and carelessness. Even then traditionally metaphor is believed to be a mode of transference. George Whalley gives several examples to show how metaphor is explicated by translating it into a predicative form that reveals the relation of resemblance. The examples that Whalley gives are as follows:

‘Love is a singing bird’ = love makes you feel like a singing bird, or as though you were listening to a singing bird.

2. ‘The proud nostril-curve of a prow’s line’ = a prow’s line with the same curve as a proud man’s nostril.

3. ‘Her head…with its echoing calm’ = Her head that, with its air of calm, makes you feel as secure as an anchor would in a ship.

4. ‘a Harris-tweed cat = a cat that looks or smells or feels as though it were made of Harris tweed

5. ‘My love is…begotten by despair upon impossibility = my love is conceived as though its father were despair and its mother impossibility.

6. ‘Hatred infects the mind’ = hatred is like an infection in the mind

7. ‘Admiral earth breaks out his colours at the forepreak of the day = The earth discloses its

colours in the morning with the same abrupt brilliance as the breaking—out of an admiral's colours or ensign at the forepeak of his flagship.

Whalley contends that an unprejudiced examination of the examples would suggest not merely the semantic equivalence but also that some actual sensation is induced by these metaphors. After some detailed analysis of these associations Whalley comes to the conclusion that to reduce the metaphor to its predicative form is to rob it of its vitality In the sixteenth century, as Rosamund Tuve has pointed out, the emphasis in handbooks and in practice was upon the delight caused by the exploration of metaphors into the similarities of things, ideas and images, etc. Whalley feels that down the ages poets have used metaphors—sometimes brilliant ones like those used by Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne—but the critics never cared much for any precise definition of a metaphor. Incidentally Johnson hailed metaphorical expression as a great excellence in style when it is used with propriety.

To go back to Aristotle. He made a profound statement when he said that ‘the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars’. Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric not only implied a sharp distinction between the uses of metaphor in prose and poetry, but had also emphasized the energetic character of metaphor by choosing examples, not in predicative form, but as formed around vigorous verbs.

In recent years there is a tendency to disregard the grammarian's view of metaphor in favour of ‘essential’ metaphor. But Whalley argues that the grammarian's

view cannot be completely ignored because the value of

a metaphor largely arises from the context in which it is

used. In other words, what is apparently a prosaic

metaphor can become a poetic metaphor if properly and

effectively contextualized in a poem. This is so because

in the function or vitality of a metaphor the matrix is

very important.

Since the publication of “The Waste Land” and the

revival of the Metaphysicals there has been a renewed

interest in the nature and function of metaphor in

poetry. The New Criticism was virtually overtaken by the

clamorous and frequent enquiries into metaphor.

Middleton Murry rightly remarked in Countries of the

Mind (1931) that the investigation of metaphor is

curiously like the investigation of any of the primary

data of consciousness… Metaphor is as ultimate as

speech itself, and speech is as ultimate as thought. If we

try to penetrate them beyond a certain point we find

ourselves questing the very faculty and instrument with

which we are trying to penetrate them.'

Eliot's doctrine of the unified sensibility which he

discussed in his essay on the metaphysical poets

exemplified how disparate elements—the smell of

cooking, the reading of Spinoza and the noise of the

typewriter—can make new wholes in the mind of the

poet and came close to the idea of metaphor. Pound's

doctrine that metaphor is a matter of abrupt

juxtaposition carriċd the question beyond the

grammatical limits and suggested a direct connection

with Aristotle's views. Many linguists, anthropologists

and psychologists, who have studied the genesis of

language, are of the opinion that metaphor reveals the

most vital principle of language. Long ago Shelley in his

“Defence of Poetry” remarked in a luminous passage:

‘Language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the

before unapprehended relations of things and

perpetuates their apprehension, until words, which

represent them, became, through time, signs for

portions or classes of thought instead of pictures of

integral thoughts: and then, if no new poets should arise

to create afresh the associations which have been thus

disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler

purposes of human intercourse'.

Two basic questions are: how does metaphor work?

and what happens in a metaphor? Richards said in

Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) that metaphor is

'the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto

unconnected things are brought together in poetry for

the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which

spring from their collocation and from the combinations

which the mind then establishes between them. There

are few metaphors whose effect, if accurately examined,

can be traced to the logical relations involved. Cecil Day

Lewis remarked epigrammatically in The Poetic Image

(1947): 'We find poetic truth struck by the collision

rather than the collusion of images.' Max Black analyzed

the previous discourses on metaphor on its three

aspects : substitution, comparison and interaction. Of

the three it is the interaction that he valued most, and

in this respect he subscribes to the view of Richards

expressed in Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936): 'In the

simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have

two thoughts of different things active together and

supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning

is a resultant of their interaction.' Richards wanted to

apprehend the total meaning of metaphor arising from

the interaction of the elements. W.B. Stanford in Greek

Metaphor (1936) includes all the aspects that Richards

associated with metaphor. He said: 'Metaphor is the

process and result of using a term (X) normally

signifying an object or concept (A) in such a context that

it must refer to another object or concept (B) which is

distinct enough in characteristics from A to ensure that

in the composite idea formed by the synthesis of the concepts of A and B and now symbolized in the word X, the factors A and B retain their conceptual independence even while they merge in the unity symbolized by X'. The most important thing is the process by which this synthesis takes place, and the New Critics' concern with paradox, tension, ambiguity and irony may be seen as their preoccupations with this process.

Let us now briefly look at Aristotle's Rhetoric which though ostensibly is a treatise on rhetoric, contains ideas which are eminently applicable to poetry.

According to Aristotle Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. It can also be seen as a counterpart of Alamkär to a great extent. As counterpart of Dialectic Rhetoric is also concerned with general affairs of men as all men use rhetoric either to defend themselves or to attack others. Ordinary people do this generally unsystematically. The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art of rhetoric; everything else is incidental. The essence of rhetorical persuasion is 'enthymeme'. Furthermore, rhetoric is useful because the things that are just and things that are true have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the judges decide the way they should not, that is if a judge gives a judgment which is not just, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and the responsibility lies with them for not being able to convince the judge about the truth of the matter. Moreover, there are people who do not have the knowledge to present the case properly. To establish a point it is necessary to employ persuasion just as strict reasoning can be employed against a particular view to enable one to see the facts clearly and in a proper perspective. No other art draws opposite conclusions impartially. However, it must be reaffirmed that things

that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, always easier to prove. Again, it is absurd to

hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to

defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to

defend himself with speech and reason when the

rational speech is more distinctive of a human being

than the use of his limbs. It is obvious that rhetoric is

not bound up with a single definite class of subjects, but

is as universal as dialectic; it is clear also that it is

useful. It is clear also that the function of rhetoric is not

just success in persuasion but rather to discover the

means of coming as near such success as the

circumstances of each particular case allow. In this it

resembles all other arts. It is also obvious that one of the

functions of rhetoric is to discern the real and the

apparent means of persuasion, just as it is the function

of dialectic to discern the real and the apparent

syllogism. Aristotle then proceeds to give some account

of the systematic principles of Rhetoric itself, the right

method and means of succeeding in the fulfillment of

the goal.

Rhetoric is the faculty of observing in any given

case the available means of persuasion. This is not the

function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or

talk about its own particular subject-matter. For

example, medicine is concerned with what is healthy or

what is not healthy. There are three kinds of modes of

persuasion. The first kind depends on the personality of

the speaker. The second attempts to put the auditor in

a particular frame of mind. The third is based on the

proofs or apparent proofs provided by the words or the

speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's

personality so that when he speaks he appears credible.

Secondly, persuasion may also come through the

hearers when the speech stirs their emotions, because it

is seen that our judgments become different depending

on whether we are friendly or hostile to the speaker. Thirdly, speech itself can affect persuasion when proper persuasive arguments are used. A statement becomes persuasive and credible when it is directly self-evident or when it appears to be proved from other statements that are so. In either case it is persuasive because there is somebody whom it persuades. The theory of rhetoric is not concerned with what seems probable to a particular individual but what seems probable to men of a given type. Rhetoric thus deals with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us. Aristotle holds that the enthymemes and the examples in rhetoric should deal with the contingent and the enthymeme should have a syllogism about it. The materials of enthymemes are probabilities and signs which must correspond to the propositions which are generally and necessarily true. A probability is a thing that usually happens.

The whole line of theoreticians like Horace, Longinus, Qunitilian, Ciccero down to Sidney subscribes to the rhetorical tradition laid down in principle and practice by Aristotle and there is an interesting affinity between the Western rhetorical tradition and the use of rhetorical figures in the Alamkāra theory in terms of probability and necessity on the one hand and in terms of persuasion on the other.

According to Aristotle the end of poetry is pleasure. But what is pleasure? In Rhetoric Aristotle defines pleasure as a movement, ‘a movement by which the soul as a whole is consciously brought into its normal state of being.’ So, it follows that what produces this condition may be called pleasant and what destroys it is painful. Furthermore, pleasure is the consciousness through the senses of a certain kind of emotion. Things that are pleasant to remember are not only those that when actually perceived at present were pleasant, but also

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somethings that were not pleasant at the time of their occurrence become pleasant when remembered later. Aristotle quotes Homer saying that even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured. In Raghuvamsam Kālidāsa describes how Sītā, after her union with Rāma, sheds tears of joy because Kālidāsa says it is always a pleasure to think of the troubled days when one has got them over. In Book II of Rhetoric Aristotle argues that since rhetoric is meant to affect the listener emotionally it is necessary to consider the nature of each emotion in regard to the state of mind in which it is felt, the people towards whom it is felt and the grounds on which it is felt. It is in this connection that Aristotle defines various kinds of emotions which have a striking and interesting affinity with the nine kinds of rasas that Bharata discusses in Nātyaśāstra. Aristotle talks of ten kinds of emotions: anger, calmness (as opposite of anger), friendship and enmity, fear and confidence, shame and shamelessness, kindness and unkindness, pity, indignation, envy, and emulation. Aristotle defines emotions as ‘all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments and that are also attended by pain or pleasure.’ (1378) Anger is defined as ‘an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends’ (1378). Since it is the opposite of anger, growing calm may be defined as settling down or quieting of anger. Anger also subsides when the object of anger is dead. Thus Aristotle rightly points out that ‘the poet (Homer) has well made Apollo say, in order to put a stop to the anger of Achilles against the dead Hector,’ ‘For behold in his fury he doeth despite to the senseless clay’ (1380). Friendship and enmity do not need much discussion. Aristotle says that a friend is one who has a friendly feeling, and friendly feeling is wishing for one what one

thinks to be good things, not for his own sake but for the sake of his friend. Enmity and hatred can be understood by their opposites. One difference between anger and hatred is that anger is always directed against a particular person but hatred is directed against classes, any thief or any dishonest person for that matter. Aristotle defines fear as ‘a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future’ (1382). Confidence is the opposite of fear and it is caused by the opposite conditions that produce fear. It may be, therefore described as the expectations associated with a mental picture of a sense of security and a distance from the terrible. Aristotle defines shame as ‘pain or disturbance in regard to bad things, whether present, past or future, which seem likely to involve us in discredit; and shamelessness is contempt or indifference in regard to these same bad things’ (1388). Then kindness and unkindness. Kindness, according to Aristotle, is ‘helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped’. But when a similar service is refused at the time of need it amounts to unkindness. While considering the next item – pity - Aristotle says that ‘we must first ask ourselves what things excite pity, and for what persons, and in what states of mind pity is felt’ (1385). Aristotle defines pity as ‘a feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon’ (1385). Aristotle, then goes on elaborating the idea of pity and says that we can feel pity only when we think that some kind of evil may befall us or our near and dear ones. Those who are completely ruined cannot feel pity because they have already suffered the worst. Nor can those who are absolutely complacent about their security experience it. Again, those who are

insensate also cannot feel pity, because they are incapable of any genuine feeling. All unpleasant things can excite pity if they tend to destroy or annihilate. Sometimes pity can also occur when something good comes after the worst has happened, that is when it is useless : the coming of help to a man after he is dead. Aristotle also makes a fine distinction between the pitiable and the terrible. According to Aristotle, the people whom we pity must not be too closely related to us, because in that case we will consider ourselves to be in danger. Aristotle says that it is for this reason that ‘Amasis did not weep, they say, at the sight if his son being bled to death but did weep when he saw his friend begging: the latter sight was pitiful, the former terrible, and the terrible is different from the pitiful’(1386). Most piteous is our feeling when we see the sufferings of the noble characters, because their innocence, as well as the presentation of their misfortunes before our eyes—as in real life or in dramatic poetry—makes their misfortunes appear very close to us. Directly opposed to pity is the feeling of indignation. If we feel pity for unmerited distress we feel indignation at unmerited prosperity. Aristotle next defines envy. He says that envy is ‘pain at the sight of such good fortune as consists of the good things already mentioned; we feel it towards our equals; not with the idea of getting something for ourselves, but because the other people have it’ (1387). We envy our equals. We do not envy the people of the past or those who are far above us. We envy those who have what we do not have but think that we ought to have. Another kind of pain is caused by emulation. According to Aristotle, it is caused by ‘seeing the presence, in persons whose nature is like our own, of good things that are highly valued and are possible for ourselves to acquire; but is felt not because others have the goods but we have not got them ourselves’(1388).

The above is Aristotle’s classification of various kinds of emotions and how these emotions can be produced or dissipated, in persuasive arguments.

Though Aristotle’s main concern is the use of rhetoric in persuasive conversation, his discussion has an interesting affinity with the various kinds of rasas described by Bharata in his Nāṭyaśāstra, in his treatment of the dramatic art. Since Bharata’s main interest is the use of various emotions in drama he considers how the rasas or the particular kinds of emotions are produced by particular characters or situations Since a drama is also meant to move men in a particular way, by rousing a particular kind of emotion, the use of the rhetoric becomes significantly relevant to its purpose. What is significant is that as in Aristotle so in Bharata there is an abiding interest in the nature of the various human emotions which have been the perennial stuff of literature in all its forms.

It is only incidental that both Bharata and Aristotle are primarily concerned with drama, and it is in drama that the emotions displayed can be directly experienced by the auditors/spectators because right before their eyes a slice of life is presented with all the illusions of reality that a dramatist has in his command. V.Y. Kantak has, however, rightly pointed out that ‘the Aristotelian view of drama doesn’t appear wide enough to include dramatic modes that developed independently in the East – whether Indian, Japanese or Chinese There is never any ambiguity or doubt about the distinct character of Eastern drama; a cursory comparison of a Sanskrit play or a Noh play with a Western classic brings out the great gulf that separates the two traditions.

The difference is reflected in the theoretical formulations based on these diverse practices—as is obvious if we set Aristotle’s Poetics beside Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra or The Kadensho of Zeami, the foremost exponent of the Noh’ (In Dani 35).

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But Bharata is never tired of emphasizing the importance of the vibhāvas and anubhāvas or the determinanants and consequents of emotional states that must concern us in the art of acting as they have their origin in human nature.

In Rhetoric Aristotle has made a detailed discussion about style in its relation to persuasive conversation. He says; ‘In making a speech one must study three points : first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the style, or language to be used; third, the proper arrangement of the various parts of speech’(1403). The speaker has to work on the emotions of the judges. He must give the right impression of his character and try to prove the truth of the statements made. It is not enough to know what to say, but one must also know how to say it so that the intended impression can be produced on the auditor. It is in this connection that Aristotle makes the statement of profound significance: ‘It is plain that delivery has just as much to do with oratory as with poetry’ (1403).

We may ignore, for the time being, the mechanism used by the orator to work on the motions of the judges and how he tries to prove the truth of his statements. We should concentrate on what concerns us immediately : the question of style in poetry. In respect of style, again, Aristotle thinks of two aspects of style : the rhetorical and the poetical. We must, however, hasten to add that. the boundary between the two is not very distinct, but there is certainly a difference in emphasis. The question of style is inextricably linked up with the question of language. In Chapter 20 of Poetics Aristotle discusses language. He says that a language is made up of several parts : the letter, the syllable, the connecting word, the article, the noun, the verb, inflexion or case, and the phrase or proposition. He defines a letter as an indivisible sound, not just any such sound, but one

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from which intelligible language may be produced. The different forms of this sound are the vowel, the semi-vowel, and mute letter or consonant. A vowel has an audible sound without any contact between two organs of speech. A mute is a letter which has no sound of its own. Furthermore, letters differ in sound according to the shape of the mouth and the places where they are produced. What Aristotle is suggesting can be seen as what is now known as articulatory phonetics. Such are the things the details of which concern the metrist. In Chapter 21 Aristotle talks about poetic diction. He says that every noun is either a word in current use or a foreign loan-word, a metaphor or an ornamental word, a poetic coinage or a word that has been expanded or abbreviated or otherwise altered. Aristotle defines metaphor as ‘the application to one thing of a name belonging to another thing; the transference may be from the genus to the species, from the species to the genus, or from one species to another, or it may be a matter of analogy’ (Dorsch 61). He says that a cup stands in the same relationship to Dionysus as a shield to Ares. And therefore, one can call the cup Dionysus's shield and the shield Ares's cup. Similarly since old age to life is as evening is to day so one may call, as Empedocles called, old age the evening of life or the sunset of life. Again, some nouns, according to Aristotle, are masculine while some are feminine.

About diction Aristotle is of the opinion that the best diction is that which has clarity without being commonplace. The clearest words are certainly those which are daily used, but they are commonplace and not fit for the high quality poetry. Again, if a diction abounds in unfamiliar words or usages in the form of loan words, metaphors, expanded forms, etc., then again it will cause impediments in the enjoyment of poetry. To put it differently, in one case it will degenerate into barbarism

while in the other case it will become more a riddle than a poem. The ideal is the golden mean, a mixture of various elements. Aristotle recommends: 'Among the most effective means of achieving both clarity and diction and a certain dignity in the use of expanded, abbreviated, and altered forms of words; the unfamiliarity due to this. Deviation from normal usages will raise the diction above the commonplace, while the retention of some part of the normal forms will make for clarity' (Dorsch 64). Aristotle, however, holds that while it is good to make a proper use of the various devices he has mentioned the most important thing is to master the use of metaphor. It cannot be learnt; it must come from within. It is a great natural ability that arises out of one's perception of resemblances. It may be pointed out at this point that metaphor is a function of what Coleridge, in Chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria calls the esemplastic power of the imagination, particularly the secondary imagination that informs poetry.

Aristotle's views that different types of words are suitable for different kinds of poetry also contains in an embryonic form the basic ideas of Stylistics which again has an interesting affinity with the theory of Rīti of Indian poetics. And Aristotle's recommendation—right kind of words for a particular kind of poetry—also anticipates, on the one hand, Horace's idea of decorum and the Indian theory of aucitya or propriety.

In the first century B.C., after Egypt including Alexandria had fallen, Rome stood supreme in the new Graeco-Roman world. From the third century B.C. Rome had been imbibing the Greek influence on culture and art, and it was from the Greeks that the Romans got the models of classical approach. If we leave out for the time being the dramatic criticism of Plautus and Terence and the occasional remarks of Cato and Lucius's comments on contemporary literature and speech it is with Cicero

that we come to a first serious study of Rhetoric. It is

Cicero who raised the current discussions of Rhetoric to

a higher plane and initiated a critical process that

influenced many subsequent writers. His first book, De

Inventione (84 B.C.) is not of much importance; it is

practically a summary of the teaching then current. In

55 B.C. came out his first major work De Oratore. His

other two important books are : Partitiones Oratoriae

(45B.C.) and De Optimo Genere Oratorium. When we

take these three books together we realize that he has

made a significant departure from the earlier scholastic

rhetorics of Ad Herennium kind. The book lifts Rhetoric

out of the narrow confines of the study of argument and

the technique of style and offers an exposition of the art

of speaking or writing on all possible subjects. Following

the guidance of Plato and Aristotle he rejects the

teachings of the contemporary craftsmen and tries to

recapture the spirit of the earlier tradition. Cicero, in

fact, adopts as his basis the teachings of the great Greek

masters. It is not only in the conception of the rhetoric

but also in the methods of argument adopted that he

follows the classical Greeks. His primary aim is thus not

to frame rules but to bring to light general truths.

Starting with the principle of nature he develops his

theories in keeping with his individual perception of

men and things. In the handling of his materials also he

abandons the severity of he treatise form and follows a

method which is understandable by the common people.

From the very beginning Cicero insists that thought

must be properly organized (quo quidque loco), that

matter and manner are inseparably related. Like

Aristotle, in his Rhetoric Cicero also holds that for any

successful oratory a knowledge of the workings of the

human mind and the mechanism of rousing particulars

of emotion is necessary. “The proper concern of an

orator is language accommodated to the feelings and the

minds of men" he writes in De Oratore. Since the highest

power of oratory lies in the special appeal to emotions

the orator must know how human passions and

emotions work. The orator must know, and intimately,

all the emotions of the mind nature has given to man.

The efficacy of this statement made in relation to oratory

is equally valid in relation to poetry and particularly in

relation to romantic poetry or any drama for that matter.

If Iago has to rouse the suspicion of Othello he must

know how he can work on the emotion of Othello. In

other words, Shakespeare must know the human

psychology to have a psychological insight into a

character. He must become every character and play

with all kinds of emotions. If Kālidāsa has to evoke the

feelings of separation and touch the tender chord of his

readers he must know how to evoke it with words.

Different kinds of emotions that inform different kinds

of poetry—the heroic or the elegiac, for example, call for

a thorough knowledge of these emotions on the part of

the poet and then his ability to use the right kind of

words to evoke that emotion. Eliot's idea of 'objective

correlative' is embedded in Cicero's idea of the basic

requirements of an orator. And what Cicero says about

oratory is equally applicable to poetry. He says that the

best orator 'teaches (docet), delights (delectat) and

moves (permoret) the minds of his hearers, and this is

exactly what Sir Philip Sidney says about a good poet in

regard to the function of poetry. Similarly when Cicero

says about an orator that he must have the natural

capacity for oratory, he must undergo sound technical

training and a liberal education, on the one hand he

harks back to Platonic unity – nature,(natura) exercise,

exerctatio) and study(studium); he also looks forward

not only to Quintilian (nature, art and practice) but also

to Sidney (poeta nascitur orator fit). Sidney believes in

Plato's theory of ideas in his notion of the ideal form of

eloquence which is eternal, unchanging and objective in

character, of which all forms are only imperfect copies. He also gives us the first rough statements of the doctrine of literary genres. Although Cicero's statement was concerned with oratory, as we have already pointed out, the statement, like other statements about oratory, can be effectively applied to poetry. It should be evident from the above discussion that although the Rhetorical school and the Alamkāra school are not identical in their views of poetry there are many interesting affinities in their views on poetry particularly in regard to the creative exploitation of the language in the use of the rhetorical devices for inducing different kinds of emotion in the recipient.

It may be also be worthwhile to have a look at the views expressed in “Longinus on the Sublime”. Although the authorship of the work is shrouded in mystery let us, for our convenience take it to be by Longinus and focus on the text.

His subject is not the sublime in the narrow modern sense of the term. In his survey, for instance, are included not only the sublime Pindar and Aeschylus but also Herodotus and Thucydides, in connection with whom the term would be simply unmeaning. The fact, therefore is that sublimity in its modern sense is not wide enough to cover his treatment. What he has in mind is rather elevation, all that raises style above the ordinary and gives to it distinction in its widest and truest sense. The five sources of the sublime are said to be: (1) grandeur of conception, (2) intensity of emotion, the consideration of which is reserved for a separate work; and both of these, as the author points out, are largely the fruit of natural genius. Then follows some account of the remaining sources due primarily to art (3) the appropriate use of figures (4) nobility of diction (5) dignity and elevation of word-order. The central theme is treated on comprehensive lines, embodying an approach

to the subject from both the psychological and the technical points of view; while something of the usual rhetorical procedure is also adopted in treating first of subject-matter and its arrangement under the head of grandeur of conception, and then of the choice and arrangement of words in subsequent sections.

Thus at the outset Longinus establishes himself firmly on the standards of the classical Greeks, and this position he maintains throughout the work. The special excellence, he explains, produces an effect whose aim is not mere persuasion of pleasure but transport. Its effect is as immediate as it is subtle and does not come as the result of a painful observance of the rhetorician’s rules.

In proceeding with his exposition of methods of attaining the desired excellence of style, he turns to a consideration of those artistic devices which contribute to that end; and in the first place he deals with the use of figures, selecting for treatment those which more especially were adopted for this purpose. Here at first sight he seems to be reverting to the usual rhetorical routine which comprised instruction in the choice and arrangements of words, and then in what was known as stylistic ornament, including the figures. But while in his treatment there is much that is conventional, there are also signs of independent thinking, and of discrimination in the handling of his various details. He devotes nearly one-third of the work to a consideration of the figures.

From the first he makes it plain that to him figures are no arbitrary devices invented by rhetoricians for mechanical application; but rather a natural means of giving to style an element of fine, surprised something rooted in genuine emotion, responsive to the artistic sense of man, and thus capable of explanation in terms of human nature. He explains that while figures are instrumental in giving excellence to style, there is

nothing on the other hand that renders figures more effective than a style that is already in some degree elevated. In the use of figures, he points out, there is normally a suggestion of artifice which excites mistrust in the minds of the hearers, often rendering them hostile to the effects intended. He acutely adds," a figure is most effective when the fact that it is a figure is happily concealed;" and this function, he maintains, is best performed by a setting that is the result of splendour or distinction of style.

When he turns to consider more particularly the effects of figures, he makes no attempt to deal with the figures as a whole. He discusses those that give elevation to style; and he is content to illustrate the general principles of their workings together with some of their effects, selecting for that purpose examples taken from Demosthenes, Thucydides, Homer and the rest. Among the more familiar of the figures treated are the rhetorical question, Asyndeton or the omission of conjunctions, Hyperbaton or inversion, and Periphrasis; and his main contention throughout is that figures properly treated are a valuable means of giving emotional quality to style, thus supplementing by devices of art the animation of ardor which normally results from the genuine emotion of the speaker. In the first place, for instance, he illustrates from a passage of Demosthenes his effective use of question and answer, anticipating as it were the questions of his hearers. The device has stimulated a natural outburst of passion and has given to his statement a vigour and a fire which would have been lacking in a plain straight forward assertion. And similar effects are said to result from the use of Asyndeton, when words are poured forth without connecting links as for example, in the passage taken from Xenophon: "Locking their shields, they thrust, fought, slew, fell. But this device may also be combined

with others such as Anaphora, when the effect is heightened as in the phrase: by his manner, his looks, his voice, etc." The essence of such breaks and repetitions is said to be the suggestion of an impassioned disorder and emphasis that strikes the minds of the hearers while betokening a disturbance of soul on the part of the speaker. Much the same in their effects were said to be the figures known as Hyperbaton (or inversions), which consisted of departures from the normal order in both expression and idea; a sure and certain sign of utterance made under stress of great emotion. For as Longinus proceeds to point out, men moved by passion are wont to express themselves in disjointed fashion, skipping from subject to subject, indulging in irrelevancies rapidly turning now this way now that, thus setting at defiance by their unexpected movements the recognized laws of normal and logical speech. Of this he gives an example from Herodotus; while to Thucydides he attributes the greatest skill and boldness in the use of such transition. And then in his comment on the effects of this figure, in composition Longinus supplies a practical and striking illustration of the very qualities with which he is dealing. Thus Demosthenes, he states, "will often leave in suspense the thought which he has begun to express, and meanwhile he will heap, into a position seemingly alien and unnatural, one thing upon another parenthetically and from any external source, whatsoever, throwing his hearer into alarm lest the whole structure of his words should fall to pieces, and compelling him in anxious sympathy to share the peril of the speaker; and then unexpectedly, after a long interval, he adds the long-awaited conclusion at the right place, namely the end, and produces a far greater effect by this very use, so bold and hazardous, of Hyperbaton." Here then may be detected something of the breathless vehemence, the studied disorder and the air of unpremeditation.

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A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

characteristic of impassioned utterance, but largely due in this instance to the employment of one of the figures.

It is in short an example of artistic expression reproducing the effects of natural expression; a principle emphasized by “Longinus” in his statement that “art is perfect when it seems to be nature, and nature hits the marks when she contains art hidden within her.”

Among the other figures treated by “Longinus” are the Apostrophe or adjuration, the Figures embodying changes of syntaxes, and lastly periphrasis; all of which are said to be instrumental in heightening the expression.

The use of the Apostrophe he illustrates from the work of Demosthenes. He explains how that orator, in defending his policy which had brought disaster at chapter one, reverts to past history, and in recalling the policy which had prevailed at Marathon, swears by those earlier champions as though they were gods; thus raising the argument to the emotional plane and carrying away his hearers by the very force of passion.

He points out the effects of variations of syntax; the use of the plural for the singular or vice versa, the representation of thing past as though they were present.

Of greater interest, however are his remarks on periphrasis which has a heightening effect on expression. By its very magniloquence, provided it is free from bombastic or discordant elements, it adds to expression a richer note and more tuneful rhythms, thus affording assistance to one who is endeavoring to set forth some lofty thought.

And Longinus likens its effects to those musical accompaniments which help to bring out the charm of a melody.

On the other hand he adds that its use is attended with considerable risk and needs much care; for otherwise it falls flat and is apt to degenerate into a trivial and cumbrous form of expression—a truth that was subsequently to be borne

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out by certain aspect of English poetry in the eighteenth century.

From the above instance of Longinus's treatment of the Figure it becomes clear that unlike most of the contemporary rhetoricians he attempts no mere enumeration of their different varieties, but aims rather at establishing the general idea of their function and at illustrating his teaching by some selected examples. Moreover, by way of inculcating a more intelligent use of such devices, he explains where possible the psychological basis on which they rested; while more than once he lays stress on their proper handling. Nor does he confine himself to caveats of merely a general kind. His exposition throughout is characterized by warnings of which the injunction as to Periphrasis is but one example. Thus he insists Figures are not to be used indiscriminately. “The place, the manner, the circumstances, and the motive, he explains, must all be taken into account; and in particular, the device of Repetition or accumulation must only be used where the occasion or subject invited inflation, redundancies, exaggeration or passion. Then, too, he points out that in employing a Figure the orator (or writer) should exercise sobriety and judgment; “in the midst of the riot of the imagination, as he puts it, “restraint is necessary”. Again, he adds that the exhibition of passion is most effective when it seems to be unstudied on the part of the speaker and to arise naturally out of the occasion itself. Equally original and suggestive, however, are his views regarding literature in the wider sense of the term; for here again he stands alone in the keenness of his vision, his penetrating insight into the nature and function of the literary art. That he conceived it not to be mere craft but a thing of the spirit is shown throughout by the character of his treatment. Thus to him a poet was great, not by reason of his technique, but by virtue

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of his imagination, his gift of feeling, and his power of conveying those qualities to others. This conception is not only novel but also essentially modern. He hints in more than one place that formal rules may be disregarded at the bidding of a higher law: an important aesthetic truth which was to be rediscovered by modern critics. Elsewhere he points out the inevitable and organic relation existing between thought and expression; or again, the atmosphere of infinite suggestion bound up with all great literature; while he also establishes once for all the survival value attached to great art. What he sees in literature is a great aesthetic force, appealing irresistible to the whole nature of man, uplifting, bracing, and stimulating, while nourishing something that lies deep in his nature.

It, therefore becomes clear that in Longinus we have a great original critic, one who, propounding the truths of art as he sees them succeeds in opening men’s eyes to new aspects of literature. Nor is his manner any less original than his matter; for in his subjectivity, his enthusiasm, his lively and personal style, may be noted features which for the most part were wanting in earlier critical work. Reminiscent in some ways of Plato’s manner, and rich with metaphors, compounds, and poetical expressions, it has at the same time a peculiar intensity of its own; and this was due partly to striking epigrams and picturesque similes, partly also to long periods brought in each instance to a triumphant close.

As for the place he occupies in the critical development this much at least is obvious, that in an age of confused standards he advocated in unique fashion a return to the ideals of Greek classical art. The doctrine as such was no new thing, but he alone succeeded in recapturing the spirit of the ancient art, and in laying bare by his analysis the unchanging principles of that art. It is therefore as an exponent of

the genuine classical spirit that he is perhaps best described; and not, as he has been called, the first romantic critic. Throughout his discussion, it has been noted, he is concerned mainly with ancient Greek models, while his theory is solely based on the conception of art as the product of principles deduced from the practice of the past. He is classical also in the balance he maintains between genius and unimpassioned hardwork, in his sense of the need for fitness, selection, and a fine adjustment of means to ends; while in addition, a “romantic” critic would not have been blind to the ‘romance’ in the Odyssey. So it is as one of the last of classical critics that he figures primarily in ancient critical history. But it is also true that he anticipates much that is modern in critical work. And this is shown by his concern with the essence rather than with the form of literature, his understanding of the part played by the imagination and the feelings in creative work, his efforts at literary interpretation and appreciation. In him we find a combination of the faculties that were characteristic of the greatest of his predecessors. Like Aristotle, for instance, he based his theories on existing Greek literature; likewise aiming at a rational explanation of literary phenomena. He is an antithesis of Aristotle using like Plato, imaginative reason as well as his idealism and enthusiasm. Conspicuous for his suggestiveness and for the number of aesthetic truths he revealed or made familiar, he stands as a reminder of some of the essentials of literature, and as a lasting and stimulating force in the field of literary taste.

The supreme quality of his work is no longer questioned. Ranking in antiquity with the greatest critical achievements, it “remains towering among all other works of its class. There are things in its pages that can never grow old; while its freshness and light will

continue to charm all ages and the work of Longinus is in a sense contemporaneous with that of Plato, Aristotle and Coleridge.

It should be evident from the above discussion that there are points of affinity between the basic tenets of the Indian Alaṁkāra school in relation to the nature of poetry and the insights of Aristotle, Cicero, Longinus and many others. It is evident also that Alaṁkāra in itself has no poetic value; it acquires poetic value only when the right use of a figure of speech commensurate with the situation of the poetic utterance contributes to the poesis of a poem. In other words, it ceases to be simply decorative and become functional by being integrated into the matrix of a poem.

3

Indian Theory of Guṇa and Doṣa, in Kāvyāśarīra, and Stylistics and the Western Theory of Form

To come back to Alamkāra again. It is necessary to understand the relation of Doṣa and Guṇa to the theory of Alamkāra. Since the main object of the writers of Alamkāraśāstra has been the search for poetic beauty and to formulate theories about poetry they tried to analyse the different aspects of poetry in order to find out the various means of its ornamentations and named the elements as Rasa, Dhvani, Rīti, Guṇa and Alamkāra. There are differences of opinion about the relative importance of these elements both in terms of conception and execution of these embellishing factors of poetry and different scholars have specialized in one or the other of these elements.

Despite the controversy amongst theorists of different ages and schools regarding the character and relative importance of these embellishing elements in their theory of poetry, they have all agreed upon one fundamental point, the avoidance of Doṣas or poetic flaws since Doṣa, as the very name indicates, has a deterring effect on poetry in as much as it mars its beauty. Dandin emphatically enjoins that even a slight

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defect ought not to be tolerated in poetry as even a single

leprous spot is sufficient to render a handsome body

ugly. Govinda is more explicit when he states that if

poetry is defective in any form, the presence of technical

excellences and figures of poetry fails to create the

necessary poetic charm: on the other hand, if it is free

from poetic flaws, it can produce at least some amount

of charm without technical excellences. In this view

Govinda appears to have been anticipated by

Abhinavagupta who lays greater emphasis upon the

absence of Doṣas than on the presence of Guṇas and

alamkāras when he remarks in connection with

Bharata’s Doṣas - etad-doṣa-vihinam, śruti-sukham

dīpta-rasam ca yadi bhavati tāvatā guṇāntarair

alamkāraiśca hīnam api kāvyam lakṣaṇa-yogāvyabhi-

cāritayuktam. These theorists, therefore, (excepting

Dandin who is not so explicit) appear to hold that

absence of poetic blemishes (a doṣa or apadoṣatā) is

itself an excellence, so to speak.

While it is true that there are differences of opinion

among the aestheticians about the nature and function

of various embellishing elements in poetry there is one

point of agreement regarding the adverse effect of Doṣa

on poetry.

But it does not mean that it is enough if a poet is

just able to avoid all the Doṣas. Theorists themselves

have a lot of disagreements about the nature and scope

of the individual Doṣas and their relationship with other

poetic elements. The ideas have changed with change in

the idea of poetry as an evolutionary process. And what

was considered to be a Doṣa by a particular theorist or

a school of opinion has sometimes been considered as a

Guṇa or Alamkāra by another. In these circumstances

Lahiri asks pertinently, “What standard would one

follow in such a state of mutual disagreement among

theorists. And is it really a matter of high commendation

if the poet only keeps his composition free from the

technical blemishes? Does it not require a positive

individual merit of its own (no matter whether it is due

to Guṇa or Alankāra or to any other factor) in order to

receive wide appreciation? (Lahiri 3). He believes that

these are questions to which theorists must have been

alive as a result of which they could not rest satisfied

with formulating the character and application of Doṣa

alone but had to look elsewhere for positive poetic

beauty. Absence of Doṣa, strictly speaking, has no

positive value and there is nothing like absolute Doṣa. It

all depends on the context in which it takes place. What

is ordinarily regarded as a fault may contribute to the

poetic charm in certain circumstances when it

maintains the rules of propriety (aucitya)? Repetition

may be a flaw but in certain circumstances it may be

appropriate in revealing the anxiety or compassion of

the speaker. But if the Doṣa is not contextually justified

it definitely hinders the poetic charm. Although the

absence of Doṣa is not the single criterion of poetic

beauty, we can never ignore its essential importance in

the theory of poetry. All the theorists pay so much

attention to Doṣa because first a poem must be made

free from flaws before it moves on to its positive

qualities. There is no doubt that the early theorists

conceived Doṣa from a more or less limited point of view

only so far as it was connected with the śabda and the

artha. The Rasadoṣa did not find any place in their

system although some such idea of aucitya or propriety

is there. They did not, of course, mention the word

aucitya explicitly but, nevertheless, the spirit was there

and it is not improbable that they supplied crude

materials for the logical development of the idea of

aucitya in the later theory of poetry. Moreover, they were

not sure about the extent to which Doṣa mars the poetic

beauty, whether it is just a minor blemish or affects the

poem completely so as to invalidate the poem as poem

so to speak. The pre-Dhvani theorists appear to have approached the subject from only a commonsense point of view, namely, that the Doṣas are bad and as such they should be avoided and in their treatment Doṣa generally possesses a character opposite to that of Guna. The post-Dhvani writers, on the other hand, consider Doṣa to be a poetic element that remains subordinate to Rasa but since the word and its sense are means for the manifestation of Rasa they could not avoid discussing the śabda-and artha-doṣas as well.

Now, before we proceed to discuss the historical development of the concepts of Rīti and Guṇa, it is necessary to understand the broad character of the elements — Guṇa, Lakṣaṇa and Alamkāra— as they are found in Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra which, though a book on dramaturgy, contains all the basic ideas of the theory of poetry.

Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra deals with dramatic techniques and he discusses the part played by Guṇa, Doṣa, Alamkāra, etc. in producing the dramatic effect or the realization of dramatic Rasa. Abhināya (acting) is, in Bharata’s theory, a very important factor, because through the manifestations of bhāva, anubhāva, sañcāribhavai it brings out the dramatic rasa. Bharata writes about four different types of Abhinaya, viz., (1) Āṅgika (body movements), (2) Vācika (language/meter), (3) Sāttvika (actions, conditions, events) and (4) Āhārya (dress and appearance). Of these four, the first three are very intimately associated with bhāva, bibhāva, anubhāva, etc. As many as six chapters (VIII – XIII) have been devoted to the discussion of āṅgābhinaya then begins the treatment of vācikābhinaya or vākyabhinaya. Since it is words which make up the body of all śāstras first few of these 108 verses emphasizes the importance of vāgabhinaya while other kinds of representation serve only to help the vāgabhinaya by giving a poignant effect

Indian Theory of Guṇa and Doṣa, in Kāvyaśāstra, and Stylistics... 49

to it. This means that they are all subordinate to the vācikäbhinaya. The latter portion of this chapter, however, deals, with vowels and consonants as well as their poits of sarticulation, which in modern terminology known as articulatory phonetics. As letters are the units of language, Bharata proceeds to discuss these together with a scheme of metres (chandas) which covers the last part of this as well as the whole of the subsequent chapter. These are, after all, merely an elementary discussion about vācikäbhinaya of which the literary aspect and therefore the most important part constitutes the treatment of Lakṣaṇas, Doṣas, Guṇas and Alamkäras Thse are included in the chapter on the ground that they contribute to the beauty of the language in which a character speaks.

Lahiri warns us in this connection that the part which these elements, as embodied in vācikäbhinaya, play in calling forth rasa in Bharata's treatment, has been very remote and it is probably for this that Bharata's successors in the pre-Dhvani schools judge their position on their own merit and not in relation to rasa, which had not been assigned much importance in their theory of poetry. For Bharata himself does not appear to have been particular about the application of these elements exclusively in connection with drama. His indiscriminate use of the terms Kävya and Nätaka in the same context in many cases runs counter to that position. He did not possibly maintain any great theoretical distinction between the aforesaid types of poetry and quite naturally the technical elements of Dramaturgy, as advocated in his school, found a permanent place in the theory of poetry.

Bharata does not try to connect the elements of Lakṣaṇa, Alamkāra, Doṣa and Guṇa either mutually or with the main current of his treatment. These are

brought in abruptly without any sufficient introduction,

except that in the last verse of the chapter dealing with

metres there is a vague hint about their relationship.

In the beginning of the next chapter, Bharata

discusses in some detail 36 varieties of dramatic

Lakṣaṇas. Then comes the treatment of Alaṃkāras or

figures of poetry of which four (namely, upamā, rūpaka,

dīpaka and yamaka) are mentioned, defined and

classified. Then follows the treatment of natakāśraya

doṣas which are also called kāvya-doṣas, and which,

like the Guṇas that come after them, are enumerated as

ten in number. Bharata writes:-

ebhir arthakriyāpeksaith kāvyam kāryam tu

lakṣaṇaih

ata ūrdhram tu vakṣyāmi kāvyadoṣāṃstathāvidhān

(XVII, 87. Ch. T.)

The verse makes one feel that Bharata has included

the Alaṃkāras under the scope of his Lakṣaṇas, but

unfortunately he does not give us any idea about the

criteria of the distinction of one set from the other.

On the contrary, he appears to confuse the issue

still further when he defines a particular Lakṣaṇa in

terms of Guṇas and Alaṃkāras. It seems that Bharata’s

definition and classification of Lakṣaṇa, Alaṃkāra and

Guṇa are somewhat dogmatic. The fundamental

distinction between these three classes of poetic

elements is hardly apparent, and some of the

characteristics of Lakṣaṇas may as well be considered

as belonging to Alaṃkāras and Guṇas. Lahiri therefore

surmises: “Apparently an early writer like Bharata does

not mean to imply any theoretic distinction between

Lakṣaṇas, Guṇas and Alaṃkāras, but accepts and

repeats traditional nomenclature and takes them all as

beautifying factors of poetry generally, just as in

Bhāmaha and partly in Daṇḍin the distinction between

Indian Theory of Guna and Doṣa, in Kāvyaśāstra, and Stylistics... 51

Guṇas and Alāṃkārās is not very sharply indicated" (Lahiri 14).

Lahiri then goes on to discuss Abhinava's peculiar views on Bharata's Laksanas. While commenting on Bharata's Laksanas in Abhinavabhāratī, Abhinava refers to a number of views on the position of the concept of Laksana in poetry. He remarks in connection with some of the verses that the Laksanas are the most important factors in Kāvya-bandha and the treatment of other elements comes as a matter of course in their connection. Later on, while he introduces Bharata's treatment of Alāmkāras, he says that Laksanas constitute the body poetic figures on the analogy of human body being adorned with ornaments. Then again, while commenting on the verse yatkiñcit kāvyabandheṣu sādrśyenopamyate etc. that defines Upamā, Abhinava remarks: kāvyabandheṣukāvya-lakṣaneṣu satsū ityanena gauriva gavaya iti nāyam alāmkāra iti darśitam. Here the Laksana is clearly identified with Kāvya-bandha, i.e., poetic speech itself and naturally it involves all the necessary charm that makes poetry what it is. This view has been more clearly set forth in the lines that come immediately afterwards and run thus: bandho gumpho bhaṇitir vakroktiḥ kavivyāpara iti hiparyāyāt lakṣaṇaṃ tv alāṃkāraśūnyam api na nirarthakam. This remark harks back to Kuntaka's theory of poetry and the individual skill of the poet that underlies it. Considering all the remarks of Abhinava in this connection it is possible to form some definite idea of the characteristics of Laksana and feel that the Laksanas are essential in poetry or kāvya and the scope of Laksana is as wide as Kāvya-bandha or poetic expression in general.

Alamkārās augment the beauty of the kāvyabandha. Laksana has got a natural grace of its own due to the peculiarity of the poet's individual power

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52

A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

which makes a poem acceptable to us in spite of any technical embellishments. Since the presence of Lakṣaṇas adds to the charm of the Alamkāras, Lakṣaṇas should also be considered as the beautifying factors of Alamkāra. (Lahiri 18)

The wide range of Abhinava’s Lakṣaṇa reminds one of Kuntaka Vakroti. The distinctive marks of the poet’s skill involved in the natural grace of Abhinava’s Lakṣaṇa or kāvyabandha is paralleled by the vaidagdhyabhangi of Kuntaka. And lastly, the capacity, which Abhinava’s Lakṣaṇa possesses for giving a poignant effect to the charm of the Alamkāras, clearly reminds one of Bhāmaha’s Vakroti which lies at the basis of all Alamkāras (ko lamkaro’naya vinā—Bhāmaha). There is evidence to surmise that Abhinava was familiar with the theories of Kuntaka or even the earlier theorists such as Bhāmaha who expounded a theory of Vakrokti as the basis of all Alamkāras although his conception of Vakrokti was not so mature or developed as could be utilized by Abhinava in connection with his treatment of Bharata’s Lakṣaṇas. Lahiri argues that since the terms and expressions used by Abhinava are undoubtedly those of Kuntaka, this makes it highly probable that the Vakroktijīvita appeared earlier than the Abhinavabhāratī and Abhinava quite consciously identified Bharata’s Lakṣaṇa with Kuntaka’s Vakrokti.

In support of his contention Lahiri points out that Dr. A. Sankaran also noted the similarities in Abhinava’s works and Kuntaka’s Vakroktijīvita in Some Aspects of Literary Criticism and remarked that probably the Vakroktijīvita appeared late in the life of Abhinava. He probably did not go into the details of Abhinava’s treatment of Lakṣaṇa. The truth, however, seems to be that Abhinava utilized portions of the treatment of Kuntaka but did not quote him anywhere by name because he was not much earlier than himself and the views expounded by him had not, till then (and in fact

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never), been established in the Śastra. Dr. Sankaran rightly observes that though the Vakroktijīvita “put forward a different theory, it did not demand serious consideration from a greater thinker like Abhinava because it recognized adequately the importance of Dhvani and Rasa in poetry…..”(In Lahiri 20). Another possibility is that both Abhinava and Kuntaka were drawing upon one and the same source and this is the Kāvyakautuka of Bhaṭṭa Tauta whose work is not traceable but whose views are quoted by later writers like Caṇḍīdāsa, Ksemendra, Hemacandra and Ruyyaka.

Bhaṭṭa Tauta emphasized the individual power of the poet in the composition of poetry (tasya karma smṛtaṃ kāvyam), and he defined poetic imagination as the consciousness that can can figure forth ever new presentations (prajñā-nava-navollekha-śālini). According to Bhaṭṭa Tauta the vision (darśana) precedes description (varṇana) in the case of the poet.It is worth recalling the views of Coleridge in this connection and note its affinity with the views of Bhaṭṭa Tauta. Bhaṭṭa Tauta, in fact, takes vision for granted as the initial prerequisite for the creative objectification.

Coleridge writes in the fourteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria (1817):

What is poetry? Is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other.

For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts and emotions of the poet's own mind The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to eath other, according to their relative worth and dignity.

He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by their synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.

The imagination, according to Coleridge ses all things in one - omne ens unum. The mind is the

storehouse of endless flux of facts and scattered fragments of images, but imagination reduces it to clarity and order, and nothing is alien to its touch. But imagination also sees the controlling Form. And when it acts on what it sees the flux itself is transformed and is fixed in the clarity of a realized design. The Well, the Vision and the Will interplay in the creative process. However, let us come back to Bhaṭṭa Tauta. Kuntaka appears to have been inspired by the teaching of Tauta which he critically combined with the views of Bhāmaha in order to expound his theory of Vakrokti. In this connection Lahiri indulgingly remarks: “Abhinava naturally subscribed to his guru’s views on Lakṣaṇa and did not mind borrowing the expressions and terms of a theorist who humbly accepted one of the main teachings of Abhinava’s venerable guru although he used it for a different purpose, namely, the formulation of a theory which deviated from the beaten tracks of the Śāstra. By utilizing the treatment of Kuntaka, he has indirectly glorified his own guru Tauta” (Lahiri 20).

After we have discussed the idea of Doṣa as it appears in Bharata and the subsequent poeticians it becomes necessary to discuss what may be regarded as the counterpart of Doṣa, in other words what is called Guṇa as opposed to Doṣa. Bharata’s Guṇas though originally discussed in relation to drama are equally applicable to poetry. Of the pre-Dhvani schools, only Vāmana, offers a general definition of Guṇa. Other writers thought it sufficient to mention the different Guṇas as undefined excellences of poetry, assign a place to them in their systems and merely describe and classify various kinds of such excellences.

Bharata, makes the Guṇas, along with Doṣas and Alamkāras, theoretically subordinate to Rasa not directly but only through an indirect association

(paramparā-sambandha). His Doṣas, however, and the Guṇas are seen as the negations of these Doṣas. Furthermore each of the Guṇas of Bharata is not, in fact the opposite of a corresponding Doṣa. Perhaps it is not meant that each of the Guṇas should be strictly regarded as an opposite of an already defined Doṣa. For in that case it would have been enough if the definition of a Doṣa were given. Thus, it is possible to imagine a set of ten Guṇas, corresponding to the ten Doṣas, and these may or may not correspond to the ten Guṇas formally enumerated by him. One may possibly find a a parallel of this in the two sets of Doṣas and Viparyayas respectively, hinted at by Daṇḍin and explicitly stated by Bhoja, one constituting the formally defined Doṣa and the other constituting the viparyayas of the defined excellences. According to Lahiri “since Bharata has not given us any slightest suggestion to that effect it does not appear to be wise to take recourse to an ingenious way of conceiving an imaginary set of Doṣas or of Guṇas simply to ascribe the meaning “opposite” to the word Viparyaya as some of the other writers have done” (Lahiri 23). He feels that it will be more reasonable “if we agree with Abhinava that viparyaya should mean vighāta i.e., absence or nonexistence” (Ibid). It is clear from Abhinava’s remarks in connection with Bharata’s description of the Doṣas that poetry, in Abhinava’s opinion, satisfies its definition, even without further embellishments if it generates Rasa and gives pleasure to the reader.

Bharata discusses the Doṣas while discussing the Guṇas because it is told at the very outset that the composition should be ‘faultless’, so that the reader can appreciate the poetic excellences that are described immediately afterwards. The post-Dhvani writers, too, suggest in more than one place that absence of fault itself is a great merit. There is no doubt that the Doṣas have an adverse effect on poetry, but to avoid them it is

necessary to know their nature. Incidentally, the later writers like Bhoja, Prākaśavarṣa and others divided Guṇas into three classes, of which one deals especially with Doṣas which cease to be Doṣas because of the propriety of their use in the particular context in which they appear. According to Govinda and Viśvanātha, such a Doṣa is Guṇa by Upacāra only and cannot be considered as a positive technical excellence. It is evident from the above discussion that that theorists of all ages have dealt with Doṣas and Guṇas side by side, and have even tried to explore the relation between the two elements.

As has been already said above, it would be an useless attempt to find in the specific Guṇas of Bharata always a direct opposite of the faults previously mentioned by him; for while presenting in a few cases, the opposite of some of the aspects of the Doṣas, his Guṇas have often been given independent definitions. Anyway Bharata enumerates the Guṇas thus:

śleṣaḥ prasādaḥ samatā samādhir

mādhuryam ojaḥ pada-saukumāryam

arthasya ca vyaktir udāratā ca

kāntiś ca kāvyasya guṇā daśaite

(XVII, 96, Ch. T)

Lahiri then considers in detail, Bharata’s conception of each of these Guṇas along with the comments made by later writers:

I. Śleṣa is defined in a twofold way in two separate verses:

(i) The Guṇa consists essentially of leṣa or coalescence and involves a coalescence (ślisṭatā) of words connected with one another (sambaddhānuparāmparam) through the collection of meanings desired by the poet (ipstenārtha-jātena).

(ii) This naturally well-knit (svataḥ supratibaddham) coalescence is apparently clear (sphuṭam svabhāvataḥ) but is to be comprehended by means of a subtle discernment (vicāra-gahanam).

II. Prasāda. This excellence is applicable to both śabda and and artha. It consists of a clarity arising out of the relation of the word and sense.

Abhinavagupta, however, regards Bharata’s prasāda as equivalent to Vāmana’s arthaguṇa of the same name, for he remarks: so’rtho vaimalyāśrayo’pi vaimalyam upacārāt. The artha cannot itself be vaimalya; the qualification is used in a metaphorical sense. This certainly corresponds to Vāmana’s arthaguṇa Prasāda, which has been defined as artha-vaimalyām.

III. Samatā or evenness, consists of expressions which are not redundant or difficult to understand and which do not contain an excess of cūrṇa-padas. Vāmana explains cūrṇa-pada as adīrgha-sāmāsa and anuddhaṭa-pada (vṛtti under i, 3, 24) – short compounds and soft vocables.

Abhinava makes Bharata’s samatā equivalent to the śabda-guṇa samatā of Vāmana, remarking: “sabdānām samatvāt samatā …... dīrgha-samāso’tyantsamāsāś ca viṣamatā ( In Lahiri 33).

IV. Samādhi consists in the presence of that peculiar or distinguishing embellishment of sense which is understood by men of critical discernment. Abhinavagupta remarks in this connection: yasyārthasya abhiyuktaiḥ pratibhānatīsayavadbhir viśeṣo’purvaḥ svolikhitā upalabhyaye sa samāhita-manah-sampādya-viśeṣatvād artho viśiṣṭaḥ samādhih.

This explanation closely follows Vāmana’s vṛtti: samādhi-kāraṇatvat samādhiḥ in connection with the definition of Samādhi as an artha-guṇa.

V. Mādhurya consists of sweetness, where a sentence heard many times or repeated again and again does not produce weariness or disgust. The text of Abhinava's commentary on this passage is corrupt in many places, but it is clear that he reads śrutam for kṛtam and vākyam for kāvyam of the K.M. text. It is clear that Abhinavagupta here, as elsewhere, reads the views of Vāmana into Bharata and presents Mādhurya from two view-points, viz, as a śabda-guṇa and as an artha-guṇa. In Abhinava's opinion, Bharata's Mādhurya is also an artha-guṇa consisting of uktivaicitrya, as defined by Vāmana.

VI. Ojas: (i) Strength where the composition is characterized by the use of varied, striking and dignified compound words, having letters agreeable to one another). (ii) This excellence occurs where there is richness of word and its sense, and where a low or censured object becomes an object of exaltation.

Abhinava accepts the first definition, reading sānurāgaih for the obviously corrupt sā tu svairiṇh of the K. M. text, and explaining sānurāga as yatra varṇair varṇāntarām apekṣyate tatra sānurāgatvam. He takes the example quoted by Vāmana to illustrate Ojas as a śabda-guṇa (vilulitamakarandā mañjarīr nartayanti) and remarks in this connection: atra ra iti śabdo nda śabdam sva-gurutvāpekṣate. etad eva gāḍhatvam ucyate..

VII. Saukumārya consists of an agreeable sense which results from agreeably employed words and from well-connected euphonic combinations. Abhinava, as usual, equates this with Vāmana's Saukumārya, both as a śabda-guṇa and as an artha-guṇa. The phrase sukha-saṃyojya śabda brings in the idea of Daṇḍin's saṃsthūrakṣara-prāyātā (I, 69) and of Vāmana's saṃrthatva (iii, 1, 21). Again, the apāruśya (iii, 2, 11) of

Vamana, which consists chiefly of the avoidance of disagreeable or inauspicious statements, is said to be implied in Bharata's sukumārartha or agreeable sense.

VIII. Arthavyākṭi. Explicitness, (i) in which meaning is apprehended as soon as the word is employed, (ii) which describes the nature of things as they appear in the world by means of wellknown predicates. It is clear that the first of these definitions corresponds to Vāmana's śabda-guṇa Arthavyakti which is explained by him as jhaṭityartha-pratipatti-hetutva, while the second would approximate to his artha-guṇa of the same name which has been defined as vastu-svabhāra-sphuṭatā.

IX. Udāra or Udātta. (i) An exaltedness which is marked by superhuman and other varied feelings and by the erotic (śṛngāra) and the marvelous (adbhutā) (ii) An excellence which characterizes a composition by the presence of diversified or charming sense (citrārthaih) and of well-spoken words (sūktaih), which have more than one particular sense and which are marked by elegance (sausṭhava-saṃyutaih). Abhinavagupta who accepts the first definition holds that the excellence consists in describing what is not divine as divine, what is not marvelous as marvelous, what is hardly tender as full of erotic sentiment, either by the delineation of these sentiments of the erotic and the marvelous or by the vibhāvas and anubhāvas thereof.

X. Kāṇṭi or loveliness which delights the mind and the ear, or which is realized by the meaning conveyed by graceful gestures (lilādi). Abhinava apparently accepts this reading of the K. M. text and explains lilādi as liladi-ceṣṭā: but the reading in the Ch. text is somewhat different. According to this latter text, the Guṇa Kāṇti would consist of a composition of words (śabda-bandha) which by its special device (prayogeṇa), appeals to the mind and the ear and causes calmness or limpidity (prasāda-janaka). Abhinavagupta thinks that the delight

is the outcome of the conspicuous presence of Rasas like the erotic, and as such Bharata's definition corresponds to that of Vāmana's artha-guna Kāñti, which is defined as diptarasatvam. Abhinava too clearly remarks - diptatvam iti yāvat. Abhinava, moreover, thinks that this Guna also corresponds to Vāmana's śabda-guna kānti, which is defined as brilliance or aujjvalya (iii, 1, 25) without which a composition would be merely reproductive and stale (yadābhāve purāṇacchāyetyucyate).

Before we proceed further it may be interesting to note how Gokak, an eminent scholar, tries to define these Guṇas in relation to literariness and style. In his inimitable style he asks : 'How can we distinguish mere language from language that has been transformed into Style? It is here that the guṇas mentioned by Sanskrit aestheticians are of great use to us. The language that has become Style is characterized by the presence of guṇas. Mere language is just lexis and syntax. There are no guṇas in it. It is only the language that has received all these saṃskāras - all this refinement at the hands of the poet, that is, the summation of all the concentric manifestations of the poet's vision. Language which has not received this orientation can only be nirguṇa - colourless, featureless and without any excellence (In Kushwaha 145).

Gokak asks, "How shall we distinguish śabda guṇas from artha guṇas? Gokak also points out, and rightly, that there are differences in the definitions and descriptions of these guṇas and doṣas among different writers between Vāmana and Daṇḍin, for example. So, Gokak says : "For our purpose, the śabda guṇas may be said to indicate the predominance of the following features in the synthesis called Style : inflections and affixes; lexis; syntax; rhythm; imagery. The artha guṇas will then indicate the predominance of Vision, Attitude,

Indian Theory of Guna and Doṣa. In Kāvyāśarīra, and Stylistics...

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Mood, Thought and Theme. Both the artha guṇas and the śabda guṇas reside in the same poem or work of art.

But viewing them separately helps us to realize the composite nature of its style” (In Kushawa 146). He then redefines the terms from a modern critical perspective.

According to him

(1) Ojas is characterized by the abundance of compounds, well-knit syntax and double consonants preceded by short vowels. The rhythm here, consequently, will be vigorous, not sweet. ‘Ojas’ is ‘brilliance,’ He thinks that Ojas suggests imagery which is hyperbolic or striking.

(2) Śleṣa also has well-knit syntax. It does not have an abundance of compounds like Ojas but many words are used to reinfoece the meaning of a single word that is used. Although there is nothing special about its rhythm its imagery, it is inclined to be lofty.

(3) Udāratā consists in the extraordinary description and passionate intensity of feeling. Both imagery and rhythm are expected to be lofty and dignified.

All these three guṇas are closely related and indicate a style consisting of tightly structured syntax, high-sounding words and splendid imagery.

Three other guṇas can be grouped together to indicate another variety of style.

(4) Prasāda is lucidity, consisting in simple sentences, familiar words and a refined expression, easy rhythm and simple imagery.

(5) Arthavyakti is ‘perspicacity’ and close to svabhāvokti. It has much in common with prasāda.

(6) Samādhi alternates between well-knit and loose syntax and generally has a few compounds, simple

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sentences, many familiar words, colourful language, and a few figures of speech.

(7) Samatā means uniformity and sweetness of texture, the language being soft, plain or a mixture of soft and plain expression. It will have simple sentences, familiar words, smooth versification and common imagery.

(8), (9), (10) ‘Mādhurya, Saukumārya and Kānti go together. They indicate the third kind of style, the sweet and lyrical one. Mādhurya or sweetness stands for refined and figurative expression and sweetness of versification. Saukumārya means ‘delicacy’ or ‘tenderness’. It takes in words that are not harsh-sounding but full of splendour, and have grand rhythm and dazzling imagery. According to Vāmana it has a touch of rasa about it.

Gokak then examines the artha guṇas.. He says that the artha guṇas can also be clustered into groups.

According to Gokak, the first group consists of ojas, lesa and udarata. The second group consists of prasāda, arthavyakti, samatā and Samādhi. The third group consists of three guṇas - mādhurya, saukumārya and kānti.

He further writes:

“Another point needs to be dealt with before we finalise our statement about the guṇas. Bharata spoke of certain other modes known as vrittis. These were aspects of subject-matter associated with four aspects of histrionics or the acting of a play. The four aspects of acting were āṅgika, vāchika, sāttvika and āhārya. The four vrittis suited to these four aspects of acting were: kaiśikī, sāttvatī, ārabhatī and bhāratī. These modes or vrittis gradually turned into suitable occasions for the manifestation of rasa and got blended with the rītis or

style that were already there in the writing. It then happened, as Shri B. K. Sivarahiah says in his Alamkāra Śāstra in Kannada, that both rīti and vritti remained dependent on the situation of rasa for a definition of their precise nature in a given context. Vrittis came gradually to be associated with rasa and meaning and rītis were narrowed down so as to indicate a relation only with words. But this development need not affect the main line of our argument and we may retain the word rīti for indicating all that the word 'style' stands for.

Reverting to the ten guṇas, it will be found that there is no conflict in any way between the features attributed to a guṇa on the side of the Word and those attributed on the side of Meaning. These two sets of features can coexist” (In Kushwaha 151-152). In fact there is a symbiotic relationship between the two. They are organically interlinked.

It has already been pointed out that the Indian theoreticians looked upon poetry as an organic object having a body and soul. As in Coleridge so in the Indian Poetics the physical poem, the entity that is amenable to sense perceptions is Kāvyasarira ( the body of the poem). We can see the poem written or printed or even when it is neither written or printed we can hear the poem recited by somebody. This is the body of the poem. As in a body so in a poem we can make operations ; we can change the syntax; we can replace one word by another and so on. But we can do nothing to the soul of the poem which may be called the poesis of the poem.

The idea of Kāvyasarira is closely related to the Western idea of form. The notions of Guṇa and Doṣa can be traced back to Bharata as all the Western essential ideas about the nature and function of poetry can be traced back to Aristotle. The notions of Guṇa and Doṣa involve many if not all the aspects of poetry, and we have already touched upon these and we shall discuss them

in greater detail in course of our various discussions about Aucitya, Vakrokti, etc. Now let us see how the Western theoreticians look at the form of poetry.

According to Professor G.N.G. Orsini “Form in poetry, simply defined, is the manner in which a poem is composed as distinct from what the poem is about. The latter may be called the subject or the substance of the poem, its subject-matter or content as distinct from its form or manner. ‘Form’ being a term with a variety of denotations, some of them closely connected with particular systems of philosophy, poetic form also admits of several meanings, some so divergent from each other that they are contradictory” (In Premiinger 286).

Taking first one of the commonest meanings of the form of a poem he says that on the surface level it may simply be the meter because poetry is usually composed in meter. In other words a verse is generally a metrical composition, and the form imposed by meter on the text distinguishes it from other literary forms such as the form of prose. Even in free verse there is the use of meter and rhythm. Even patterned prose or what we call a prose-poem is also amenable to this meaning of form. Form also, by extension, may be the style in which the poem is written. All such meanings are, in fact, implied when one sees that the art of writing poetry consists essentially in the skillful handling of words and phrases, verse and rhyme, style and diction. Formalists believe that the value of a poem depends exclusively on the quality of its form in that sense. It is for this reason that the poeticians in the West advise poets to follow Horace’s recommendation of labour and polishing file, revising and polishing the form until it is perfect. Theophile Gautier also recommended in the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin that “form is everything” : “Sculpte, lime, cisele”. However, critics like Bosanquet

contended in Three Lectures on Aesthetics (1916) that such a meaning of form “is something superficial, general, diagrammatic. We speak of empty form, mere form, formal politeness; it is opposed to the heart and soul of anything, to what is essential, material, and so forth”.

W. P. Ker, on the other hand, pointed out in “Form and Style in Poetry” that “from another point of view, however, which is just as common, it is the scheme or argument that is the form, and the poet’s very words, are the matter with which it is filled. The form is not that with which you are immediately presented, or that which fills your ears when the poem is recited – it is the abstract original scheme from which the poet began”. Ker further adds that when we say that Wordsworth’s “Excursion” is formless all that we mean is that “the argument is not well planned. In this sense form is the structure, which may be tight or loose, supple or flaccid”. The fallacy that Ker makes here is that he confuses between form and structure. Form is actually the end point of structure in the sense that we can think of the form only after the structure is complete. Moreover, the structure can be broken up into separate components or elements, but the form cannot be broken up; it is a complete autonomous entity not amenable to division into parts. Again, when we think of form in terms of the epic, the lyric, the drama, with all their subdivisions, we actually mix up form with genre. This meaning of form is handed down to us by Plato who said that “that which an object has in common with other objects is its form”. Accordingly what a poem has in common with other poems – its presentation as dialogue or narrative or as personal effusion – is its form, which is seen as identical with what we now call genre or kind. The kind or genre then determines the structure of the poem, which is the previous meaning of form. This meaning of form is still current in critical parlance when

we speak about a sonnet or an ode in terms of literary form.

Again V.M. Ames writes in V. Ferm, ed., History of Philosophical Systems, (1950,): “In a broad sense, whatever in the make-up of an object helps one to perceive it as a whole is its form (555). Form, in this sense, is the unifying factor in the poem. R.W. West and R. Stallman also seem to subscribe to this view when they contend in The Art of Modern Fiction (1949) that “form represents the final unity of a work of fiction, the successful combining of all parts into an artful whole.

Form is, therefore much more than the ‘abstract argument’ or ‘original scheme’: it is the actual welding of all parts into a whole, the individual organization of a work so that all its constituents, however defined – words, thoughts, diction; style, or meter – cohere and harmonize into an organic whole. In this sense form is often called organic form and is sharply distinguished from abstract, structure, especially as it is determined by genre. The external and preconceived structure which depends on genre is correspondingly called mechanical or abstract form in contrast with the organic form. We owe this distinction between the mechanical form and organic form to the famous lectures that August Wilhelm Schlegel delivered in Jena and later in Berlin, published as Lectures on Dramatic Literature (1809-11), where he privileged Shakespeare over Racine and defended the free and supple form of Shakespearean tragedy as organic, in contradistinction of the mechanical regularity imposed by the rules and unities of neoclassicism that we find in Racine and Corneille. Thus Schlegel finally solved the problem of the artistic pattern of Shakespeare’s plays, which baffled the Shakespearean critics throughout the 18th century.

Coleridge borrowed the idea of Schlegel’s formula, made it his own by assimilating it into his theory of poetry.

Thus Schlegel's idea found its way into English Criticism through Biographia Literaria and since then, over the centuries it has now become almost a commonplace, and Professor Orsino deplores the fact that its original author and application are often forgotten. A. C. Bradley in his famous inaugural lecture of 1901, "Poetry for Poetry's sake", initiated another great critical dispute by formulating a dichotomy of "form and substance" and argued: "If the substance means ideas, images and the like taken alone, and the form means the measured language taken by itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of things not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them. If substance and form mean anything in the poem, then each is involved in the other, and the question in which of them the value lies has no sense. The true critic in speaking of these apart does not really think of them apart; the whole, the poetic experience, of which they are but aspects, is always in his mind; and he is always aiming at a richer, truer, more intense repetition of that experience. Bradley then used the phrase 'significant form' for the unified whole which has gained an excellent currency in critical discussions."

It is really interesting to note that even this concept of form as a unifying factor can also be located in Aristotle. In Book 7 of the Metaphysics Aristotle applied to art his ontological concept of form as "determining matter, such as the idea of the statue which is the form in the mind of the sculptor and which he then imposes upon some kind of material: the resultant work is thus a synthesis of form and matter produced by human intelligence, while living beings are a synthesis of form and matter produced by nature". But unfortunately in the Poetics Aristotle, possibly diverted by the Greek conception of poetry as mimetic, refrained from applying this concept of organic form to poetry. The recognition of

the relationship of the quality of beauty to the inner form is of course Plotinus's constructive contribution to aesthetics. The concept of Inner Form in German criticism is nothing but a variant of organic form as understood by Schlegel and adumbrated by Coleridge. Invidentially Goethe's criticism of dramatic rules and of the unities in Jubilaum Ausgabe, (1776) contains the idea of Inner Form.

In the twentieth century a lot of discussion has been made about the idea of form, and we have already touched upon most of them. But I find that the person whose theory of form not only subsumes various ideas of form but bears a close affinity with the Indian notion of Kāvyasārira and its ramifications is the American New Critic, Yvor Winters.

Yvor Winters is not primarily a theoretician, because he believes that “theory in itself is insufficient” (Donald Davie 16). His theory of form, therefore, has to be developed from the various observations he has made on different occasions. While it is true that the observations are partly occasioned by the immediate context in which they are made, there is a broader pattern within which these observations can be reconciled. It can be seen, then, that Winters's theory of form is quite consistent and well-defined. While discussing the theory of form we have confined our discussion to “the poetic form only, keeping in view Winters's remark that the poem exhausts more fully than any other literary form the inherent possibilities of Language” (IDR 11).

Winters is an “avowed moralist” (Hymen 54). Rejecting what he calls the “didactic”, the “hedonistic” and the “romantic,” he says he is most in sympathy with a fourth theory, which, “for lack of better term”, he calls the “moralistic” theory (IDR 31). I propose to examine

how Winters's theory of form is related to his idea about the moral nature of literature and his belief that the poet is a moral agent. It can also be seen that Winters's theory of form has a strong affinity with the tradition of Indian thought as expounded in Sanskrit poetics.

To begin with, there are two aspects of a poem: (1) the subject-matter or the material provided by the life-experiences; and (2) the way the material is structured into an authentically personal and unified art-form. The material governs and is subsequently governed by the structure in the poetic process. Winters writes:

"The poem is a statement in words about human experience" (IDR 5). And again: "I believe that a poem (or other work of artistic literature) is a statement in words about a human experience. I use the term 'statement' in a very inclusive sense, and for a lack of something better (FC 26).The statement referred to, however, is a rational statement, because words are concepts, and language itself is essentially rational. So Winters qualifies:

"The poem is good insofar it makes a defensible rational statement about a given human experience (the experience need to be real but must be in some sense possible) and at the same time communicates the emotion which ought to be motivated by the rational understanding of experience" (IDR 11).

But the poetic statement is different from a statement of purely cognitive nature In an article entitled, "The Language of Poetry: Materiality and Meaning", published in Essays and Criticism Derek Attridge discusses at length the nature of the language of poetry and observes that "the organization of the linguistic substance in poetry acknowledges and enforces the fact that literary language is not the language of daily discourse". Winters writes:

"A poem is first of all a statement in words. But it differs from all such statements of a purely philosophical or theoretical nature, in that, it has by intention a controlled content of feeling" (IDR 363). The "content of feeling" refers to Winters's theory of language and the word "controlled" refers to the role of the poet, while both the aspects, at bottom, are inextricably interlinked with the issue of the morality of poetry.

Thoughts and feelings are couched in words, and words have dual roles to play:

"My theory rests on the observation that language, if one disregards for the present its phonetic values, is dual in nature; that each word is both conceptual and evocative, denotative and connotative, and that the feeling, evocation, or connotation is directly the result of the concept and dependent upon the concept for its existence". (IDR 502)

And again:

These terms, however, all suggest certain loose possibilities in the way of perception and feeling; and the poet's business is so to relate them, that a single and definite idea emerges. (IDR 50)

The poet exploits the denotative and the connotative aspects of a language in transmitting meanings and feelings. In other words, he uses words to generate referential meanings but he also uses the emotional connotations (or the feeling-contents) associated with the words. The referential sense of any statement is its motive and the connotations form its emotion. The relation between motive and emotion as far as I understand these terms, is similar to, if not identical with, the relation between denotation and connotation. Furthermore, there is a close relation between motive and emotion, as there is between thought and feeling. If the concept happens to be trite or

imprecise, the feeling will be enfeebled and the harmony will be disturbed.

What is important in regard to a poem is a just feeling, and not necessarily an intense feeling. The feeling, to be just, must be properly motivated. A poem can be successful only when the poet is able to strike the perfect balance between motive and emotion. This balance can be achieved by a judicious application of the tools for the evocation of the proper feeling. Some of the tools, such as imagery, diction, syntax, etc. are subjective, while others such as rhythm, meter, etc. are objective. The blending can be perfect only when the poet has a perfect command of the resource of language, the varying levels of denotation and connotation and the rhythmic potentialities. In this connection it is worth, recalling what Mallarmé wrote to Degas; “It is not with idea that one makes sonnets, but with words”- What Mallarmé meant is that the poetic tissue consists of words, the words charged with evocative power. Just a command of the language is not enough. Since a poetic statement has a “controlled content of feeling”, and also because a poem must make “a defensible rational statement about human experience”, reason must function as a moderator of the consciousness of the poet and also as the ultimate controlling principle. Reason is of paramount importance in Winters’s theory of form. The very title ot his monumental work, In Defense of Reason, indicates the primacy of reason in Winters’s critical theories. The rational quality of language calls for the central function of reason both in the understanding and evaluation of the human experience, the raw material of a poem, and also in the composition of poetry. It brings the human character of the poet into full activity in his poetic expression: “The poet, then, understands his subject in rational terms, and he so employs language that he communicates

simultaneously that understanding and the feelings which it properly motivates" (IDR 503).When the poet tries to understand his experience in rational terms, as a man qua man he is equipped with a world-view; he has his personal passions and prejudices. His experience originates from an interaction between the given situation and his highly developed sensibility. The poet is, then, in "semi-intuitive contact with experience", as Winters observes in his note to the poem "Heracles" (CP 146). In a way, one's view of reality determines one's view of consciousness. The point is that the poetic reaction to life-experience becomes significant only when the total personality of the poet – the rational, the emotional and the sensuous – is involved in the response. It is through reasonable control in the organization of the perceived material that the poet achieves the desired balance in his complete poem. Keith Mekean says in The Moral Measure of Literature (1961 ) that for Winters balance is more important than control, for it is not the material but the perception, organization and structuring of the material that makes a poem successful. Quite often the forms of individual poems vary in quality because of the varying powers and interests of the poets. Winters traces, for example, the source of the Romantic disintegration in the Romantics' abandonment of logic. I am inclined to agree with Andor Gomme when he says in Attitudes to Criticism that ‘It is through Winters's understanding of form that one is able to penetrate to the heart of the disease which he calls romanticism in which there is a special concentration on feeling at the expenses of a properly motivated situation.

Since the content of poetry is human experience, moral evaluation of human experience will inevitably creep into the texture of the poem. The poet draws the emotion from the rational understanding of the human

experiences; he evaluates his experience and records it in the light of the rational understanding derived from the tenable human experience. This is an act of moral judgment. If the poet can hit upon the right form which can best control the logical content and evoke the proper feeling toward the subject, then the poem becomes aesthetically moral. This is not an easy task. Winters write: “The act of moral judgment so considered is far more difficult, is a much fuller experience, than an act of classification; it is a full and definitive account of a human experience” (IDR 503). Moreover, “The feeling is particular and unparaphrasable….is inseparable from what we call poetic form or unity, for the creation of form is nothing more or less than the act of evaluating, and shaping (that is, controlling) a given experience” (IDR 20). A similar idea is expressed elsewhere: “The poetic content inheres in the feeling, the style, untranslatable and can be reduced to no formula save itself” (UER 224). The form inheres in the feeling and embodies the poet’s perception of life, the evaluation of the perception through reason and emotion as revealed in the completed poem. When the evaluation of experience is communicated through all possible variations of versification and rhythm, it makes poetry “a means of enriching one’s awareness of human experience and strengthen the moral temper”IDR 29). Moreover, “if art is moral, Winters contends, “there should be relationship between art and human action (IDR 371). Winters concludes that poetry is thus “a civilizing influence: it trains our power of judgment and should, I imagine, affect the daily judgments and actions” (IDR 372). And again : “We regard as greatest those works which deal with experiences which affect human life most profoundly, and this criterion is not merely one of the intensity of the experience but of the generaitity or exclusiveness of the implications” (IDR 27). This, in a way, completes the circuit by pointing out the

way in which poetry can and should influence the

course of human action. The morality of poet is not

confined to the poet or the act of composition of poetry;

it encompasses and involves the reader as well.

While discussing the form of poetry, Winters

suggests that any successful poem is a complex of

meaning with two distinguishable features : a logical

structure and a texture made up of sound through

meter and musical phrasing the rational structure and

the rhythmical progression:

"What we speak of loosely as the 'form' of a poem is

probably, at least for the most part, two-fold; we have on

the one hand the rational structure of the poem, the

orderly arrangement and progression of thoughts; and

we have on the other a kind of rhythm broader and less

easily measurable than the rhythm of the line—the

poem exists in time, the mind proceeds through it in

time, and if the poet is a good one he takes advantage of

this fact and makes the progression rhythmical" (IDR

12).

What Winters means by “rhythmical” may be

understood from his explanation of the term in the

context of his own poems: “The poems are rhythmical

not merely from line to line but in total movement from

beginning to end, and that the relations between the

meanings of the part is an element in the rhythm, along

with the sound” (CP 16).

The rhythmical progression results from the

ordering of a poem's rhythm, meter, pace and cadence.

Winters starts with the assumption that “meter or rather

the total phonetic quality of material language is in some

way or degree expressive” (IDR 545).

"Music expresses emotion. A particular kind of

music expresses a particular kind of emotion. Although

the material language is no substitute for music, it

shares with music the property of rhythm : And metrical language, if we understand the language, is not pure sound; the sound is merely one quality of the total meaning, but it contributes, or can be made to contribute to the meaning” (IDR 546). And again: “If the total rhythmic structure can affect the total feeling of the poem, it is only reasonable to suppose that there is a similar relationship within the details” (IDR 547).

Winters believes that a well-formulated metrical technique is essential to the art of poetry, although Winters would hasten to warn us that a monotonous meter invariably enfeebles the rhythm. Within the general frame of metrical reference, it is the variations from the metrical norm that gives rhythmic vitality to a poem. An appropriate meter with careful variations can enhance and strengthen the total rhythmic structure in its capacity to transmit both motive and emotion, which together comprise the philosophical structure of the poem. This becomes evident in the audible reading of poetry. In the individual poem the meter serves as the metrical norm; but the rhythm is the broad, prevailing accentual sound pattern of the actualized poem. The metrical technique is thus a necessary controlling instrument of all kinds of poetry. It helps the poet to relate his rational understanding to his emotion and enable him to qualify his emotion more precisely than in any other form of statement. What is more important, it provides the poet with an opportunity to bring his poem close to a true judgment of rational choice because, “the total phonetic value of metrical language has the power to qualify the expression of feeling through language” (IDR 551).

And again: “He [the poet], is not endeavouring to invent a logical argument, then meter it, then confuse argument and meter in the interests of excitement. He is seeking to state a true judgment; he is endeavouring to

bring each word as close to a true judgment as possible; and he has it in power to modify the values of words within certain limits” (IDR 550)

And again,

“Meter has certain values of its own, and it clarifies, identities, and even modifies the phonetic values of unmetered language. And the total phonetic value of metrical language has the power to qualify the expression of feeling through language. Since the expression of feeling is a part of the moral judgment as I have defined it, the meter has moral significance, for it renders possible a refinement in the adjustment of feeling to motive which would not otherwise be possible”. (IDR 551)

We have earlier seen that the rational structure of poem is aesthetically moral, and now we see that the rhythmical progression or the texture made up of sound through meter and metrical phrasing is also of moral significance. Thus the form of a poem which integrates the local and the metrical structures is moral par excellence, and in Winters’s aesthetics this integration is achieved not through any esemplastic imagination but by an act of moral judgement, as Winters feels that he is not quite sure what imagination means, because during the past hundred and fifty years it has been used so variously and so illusively as a term of sophisticated criticism (See IDR 7). The form must be sensitive to and improve upon the configuration of reality.

Incidentally, in his poem “Dedication for a Book of Criticism,” addressed to W. D. Briggs, Winters says that the task of a scholar is very difficult indeed. Winters writes:

Strong the scholar is to scan

What is permanent in man;

Indian Theory of Guṇa and Doṣa, in Kāvyśarīra, and Stylistics... 77

To detect his form and kind

And preserve the human mind;

By the type to guide,

Universal wisdom bide (CP 145)

I believe that Winters has satisfactorily performed

the task he had set upon himself (See IDR 14) and there

is every reason to hope that the prayer that Winters

made in his poem “To Herman Melville in 1951” would

be granted without pain:

Saint Herman grant me this that I may be

Saved from the worms who have impested thee (CP

137).

Winters’s concept of form as related to the circuit of

poetic experience has a close affinity with the tradition

of Indian thought. Sanskrit poetics clearly delineates the

circuit of poetic experience. The modality of poetic

experience is similar to life experience in terms of

stimulus and response. The circuit begins in the world

itself, the primary source and the ultimate reservoir of

all experience. The next link is the poet, who reacts

intensely to the life-experience and recreates that

experience in an art-form which becomes the objective

correlative for the experience. This form is the third link.

The fourth is the reader, the sahrdaya of Sanskrit

poetics. The circuit becomes complete only when the

aesthetic experience of reading a poem refines the

sensibility of a reader and heightens his perceptivity.

Similarly, Winters’s concept of form as inhering in the

logical and the metrical structure is congruent with the

concept of kāvyśarīra or the poetic tissue. Critic after

critic in Sanskrit poetics have called attention to the

distinctive quality of poetic expression which is

distinguished by the supremacy of utterance

(uktipradhāna). The poetic tissue (kāvyśarīra) is

qualitatively different from and superior to other verbal structures. Abhinava Gupta in Locana interprets poetic utterance as an ideal structure (utkṛsta sangathana) and derives it directly from poetic action. Utterance here does not refer to the verbal tissue alone. It is the perfect balance of all the elements of poetry. Abhinava Gupta contends that the ideal poetic structure integrates the idea and the image, the sonic and the semantic. Bhāmaha in Bhāmahālankāra also meant the same thing when he defined poetry as śabdārthasahitau kāvyam: the sonic and the semantic together constitute the body of poetry. According to Sanskrit poetics there is a precise genetic relation between feeling and expression. Rhythm as an intrinsic feature of expression is determined by feeling. In other words, the feeling creates its own rhythm and determines the meter. The metrical structure of a poem must be organized in such a way that it points out the highlights and deepens the shadows. Expression, sound and rhythm arranged in an ideal pattern world require us to obey a certain order and development of thought imagery and emotion. All these are poetical devices for the concretization of feeling.

The analysis of meters in terms of their efficiency to be the vehicles of feeling can be traced to the third century B.C., if not earlier, in Sanskrit poetics. Kātyāyana is certainly one of the oldest writers in the field. He discusses the appropriateness of certain meters to certain subjects and situations. The situations, in his view, should forge their own meter (arthānurup chanda). Meter is only an abstract pattern of the rhythm. Formal analysis can indicate the precise shape of this pattern. But in any actual poem, if it is a good specimen of poetic vitality, the component rhythms will certainly be found to vary from the abstract scheme, for the simple reason that rhythm is really the undulation of poetic feeling as it flows into the linguistic tissue and moulds it. The

pulse of feeling cannot be expected to be mechanically regular.

As in Winters, so in Sanskrit poetics, every link in the poetic circuit is of profound normal significance. The writings of Bharata (Nāṭyaśāstra), Ānandabardhana (Dhvanyāloka), Mahima Bhaṭṭa (Vyakti Viveka) to mention only some of the exponents of this theory, would abundantly illustrate the point. Poetry takes its origin from life and, it must, in a profound sense, illuminate life. The poetic form in its new integral reality provides the relevant means as much in Western Poetics as in Indian Poetics.

·

4

Vakrokti and Oblique Poetry

The Indian theory of Vakrokti can be traced back to the critical speculations of Bhāmaha who is followed, with divergence of conception and treatment, by Dandin, “Vāmana, Rudraṭa, Kuntaka, Abhinavagupta and Bhoja among others. Bhāmaha mentions Vakrokti in various connections. According to him it is Vakrokti which raises a linguistic expression to the status of a poetry yuktam vakra-svabhāvoktya sarvam-evai-tad-isyate (Kāvyālamkāra:I:30). Again, it is Vakrokti which adorns poetic figures (Vacam vākrārtha-śabdoktiralamkāraya kalpate.) And again, what is a poetic figure without Vakrokti? (ko'lamkāro'naya vinā)! Bhāmaha rejects poetic figures like Svabhāvokti, Hetu, Sukṣma, etc., because they lack the attribute of Vakrokti. To Bhāmaha Vakrokti is not a particular figure but a peculiar mode of expression giving rise to figures. Vakrokti, for Bhāmaha, is an essential element of poetry. It is Vakrokti that flashes forth its meaning. Although Vakrokti literally means a crooked or indirect speech in its wider sense it consists in the strikingness of expression.Raghavan has defined Vakrokti as a “striking, deviating expression” According to S.K. De the term refers to a kind of heightened expression. Vākrokti transcends the mundane experience. Bhāmaha identifies Vakrokti as something that underlies all figures of speech and imparts beauty on them:

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Saiṣā sarvaiva vakroktir anayārtho vibhāvyate.

Yatno'syām kavinā kāryaḥ ko'lankāro'nayā vinā

(Kavyalamkara : II:81)

The next important critic is Dandin. To Dandin it has a restricted sense and it is a collective designation of all poetic figures excepting Svabhavokti, which he calls the first figure of speech. What Dandin says about Atisayokti applies to Vakrokti as well. He says that the poet's desire to say something which will transcend the bound of commonality gives rise to Atisayokti, which is the best of poetic figures: vivakṣā ya viśeṣasya lokasīmātivartinā asau atiśāyoktịḥ syād alamkārottamā yathā (Kavyadarsa II 214) Dandi also argues that Slesa is the beautifying factor of all oblique modes of expression.

Coming down to Vāmana it is seen that the term Vakrokti indicates a particular figurative expression. He conceives it as a peculiar mode of metaphorical expression based on similarity: sādrśyalakṣaṇā vakroktiḥ (Kavyalamkarasutra IV. Iii 8)

In the hands of Rudrata Vakrokti undergoes a transformation to mean a particular verbal figure, Śabdalankāra, based upon a play upon words and which is actually a pretended speech taken in a complete distinct sense by the listener through the accompanying behavior and intonation of the speaker. It is Rudrata who first described Vakrokti as a verbal figure or Śabdalankāra and led to the development of two wellknown types of Vākrokti : Śleṣa-Vakrokti and Kāku Vakrokti. The successors of Rudrata like Ruyyaka, Vidyādhara and others took the term in the sense in which Rudrata used it.

It was Kuntaka who discussed Vakrokti at a great length, elaborated the concept and carried it to such a length that he was able to develop a unique theory of

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literary criticism out of it. At the very outset of his famous treatise, Vakroktijivita Kuntaka writes that his intention is to establish the idea of strikingness which lends extraordinary charm to poetry. He looks upon Vakrokti as the life-breath of poetry and describes Vakrokti as a striking mode of expression depending on the peculiar turn given to it by the skill of the poet. One at once remembers Donne's lines like, “I met the ghost of a lover who died before the god of love was born”. The shock of surprise is largely due to the peculiar turn to the idea of the god of love given by the poet. This skill of the poet, vaidagdhta-bhangi-bhanitih, is reflected in the strikingness of the peculiar charm or Vaicitra. According to Kuntaka the language of poetry is different not only from the current mode of speech but also from the language of science, a point that Coleridge would also make in Biographia Literaria. Kuntaka defines poetry as the synthesis of word and meaning, embodied in oblique expression that constitutes the creative process and becomes a source of aesthetic relish to the reader. He says:

śabdathau sahitau vakrakavivyāparaśālini vandhe vyavasthitau kāvyam tadvid-ābhādakārtini (vakroktijjivita 1/7)

Kuntaka goes on to argue that neither word nor sense nor their combination can make poetry. What makes poetry is the presence of strikingness arising out of Vakrokti in the interanimation of sound and sense in a metrical composition. For Kuntaka Vakrokti or the charm of strikingness is a major or rather the seminal concept that subsumes all other theories and relates it to what is called Kāvyāyapara. Kuntaka identifies six possible sources of strikingness: the arrangement of letters, the substantive or the terminal part of a word, a sentence, a particular topic and the composition as a whole. The first variety is called Varṇavinyāsavakratā or

peculiar use of letters resulting in Anuprāsa, Yamaka etc. The second variety is Padapūrvārthavakratā resulting in peculiar use of synonyms, conventional words, words used in their secondary meaning compounds, etc. The third variety is called Padaparārthavakratā, found in the peculiar use of tense, number, gender person, case, etc. The fourth variety is Vākyavakratā, manifested in the peculiar use of sentences by foregrounding certain ideas, by the formation of various poetic figures, etc. The fifth variety is Prakaranavakratā consisting in the use of a peculiar topic causing strikingness. The curse of Durvāsā effecting a forgetfulness in the mind of Dushyanta is one such Vakrata. The sixth and last type of Vakrata is described as Pravandhavakratā manifested in the peculiarity and strikingness of a whole compososition. Presentation of the play Venisamhāra in heroic sentiment in contrast to the quiet or Sānta sentiment in which it is found in the Mahābharāta is an example of Prakaranavakratā.

Kuntaka agrees with Ānandavardhana that the images well up spontaneously from the unconscious of the poet and thus the images become the part of the poetic texture itself. From this one may come to the conclusion that for Kuntaka, as for Ānandavardhana the feelings inhering in the words and their resonance in the mind of the reader are the most important thing. All the deviations or all the kinds of Vakratā only help the feeling in its manifestation. Thus the poetic figure plays a crucial role in the universalization of the feeling that informs a poem.

Kuntaka's theory of Vakrokti, thus, if taken in the right light, would encompass the ideas of Rasa and Dhvani as well. Even the idea of Dhvani can be seen as a special form of Vakrokti. It lies at the very root of all metaphorical expressions. It is possible to identify the

influence of Ānandavardhanā in the high status he gives to Rasadhvani. Kuntaka recognizes the value of

suggestion in creating the poesis of a poem. Kuntaka also admits that there are three basic forms of

suggestion: Vastu, Alamkāra and Rasa. To come to point to point correspondence, Vastudhvani occurs in the

case of Vākyavakratā, Alamkāradhvani occurs in the case of Pratīyamāna Rūpaka, etc. and Rasadhvani

occurs in Rasavat and various other figures indicating various kinds of Vakratā. Kuntaka also gives paramount

importance to Rasa in his treatment of Prakaranavakratā and Pravandhavakratā. He says that while presenting a hero the incidents which run counter

to the image of the hero should not be used and only incidents which are conducive to the heroic character of

the protagonist are to be used. And in this connection he says that the dramatist can even use imaginary

incidents if necessary. The idea is very close to the idea of Aristotle that what the poet is concerned with is not

what it was but what it could be. Probable impossibility is better than improbable possibility. In this connection

it would be worth recalling Aristotle's comparison between poetry and history. Poetry is superior to history

because while history is tied to fact, poetry is free from it. Since the poet is not writing history but poetry he can

take liberty with history and concoct stories and incidents which never happened to the historic person.

Although apparently Kuntaka seems to be too preoccupied with the formal elements of poetry his great

contribution lies in formulating a theory of poetic expression and relating it to the poetic consciousness.

Kuntaka's theory of Vakrokti has interesting affinities with Western analytical criticism and the

concept of oblique style. In his book Poetry Direct and Oblique Tillyard says that the distinction between direct

and oblique poetry is not something really very new;

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85

only it has been formulated with some systematic analysis in recent times. We shall return to Tillyard and discuss his views as recorded in the book later in course of our discussion.

In Western criticism when Aristotle prefers probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities he is actually pleading for a kind of obliquity. In Rhetoric also he advocates that in rhetoric the everyday speech or expressions should also be presented with an air of unfamiliarity. Of the Roman critics Longinus claimed that the effect of elevated language is not persuasion but transport. For him the sublime consists in a certain loftiness and consummateness of language. The diction must be so used that it has a moving and seductive effect upon the reader and the first things in a style to render it are grandeur, beauty and mellowness, dignity, force and power. It is these things that breathe life into poetry. The other factors or sources of the sublime, according to Longinus, are the capacity for strong emotion, appropriate use of the figures of speech and the dignity of composition. It is obvious how intelligently and elaborately Kuntaka identifies these sources— not only of the sublime but also of the poetic relish in general.

The Italian critic, Dante, also believed that the highest kind of poetry is generally presented in an elevated and sublime fashion. Lessing, Goethe and Schiller in Germany tirelessly advocated the poet’s freedom and experimentation with the language, the most important tool of poetry. Mallarmé sincerely believed that art has its own mystery and this is heightened by the original use of the language. Rimbaud, a great admirer of Baudelaire also believed that poetry uses a special form of language because it has to perform a special kind of function. In England Sidney in his Apology for Poetry spoke highly about the

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flexibility of the English language in expressing all kinds of ideas. The Augustans in their slogan to follow nature also experimented with the language in their own ways. Since they were mainly dominated by reason and the eternal stuff of genuine poetry is emotion they did not cut much ice. But with the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge, there was a great preoccupation with language in their desire to present the familiar things in an unfamiliar fashion, and the supernatural as natural by creating a ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ In spite of Wordsworth’s vociferous claim of bringing language close to speech his poetry clearly shows his departure from his theory. In other words their goals, in a way, compelled them to have recourse a kind of obliquity. If the poet’s feeling is to be individuated he has to devise a kind of obliquity which will properly and adequately express his individual feelings. The poetry of Eliot and Pound abound in such deviations or Vakrokti. For the New Critics the language of poetry, according to Brooks, is the language of paradox. Both irony and paradox make poetry oblique. Allen Tate’s idea of tension also contributes to obliquity. For Tate the poet’s immediate responsibility is the maintenance of the vitality of the language. For Tate a poem is a verbal structure with intension and extension, and needless to say care for these two essential elements would make poetry oblique, because as Tate sees it the poet must give up the language of denotation and must rely upon ‘a continually thinking flux of peripheral connotations’ Tate’s views of tension in poetry and Blackmur’s notion of gesture are subsumed in Kuntaka’s theory of Vakrokti. In brief one might say that all the New Critics, despite their general belief in the objectivity of poetry as in objectivity of criticism, and some specific differences about the nature and function of poetry, have supported and contributed to the obliquity in poetry.

Vakrokti and Oblique Poetry

To come back to Tillyard. In the very beginning of the third chapter of his book Poetry Direct and Oblique Tillyard says that it would seem at first sight ridiculous to treat the topic of obliquity because it is very difficult to define the sphere of obliquity in poetry. Is it really possible to create poetry of any sort without some kind of oblique expression, he asks. Then, more for convenience than conviction Tillyard first tries to give an idea of the sphere of obliquity and then discusses the means of obliquity. It is according to him sensibility, the great commonplaces and the primitive that constitute the sphere of obliquity. Starting with the basic assumption that "a poet is a man of unusual sensibility" he asks if there can be some obvious material which calls for oblique rendering, and says that there is. There is a significant body of material whose value to the reader would consist in the ability of the poet to communicate his superior sensibility. When a poet is great in rendering any kind of experience there is no need to criticize him on the basis of his sensibility. But if the sensibility is a poet's chief virtue then the quality of the sensibility becomes an important factor in criticism. Tillyard believes that sensibility is the main material that leads to obliquity in the poetry of these poets. However, it must be admitted that sensibility was the main material even before the advent of the sentimental movement of the eighteenth century. Tillyard thinks that by expressing sensibility directly and not obliquely the poets made the sensibility cheap. The Romantic poets described things, by and large, without much obliquity, but their simplicity was deceptive and had pernicious influence on many who came to believe that any straightforward statement is poetry. Poems of pure sensibility we hardly come across before the Elizabethan age. Drummond or Hawthornden are minor poets but their verses evince an exquisite sensibility. Apart from fine sensibility they have very

little other admirable stuff in their poetry. Tennyson is often praised for the ‘marvellous accuracy’ of his nature descriptions. But a close look at Tennyson’s poems reveals that there are many poems where the descriptions do not show any scientific accuracy but ‘an altogether more complicated phenomenon. In the middle of the narrative of “Geraint and Enid” we suddenly come across the following lines :

So thr’ the green gloom of the wood they past,

And issuing under open heavens beheld

A little town with towers, upon a rock,

And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased

In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it.

This is not pure description; there is an obliquity. The picture of the airy little town with its towers and the bright meadow and the undefined mowers are not directly related to the actual life but they help in creating a mood or an idea, and it is there that the obliquity of the poem lies. Take another example from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” where Ulysses says, “yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams the untravelled world whose margin fades forever and forever as I move.” It is oblique poetry, and it is doubtful whether it would have been possible for Tennyson to convey the mood and aspiration of Ulysses, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge without the use of the powerful metaphor of the arch and its fading margin.

Tillyard quotes a passage from Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to demonstrate how sometime a ‘brutal directness’ tends to obscure the obliquity of expression.

The lines are :

For lo! the Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d,

The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round;

On shining Altars of Japan they raise

Vakrokti and Oblique Poetry

The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze.

From silver Spouts the graceful Liquors glide,

While China's Earth receives the smoking Tyde.

Tillyard thinks that though Pope is “steadied by the fine eighteenth century convention of the burlesque epic”, what makes the lines unusual is Pope's hypertrophied sensibility that obscures the obliquity of his expressions. Tillyard concludes that sensibility is often the subject of oblique expression, and it is often present when we are least aware of its presence.

Tillyard then focuses on some of the great commonplaces that lie in the sphere of obliquity. One such commonplace is the talk about passions. Consequent upon Aristotle's definition of tragedy as the imitation of action that brings up pity and fear most critics have taken imitation as the end that rouses passions. Dryden in Essay of Dramatic Poesy defines in the persona of Lisideius a play as “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours [….].” It is thus assumed that the passions are the important stuff of poetry, or drama for that matter. Arnold also lays great emphasis on passions, although he does not use the word ‘passion’ at first. He says :

“What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times? They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated ir. an interesting manner by the art of the Poet. And what actions are the most excellent? Those certainly which most powerfully appeal to the great primary affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. Poetical works belong to the domain of our permanent passions: let them interest these, and the voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced”.

90 A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

When exhibition of passions was regarded as the great aim of poetry the major forms of poetry tried to present things in direct statement. The poets tried to say things about great human passions and that was the end of it. And one did not care to ask whether these passions were figures of some larger patterns. “Aurora Leigh” gives us “a just and lively image of human nature”, and that is the end of it. But what about Paradise Lost? Does it not reach out to some patterns larger than what are presented in the poem? Similarly there is a difference between Congreve's The Way of the World and Browning's Men and Women. The point that Tillyard tries to make is that if we think that the poem is oblique then the criticism of passions should be subordinated to the question of what that obliquity consists in. Whenever a poet tries to suggest something beyond the delineations of passions or human actions, the poem is bound to attain obliquity. To put it differently, obliquity becomes indispensable in poems which are meant to illuminate life in a profound sense. To show how in great poetry the higher pattern is suggested Tillyard refers to the last book of The Iliad where Prium visits Achilles to beg from him the body of his son, Hector. Achilles and Hector are sworn enemies. Hector killed Patroclus, so dear to Achilles and Achilles has killed not only Hector but some other sons of Prium as well. Yet in bereavement they have a feeling of kinship, and that is the reason why Achilles who had been abusing the body by dragging it round the walls of Troy, returns the body to the bereaved father. But, Tillyard says that “it is wrong to stop here for here is something behind this poignant exhibition of the passions”. Tillyard then makes a detailed critical discussion of The Fairy Queen to show how the obliquity of the poem that really accounts for its greatness as a poem has been missed by most critics on account of its fine versification and the structure of its allegory.

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The third item that Tillyard encounters in the sphere of obliquity is the primitive. He believes that there are elements of obliquity in poetry which are more primitive than the commonplaces and are often illumined only by conscious thought. And for these oblique expression was necessary. One of the primitive elements is fear. Even many of the ballads that narrate fearful incidents and draw on man's unconscious desire to be vicariously frightened, use oblique expressions. Two other primitive feelings are those of joy and sorrow., and when joy is accompanied by sorrow we have entered the sphere of obliquity. The true joy-melancholy means full acceptance of the situation that calls for obliquity in poetic expression. When Keats says about Melancholy 'dwells in Beauty - Beauty that must die' his poetry becomes oblique as it makes us ponder the truth of the statement.

In the second section of the third chapter Tillyard lists some of the means of obliquity: Rhythm, Symbolism, Allusion, Structure, etc.

Tillyard begins with a poem of Catullus to Lesbia. The poem begins with the simple statement, 'Vivamus,mea Lesbia, atque amemus' ( Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love). It is apparently a very simple poem animated by the general idea that life and love are one, love is the only life and without love life is death. Catullus simply isolates living and loving from all else, and by so doing he gives a significance to love which also makes life significant. As a result loving and living are not only identified; both derive their significance from Lesbia who in the line has been placed in the middle flanked by two supporting words: vivamus and amemus (life and love). This apparently simple line thus attains a significant degree of obliquity. Rhythm can also make a poem oblique. Tillyard says that rhythm is one of the major means of obliquity. Rhythm becomes oblique

when it more than supports the professed sense. In that

case it can overwhelm the sense or it can suggest

something entirely alien or irrelevant. Tillyard cites an

example from out of the many possible rhythmic

obliquities in Wyatt’s poems. Here is the poem :

If in the world there be more woe

Than I have in my heart,

Whereso it is, it doth come fro,

And in my breast there doth it grow

For to increase my smart.

Alas, I am receipt of every care,

And o.c my life each sorrow claims his part.

Who list to live in quietness

By me let him beware,

For I by high disdain

Made without redress

And unkindness, alas, hath slain

My poor true heart all comfortless.

One can at once feel the similarity in ideas

enshrined in this short poem with the idea of Donne’s A

Nocturnal”, but there is a significant difference Wyatt

does nothing to rationalize his emotion. The poem is

written in a simple language but the rhythmic variation-

the forcefulness of the first four lines in contrast to the

casual resentment in the line “Alas, I am receipt of every

care–makes the poem oblique. Tillyard also shows how

in “Hymn to Pan” Shelley attains obliquity by exploiting

a shift in rhythm. Symbolism or, more precisely, the use

of symbolism also makes a poem oblique. Shelley said in

“Defence of Poetry” that the poetic language is vitally

metaphorical and it “marks the before apprehended

relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension”.

Not only that. He further said that when a poet

composes a poem many additional emotions crowd the mind and produce an additional treasure of emotion. Then the language becomes simultaneously the representation and the medium. Poetic language, according to Shelley, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”. The moment the west wind or the skylark is used as a symbol the poems become oblique. However, it was the French symbolists who espoused vigorously the obliquity in poetry by celebrating vagueness or obliquity as the soul of poetry. Objects of the phenomenal world suggest the suprasensible reality beyond them. The poet can present them only by indirection or suggestion. The association between symbolism and suggestion is inseparable and its affinity with the Indian theory of Dhvani is another important area of correspondence which we shall take up separately in another chapter. Suffice it to say, for the time being, that obliquity is evident in its variations in the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry and others. Valéry went to the extent of saying that the poet has to create a verbal situation by transferring the ordinary language into a non-language and forging a language which is very diffeent from the original form. The poet, according to Valéry, is maker of deviations who often forces the language to make the common word take different form and say different things. This is done mainly through the use of symbols, or using a word symbolically. In Germany all the German Romantics espoused obliquity in different degrees and in different ways. Lessing, Schiller and Goethe advocated for the freedom of the poet and independence of art, and in the process they asserted the relevance of obliquity. In English poetry the simple symbols of the Romantics gradually gave way to the highly complex and rich symbols in the poetry of Yeats and Eliot. However, Tillyard holds that in the later Yeats the symbols are

only incidental, but when he uses them he uses them

with great force and significance. Byzantium, for

example is a powerful symbol of passionless intellect in

the two Byzantium poems. Most of Eliot’s poems are

suffused with symbols. Tillyard cites one from “Ash-

Wednesday”. The lines he quotes are :

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings.

Tillyard remarks that the phrase ‘profit and loss’

makes one recall the lines of the fourth section where

Phlebus the Phoenician, a fortnight dead

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

Tillyard says that the lines prepare us for the

passage in “The Waste Land” dealing with Tristan’s

voyage from Ireland, and symbolizing the bravery of

youthful passion. Tillyard claims that it was impossible

to make the earthly delight break more dazzlingly or

more economically through the religious asceticism of

“Ash Wednesday” without the recurrent sea-symbol.

Allusions, conscious or unconscious, also

contribute to the obliquity of a poem. It thickens the

meaning of certain details. It makes a text intertextual.

The obliquity in Eliot’s poetry is largely due to the

profuse allusions that he uses. The very first line of ‘The

Waste Land, “April is the cruelllest month” harks back

to Chaucer’s ‘When that Aprille with his shoures sote,’

and thus brings an old text into a relationship with the

present text, and in the process, makes the present

poem oblique.

Tillyard argues that even plot can cause obliquity.

This happens because plot signifies order and control,

and Tillyard says, “it is the chief means of giving the

impression of what we loosely call greatness” (Tiltyard’s

emphasis). Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is a poem

that illustrates plot-obliquity. Lycidus, also, according

to Tillyard is a typical example of plot-obscurity. Tillyard

says that the apotheosis of Lycidus figures forth Milton’s

own reconcilement with the difficulties of life.” Tillyard

also refers to Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” and analyses

it to show how the nature of the coarse plot leads to

obliquity of the poem. Not only plot; even a particular

character can compel the poet to have recourse to

obliquity. Tillyard cites the example of Hamlet, and

shows how, compared with Orestes, Hamlet is much

profounder, and expression of this profundity has made

the poetry of Hamlet often oblique.

In brief we may say that both the Indian poeticsians

and the Western poeticians believe that poetry, to be

striking, calls for certain obliqueness in the use of

language. Even then it will be wrong to presume that

Vakrokti is poetry. Vakrokti is only a device to create the

imaginative world of poetry and to induce an aesthetic

rapture.

5

Svabhāvokti and

Statement Poetry

Svabhāvokti or natural description consists of the

simple realistic description without any obliquity or

ornate uses of various figures of speech. It does not,

however, mean that there is an avowed rejection of all

rhetorical devices. It is mainly a question of emphasis.

The exponents of Svabhāvokti believe that it is possible

to generate Rasa and induce a state of aesthetic rapture

without having recourse to stylistic deviations or

standard rhetorical tropes. The first references to

Svabhāvokti are found in the writings of Bāṇa who in his

Harṣacarita pleads for a combination of novelty of theme

and ideas with refined natural descriptions of life,

although it is not easy to find all these things in one

place. He says: “navo’tho jātiragāmya śleṣo’kliṣṭah

sphuṭo rasah/vikaṭaksarabandhaśca krtsnameketara

durbhalam” (Harṣacarita I/8i)

Bhaṭṭi who describes Svabhāvokti as Vārtā or

message says that Vārtā aims at capturing and

elucidating the essential nature of an object in its

concrete individuality. According to Bhāmaha if the

quintessential thing described is specific in its nature it

is Svabhāvokti, but if it concerns itself with the non-

specific aspects then it is Vārtā. Thus he makes a subtle

distinction between Svabhāvokti and Vārtā in terms of

their modes of apprehending an object. But the general

Svabhāvokti and Statement Poetry

97

consensus is that Vārtā is only one kind of Svabhāvokti, and not a different form of poetic utteranceance. It is interesting to note that Bhāmaha who is a great exponent of the Alamkāra school also shows a remarkable awareness of the value of poetry which is devoid of Alamkāras. He even opines that there can be figurativeness of subject without actual use of any figure of speech. He goes on to declare that even the use of a single word can add immense value to a poem if it can capture the essential nature of an object in a succinct manner. Bhāmaha also holds that if a composition is presented in a simple laguage which is precise and to the point it can be of immense poetic value. Dandin also shows an awareness of the importance of Svabhāvokti. In Kāvyādarśa he writes that Svabhāvokti is a live and vivid presentation of things in their varying forms and states. He writes:

Nānāvastahaṃ padārthānaṃ rūpaṃ sākṣādivivṛnvati/ Svabhāvoktisca jātiśsetyādyā salankṛtiriyathā (Kāvyādarśa II/8).

According to Dandin Svabhāvokti should be able to bring the object to life before our mind's eye. Dandin divides Svabhāvokti into four classes according to the genus, the action, the attribute and the substance. Dandi thus is of the opinion that Svabhāvokti has an important position in the world of poetry, although it is not necessary that it is a must for any kind of poetry. Again, the question of propriety comes in. There are occasions when the kind of experience that the poet is trying to describe or the kind of perception that he wants to convey calls for Svabhāvokti. Rudrata uses the word Jāti for Svabhāvokti and discusses several varieties of Svabhāvokti in terms of form, and holds that its staple subjects are children, maidens that require simple treatments. Udbhata, on the other hand, delimits the use of Svabhāvokti to the description of the activities of young ones, of animals and the like. Of the other

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commentators Bhoja says that characteristics which are innate in things in their several states and which naturally belong to them, should form the subject of Svabhāvokti. He thus rules out all kinds of conceits from Svabhāvokti. Similarly, external ideas or ideas emanating from the poet's interaction with the object are also ruled out. The main characteristic of Svabhāvokti, for Bhoja thus is the sharp presentation of the essential nature of the object. In this respect it has some affinity with the imagist poetry where the poem captures a moment of discovery or awareness created by an effective metaphor which provides the sharp, intuitive apprehension of an object. But there is a lot of difference too. The most important difference is the use of metaphor in imagist poetry. Svabhāvokti tries to capture the essence with simple intuitive insight without any metaphorical aid.

According to Mahimabhaṭṭa, the poet using Svabhāvokti should be particularly careful while depicting realistic scenes to avoid the commonplace aspects of things which we cannot vividly visualize. Mahimabhatta says that things of the world have two-fold aspects : the universal and special. The universal aspects have scope for varieties, while the special aspect does not admit any variety. It is the special aspect which can be perceived by the senses and can be used as the subject of imaginative poetry. He further remarks that even commonplace things when touched by imagination can attain the realm of true poetry. Svabhāvokti can in that case picturesquely present to the reader's mind an object in such a manner that the reader feels that he is actually beholding it. A confirmation of this statement can be had from Wordsworth's presentation of the solitary reaper : “Behold her single in the field, yon solitary highland lass”. Ruyyaka also gives importance to the role of imagination in elevating Svabhāvokti to the

status of good poetry. Ruyyaka particularly stresses the point that in order to qualify for being accepted as poetry, the nature of the realistic description must be informed and activated by the poet's imagination. Mammata also holds that the action or qualities described in Svabhāvokti must pertain to the object itself and not imposed or superadded by the poet. He says that when one describes a child or his own action as in itself it really is it is Svabhāvokti. In Kāvyaprākaśā (1/4) he emphatically affirms that lack of poetic figure does not necessarily make a metrical composition unpoetical.

It can thus be seen that the Indian aestheticians have thought a great deal about the nature and function of Svabhāvokti and they, in general, agree that Svabhāvokti forms a distinct subgenre of poetry. And it is this conviction that invites comparison with what is known as Statement Poetry in English.

In English we come across simple statement poetry in much of the writings of Chaucer, Dryden, Johnson, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Byron, in some poems of Arnold, occasionally in the verses used by Eliot in his poetic drama as well as in his poetry, in the poetry of the Movement Poets, and then again in much of the contemporary British poetry, in the poetry of Andrew Motion, for example. In American literature most of the poems of Robert Frost can be brought under statement poetry, in the sense that in spite of the profundity of thought the idea is communicated in very simple terms. Take for example, the poem, “Fire and Ice”:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

The language is starkly simple, but who can deny

the poetic richness of the lines which give us an almost

epiphanic revelation of the precarious state of man’s

existence.

The poems of the Movement Poets are characterized

by lucidity, accuracy and precision. Theirs was a poetry

of reason and statement. Although with the symbolist

movement poetry started becoming increasingly

complex, and more so when a poet like Yeats, for

example, used extremely esoteric or personal symbols.

But, it must be maintained that statement poetry has

always continued to exist—either parallel to other kinds

of poetry or in the writings of the poets who are generally

regarded as difficult poets. A line, “That is no country for

old men” or “This is the way the world ends” are simple

specimens of statement poetry. It is generally believed

that Wordsworth who advocated that the language of

poetry should be the language of common man inherited

statement poetry from the verse essays like Pope’s

“Essay on Man” or “Essay on Criticism. According to

Wordsworth poetry is “the image of man and nature”

and “its object is truth, not individual and local, but

general and operative” carried alive into the heart of

passion. The poet, according to Wordsworth, is “a man

speaking to men”. A poet only has a higher degree of

sensibility than the ordinary men and he can articulate

his feelings in a way which the ordinary people cannot.

In other words, on account of his finer sensibility he can

verbalize his feelings. Wordsworth maintains that even a

“naked ejaculation” implies sincerity and it can be

accepted as poetry in spite of the rudeness of

expression. Wordsworth is, by and large, a competent

practitioner of statement poetry. Although Coleridge in

his criticism of Wordsworth points out the discrepancy

between Wordsworth’s theory and practice as a poet in

terms of the language of his poetry, the fact remains,

nevertheless, that the main bulk of Wordsworth’s poetry

is statement poetry. The poems like “Michael” or “Leech

Gatherer” or even large sections of The Prelude are fine

examples of statement poetry. Eliot spoke of the

responsibility of a poet to purify the dialect of the tribe,

and in his poetry which is often polyphonic in nature we come

across statement poetry as well. Take, for

example, the following lines from “The Waste Land” :

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago/They called me

the hyacinth girl.” The language is simple and

straightforward although the lines are emotionally

charged. To take another passage from the same poem :

“Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with the money he

gave you/To get yourself some teeth”. This is pure

speech. Or, “What you get married for if you don’t want

children” is a simple, straightforward question which

does not evince any difference from the language of

common parlance. Eliot is here apparently subscribing

to the views of Pound that when one really feels and

thinks, one stammers with simple speech. Think of the

opening line of Donne’s “The Canonization”: “For God’s

sake hold your tongue and let me love”. In a letter to

Harriet Monroe Pound had written what Wordsworth

had said about a hundred years ago. Pound wrote:

“Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language

must be a fine language, departing in no way from

speech save by a heightened intensity”. The early Yeats

indulged in rhetorical devices. But with the

advancement of age and maturity Yeats’s syntax and

vocabulary came increasingly closer to speech. In “The

Circus Animals’ Desertion” Yeats says that after the

ladder and the symbols have gone he has come down to

"the foul rag-and-shop of the heart". He becomes increasingly concerned with a simple style and says that we should transcribe our thoughts as far as practicable in the same language we thought them in. Accordingly Yeats revised his poems as much to freshen his diction as to regularize his syntax. Here are the opening lines of his famous poem "Easter 1916": "I have met them at close of day/coming with vivid faces/From counter or desk among grey/Eighteenth century houses." No rhetorical flourish, no circumlocution, no figures of speech. A simple statement poetry. Wallace Stevens also believed that poetry must be written in a language accessible to the common reader. The unfamiliar has to be approached through the familiar as the unreal must be drawn from the real. Nothing, according to him, is too mundane to become the subject of poetry. Many modern poets believe that poetry should be "simple, sensuous and passionate" and the language should be as simple as possible, although it is not an easy job. To say something profound in a simple language is always a very difficult job. Lawrence was of the opinion that poetry should be "direct utterance from the instant, whole man." He advocated for a "stark, bare, rocky directness of statement." The statement is true in regard to most of the poems of Lawrence. Take, for example, the following lines from his "Spring Morning" :

Ah, through the open door

Is here an almond tree

Aflame with blossom!

"Let us fight no more.

Among the pink and blue

Of the sky and the almond flowers

A sparrow flutters.

—We have come through.

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103

The language in which Ted Hughes describes birds and animals is simple and straightforward but sharp and precise. Here are the opening lines of “The Hawk in the Rain”:

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up

Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,

From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle

With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.

The language is the language of normal conversation, but the poetic effect attained through the depiction of the contrast between the poet and the hawk is unmistakable.

It should be evident from the above brief discussion that there is an interesting affinity between Svabhāvokti and Statement Poetry and it is possible to attain poetic heights in simple language. We have also noted that even writers like Eliot and Yeats who are noted for their poetic complexities have also written Statement Poetry on occasions. “Two things emerge from this brief exploration. A poet need not specialize in either oblique poetry or statement poetry, but can use either depending on the nature of the subject, or the situation or the character the poet is concerned with at the moment. Secondly, statement poetry can be as powerful as oblique poetry in conveying the poet’s vision. It should follow, therefore, that neither obliquity nor simplicity is essential for the poetry of a poem.”

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6

Aucitya and

Decorum

In course of his discussion of the conditions of successful oratory, Cicero, like Aristotle, focuses on the fact that the purpose of the orator being broadly to teach, to delight and to move, his style must be a combination of different kinds to suit the different purposes; simple for teaching, middle style, coloured yet restrained for delight, and sublime for moving men's emotions. In other words, the style must be in accordance with the aim it is intended to serve. The idea naturally leads on to the discussion of decorum. The methods employed are the outcome of the principle of decorum which became in course of time the all-embracing critical doctrine of Roman criticism. Cicero says that a perfect orator should speak in, whatever style the case may demand. He must only observe propriety in his work as a whole as well as in parts thereof. There must be a perfect correspondence between the subject-matter and the style, or the matter and the manner at every stage. Cicero also quotes approvingly the dictum of the actor Roscius who said that a sense of fitness is the most important thing in art, although that is something which cannot be taught. To put it in a broader perspective the idea if decorum is actually a matter that fully concerns the sensibility of a person. In art we only apply what is essentially relevant

to life. Decorum thus is a principle of life transferred to

art. Cicero then discusses style, and there, too, the

guiding principle is decorum or propriety. What Cicero

says in this connection would at once remind one of

Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction propounded a few

centuries later. Cicero says that a good style is one that

is based on a choice of fit words, that is, words selected

from the language actually used by men, not a separate

jargon; words that are free from commonplace elements

and yet words that comprise unusual forms and

metaphors to give elevation and colour to the effect.

Words in a certain combination produce a certain kind

of effect. The same is true about sentences. Each

sentence has its peculiar harmony and rhythm. In this

respect there is affinity between prose and poetry, and

like Coleridge, again, a few centuries later he believes

that there is no essential difference between poetry and

literary prose. The difference exists only between poetry

and scientific prose. According to Cicero the words must

be chosen in a way that they sound well and have a

harmony and produce sensuous pleasure. But, at the

same time, Cicero hastens to add, that a sentence

should be interrupted by smaller clauses so that there is

a variation in cadence. Cicero analyses the style of many

orators and, almost in a manner of practical criticism,

points out their distinctive features and their

effectiveness in fulfilling the purpose they are intended

to serve. An orator has to appeal to many persons at a

time, and the ears of the people are the instruments on

which the orator has to play (oratori populi aures tibiae

sunt). Moreover, the artistic appeal must be felt

naturally. In this connection Cicero makes a statement

the echoes of which would reverberate for centuries in

the West, and would find its approval in the East as well,

though arrived at independently. Cicero says “Art being

derived from nature, seems to have effected nothing at

all, if it does not move and delight naturally” (nisi natura

moveat ac delectet) [De Oratore III 197. In Atkins II 39]. Cicero is never tired of insisting that works of literature

and oratory are not isolated phenomena, but are intimately, almost symbiotically related to one another. He also shows fine

original insight when he says that every age has its peculiar style of speaking, (aetates extulerunt singulae singula prope

genera dicendi) and suggests the relativity of aesthetic standards.

Before we come to Sanskrit poetics, particularly the works of Kṣemendra whose Aucityavicāracarcā is the most

important exposition of the theory of propriety it will be salutary to have a brief look at few other Roman critics who

also insist on propriety, among other things: Philodemus, Horace, Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Longinus and Qunitilian.

When Philodemus talks about the inseparability of form and content – the theme and form must be combined to

produce the true effect of poetry — he is virtually talking about propriety, and is saying what Kālidāsa would say in the

very beginning of Raghuvaṃśam

“Vagarthabibasamprktau vagarthatipattaye jagatah pitarau vandye pārvatiparameśvarau” (I pray to the parents of the

world – Parvatī and Parameswar that in my poetry there should be a perfectly harmonious blending of Vāk ( thought) and

Artha (meaning).

It was during the time of Horace, that is during the Augustan period, that a fresh dignity was accorded to decorum.

Horace is the most important exponent of Roman criticism. But there is no need to discuss all his ideas or contributions to

criticism for our purpose. In Ars Poetica Horace discusses poetry under three heads: poesis or the subject-matter (ll 1-41),

poema or form(ll 42-294) and poēta or the poet (ll295-476). In the very opening section Horace talks about the need of

organic

unity and propriety (II 1-37). After a brief note on the arrangement of material he proceeds to deal in detail with poetic style or expression commenting in detail on the proper choice of poetic diction or arrangement of words particularly in metrical form and finally on style or tones appropriate to the different dramatic genres and characters. Concerning the function of poetry Horace says that the poet’s function is either to improve (prodesse) or to give delight (delectare), or again to combine both the aims. The combination of the effect will be utilitarian (utile) and hedonistic (dulce). But for Horace the poetic style calls for proper choice of words and their arrangement in composition and metrical form. This is the law of decorum or literary propriety or appropriateness. If Horace’s idea of decorum which partly harks back to Cicero and at the same time has an affinity with Kṣemendra’s theory of Aucitya, his views on the aesthetic side of poetry, the nature of the pleasure aimed, at once calls to our mind the Indian theory of poetry and poetic pleasure.

The concept of Aucitya or propriety is actually touched upon by all the poeticians in one way or the other. It is discussed by the exponents of the schools of Dhvani, Rasa, Rīti and others. This is in the fitness of things, because propriety has to be an important concern for all the theorists who are interested in the ideal kind of poetry. For the exponents of Alamkāra it is supremely important that the right figure of speech is used to convey the particular kind of perception. Similarly unless there is propriety Rasa cannot be generated. The same is true about Rīti or style and deviation or Vakrokti. Thus the concept of propriety embraces all the schools and all the aspects of poetry: the texture and the structure, the meaning and the music, the symbols and the images, the diction and the character etc. The Bhāvas must be delineated according

to the characters represented. And the style and diction

must be according to the cultural level of a particular

character.

However, it is Ksemendra who develops Aucitya as

a consistent theory and he is therefore regarded as the

most important exponent of Aucitya. In his theory of

Aucitya or propriety he takes as his thesis the treatment

by Ānandavardhana of the question of propriety in

relation to Rasa. The famous verse runs as follows:

Anaucityād rte nānyad rasa-bhaṅgasya kārakam

Prasiddhaucitya-bandhas tu rasasyopaṇiṣat parā

The verse means: There is no other circumstance

which leads to the violation of Rasa than impropriety;

the supreme secret of Rasa consists in observing the

established rules of propriety. Rasa can never be created

or even depicted unless there is an intelligent and alert

attention to the established rules of propriety. The idea

was also suggested by Bharata though very briefly,

almost in passing, by way of obiter dicta where he

speaks of the proper employment of Anubhāvas.

Bharata says that a subject may take different forms

depending on the nature of the subject-matter, the

character of the speaker, the nature of the sentiment

evoked or the means by which it is evoked. All those who

discuss Dhvani theory discuss propriety.

Ānandavardhana, in fact, offers elaborate rules for

avoiding Anucitya in episodes and whole works.

Kuntaka shows how the sixth Act of

Abhijñānaśakuntalam which portrays the love pangs of

Dusyanta after he recovers from the effect of the curse

of Durvāsā causing amnesia, is proper for the

delineation of the purified character of Dusyanta who

half redeems himself through these genuine pangs of

separation. Kuntaka gives equal importance to all the

aspects of a poem: structure, texture, rhythm, imagery,

diction, etc. The post-Dhvani writers discuss it in

relation of the treatment of Guṇa and Doṣa. The credit goes to Kṣemendra for developing this idea to its extreme and suggesting that Aucitya is the essence of Rasa – Rasajīṭabhūta as he calls it. He argues that it is Aucitya which constitutes the basis of the charm or aesthetic rapture underlying the relish of Rasa. The Alamkāra and Guṇa in poetry are justified by, and receive their true significance from this element of Aucitya which, therefore, he claims can be called the soul of poetry. What is proper or most befitting for an object is Ucita in its relation to that object? In verses 8-

10 Kṣmendra calls attention to the various aspects of a metrical composition where the concept of Aucitya effectively operates. These are: Pada or phrase, Vākya or sentence, Prabandhārtha or the composition as a whole, Guṇa or excellences; Alamkāras or the poetic figures, Rasa or the sentiment of a poem, Kriyā or the employment of verb, Kāraka or the use of case, Linga or the use of gender, Vacana or the number, Viśeṣaṇa or the qualifiers, Upasarga or prefix, preposition and particle, Nipita or redundancies, Kāla or time and tense, Deśa or country, Kula or family, Vrata or custom, Tattva or truth, Sattva or the inherent self, Abhiprāya or motive, Svabhāva or nature, Sārasamgraha or essential properties, Pratibhā or natural talent, Avasthā or the particular condition or state, Vicāra or judgement, or thought, Nāma or name and Āśīrvāda or blessing. As Kṣemendra presents it there are as many as twenty-seven forms or kinds of Aucitya. Kṣemendra goes on to illustrate each of those items with a number of examples from Sanskrit texts taken from different works by different poets. And this he does by drawing parallels and contrasts. One example that illustrates the item as a successful employment of the theory of Aucitya is followed by a few examples of failure where propriety has not been maintained. Even then there is hardly anything original in the theory of Aucitya as propounded

by Kṣemendra. Ultimately it boils down to what Ānandavardhana and his followers call Sahṛdayatva which implies propriety. Moreover it is never possible to draw up a complete list of areas of the functioning of propriety, as it is not possible to exhaust the universe of poetry. At the same time as S. K. De has rightly pointed out there is a value of this kind of list as a guidance for the aspiring poet, a warning about the important areas which demand his alert attention and practical consideration. However, the credit should go to Kṣemendra for attending an untrodden path. While other theoreticians are myopic in their approach to poetry, confined to the special school that they are exponents of, Kṣemendra discusses Aucitya in a manner which is more Catholic and universally applicable to all kinds of poetry and all schools of poetic theory. Moreover, his practical criticism that reminds one of the New Critics in general and I. A. Richards in particular is of immense value. Unless a theory is illustrated it lacks conviction. It needs a great deal of critical acumen to establish the propriety or the impropriety of a particular use, be it a lexical item or an image or a figure of speech. Kṣemendra also shows great humility when he does not hesitate to point out areas where his own verses have gone wrong. It is not that he finds faults only in others; he finds faults in himself as well. Another aspect of Kṣemendra's treatment of Aucitya that deserves mention is his courage of conviction in challenging established opinion regarding even a canonical literature. For example he censures Kālīdāsa's treatment of the love of Hara and Pārvatī in terms of love- making of the ordinary mortals. Incidentally Milton had to face the same kind of problem in describing the love between Adam and Eve in the fourth book of Paradise Lost.

In the West the idea of decorum or what the Indian theoreticians call Aucitya can be traced back at least in

its seminal form in the seventeenth chapter of Poetics where Aristotle recommends that a tragic poet would do well to visualize every scene that he wants to compose so that what he devises is appropriate and free from incongruities. In Rhetoric also he raises the question of propriety in his discussion of style. Cicero thinks the word prepon that Aristotle uses in his discussion of style is actually what the Latin writers - Longinus and Horace, for example- call decorum. Decorum, in poetry is propriety or what the Indian aestheticians call Aucitya. In the Western context, as well as in the Indian context, it means that in a good poem action should be appropriate or befitting the character and there must be a perfect correspondence between matter and manner, between subject and lexis. A mighty character must be described in a dignified manner and trifling matters must be treated with humbleness. While Cicero applied the term to real life, suggesting that in real life a man should behave the way he is expected to behave in accordance with his social position and cultural level, he suggested that in oratory the choice of vocabulary and style should be in keeping with the nature of the subject on which the lecture is delivered.

Although Horace never used the word decorum in his Ars Poetica, his chief doctrine was literary propriety. The favourite passage for his modern disciples was lines 89-127, wherein Horace argued that each style should keep its proper place since a speaker's words should never be discordant with his station. He argued that it makes a great difference in who is speaking, whether a god or a hero or a slave, an old man or a youth, a great lady or a nurse, a merchant or a plowman, an Assyrian or a Greek. He, moreover, also pointed out that comic themes are distinct from tragic, and the two should never, or very rarely, be mingled. Throughout the Renaissance and long afterward this doctrine of decorum was paramount in the theory of poetry and

highly influential in its practice. Milton, in his Tractate of Education, spoke of the crowning study of poetry as “that sublime art” which in Aristotle’s Poetics, in Horace, and the critics of the Italian Renaissance like Scaliger, Castelvetro, Minturno, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, “teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is which is the grand masterpiece to observe. As interpreted by the critics and commentators, decorum called for distinct poetic genres, consistent characters, and the careful observance of the classical hierarchy of grand, moderate, plain style. Neoclassical decorum came to emphasize literary propriety in the sense of elegance and correct taste, a propriety that avoided the vulgar as well as the unconventional. Pope in his Essay on Criticism very emphatically said that when Ajax is struggling to lift a huge rock the line should also labour and the reader should have a feel of Ajax’s struggle.

Even while this neoclassical theory of decorum was still in its formative stage, it was being challenged by some poets. Croce insisted in his Aesthetics, that art is intuitive, and so the intuitive poets are always upsetting the rules. Medieval poets had more often than not either ignored or modified classical decorum, and many Renaissance poets, influenced by the Bible and Christian literature as well as by the medieval anarchy of forms, flouted fixed genres, conventionalized characters, the hierarchy of styles, and studied elegance of expression. Thus flourished comical tragedies, tragicomedies, histories, romances, simple narrative poems and lyrics. To name just one example among several notable, the actor playwright Angelo Beolco better known as Ruzzante from his favourite role, understood classical decorum, which fostered “literary” poetry, but argued for a different kind of artistic propriety, namely, simple nature. The characters in his peasant eclogues and farces spoke in their native

dialects, using the most native and sometimes the coarsest expressions.

Ruzzante of Padua was a naturalist, and soon turned from verse to prose as even more appropriate for his representation of pure nature. Naturalist in poetry, however, has always distrusted the conventional and traditional decorum. Wordsworth’s revolt against “false refinement” and “poetic diction” was in large part the revolt of the naturalist against an artificial decorum by recommending “selection of language really used by man.” Although Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, showed that the very act of “selection” and the use of meter removed this poetry from rusticity, Wordsworth was demonstrating the truth of Croce’s assertion that the intuitive artist is always upsetting the rules. For Wordsworth, not rules but the author’s own feelings were his “stay and support”.

It should, however, be noted that although decorum in its Augustan sense had subsequently fallen into disrepute the theory of decorum in its original sense as suggested by Aristotle and subscribed to and reinforced by Cicero, Longinus and most importantly by Horace is still valid, as Marvin T. Herrick has pointed out: “No sensible poet or critic can quibble very much with the admonition that it is unseemly to use high-sounding expressions when speaking of the gutter and equally unseemly to use mean expressions when speaking of the majesty of Rome” (Preminger 188).

When we compare the Western stand on propriety or decorum and the Indian speculations on propriety or Aucitya we are bound to be amazed by the meticulous care and elaborate treatment of the Indian aestheticians in expounding the idea of propriety, although the basic stand is the same.

7

Dhvani and

Suggestion

About eleven hundred years of Indian poetic tradition preceded Ānandavardhana’s appearance on the literary scene, and the origin of the Dhvani school, like any other school of poetry, is lost in obscurity. But it is Ānandavardhana who expounds the theory of Dhvani as an elaborate system, assimilating in the process all the earlier theories of poetry such as Rasa Siddhānta, Alam̐kāra Siddhānta and Rīti Siddhānta. It may be worthwhile to give some idea of the theory of Dhvani, particularly for the benefit of Western readers, before comparing it to the poetic creed of Mallarmé.

Starting with a theory of expression, the Dhvani school is mainly concerned with the semantic problems of the function of words and their meanings. But the theory, nevertheless, reaches out to phenomenological problems of discerning the affective response of a perceptive reader. The doctrine is based on the three-fold power of the word Abhidhā (denotation of word), Lakṣaṇā (the figurative power) and Vyāñjanā (the suggestive power), yielding respectively in three kinds of meaning, namely Vācyārtha (the literal meaning), Lakṣaṇārtha (the figurative meaning and Vyāñjanārtha (the suggested meaning). Vācyārtha is the literal meaning in terms of common parlance; it is the primary meaning. Lakṣaṇārthā is the secondary or figurative meaning.

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meaning developed through a trope and Vyāñjanārtha

or Dhvanyārtha (Dhvani) is the suggested meaning, the

emergence of which annihilates the first two meanings.

The Vyāñjanā does not consist in the utterance of

something new but in suddenly revealing, almost in a

lightning flash, what is already there, like the revealing

of the already existing jar by the lamp. Vyāñjanārtha or

the suggested sense to which the name Dhvani is

applied is held as the soul of poetry, the poeisis of a

poem. Dhvani is defined in the following words:

Yatrārthah śabdo vā artham upasarjanīkrta-svārthau

Vyaktah, kāvyaviśeśah sa dhvanir iti sūrbhiḥ kathitah.

(The learned call that particular kind of poetry dhvani

in which the expressed word and sense, subordinating

themselves, manifest that [other suggested] sense).

(De 158)

A close analysis of the minutest details of the

Dhvani theory reveals, as Viśvanātha has shown, 5355

subdivisions of suggestive poetry. The figure is a

testimony to the scientific rigour with which

Ānandavardhana developed the theory, taking into

account all the possible variations and ramifications.

Ānandavardhana follows the binary division, the most

modern scientific approach, in his analysis. First

Dhvanikāvya is divided into two broad categories :

Avivakṣitavācya and Vivakṣitānyaparavācya. In the first

case the expressed sense is not intended, and in the

second case it is certainly meant but ultimately it

amounts to something else or the unexpressed. The first

is based on Lakṣaṇā or indication, and the second on

Abhidhā or denotation. The Lakṣaṇā-born Dhvani is

again of two kinds: Arthāntarasaṃkramita (suggestion

where the expressed sense passes into another sense)

and Atyantatiraskṛta (suggestion where the expressed

sense disappears entirely). Either of these, again, may be Padaprakāśya (manifest in a word) or Vākyaprakāśya (manifest in a sentence). Abhidhā-born Dhvani is also subdivided into two categories : Asamlakṣyakrama (that in which the suggested is of an imperceptible process) and Samlakṣyakrama (that in which the suggested is of a perceptible process). The main difference between Asamlakṣyakrama and Samlakṣyakrama is that the former includes the suggestion of Rasa or relish or some Bhāva or emotional state suggested in a particular way. The latter includes the suggestion of Vastu (matter/fact) and Alamkāra (figure). The credit goes to Ānandavardhana for reviving the concept of Rasa first enunciated by Bharata (living sometime between the second century BC and the second century AD) in Nātyaśāstra (Treatise on Dramaturgy) and extending it to literature in general and poetry in particular. The process by which the Rasa or the affective response of the perceptive reader is manifest is, according to Ānandavardhana, basically a process of suggestion. The Vyāñjanās (suggestors) are the objective correlatives of the response of the reader. Samlakṣyakrama has two varieties: Śabdaśaktimūlaka (suggested by a particular word and Arthaśaktimūlaka (suggested by fact or figure). This thus is of two kinds: Vastudhvani (suggestion of fact and Alamkāradhvani (suggested by a figure of speech). The distinctions go on almost endlessly, but Ānandavardhana takes adequate care to illustrate different kinds of Dhvani. Space does not permit me to quote examples, but suffice it to say that the main thrust of the theory of Dhvani is that the language of good poetry is emotive, ambiguous, non-logical and open to multiple interpretations. It is the supreme glory of language that, creatively used, it can yield an infinite variety of meaning, so that poetry can transcend the descriptive and become suggestive and evocative. But this should not lead us to think that the

concept of Dhvani is something mystical at leaving the

unexpressed to be darkly gathered. Ānandavardhana

takes care to point out that the Dhvani is not something

mystical, but it is something that can be scientifically

defined and satisfactorily grasped. The unexpressed is

ideally linked with the expressed, without which is

cannot exist. But it is wrapped up so mysteriously that it

is needs a Sahṛdaya, a perceptive reader of disciplined

sensibility, to unravel the mystery, comprehend its

subtlety and enjoy it. And the entire treatise is based on

the solid foundation of faith that good poetry must

suggest and not simply describe.

The theory of Dhvani owes its inspiration to the

grammarians in general and from Bharṭhari in

particular, and thus has a relation with the theory of

Sphoṭa. The eternal sound unit, according to Bharṭhari

is Sphoṭa and that alone can convey ideas. It is thus, on

the one hand manifested by letters and on the other an

entity from which the sense comes out. There are

various kinds of Sphoṭa: Varṇasphoṭa, Vākyasphoṭa,

etc. A word expresses a sense not separately by its

letters, which make up the word but by its entirety.

Thus only when the word is complete the meaning

emerges. The grammarians believe that the Eternal

Verbum or śabdabrahman manifests itself through

different words in a sentence. Some believe that a

sentence is indivisible, and this means that a word will

acquire a full sense only when the sentence is complete:

by its original denotation and connotation and its

position that the word occupies in the syntactic

structure of a sentence. Taking cue from these ideas of

the grammarians the Alamkārikas developed the theory

of Dhvani. As the grammarians see the term Dhvani

indicates the sound emanating from each letter during

articulation and then mingling with the next sound and

so on finally create a complete word with its denotation

and connotation. The Alamkārikas also use the term Dhvani to signify suggestive word and meaning. The grammarians speak of different kinds of Dhvani depending on whether it is short or long, soft or harsh, quick or slow, etc. In the opinion of the Alamkārikas also the function that is required in addition to the denotation, connotation and purport is Dhvani.

Ānandavardhana who is the most important exponent of the theory of Dhvani holds that the Dhvani is not something mystical but is grasped by the disciplined readers of poetry. He argues that in a poem both the expressed word and the expressed meaning together bring home the part played by both these elements in the matter of suggestion. He holds that in Dhvanikāvya the words and meanings are of secondary importance. The figures, according to him, only embellish the sound and sense, and thus hold a subordinate position. The figures or Alamkāras alone on their own cannot enhance the beauty of a poetic creation. They can do their job of embellishment only when they are applied to sound and sense.

In reply to the claim of the Alamkārikas that Dhvani is subsumed under the figures of speech, Ānandavardhana contends that Dhvani has nothing to do with denotation. Moreover, as Mukherji has shown that Dhvani is the name given to the whole composition of which the figures of speech are only some constituent elements. Since Alamkāra is only a part of Dhvani it cannot be equated with Dhvani. There are figures that lead to the emergence of some unexpected sense. Some of these figures are: Samāsokti, Ākṣepa, Paryāyokta, Dipaka, etc. One can consider the inclusion of these figures in the realm of Dhvani because they imply some suggested meaning. Mukherji says that Ānandavardhana, would not consider them as constructs of Dhvani, because in Dhvanikāvya

Dhavani and Suggestion

119

suggested meaning is inexplicably charming, but in the case of the figures just mentioned it is the particular way of expression that accounts for the attraction and certainly not the unexpressed sense. Mukherji says: “In the verse,

Upodharāgena vilolatārakam

Tathā grhītam śaśina niśāmukham

Yathā samastam timirāṃśukam tayā

Puro’pi rāgādgalitam na lakṣitam

the behaviours of the two lovers are superimposed on the moon and the night; both are presented with the behaviours of two lovers ascribed to them. Yet in the verse under consideration the unexpressed meaning in the form of lovers is incapable of being accepted as forming the final import of the proposition, and as such is of paramount importance; it is the description of the moon in the evening that is the final import of the verse. The lovers only render the moon and the night suitable Vibhāvas for the manifestation of erotic emotion. Thus in the Samāsokti the expressed sense, whose beauty is heightened by the superimposition of the behavior of the unexpressed idea is of more importance than the subtle meaning itself (Mukherji 390-391). The same explanation can be given to Ākṣhepa also where the expressed meaning dominates over the suggested meaning., because in this mode of expressionn Ākṣepa also gives primacy to the expressed meaning and not the suggested meaning. The only criterion to determine whether the primacy is given to the expressed meaning or the suggested meaning, according to the exponents of the theory of Dhvani is Cārutva or beauty: Kva anyatra

ittham drṣṭam iti cet bhūṣaṇam etat asmākam alaukikatvavasiddhau (AB.I.285) Similarly, in the figure of speech Dīpaka, says Mukherji, following Ānandavardhana, the contextual and noncontextual

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meanings are connected by the same action or attribute, and this connection ultimately leads to the apprehension of a suggested similitude existing between them. But nevertheless, what happens here is that the form of expression is more attractive than the suggested Upamā lying in the background, and therefore, it cannot be called to comprehend Dhvani. Again, in Apahunti the object of description is rejected and in its place a standard of comparison is established. Here too the mode of rejection and the tone of the other being more attractive, cannot attain the status of Dhvani. In the figure of speech of Viśeṣokti, however, the effect is described as absent, even though all the factors are present. Mukherji comments: “[...] this apparent violation of the law of causailty creates charm of an Alamkāra. But this charm is due more to the expressed than the unexpressed and so cannot be called Dhvani. The point that Ānandavardhana tries to make is that any expression through a use of figure of speech or otherwise, can never be considered Dhvani as long as the expressed gains primacy over the unexpressed.

Even in Saṃskṛti and Sangara where a number of figures are combined the expressed meaning is more important than the unexpressed and, therefore cannot qualify for Dhvani. Mukherji takes up various figures of speech one by one and shows how each of them fails to qualify, on their own, for being considered Dhvani.

Ānandavardhana even goes to the extent of showing that even Rasavat cannot comprehend Rasadhvani. Mukherji, following Ānandavardhana, writes :

“The verse:

Kim hāsyena na me prayāsyasi punaḥ prāptaścirāddarśanam

Keyam niṣkaruṇā pravāsaurucitā kenasī dūrikṛtaḥ

Dhavani and Suggestion

Svapnānteṣviti te vandan priyatamavyāsaktakānthgraho

Buddhvā roditi riktabahualayastārām ripustrijanah

is an illustration of this figure. The poet eulogizes his royal patron and depicts the sad plight of the ladies of rival kings only to bring into bolder relief the glory and valour of his patron. As the greatness of the king is manifested clearly by tragic emotion it can be said that the latter beautifies the former and thus is subservient to it” (396). Similarly Ānandavardhana quotes another verse where the erotic emotion suggested by the expression Kāmivādrāparādhah brings into full relief the prowess of Lord Siva and as such serves only as an instrument of decoration. According to Ānandavardhana these cases cannot be called Rasadhvani because emotional moods are not primarily developed in them.

In course of his discussion Ānandavardhana quotes the viewpoints of many writers of the pre-Dhvani school on the nature of the poetic figure, Rasavat. According to Bhāmaha and Dandin the figure consists in the presentation of such permanent feelings as love, hate, heroism, etc. They are however, unable to demarcate between Rasavat and Rasadhvani. One may contend that as the permanent feelings belong only to animate objects so the descriptions of them are cases of the figure of Rasavat while the descriptions of inanimate objects come under the purview of Upamā, Rūpaka, etc. Here. Ānandavardhana's contention is that the inanimate objects like hills and rivers are states and as such they are devoid of conscious activities and permanent mental states, but in poetry they are often given human attributes as a result of which even in the inanimate objects there exists a touch of human elements, so in these we find only illustrations of Samsṛti or Samakāra between Rasavat and other figures.

It thus becomes increasingly clear that the viewpoint of the ancient theorists about Rasavat is inimical to the distinction between the fields of pure Upamā and pure Rasavat. If on the other hand the view of the Dhvani theory is accepted then we can demarcate between Dhvani, Rasavat and Upamā. The poetic creations in which an emotional mood is ornamented by other things or superimpositions or introspections, and where other secondary emotional moods are absent from the scope of such poetic figures as Upamā, Rūpaka, Atiśayokti and the like and those compositions in which an emotional mood is predominantly depicted form cases of Rasadhvani.

It should be evident from Mukherji's brilliant exposition of the theory of Dhvani that the broad idea of beauty of literature, the poetic charm leading to poetic relish cannot be explained by the various figures of speech, the Alamkāras or Guṇas and Doṣas, deviaion or Vakrokti or even simply the sonic elements. As Helen's beauty cannot be grasped by an anatomy of Helen's flesh so the final charm of poetry cannot be explained by analyzing the various elements that go into the making of a poem. Krishnamoorthy has rightly pointed out that if we want to make a gradation of poetic success or determine the quality of a particular poem “the alamkara-cum-guṇa scheme cannot take us far” (Krishnamoorthy xxix) The more we study the elements, the Alamkāras, for example, the more we get perplexed as to how they account for the poetic charm or he aesthetic relish. Krishnamoorthy puts his finger at the right point when he says; “This is the famous distinction between alamkārya and alamkāra which we owe to the searching philosophy of Dhvani, formulated for the first time in the Dhvanyāloka by Ānandavardhana. The differentiation cannot be rendered precise until it can mark off the boundaries of poetic language from the

other uses of language" (xxx). How to answer the vexing questions like, what are the varying moods of a poet? or what does a poet really want to achieve through his poem? or what does a poet actually do to achieve his goal? how does he try to communicate his vision?, how do we know whether he has been successful in his mission, etc.?

Ānandavardhana holds that only the doctrine of Dhvani can logically and satisfactorily explain the poetic process and the final outcome of the poem. The word "logic", here used, however, should not be taken in the ordinary sense, because poetry has its own logic which is governed by poetic truth and poetic relevance. However, it should never be forgotten that Rasa is the essence of poetry and it is also the corner stone of the arch of Dhvani. But we should also remember that there is a difference between poetic Rasa leading to aesthetic relish and the spiritual bliss which is also described in Upanishadic terms as Rasa in such dictum as Raso vai sah. There is some close affinity in the nature of enjoyment but they are not identical, because while the spiritual bliss is attained through the discipline of Yoga the poetic Rasa is created by the poet and enjoyed by the Sahṛday, or the sensitive reader. Krishnamoorthy sums up the thesis of the Dhvani theory in the following words: "The thesis of the Dhvani theorist can be simply stated :-Dhvani is the quintessence of poetry; and rasa is the quintessence of dhvani" (xxxi). This naturally leads to the next question, what then is Dhvani? Dhvani may be briefly stated as the whole poetic process that subsumes, as has been pointed out elaborately and with abundant illustrations by Mukherji, all the elements of poetry. In other words Dhvani is what is appreciated by the critic as something most beautiful. He may not be able to assign the reasons thereof, or he may, but the fact remains that he is simply charmed by the poem, or the beauty of the poem that he feels irresistibly and

inevitably. What are called Vacyārtha or Lakṣanārtha, the explicit meaning and the implicit meaning respectively, are concerned only with the externals of poetry. The poets use common words but use them in a manner that they are endowed with a new hue and contribute to the beauty of the poem where they are used. Similarly, Alamkāras, Guṇas, Rītis or Vakroktis are all concerned with the outer form of poetry – the Kāvyasariira so to speak. But none of these can adequately explain the soul of poetry. The idea of Alamkāra presupposes the existence of something that is to be ornamented or decorated. Similiarly Guṇa implies tʹe prior existence of something which it qualifies or enriches. The doctrine of Rīti or Vakrokti can become meaningful only when seen in the context of the subject where these are used. Even to speak of Rasa as a special kind of Alamkāra, a special class called Rasavadadi has a penumbra of vagueness about it. The fact is that the innermost essence of poetry is Rasa and this can be achieved only by Dhvani.

Although Stephane Mallarmé (1842–93) and Ānandavardhana (ninth century AD) are separated by about ten centuries and by continents, one finds, on close scrutiny, a striking affinity between the poetic theory of Mallarmé and the Indian theory of Dhvani as expounded by Ānandavardhana, the greatest exponent of the school. It is all the more interesting because there is no evidence of Mallarmé’s familiarity with the theory of Dhvani, although he uses some Indian themes in his writings, the story of Nala and Damayantī, for example. But both Mallarmé and Ānandavardhana are highly original as theoreticians, some early influences notwithstanding. Both are revolutionary in their attitude to poetry, in their rejection of their predecessors as superficial and insignificant, in their emphasis on the unexplored potentialities of language which, eventually,

is the tool of any poetry, in their assumption that the value that inheres in poetry is not the “beautiful” in the conventional sense but rather arises out of the fact that a linguistic structure can alter and satisfy certain emotional, needs, and above all, in their emphasis on the suggestive or evocative power of poetry in preference to the descriptive power of poetry. But while Ānandavardhana developed his theory into an elaborate system, almost a scientific treatise, with meticulous care and consideration of the minutest semantic categories so that the methodology was systematic and exhaustive, working from parts to whole rather than vice versa, Mallarmé’s theory is to be developed from the various critical comments and observations scattered throughout the entire corpus of his writings. Both anticipate some of the major critical interests of modern times. Mallarmé does not develop his doctrine so systematically or so scientifically. More a poet than a critic, Mallarmé does not really care to develop his theory of poetry at any great length. But his critical observations would show that he is at one with Ānandavardhana regarding some of basic assumptions about poetry. He believes, for example, that the power of poetry consists not in description but in suggestion. Mallarmé writes:

Les jeunes sont plus pres de l'idéal poetique que les parnassiens qui traitent encore leurs sujets à la façon des vieux philosophes et des vieux rheteurs, en présentant les objets directement. Je pense qu'il faut, au coinraire, qu'il n'y qu'allusion. La contemplation des objets, l'image s'envolant des rêveries suscitées par eux, sont le chant: les parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entièrement et la montrent: par la ils manquent de mystère; ils rètiement aux esprits cette joie delicieuse de croire qu'ils creent, Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trios-quarts de la jouissance du poème

qui est faite de deviner peu à peu: la suggerer, voilà le rêve. C'est le parfait usage de ce mystere qui constitue le symbole; evoquéà petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d'âme, ou, inversement, choisir un objet un dégager un etat d'âme, par une serie de déchiffrements... (Oeuvres Completes 868-69).

The passage just quoted implies the following assumptions: First, poetry should not present things directly, descriptively or even carefully. It should present things suggestively so that the desired state of mind is gradually evoked and what is unexpressed becomes slowly, stage by stage, expressed. Secondly poetic enjoyment comes from divination. Finally, the suggested object is ultimately valuable because, charged with feeling, it reveals the state of soul.

Like Ānandavardhana, Mallarmé opposes direct expression, prefers the suggested image (Alamkāradhvāni) to an image clearly outlined, and prefers, by implication, Vastudhvani to photographic or accurate description of an object.

The passage may be regarded as the locus classicus of the theory of Dhvani. What Mallarmé says in the passage, incidentally, is not an obiter dicta, or just a passing remark. There are enough echoes of it in the personal letters and other writings of different periods to suggest a growing conviction. In his letter to his friend M. Cazalis, Mallarmé writes:

Avec terreur, car j'invente une langue qui doit nécessairement jaillir poétique très nouvelle, que je pourrais définir en ces deux mots: non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit... (Correspondance 137).

In his letter to Franscois Coppee, dated 5 December 1866, Mallarmé expresses this unambiguously: “Le hasard n'entame pas un vers, c'est la grande chose. Nous avons, plusieurs, atteint cela...” (Correspondance

Dhavani and Suggestion

234). His criticism of Zola also points in the same

direction, as it grows out of his conviction about the true

nature of great literature. Mallarmé writes:

J’ai une grande admiration pour Zola. Il a fait mois, à

vrai dire, de veritable littérature que de l’art évocatoire,

en se servant, le moins qu’il est possible, des éléments

littéraires; il a prés les mots, c’est vrai, mais c’est

tout; le reste provient de sa merveilleuse organisation

et se répercute tout de suite dans l’esprit de la foule.

Il a vraiment des qualités puissantes… Mais la littérature

a quelque chose de plus intellectual que cela : les

choses existent; nous n'avous pas à les creer; nous

n'avons qu'à en saisir les rapports; et ce sont les fils

de ces rapports qui forment les vers et les orchestres…

(Oeuvres Complètes 871).

The idea finds much clearer articulation in a passage in

'Crise de Vers;'

Decadante, Mystique, les Écoles se déclarant ou étiquettés

en hate par notre presse d’information adoptent, comme

rencontre le point d’un Idéalisme qui (pareillement aux

fuges, aux sonates) refuse les matériaux naturels et

comme brutale une pensée exacte, les ardonnant; pour

ne garder rien que la suggestion. Instituer une relation

entre les images exactes, et que s’en détache un tiers

aspect fusible et clair presente à la divinations

(Oeuvres Complètes 365)

What Mallarmé refers to as the third element (tiers

aspect) is Vastudhvani in Ānandavardhana’s theory of

poetry.

Again:

Les monuments, la mer, la face humaine, tous leur plèntitude natifs, conservant une vertu autrement attrayante que ne les voilera une déscription, evocation dites, allusion je sais, suggestion

(Oeuvres Complètes 366).

Suggestion and resonance are generated when words with various denotations and connotations, the sonic and the semantic qualities, are creatively welded and patterned into organic, artistic wholes of verbal artifacts. Then we can realize the pleasure dome that Coleridge so longed to create in Kubla Khan. With the alchemy of genius the hard contours of the lexical items, in such a poetic context, melt in the suggestions they develop, as the charm of a youthful maiden arises out of the physical features and yet remains distinct of them. But this new power of words, Mallarmé insists, like Ānandavardhana, is as real as the other ordinary powers of word. The suggestive power or Vyāñjanāvṛtti is a real power of language and can be realized only when language is creatively exploited. This is the reason why both Mallarmé and Ānandavardhana insist on the impersonality of poetry. Both believe, like Poe, Flaubert and Eliot, in the depersonalization of the artist in the creative process so that the end product should not contain any trace of the poet. It means, by implication, and reinforces the idea that the poetic relish comes not from any “intentional fallacy” committed on the basis of our knowledge of the poet, but it actually arises out of, and is ensured by, the literary artifact, the poem itself. This further re-affirms that the suggestive power of the words or the suggestive meaning of poetry arises actually out of the language of poetry. Mallarmé shares with Ānandavardhana this concern for language and the need for purifying the dialect of the tribe by exploiting the resources of the language. In this connection René

Dhavani and Suggestion

Wellek observes in History of Modern Criticism Vol. 4 (1970):

"He (Mallarmé) is, as far as I know, the first writer who is radically discontent with the ordinary language of communication and attempts to construe an entirely separate poetic language….. He described and exploited systematically most of the traditional devices for separating poetic language from ordinary speech" (454).

It is true that Mallarmé began his critical career under the visible influence of Edger Allan Poe, whom he practically worshipped, and derived from him continual insistance on calculation and effect and contested the view that a poet is “a great epileptic whom one depicts unkempt with haggard eyes, haphazardly pouring forth his facile and incoherent verse on one stream” under the inspiration of some “talkative Muse”. Poetry, for Mallarmé as for Poe, is more a matter of perspiration than inspiration. It is a matter of labour and polishing file. It is also possible to trace the theory of suggestion in Western criticism in the writings of Poe. Poe seems to indicate that suggestion is an undercurrent of meaning, a product of imagination, and lends a kind of indeterminateness to the meaning of a poem. The insights of Poe, however, constitute only in an embryonic form the theory of suggestion. Mallarmé picks them up and develops them along lines which come very close to Ānandavardhana’s theory of Dhvani. In other words, one may say that Mallarmé starts under the influence of Poe, outgrows the influence and becomes the greatest exponent of the nineteenth century French theory of suggestion.

It remains to be seen how Mallarmé and Anandavardhana, though independently, anticipate some of the recent tendencies in contemporary literary criticism in the West. It may be worthwhile to bear in mind in this connection how the western approach to

poetry differs, historically speaking, from the Indian approach to poetry. In the West the emphasis, from the very beginning, was on rhetorics or the art of speech, which was as much a tool for argumentation and persuasive conversation as for the study of literature. In the course of time some of the figures of speech - particularly metaphor and later allegory - acquired a literary status. Metaphor eventually became the figure of poetry but the relationship between poetic form and poetic meaning was never explored linguistically. Poetry was looked upon as a violation, or at least a significant departure, from common language. In India, on the contrary, rhetorics and poetics were never separated. The art of speech was, at bottom, an art of literature, and poetry was seen to be just language, but language exploited in full. In this respect, Mallarmé's preoccupation with language is worth noting. “Ce n'est point avec des idées qu'on ait des sonnets, Degas, c'est avec les mots,” said Mallarmé to Degas.

The interest in the nature of words that constitutes the most important element of poetry in Mallarmé and Ānandavardhana is echoed in the New Criticism's concerns for the formal aspects of poetry. The New Critics made a distinction between the language of literature and the language of science and defended literature as a unique mode of cognition different from and superior to science. The New Critics evinced interest in Vastudhvanī, the suggested meaning as realized in the achieved structure of the work. Rasadhvanī, on the other hand, has been one of the main interests of phenomenological criticism. The Reader-Response theory is only a detailed ramification of Rasadhvanī, depending on the authority of Sahrday, the perceptive reader, who is seen as the co-author. The meaning of a literary work emerges out of a vital interaction between the “text” or the written material which is supposed to

be largely open and the reader who is to fill it with meaning. According to Roland Barthes the indeterminate text arises out of the mode of interaction in the Nietzschean sense which “posits the images of a triumphant plural unimpoverished by any constraint” The text is just interweaving, a web without a centering spider, and according to Stanley Fish, a kind of empty container waiting to be filled with meaning. According to Wolfgang Iser, the leading Reader-Response critic, an abundance of indeterminate elements is a characteristic feature of modern writing. All these ideas can be traced back to the aesthetic implications of Rasadhvani.

To say that there are distinct echoes of the theory of poetry as enunciated by Mallarmé and Ānandavardhana in contemporary literary criticism is not to suggest that contemporary literary criticism is derived either from Mallarmé or from Ānandavardhana, but only to focus on the contemporary relevance of these two highly original thinkers, who worked independently and yet arrived at certain insights into the literary universals which we would love to share.

8

Rasa and Pleasure

Any definition of poetry according to Indian poetics must take into account three things: How does poetry differ from other forms of expression? What is the purpose of poetry? What is the effect of poetry? It is in the third question that the idea of aesthetic pleasure is implied. The word that, according to Abhinavagupta, sums up the entire body of critical literature is Rasa. (rasa eva hi prītya vyutpattipradam nāṭyamakan śāstram (In Masson II 30). Throughout Nāṭyaśāstra Bharata subordinates other elements in the drama to Rasa and holds that without Rasa no dramatic device is of any importance. What is essential to poetry is the creation of beauty. In Locana Abhinavagupta, points it out in the very first Uddyota that the perception of beauty is the soul of poery. “The only dispute is about the name whether we will call it Cārutvapratīti or Dhvani. Abhinavagupta, calls attention to the difference between “suggestion” and other unusual uses of language, and it is a difference which is concerned with the very essence of a poem. When we say that “She is a rose” we do not mean it literally. All that we mean is that there is an affinity between these two entities. It simply suggests that the woman in question is beautiful and charming. This presumed knowledge explains the contradiction inherent in the original phrase. Beautiful is what gives rise to aesthetic repose. Abhinavagupta, means that suggestion, if given its proper scope can carry us deeper

and deeper into poem, but if hindered by other considerations it lapses into an intellectual function only. In that case, it would bring one to the brink of a true aesthetic experience but on account of lack of beauty in the original would frustrate the possibilities of its fullest realization. Thus one of the great criteria for poetry is the subjective one of artistic beauty. Ābhinavagupta, makes it clear when he insists that the fact that Rasa is not something certain. (Niyata).

According to Masson and Patwardhan Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, “make the important point that the conditions for understanding direct utterances are less complex than those required for understanding suggestive utterances. They explain that once we are taught the lexical meaning of a given word, its denotative scope is fixed (Niyata), for convention which lies at the root of denotation is limited” (Masson 17). The suggested meaning, however is completely unfixed (Anitya), since it depends on intangibles like the cultural level of a reader, the immediate context in which the utterances are made, the situation depicted, the nature of the person, etc. Ānanda insists that a mere knowledge of the lexical meanings of words is not sufficient for understanding their hidden suggestions. This idea leads to the introduction of a whole new vocabulary.

Abhinava says: “In literature the aesthetic relish through the verbal paraphernalia is like the blossoming of a magic flower; it is essentially a thing of the present moment which does not depend on past or future time” (In Masson 18). It is like what James Joyce would call epiphany; a sudden revelation. It is generally believed hat Ānandavardhana uses the word Camatkāra for the first time. Afterwards it becomes a part of the common critical parlance. Viśvanāth sums up the position thus : “The essence of Rasa is aesthetic delight (Camatkāra)

and it is found in all Rasas." Abhinavagupta holds like Aristotle that the goal of poetry is delight and he reminds one of Horace when he further implies that this delight leads to intellectual refinement. But it may be pointed out here that both these goals,— delight and instruction – dulce and utile of Horace can be traced back to Bharata who in the first chapter of Nātyaśāstra tells us the story of the birth of poetry when the gods approach Brahma and tell him : "We want something to amuse us. Something we can see and listen to at the same time." Brahma agrees to create drama and says

"Since these Vedas cannot be heard by women and Sudras and other lower classes, I will create a fifth Veda, different from these, that will be for all people. I will create a fifth Veda called drama out of past stories that will lead to righteousness, to material gain, to fame, with good advice and full of wise sayings". (Masson 19). In this context Bharata also talks about imitation (Anukīrtana)) of the emotions found in all the three worlds. In a separate section we shall examine the relation between Aristotle's theory of imitation and Bharata's. Later Bharata would say that the drama is Vinodakarana (entertaining). Then Brahma writes a drama about Siva, and when Siva witnesses the play he says, "This play reminds me of the dance I dance at sunset. With its many movements of the limbs and varied kinds it is most lovely. Use it in your Pūrvaraṅga".

When asked by the sages about the relevance of a dance, because it has apparently no meaning, Bharata gives a magnificent reply that at once looks forward to the the theory of art for art's sake of Theophile Gautier. Bharata says "Dance does not require any meaning. It has been created for the simple reason that it is beautiful. Abhinavagupta, is conscious of the fact that literature has no goal other than delight. In this respect his affinity with Aristotle is obvious. This becomes abundantly clear when he says that Siva is one of the

deities of the drama because the dance he performs at sunset is a manifestation of ecstasy without any purpose. Abhinavagupta, also anticipates post-modernism in a way when he says that in drama one can show the full moon several times in a play because drama is not concerned with the phenomenal reality. In other words poetry has no extra-territorial loyalty. When, again in Nāṭyaśāstra Bharata compares the reader to a gourmet and calls him Sumanas, a word that eventually leads to the word, Sahṛday, he anticipates the Reader-Response theory. The reader must be in sympathy with the characters. If a character is depressed, the reader also should feel depressed. It is this idea that possibly makes Abhinavagupta, coin the word, Hṛdayasamvāda.

Abhinavagupta, has also something to say about propriety. When he says that depiction of love-making of two gods who are regarded as mother and father of the universe is improper he means that what obstructs the delight of those who experience Rasa, is improper.

Like Coleridge’s organic aestheticism Abhinavagupta, also believes that artificiality of any kind in a poem must be avoided. If a poem tries to impress us only by verbal tricks by virtue of rhymes, alliterations etc. or the handling of the meter, so to speak, it cannot produce Rasa or aesthetic relish. One remembers Coleridge’s famous distinction between a legitimate poem and a poem, which has only the shape of a poem, a metrical composition only, and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate poem. Abhinavagupta, is at one with Coleridge that every element in a poem must be integral to the poem. Every element must be functional and and must contribute to the totality of a poem. Only then it can produce aesthetic relish. Thus when Abhinavagupta, says that just delightful handling of meters cannot make poetry the

136

A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

affinity becomes obvious. There are people, Abhinavagupta says, who are incapable of appreciating the beauty of poetry for lack of imagination. It is a view which Pope would endorse, because he also believed that there are people who lack imagination, but blindly follow convention. One may also find affinity with Wordsworth’s theory of poetry as ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ taking ‘its origin in emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ According to Abhinavagupta, although poetry comes to the man gifted with imagination spontaneously, the poetry comes into being when the poet has reflected on it in detail and has made the intellectual exercise regarding the proper words, images, meter, etc. by which it can be articulated. This is exactly what Wordsworth means by ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ The immediate emotion is not captured in poetry; only after a period of gestation and recrudescence the poetry comes into being as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’

It is now well established critical opinion that the key word of all Sanskrit literature is Rasa. According to this theory as propounded by Bharata in Nātyaśāstra the Vibhāvas (sources) belong to the characters represented on the stage, and there is no limit to the number of Vibhāvas. In the case of Abhijñānaśakuntalam the Alambana Vibhāvas or primary sources are Sakuntala and Dushyanta. The physical beauty of both characters, the spring flowers, the bees, etc. constitue the Uddipanavibhāvas or the setting. The Anubhāvas which form parts of Sāttvikabhavās refer to the characters and, according to Bharata, the physical manifestations of love. The Anubhāvas are realized through actions and behaviour of the characters. Since actions are louder than words the actions reveal a character better than the words used by a character. In this respect the Anubhāvas are

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what Eliot would call “objective correlative” in his famous essay, “Hamlet and His Problems.” The three most problematic elements in the poetics of drama are :

Vyābhicāribhāvas or Sañcāribhāvas, the Sthāyibhāvas and finally Rasa itself. Although Bharata lists thirty-three of these vyābhicāribhāvas he makes it clear in the seventh Adhyāy that this number is not actually exhaustive; there may be many vyābhicāribhāvas other than the thirty-three enumerated.

The Vyābhicāribhāvas are emotions that accompany the primary feelings of the character, but they are not inherent to the character’s personality, although at the time of action they belong exclusively to the character.

An example will make it clear. Dushyanta’s longing for a union with Sakuntala is not shared by the audience, although the audience would in all probability endorse this longing.

So, though both Sañcāribhāva and Sthāyibhāva deal with emotions one is exclusively confined to the character while the other, that is the Sthāyibhāva is shared by the audience.

Sthāyibhāva is a state of mind which on account of being deeply felt dominates all other emotions. It is shared by both the character and the audience.

When a character experiences a Sthāyibhāva he has experienced a height of emotion, say the emotion of love. The spectators do not fall in love with Sita.

Once the Sthāyibhāva Rati is transformed into an otherworldly state or Alaukikāvastā Rasa is achieved. The reader or the spectator, the Sahṛdaya is then in sympathy with the character.

This is described as Hṛdayasamvāda that enables the spectator to even identify with the situation depicted. But what is supremely important is that he never identifies completely, he cannot and should not in fact, completely identify with the character.

He maintains an aesthetic distance, and this is Rasa. Vidyācakravartin gives a

succinct definition of Rasa which is quoted by S.S.

Janaki and V. Raghavan in Sanjivani on Ruyyaka’s

Alamkārasarvasva (New Delhi, 1965) : “rasas tu

vibhāvānubhāvavyabhicāribhir

vyājyamāna

ratyadyapratīti viśeṣaḥ”. The idea of Rasa involves an

idea of distance. The very existence of literature depends

on aesthetic distance. It is worth recalling in this

connection Abhinavagupta’s famous comparison of

drama to a dream. In drama as in dream nothing in the

real world is affected. It would be as absurd for a

spectator to fall in love with a character as it would be

absurd to expect the golden lady-bug of a dream to be

still shining in our hand in the morning. This reminds

us one of Eliot’s obiter dicta that the distinction between

art emotion and life emotion is absolute.

It may be pointed out here that although there has

been a series of debates about the importance of Dhvani

as propounded by Ānandavardhana there has never

been any dispute about the importance of Rasa in

poetry. In fact, if looked closely it would be also evident

that for Ānanadabvardhana also there is no real dispute

between the relative importance of Dhvani or Rasa.

Strictly speaking Ānandavardhana states very clearly in

Dhvanyāloka that the whole point of his treatise on

Dhvani is to establish the importance of Dhvani in the

creation of Rasa.

It is not the intention of Ānandavardhana to plead

for the priority of one school over another but just to

establish that it is Dhvani or Rasadhvani, to be more

precise, that helps in creating Rasa. Ānandavardhana is

the first author to give supreme importance to Rasa as

the poesis of a poem. Rasa is the greatest contribution

of India to the theory of literature. Aristotle says in

Poetics that the end of poetry is pleasure, but he does

not – or at least the Poetics as we have it – does not

elaborate the nature of the pleasure. It is only in relation

to drama, and that too particularly tragedy, that he talks

about catharsis. But the Indian theorists and

aestheticians have thought deeply and have explored in

depth the nature of this pleasure. For Rasa is no less

than the reader’s response to a literary work. Rasa is

what the reader experiences in his aesthetic rapture. It

is not possible to give a single consistent translation of

the word Rasa. Sometimes it is translated as mood, but

mood conveys a sense of transitoriness and, therefore,

does not really mean Rasa. Since Rasa necessarily

involves emotion ‘aesthetic experience,’ ‘aesthetic

rapture’ or ‘aesthetic relish’ would possibly be more

appropriate. Rasa, after all, evidences a state of mind.

Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta use it as the

nucleus or the seminal concept that dominated the

history of Sanskrit literary criticism for a long time.

Even Kuntaka criticizes Udbhata for his belief that Rasa

could ever be conveyed in direct speech, and by

Kuntaka’s own testimony one can have an idea of

Ānandavardhana’s influence on and Kuntaka’s

acknowledged debt to Anandabardhana.

When Bharata says that a person has Rasa he does

not mean it literally. It is, as we have already suggested,

the poem’s capacity on account of some quality inhering

in it, to induce the desirable state of mind in the reader.

The experience of Rasa is a private experience. Although

the idea has an affinity with the Reader-Response

theory or what the New Critics considered as affective

fallacy, there is a vital difference between the two as far

as the role of the reader is concerned. The reader as

envisaged by Bharata is a Sahṛdaya, that is a well-read,

sensitive and fully responsive person. In an exquisitely

delicate verse of Dharmadatta we are told that if the

spectator is not acutely attuned to the poetry he will be

no better than the dead wood on the walls of a theatre

Abhinavagupta, also says that the glass in which

the wine is served cannot appreciate its flavour.

In Western poetics and in Reader- Response theory

the reader is also given a high place of importance. But

different critics look at the role of the reader from

different points of view. The theory can be broadly

divided into four categories despite overlappings and

cross-currents. In The Pursit of Signs Jonathan Culler

adopts an objective view and holds that the meaning of

a work of art is not an individual creation but “the result

of applying to the text operations and inventions which

constitute the institution of literature” (127). He gives

the example of lyric. In a lyric the poet observes the

particular literary conventions associated with lyric:

coherence, rhythm, individual reaction or subjective

feelings, phonetic patterning etc. In order to appreciate

the poem the reader must bear in mind these

conventions. Even then within its limits the individual

responses cannot be uniform. There can be thousand

interpretations depending on the intellectual and

cultural level of the reader and his passions and

prejudices, and yet all the interpretations an be valid if

they are systematically and consistently developed.

Norman Holland would go one step further and would

suggest that not only the readers’ interpretations are

variable, but the test itself is variable. His argument is

that the text is not an artifact, but an experience which

is shared by the author and the reader. The reader is the

author. In other words, the author’s text is not a finished

product. The reader recreates it. The text emerges out of

the vital interaction between the reader and the printed

material. And as the response varies from reader to

reader depending on the cultural level of the reader, his

passions and prejudices, his beliefs and disbeliefs, etc.,

every reader actually creates a subtext out of the text.

Thus according to Holland every individual’s self-being

variable, the text is also variable. Holland writes: “[…..]

meaning, like beauty does not inhere in the words of a page, but in the eye of the beholder. There is another factor. The text àoes generate a consensus of shared aesthetic experiences in spite of the fact that the readers never lose their personal idiosyncratic qualities and make different interpretations” (In Pati 136 ). Holland further writes that “we find consensus because different readers are using the same material”. Stanley Fish, however, has a different opinion. For him the element of objectivity in the reader’s reference is not the text. It is according to him, actually due to the fact that all the readers make use of the same analytical strategies while responding to a text. The reader’s mind is the community mind with individual differences. David Bleich, however, contends that there is a difference between response and interpretation. He says: “Every reader’s response is different – he has his own text, and the objectivity of the printed text is an illusion. When these symbolizations through responses are, however, resymbolized as interpretations, the reader has a chance to know the responses of others”. He further writes: “The assumption of the subjective paradigm is that collective similarity of response can be determined only by each undivided announcement of his response and subsequent communally motivated imaginative comparison. This assumption is validated by the ordinary fact that when each person says what he sees, each statement will be substantially different” ( In Pati. 137). There are critics who believe that while reading the reader modifies the text and the text modifies the reader’s self. Roman Ingarden, for example, writes: “[…] a literary work exists merely as a schemata. The reader actualizes it. Reading a text is a movement from part to whole and from whole to part, within its hermeneutical circle. It also means moving forward and backward and that too simultaneously. The reading has to be done at many levels for the text has backgrounds and

foregrounds. Many expectations are modified in course

of the reading. Ultimately it is the reader who resolves

the text with an integrated whole" (In Pati. 138).

Wolfgrang Iser, who was deeply influenced by Ingarten,

argues that the reader has to meet the text half way. He

has to have an idea of the codes the text uses, which are

different from the codes which language ordinarily uses.

Through the analysis of this text, the reader is able to

acquire not only a unified text, but also a unified self.

According to Iser a literary work is situated between the

author's text and the concretization of it by the reader.

It is thus the reader who turns a text to a literary work.

He further reaffirms: "The work is more than text for the

text only takes on life when it is realized (by the reader).

Communication must ultimately depend on the reader's

creative activity. The written text imposes certain limits

on its unwritten implications, but these implications,

worked out by the reader's imagination endow it with far

greater significance than it might have seemed to

possess on its own" (In Pati 139). Iser's contention

implies that a text is indeterminate and a text can

become a literary work only when a reader has entered

into a dynamic interaction with it. Sartre in his essay

"What is Literature?" looked at the problem from a still

different point of view. He observed : "The author has

always a potential reader in mind, for a literary work is

a production and like any other item of production, it

takes the customer into consideration. So the reader is

a part of the internal organization of the work of art.

Roland Barthes in "The Pleasure of Reading the Text"

separates pleasure of reading a text from its form. In

other words, the pleasure has not much to do with the

formal unity of a text. According to Barthes some texts

aim at giving pleasure through the luxuriance of

creation, and do not have an aim of giving unified shape,

leading to a unified self on the part of the reader and the

reader gets himself merged in the text and the text in the

reader” (In Patil 140).

Reader-Response Theory gives primacy to the

reader. The true reader is one who wili try to explore the

vision enshrined in the text and the way the vision is

communicated. Since the language of the text is the

language of poetry it is amenable to innumerable

different responses and consequently different

interpretations. To put it differently, if a reader remains

satisfied with his response and interpretation it may be

myopic and, therefore, deficient. Though the response

may be valid for that reader at that particular point of

time, there is always a possibility that the response may

be not only deficient but defective as well.

We should always bear in mind that the text as an

entity is an autonomous whole and every reader may be

justified in considering his response as the correct

response in recreating the vision enshrined in the text.

A poem is amenable to multiple interpretations and all

the interpretations may be valid provided an

interpretation is supported by internal and external

evidences. But no interpretation can exhaust the text.

The point that a reader, through active interaction

with the text, activizes the text finds its parallel in

Locana’s famous utterance kavisahrdayākhyam

sarasvatvām vijayatām And the idea of pleasure which is

regarded as the end of poetry by Aristotle and later by

Coleridge and the exponents of the aesthetic movement

of the late nineteenth century England, is also the

concern of the Indian aestheticians in their theory of

Rasa. But while Aristotle simply talks about pleasure

the Indian theoreticians have closely examined the

nature of the pleasure, its contributing elements, its

diverse manifestations and the different psychological

stages through which it passes till it is fully enjoyed by

the readers. It is therefore, necessary to understand the

Indian theory of Rasa which is one of the most

important foundations of Indian poetics. The idea of

Rasa can be traced back to Bharata where Nātyaśāstra

in its extant 36 chapters covers various aspects of

dramatic presentation, in general and to Rasasūtra in

particular. Bharata says that without Rasa a literary

work signifies nothing: “Na hi rasād-ṛte kasud artha

pravartate” Bharata also states how this transcendental

experience of Rasa comes into being through the

combination of the factors known as Vibhāva. Anubhāva

and Vyābhicāribhāva:

Tatra vibhāvanubhavavyā-

bhicārirāmyogadrasanispattih.

Bharata explains his point with an analogy. Just as

various ingredients go into the making of a fine beverage

similiarily Rasa is brought into being through

combination of a number of Bhāvas. Similarly an

elevated pleasure of a play is experienced by the

spectators when a Sthāyibhāva is combined with-

Vibhāvas, Aunbhāvas and Vyābhicāribhāvas:

It should appear from the above observations of

Bharata that Rasa is experienced by the spectator while

witnessing a drama, and that Rasa cannot be experienced

in non-dramatic poetry. But though Bharata talks about

Rasa in connection with dramatic presentation only it is

later applied to all kinds of poetry. Coleridge talks about

a poem as an organic entity with the analogy of a plant

where the idea is the seed and everything develops ab

intra and the idea is later applied to almost everything.

Everything, like a plant or like a poem, has origin, growth,

decay and death. Civilization, for example, has a

beginning, growth, decay and death; a language, a

culture, a fashion, everything for that matter, undergoes

the same process that the plant undergoes. In this respect

Bharata, like Coleridge, is a semasiologist. However the

susequent critics discover that the principle of Rasa is the ulterior aesthetic principle which covers the whole range of literary activity and forms the ultimate of poetry in its diverse forms. Now coming back to Bharata, he defines Bhāva as the basis of Rasa and speaks of three categories of Bhāvas—Sthāyibhāva, Vyābhicāribhāva and Sāttvikabhāva—all of which go to help the enjoyment of poetry. But, Bharata insists that it is Sthāyibhāva abone which leads to poetic relish through a combination of Vibhāva, Anubhava and Vyābhicāribhāvas.

Like Aristotle, Bharata is also sketchy in his elaboration. He does not care to distinguish between Sañcāribhāva and Vyābhicāribhāva nor does he care to point out the difference between the eight Sthāyibhāvas and the thirty-three Vyābhicāribhāvas that he mentions. The Sthāyibhāvas are the elemental human feelings, joys, horrors, hate, anger etc. on relevant occasions. They differ from person to person only so far as our man is different from another man in terms of cultural level, educational background, etc. In other words, in regard to Sthāyibhāva in man there are generic similarities and specific differences.

While Sthāyibhāvas and Vyābhicāribhāvas are the internal factors leading to aestheic relish, Vibhāva and Anubhāva which do not belong to or come from the ordinary world but from the poetic world, represent the external factors of such experience. Anubhāva represents only a physical change or, more precisely, physical manifestations of the feeling in the tears, perspirations, etc. It should be noted that Aristotle does not say anything about the physical manifestations of a feeling. Even when he talks about catharsis he is mainly concerned with the tension generated in the mind through the interaction of the opposite forces of pity and fear and their friendly resolution in the attainment of the calm of mind. The idea of catharsis is concerned with

the mind, a feeling of tranquillity and not with its bodily manifestation.

One is reminded of Sidney’s famous utterance in An Apology for Poetry: “Hers (Nature’s) world is brazen : poets only deliver a golden”.

We shall come back to Vibhāva, Anubhāva, Vyābhicāribhāva, etc. later again. Meanwhile let us look closely at two seminal terms used by Bharata. These are Samyoga and Nispatti. While some critics think that Samyoga conveys the idea of combination, the word Nispatti suggests the result or the outcome of the combination.

The main problem is to define the relation of these two terms to the process of aesthetic realization on the one hand and to Vibhāva, Anubhāva and Vyābhicāribhāva, on the other.

Mukherji has shown how, according to Bhaṭṭalollaṭa, Rasa is the developed form of a permanent mood which comes to maturity when it comes in contact with Vibhāva Anubhāva and Vyābhicāribhāva. The Vibhāva generates the mood, Anubhāva manifests it and Vyābhicāribhāva nourishes it and thus helps it to grow into Rasa. Dandin also holds that Rasa is a mature mood as in his implication of the poetic figure Rasavat he makes it clear that the feeling of love is developed with Śṛṅgārarasa through its contact with the excitants and accessories.

The Alamkārikas, however combat the view that Rasa is a developed mood. The fact that Bharata maintains a distinction between Sthāyibhāva and Rasa implies that they cannot be equated and, accordingly, one cannot develop into the other.

Śaṅkuka, the next critic of importance, thinks that Rasa is not, as Bhaṭṭalollaṭa argues, a developed permanent feeling, but a copy thereof. He gives the

analogy of a painted horse, Citraturanganyāyānusārini-Pratīti. The actor through his fine imitative faculty exhibits on he stage the Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas and Vyābhicāribhāvas, which, though artificial, create an illusion of reality. It is this experience of illusion which Sankuka describes as Rasa. For Sankuka Rasa is experienced when a work of art can induce in the reader or the spectator what Coleridge calls 'a willing suspension of disbelief.' Abhinabagupta, in his turn, combats the view of Sankuka, because Bharata never refers to Rasa as a semblance of a mental condition or an experience of an illusion of reality. To describe Rasa as a copy is to presuppose the existence of the object imitated. But in Rasavāda the object which appears as a copy of a permanent mood cannot be traced. The physical manifestations like perspiration or horrification or some violent gestures cannot be regarded as this object, becuase they are perceptible entities and no spectator can partake of them. Furhermore since the specttor does not know the mental condition or the accompanying behavior of the original actor he is not in a position to judge whether the behaviour of the actor is actully an imitation of the behavior of the original character.

Since Sankuka's theory does not carry conviction Bhattanāyak shifts the emphasis from the objective to the subjective aspect of the issue and tries to explain rasa by minutely analysing the inward experience of the sensitive appreciators, and in contradistinction to the earlier theorists propounds a theory of aesthetic enjoyment. According to him Rasa is neither known, nor produced nor revealed. It is an experience of bliss generated in the mind of the spectator. The realization of Rasa can generate the experience of supreme bliss only when it is felt to be belonging to the spectator only. However Bhattanāyka does not negate the ideas of Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas and Vyābhicaribhāvas. His only

point is that it is the spectator who experiences Rasa as a blissful state of enjoyment occasioned by the Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas and Vyābhicāribhāvas represented by the actor through the dramatization of certain feelings. Unless these Vibhavās, etc. are properly manifested Rasa as the aesthetic reaction of the spectator cannot be generated. The idea has an interesting affinity with Eliot's theory of 'objective correlative'. Applied to the theory of Bhattanayaka it would mean that unless there is a proper objective correlative on the part of the actor the spectator cannot experience Rasa, because it would not be generated in that case.

Bhaṭṭanāyaka also combats the view that Rasānanda, the experience of aesthetic rapture is identical with Brahmānanda, the supreme bliss of communion with God, because, he contends, that while in Brahmānanda there is a complete detachment from the mundane world, in Rasānanda there is dissociation from the characters presented on the stage, but there is an emotional involvement as well. The auditor's reaction is simultaneously sensuous, emotional and intellectual.

However, coming back to the problem of the nature of the aesthetic experience Abhinabagupta offers a view which is slightly different from Bhaṭṭanāyaka's. According to him it is the union of the permanent mood with the Vibhāvas, etc. that suggests Rasa. It is the power of suggestion that leads to the realization of Rasa as an extraordinary state of relish. For him Pratīti of Rasa is nothing other than Abhivyaktī. Abhinabagupta is an important exponent of the theory of Dhvani or suggestion. He believes that when Bhāvakatva is stimulated by the literary excellences and four recognized forms of acting in a drama, the mind of the spectator transcends the mundane and is transported to the world of aesthetic bliss. The Bhāvas are named so,

because they lead to the aesthetic experience. The Bhāvakatva becomes effective when a composition is free from literary blemishes and the actor is capable of dramatizing appropriately the feelings inherent in a situation. In that case the spectator gets into the right frame of mind to discover the universal dimension of the particular scenes or situations being dramatized. This idea of Abhinabagupta has a striking affinity with the Aristotelian idea of the concrete universal, an idea according to which the dramatist, by presenting a particular character focusses on certain universal elements so that the chracter assumes a universal dimension. By portraying the jealousy of Othello or the ambition of Macbeth Shakespeare actually depicts universal passions and thus though Othello or Macbeth is an individual each becomes universal and timeless.

Thus, according to Bhaṭṭanāyaka, Bhāvakatva is occasioned by a suitable use of Guṇa and Alaṃkāra in a poem or the four types of acting in a drama. Both Abhinabagupta and Bhaṭṭanāyaka believe in the Aristotelian idea of ‘concrete universal,’ but there is a difference between them about the process through which the particular attains the status of the uiniversal.

For Bhaṭṭanāyaka, it happens through the opertion of Bhāvakatva but for Abhinabagupta it is actually effected in the mind of a Sahṛday or an intellectually accomplished person when the Guṇas and Alaṃkāras are appropriately used. The right Guṇas or Alaṃkāras or the appropriate literary and linguistic devices can be used by a poet only when his mind is in white heat, and when, what Coleridge describes as the Secondary Imagination, operates and shapes all things into one. It diffuses, disolves and dissipates to unify the discordant elements. When this happens the meaning and the music, the denotation and the connotation, the sound and the sense, the matter and the manner, the idea and the image and all other elements become organically

interrelated, and contribute to the totality of the poem. And when this unity is achieved the reader or the spectator experiences the bliss of aesthetic rapture of being transported to the world of art which is universal and timeless.

So, according to Abhinabagupta. generalization is only a function of Abhivyaktl. However, it must be said to the credit of Abhinabagupta that there is novelty in his view that the Sthāyibhāva or the permanent mood must lie dormant in the heart of the appreciator to be evoked into the aesthetic rapture and universalization. Just as, if a thing is not there light cannot reveal it, similarly the appreciator or the Sahṛday must have in him the capacity to be evoked into aesthetic delight. It is for this reason that the Sahṛday must be a man of experience and intellectual accomplishments; he must be sensitive and must have a well-developed literary sensibility. At the moment of aesthetic rapture the Sahṛday forgets his mundane existence and the trivialities of life. He loses his special form and individuality and is elevated to a higher transcendental level of consciousness and attains the celestial state of aesthetic rapture. This celestial mental state is described by Abhinabagupta as Sarvasāmājikāraṇa:

The important point here is that the individual personality of the Sahṛday must be transcended in order to enter the world of aesthetic relish. In this respect one would recall Eliot's doctrine of impersonality. The reader, like the poet, must depersonalize himself to be absorbed in the poem. The idea, so far as critical reaction is concerned, has also an affinity with Arnold's theory of the fallacy of the personal estimate. The critic must set aside his personal passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, if he has to make an objective assessment of a work of art. What is true about the critic is also true about the Sahṛday: he must depersonalize

himself in order to appreciate the universal dimension of

the literary work and experience the bliss of aesthetic

rapture. According to Abhinabagupta the realization of

Rasa lasts as long as the Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas and the

Vyabhicāribhāvas are in operation. This is so, because it

is the Vibhāvas that evoke the latent impression in the

sahrday.

Abhinabagupta also makes an insightful

observation when he says that the realization of the

aesthetic relish gives a kind of cognition which is

different from the usual type of such cognition in which

the objects are realized in their distinct characters.

Here, again, what Abhinabagupta says takes us back to

Aristotle’s contention that poetry is knowledge and that

the kind of knowledge that poetry offers is intuitive

knowledge in the sense that it cannot be communicated

in the form of a logical proposition. It is a sudden

revelation that illuminates life. Jagannātha illustrates

this with a fine analogy. Just as a lighted lamp reveals

not only the nearby objects but reveals itself as well

similarly while the pure consciousness manifests

various moods it also scintillates in its luminous

splendour. Jagannātha holds that the excitants and

other upshots are internalized in the moods with the

help of many instruments of cognition. The experience of

Rasa, the peculiar feeling of the man of poetic sensibility

is akin to the consciousness of bliss growing in the mind

of an ascetic in a state of profound meditation.

Abhinabagupta identifies seven factors which he

considers inimical to the aesthetic relish :

1. absence of plausibility in the events described;

2. the realization of the excitants, etc. as confined

to the appreciator’s own self or

í

3. as belonging solely to the other;

4. awareness of one’s personal joy and sorrow;

5. lack of clear cognition, on account of improper presentation of means;

6. relegation of Rasa to a subordinate position and

7. the presence of doubt as to the exact nature of the mood delineated.

In terms of Western poetics all the points are subsumed in Aristotle’s contention that an action must be probable. Probable impossibility is better than improbable possibility. The second and the third points of Abhinabagupta parallel Aristotle’s dictum that what is presented must have a universal dimension and sense of timelessness. The action may be related to a particular time and place but it must transcend time and space in its appeal and significance The fourth point of Abhinabagupta is what Arnold calls personal fallacy. Though Arnold speaks from the point of view of the critic, it is equally true of the poet. If the poet is too personal and cannot evince what Keats calls ‘negative capability’ the work will fail as a work of art and therefore will not be able to evoke the right kind of psychological state necessary for the aesthetic relish.

The fifth point of Abhinabgupta when seen in the light of the Western poetics is what Eliot calls ‘objective correlative’. The objective correlative fails when the ideas are not properly embodied in characters and situations. Abhinabagupta’s sixth point—the relegation of Rasa to a subordinate position—takes place, according to Western poetics, when literature is used as a propaganda. In that case literature as an aesthetic object becomes eclipsed by the cognitive discourse. In other words, when the appeal is more to the intellect than to the aesthetic sensibility Rasa would naturally take the back seat.

In order to foreground the paramount importance of an emotional mood in poetry the exponents of Dhvani argue that in a good specimen of poetic art the

expressed idea, comprised of the Vibhāvas, etc., renders itself subservient to the implicit mood of superior charm. According to them the suggestion of a fact or an imaginative mood terminates ultimately in the suggestion of the emotional mood of supreme attraction. The main point which distinguishes the experience of the original character from the aesthetic relish of the Sahṛday is that, whereas the characters presented in their particularities are directly involved in their actions, the appreciator experiences them only in their generalized aspects. He experiences the emotions only vicariously. The bliss that is derived from the nature of the emotional mood or feeling that informs a particular situation comes from within one’s soul.

When Bhaṭṭanāyaka upholds the principle of Sādhāranikarana – the realization of Vibhvās in their universal aspect, he also looks upon it as something associated with the perceiver’s own being. It is because of Sādharanikaraṇa that the Laukika causes are transformed into Alaukika Vibhāvas, and, accordingly, the aesthetic relish of Rasa differs from the ordinary forms of cognition. At the time of aesthetic rapture Sahṛday does not remain conscious of his own personality. He divests himself, momentarily though, of all personal attributes and identifies himself with the persona.

Jagannātha is at one with his illustrious predecessors like Māmmata and Viśvanātha in accepting the doctrine of Abhinabagupta on aesthetic experience. Jagannātha also endorses the view that the perceiver feels a sense of identity with the original character and, therefore, shares his emotions. One might raise the objection that it is not possible for the perceiver to experience aesthetic rapture or the supreme bliss when unpleasant moods, such as grief, horror, detestation, etc. are presented in the poem. The point

that Jagannātha tries to make bears interesting affinity with Aristotle's idea of pleasure. The fact that a spectator or a reader enjoys a tragedy is an evidence of the fact that even the depiction of pain and the spectator's identification of feeling with the tragic protagonist does not impede his enjoyment or his judgment. It is so, according to Aristotle, because the spectator or the reader does not get actually involved in the tragic situation. The tears that he sheds for the sorrows of Hecuba, for example, are tears that the angels weep. It is here that the transcending power of poetry lies. The pain is vicarious. One must, however, make a distinction between the unreal pain that one may experience in a bad dream and the real pain which however paradoxically leads to aesthetic pleasure when one experiences the tragic feelings or acute pain delineated in a poem or dramatized through a character presented on the stage. After all the identity that the reader feels with the character is not real but a temporary suspension of disbelief. It is transcendence over all limitations when one's individuality is kept in abeyance or is put to sleep at the time of perception of poetry and the aesthetic relish that goes with it, and it is due to this transcendence that the aesthetic relish is possible. The reader is transmuted by the proper organization of the Vibhāvas and is transported into the world of imagination to enjoy the aesthetic rapture.

According to both Bhaṭṭarāyaka and Abhinabagupta the state of aesthetic pleasure is one of unmixed bliss. The pleasure, according to him, is not so mch due to the subject matter or imaginative handling of it as due to one's own refined literary sensibility and ability to depersonalize himself and merge with the character. The source of pleasure is in one's own being. A powerful imaginative artifact only taps the source, activates it and leads the reader to the transcendental

plane of poetic truth, the experience of which produces a universal bliss of aesthetic relish. At he time of the enjoyment of Rasa, a particular state of mind is reached and the bliss associated with one’s pure consciousness flashes forth. Since the cognition of Rasa differs from ordinary or Laukika forms of the process, emotions like Karuṇā, Vibhāva or Bhattanāyaka which cause pity, disgust or horror respectively, are connected with Rasa the relish of which is a universal bliss and cannot be compared to ordinary pain or pleasure as Eliot said very emphatically that the distinction between art emotion and life emotion is absolute.

It is evident that the Indian theory of Rasa and Aristotle’s idea of pleasure which is the end of poetry has a fundamental affinity in conception. Both Aristotle and the exponents of Rasa theory believe in the experience of an aesthetic bliss as a reaction to a powerful literary work. And as the idea of Aristotle is adumbrated by the subsequent Western critics like Horace, Longinus, Coleridge and Eliot, it becomes increasingly clear that the pleasure derived from art is ontologically different from and superior to the mundane pleasure. Although Horace, and following Horace, Sidney brought in the idea of instruction as part of the objective of poetry, they do not, however in any way reject or controvert Aristotle’s view that the end of poetry is pleasure They only supplement it with the idea of instruction. However, a close look at the history of Indian Rasa theory that starts with Bharata shows how meticulous and thorough the Indian aestheticians have been in analyzing the nature of the aesthetic bliss. The output of their observations and alert attention to the minutest nuances of the issues involved in the aesthetic reaction to an art object looks simply staggering. The classification of emotions and ensuents and accessories, comparison of the nature of the aesthetic pleasure with the pleasure of communion with God show how

profoundly they have explored the subject. Here is opulence in sharp contrast to the reticence of Aristotle who talks only about pity and fear in regard to tragedy and comic delight in regard to comedy in some detail. To say this is not to imply that Aristotle is deficient in his understanding of the nature of pleasure. His critical utterances clearly indicate that he was fully aware of it, but he did not care to amplify or elaborate it, or classify the different kinds of pleasure, possibly because the list can never be exhaustive. The eight Rasas that Bharata enumerates in his Nāṭyaśāstra subsume in them the innumerable permutations and combinations. Ānandavardhana was right in his belief in the unity of Rasa and that the enjoyment of quietitude or Śānta makes itself felt in the experience of all the other Rasas., very much like the combination of all the colours producing the white rays of the sun. Aristotle only struck at the root and left the rest to the imagination and literary sensibility of the disciplined reader.

9

Indian Theory of Sphoṭa

and Derrida’s Theory of

Écriture

It was in October 1966 during the symposium on “The

Language of Criticism and Sciences of Man” held in

John Hopkins University that Derrida presented his now

famous paper “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse

of Human Science” and initiated something like a

Copernican revolution in fields of Philosophy,

Linguistics and Literary Criticism. His critique of

Western metaphysics struck at the very root of all

Western philosophical discourses which attempt to

establish the signifier as offering an unobstructed view

of an autonomous signified whether it is truth or reality

or being. In the process he questioned the primacy of

speech and put forward a theory of writing—écriture or

archewriting that prefigures both speech and writing.

Furthermore, it contains within it the potentials of

everything that may be written or spoken. It is only what

is contained in the écriture that can be either verbalized

or orthographed.

Writing, for Derrida, is not just the inscription of

words on paper but includes the neuronal traces in the

brain which Freud identifies as memory. In “Freud and

the Sciene of Writing” Derrida writes:

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158

A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

"Freud does not simply use the metaphor of non-phonetic writing: he does not deem it expedient to manipulate scriptural metaphors for didactic ends. If such metaphors are indispensable, it is perhaps because they illuminate, inversely, the meaning of a trace in general, and eventually, in articulation with this meaning, may illuminate the meaning of writing in the popular sense. [...].The gesture sketched out by Freud.... opens up a new kind of question about metaphor, writing, and spacing in general. (Derrida 1978 : 199)

And again:

"Finally, what must be the relationship between psyche, writing, and spacing for such a metaphoric transition to be possible, not only, nor primarily, within theoretical discourse, but within the history of psyche, text, and technology? (Ibid)

Derrida refers to Freud's insight into language by calling attention to Freud's example.

"Assume, for example, says Freud, that I have dreamed of a letter (Brief/epistola), then a burial. Open a Traumbuch, a book in which the keys to the dreams are recorded, an encyclopaedia of dream signs, the dream dictionary which Freud will soon reject. It teaches us that letter must be translated (übersetzen) by spite, and burial by engagement to be married. Thus a letter (epistola) written with letters (litterae), a document composed of phonetic signs, the transcription of verbal discourse may be translated by nonverbal signifier which, inasmuch as it is a determined affect, belongs to the overall syntax of dream writing. The verbal is cathected, and its phonetic transcription is bound, far from the center, in a web of silent script." (Ibid. 207)

For Derrida writing is nothing but dynamic expressive difference. It does not depend on sound and writing, but is the condition for such sound and writing.

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Although it does phenomenally exist its possibility is anterior to all experiences.

For Bhartrhari, Brahman, as the Word-Principle, is an intrinsically dynamic and expressive reality, and the language is its manifestation through the process of temporal beginning. In the very opening vese of his Vākyapadīya Bhartrhari, possibly the greatest exponent of the Grammarian School has given a brilliant exposition to the unique nature of the Eternal Verbum. Bhartrhari does not use Derridean words like trace or archewriting but uses the word Śabdatattva or Word-Principle. In Bhartrhari the Eternal Verbum is conceived as an eternal principle having neither production, nor annihilation, nor any sequence of things and this object world, according to him, is nothing but its illusory modification:

Anādinidhanam Brahma śabdatattvaṃ yadakṣaram

Vivartate 'rthabhāvena prakrīyā jagato yatah

(Vākyapadīya 1:1)

In order to drive home his point Bhartrhari conceives of certain eternal powers (Śaktis) residing in the Eternal Verbum, of which Time-power (Kālá-Śakt) is the chief one inasmuch as it regulates all the other powers. In order to disarm criticism, “that is how the unitary character of the Eternal Verbum can be postulated if the myriad objects of the world be its manifestations, he argues that its unitary character can never be denied outright since, though it is really one and undifferentiated, it appears to be manifold and different owing to the superimposition of differentiation belonging to the eternal powers creating diverse objects:

Ekameva yadāmnātam bhinnam śaktivyapaśrayāt

Aprthaktvepi śaktibhyah prthaktveneva vartate

(Vākyapadīya 1:2)

(Chakraborti 35)

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He continues further that though the powers are eternal, the possibility of successive occurrence of the six states of things, namely production, existence, modification, growth, dimension and destruction, cannot be objected, for it is the apparent sequence in its Time-power which is solely responsible for the occurrence of these transformations in succession:

Adhyāhitakalāṃ yasya kālaśaktimupāsritāḥ Janmādayo vikārāḥ ṣaḍ bhāvabhedāsya yonayaḥ

(Vākyapadīya 1:3) (Chakraborti 36)

It is language that allows every form of knowledge to be manifested. In other words, had our knowledge lost linguistic form it would not have been manifested at all:

Vāgrūpatā cenniṣkrāmedavabod'hasya śāśvati Na prakāśaḥ prakāśeta sā hi pratyavamarśinī

(Vākyapadīya 1:124)

Language, according to Bhartrhari, is “consciousness in the form of external and internal experience, since consciousness in all creatures is never devoid of comprehension of words:

Saisā samsāriṇāṃ sajñā bahirantaśca vartate Tanmāt ramanatikrāntam caitanyam sarvajantusu

(Vākyapadīya 1:120)

This is evident also in the fact that all the persons are impelled to react through language and that they become devoid of consciousness like a piece of wood or wall when language ceases:

Arthakriyāsu vāk sarvān samīhayati dehinah Tadutkrāntau visamjño' yam dṛśyate kāṣṭhakaudyavat

(Vākyapadīya 1:127) (Chakraborti 37)

According to Chakraborti Bhartrhari contends that “just as one cannot conceive of an object entirely

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161

independent of knowledge, in a similar manner one cannot have any knowledge from language which is the only medium of its expression:

Na so’ sti pratyaayo loke yaḥ śabdānugamādṛte

Anuviddhamiva jñānam sarvam śabdena bhāsate

(Vākyapadīya 1: 123)

(Chakraborti 36)

So, “the fundamental principle must be knowledge or knowledge par excellence imbibed with linguistic principle. Thus knowledge is revelation, revelation is expression and expression is communication. But there is no communication language. Hence, consciousness and language are combined into one principle, the Eternal Verbum (Śabdabrahman).”

(Chakraborti 37)

Like Derrida, Bhartrhari also sees the inherent trace consciousness of language as conditioning all psychic experience from deep sleep to dreams, to ordinary awareness and even to the mystical, the states in which direct supersensuous perception of the meaning is obtained. In the dream state the only difference is that the seeds or traces of language function in a subtler manner. For Bhartrhari, as for Derrida the experience of self is the unobstructucted experience of Śabdatattva or archwwriting manifested in the temporal dynamics of language.

Before we proceed further it would be worthwhile to have some idea of Bhartrhari’s theory of Sphoṭa in order to appreciate the points of affinity between Bhartrhari and Derrida regarding their theory of language. Sphoṭa or more precisely the theory of Sphoṭa in its rudimentary form maintains that a word or a sentence is not just a collection of sound units or phonemes arranged in a particular order, but a single whole. The audible sounds, the ‘noisy realities’ are regarded in this

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theory as the means by which the whole, the relevant Sphota is made public. The implication is that language is what is revealed finally and not the phonemes themselves. Early Indologists like Keith, for example, describe Sphota as a mysterious or mystical entity. But it was established by later scholars, by Brough and Kunjunni Raja, for example, that the Sphota is not a mystical entity; it has an experiencial validity which can be put forward in theform of a logical proposition.

Bhartrhari, in fact, begins his discussion of Sphota by reference to the two distinctions made by his predecessors Sphota and Nada In the sequenceless nature of the speech (Vak) both powers, the power to articulate in sound and the power to convey meaning are intermixed. Sound is the linguistic unit properly understood. Nada manifests Sphota and Sphota conveys meaning. For the sake of communication between language-users Sphota must necessarily be made explicit. The potentially must be realized so that the listener may receive it. But this cannot be done without Nada, the sequential utterances of the phonemes. This is how the Nada becomes the causal factor for making Sphota explicit. Sphota is also shared by the listener, and as a result the listener's Sphota is awakened by the utterance of the speaker. This awakening of the listener's Sphota is what is called the comprehension by the listener. This is what is meant by the claim that the sentence uttered must already be present in the listner.

From the point of view of the speaker, however, the Sphota already present in him will be the causal condition of the Nada or the sequential word utterance. In verse 1:46 Bhartrhari says that as fire resides potentially in the arani stick similarly Sabda resides in the mind (Buddhi) and, being manifested becomes separately the cause for manifesting the meaning as well as itself. In 1:8 Bhartrhari tries to account for the general wrong notion that Sphota is sequential. He says

that Sphoṭa is not sequential but it appears to be sequential, because it is manifested through Nāda which is sequential. Thus the properties of Nāda are transferred to the Sphoṭa. He tries to clarify the situation with a simple analogy. The moon resides in a separate location, say, in the sky. But the reflected image of the moon shares the operations of objects in a separate location. If the image is reflected in waves in water it assumes the movement of the waves. Similarly, Sphoṭa being manifested in Nāda shares the properties of Nāda. Like Derrida, Bhartrhari believes that the temporal transformation of the originating source of language through speech and writing is continuous. Derrida uses the technical term “sign” to refer to the whole, and this is Bhartrhari’s Sphota. And what is “signified” for Derrida is Artha for Bhartrhari. For both Derrida and Bhartrhari the linguistic whole – the sign or Sphoṭa – has an inherent force of differentiation that produces the double manifestation in inner meaning (signified/Artha) and spoken sound (signifier/Dhvani). Although sign and Sphoṭa are irreducible, neither can be experienced in pure presence. The struggle towards sequencing, spacing, punctuation or differentiation in space and time is rooted in the nature of the language even in its most holistic form. In Vakyapadiya (1:99 and 1:5) Bhartrhari asserts that Sabdatattva symbolized by AUM is sequenced by the power of time into the various recitations of the Veda and all spoken words. For Derrida the image is one of sign as the linguistic whole being differentiated by spacing on the page and pause in speaking into articulated meaning and sound-image. According to Derrida, since a sign which is supposed to indicate the unity of the signifier and the signified cannot be produced within the plenitude of absolute presence, there is therefore no full speech, no absolute truth of full meaning. For both Derrida and Bhartrhari the Sphoṭa and the sign are manifested, and in the

dynamic tension of that manifestation lies truth. Both see truth contained in the dynamics of the language itself.

Bhartrhari contends that even before the utterance the language along with whatever it conveys or means is like the yolk of a peahen's egg. In that state all the variegated colours of a full grown peacock lie dormant in potential form. Later these colours are actualized. Similarly in the self of the speaker or listener all the variety and differentiation of linguistic item and their meanings exist as potentialities. Language and thought are identical at this stage. Bhartrhari even believes that the nature of the self is nothing but identical with the nature of language-thought. This state of complete identity of language and thought is called the Pasyanti stage of language. Before the proper articulation of the sound-sequence or utterance there is another intermediate stage (Mādhyamik Vāk) where the language and the thought it conveys are still one and undifferentiated, but at this pre-verbal stage the speaker sees them as differentiable. In other words, he recognizes the verbal part, which he is about to verbalize either to himself or to another, as distinct and separable from the Artha, meaning or thought. This perception impels him to speech which results in Nāda-Sphoṭa differentiation.

Derrida's critique of the Western metaphysics focusses on the privileging of the spoken over the written word. Barbara Johnson summarizes Derrida's position in the following words:

'The spoken word is given a higher value because the speaker and listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously. There is no temporal or spatial distance between speaker, speech, and listner, since the speaker hears himself speak at the same moment as the listener does. This immediacy seems to guarantee the motion that in the spoken word we know

what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said. Whether or not perfect understanding always occurs in fact, this image of perfectly self-present meaning is according to Derrida, the underlying ideal of Western culture" (Derrida 1981:ix).

Derrida calls this belief in the self-presentation of meaning “logocentrism, from the Greek logos. Writing, from the logo-centric perspective, is seen as a secondary representation of speech to be used when speaking is impossible. As the writer reduces thought to writing he distances it from the immediacy of speech and enables it to be read by someone far away, even after the writer’s death. All of this is seen as a corruption of the self-presence of meaning, an opening of meanings to forms of corruption which the presence of speech would have prevented. It should be noted here that Derrida’s critique is not aimed at reversing the value system, and showing writing to be superior to speech. He shows that both speech and writing are beginninglessly structured by difference and distance. The very experience of meaning is itself an experience of difference, and Derrida shows that this difference inhabits in the very heart of what appears to be immediate and present. In his commentary on Freud’s mystic writing pad Derrida has shown that difference is present even in the structures of the unconscious. The apparent experience of a unitary self-presence of meaning and consciousness actually arises from the repression of the differential structures from which they spring.

Derrida finds support in a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus in The Dialogues of Plato. The relevant passage runs as follows:

"Socrates. Is there another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power – a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

Phaedrus. What do you mean, and what is the origin?

Socrates. I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the Socrates.

learner, which can defend it-self and knows with whom to speak and with whom to be silent.

Phaedrus. You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?

Socrates. Yes, of course that is what I mean.

(Plato 1953 : 185-186)

This other kind of writing, ‘graven in the soul of the learner, is arche-writing for Derrida and this is the preverbal stage in Bhartrhari’s theory of Sphoṭa.

If all knowledge comes through language, is there a source or ground of language which lies outside of or beyond language? Can we say that language depends on something else – God or Brahman? Both Bhartrhari and Derrida would hold that there is no such extralinguistic source of language. For Bhartrhari, as is clearly enunciated in Vākyapadīya, the absolute is the Śabdatattva, the Word-Principle, and therefore in not something outside or beyond language. Derrida deconstructs the Western metaphysics and the notion of any extralinguistic source of language through his understanding of writing as difference containing all of spoken language and inscribed language.

It should be evident from the above discussion that there are many striking affinities between Bhartrhari and Derrida in their notions of language. Both believe that speech and writing are beginninglessly structured by difference and distance. Both break down the barriers between literary criticism and philosophy. Both believe in the wholeness of the preverbal stage which precedes both speech and writing, and none of them believes in any extralinguistic source of language.

It would not be possibly wrong to say that Bhartrhari as an exponent of the Indian theory of language prefigured much of Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics.

10

Imitation: Bharata and Aristotle

Both Bharata and Aristotle are primarily concerned with drama and the theory of imitation that they espouse in the works - Nāṭyaśāstra and Poetics respectively - is immediately concerned with the nature of imitation expected in a successful drama. What they say about imitation in the context of drama is also eminently applicable, mutatis mutandis, to poetry. It should also be borne in mind that the Western world-view and the consequent philosophy of life are significantly different front the Indian world-view and philosophy of life. If Western drama excels in tragedy, possibly on account of its tragic view of life the Indian philosophy of life is essentially one of acceptance where everything is supposed to be predestined. It is this acceptance of life arising mainly out of a belief in the doctrine of Karma and the concept of rebirth, that precludes the possibility of the existential anguish or the tragic trauma. The entire movement of the Western drama created by the great Greek and Roman masters through Shakespeare, Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard, Wesker and others may be experimenting with the new elements of structure within the drama itself, but basically all the dramatists follow the imitative mode as suggested by Aristotle. Even the Theatre of the Absurd is no exception; only it believes that the world of

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dream is more real than the world of consciousness, because the real man comes out in his dreams, and accordingly it tries to imitate the structure of a dream.

But the traditional Eastern drama — whether it be Indian, Japanese or Chinese or Indonesian — has a distinct character which is radically different from its Western counterparts. When we read a Noh play, for example, we feel that it ends abruptly. But actually what happens is that the play in which incidentally all the characters wear masks, ends in a dance. So reading the play cannot give full satisfaction; it leaves apparently much to be desired.

To come to Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra. It is, like Aristotle’s Poetics a treatise on drama. But what is significant is that it is at once a treatise on Dance, Drama, Music and Poetry. Etymologically the word Nāṭ is associated with Nṛt or dance, and the relation between dance and drama is so close that to perform a play is to dance a drama. It is this integration that makes the Indian drama so different from the Aristotelian conception. One may point out that the choric songs play an important part in the structure of a Greek drama, but the point is that in the Greek drama the chorus as well as the choric songs retains a separate identity. In fact Nietzsche pointed out in The Birth of Tragedy the dialectical relationship between the Dionysian element represented by the song and dance of the Chorus and the Apollonian elements represented by the action and dialogue. But in the Indian drama it becomes integrated into the action of the play and the performance of the actor. Kantak has rightly remarked that this “synthetic conception is the first premise of the Sanskrit theatre” (In Dani 36). The problem of Sanskrit drama or any classical drama in Asia, for that matter, is essentially a problem of enacting poetry. If the poetry in a Sanskrit drama retards the action it is done on

purpose to induce a static mood. Kantak rightly remarks that it is actually “drama’s strength than weakness because the surplus time thus released is needed to enlarge and draw out a movement, a gesture-allow it time to register—so as to bring the dominant sentiment to a ripe fullness” (In Dani 36). Thus although Bharata, like Aristotle uses the same word, Anukarana which means imitation, the apparent likeness only hides a deep-seated difference. We will later see that the same thing happens in the case of Aristotle who uses the same word, Mimesis, (imitation) like his master Plato but uses it in a radically different sense. Anyway the point is that though in Bharata the idea of Anukarana can be translated as mimicking, imaging or representation there are some qualifiers used by Bharata which reveal the fundamental difference. The phrase that Bharata uses is Bhāvānukīrtanam or Avasthānukīrtanam. Drama, according to Bharata, images certain actions, states and sentiments. Always, the emphasis is on ‘states’ or ‘sentiments’ (Avasthās or Bhāvas) or, the essence, the ‘being’. Bharata further states that, the presentation should be Mūrtimat and Sābhilāsam. These qualifications naturally make a drama as Bharata understands it different from the general notion of drama. All these qualifiers only lead to the inevitable conclusion that Bharata’s idea of Anukarana, Anukīrtana or Anukrti in terms of Sanskrit dramaturgy is basically a different concept from Aristotelian theory of imitation. In the Indian concept the likeness of something to its artistic representation should never be a copy but analogical or exemplary. What is needed is the total apprehension and as the word Sādrśya is further qualified by Pramāna it implies that there must be the right proprtion and design. Imitation in Bharata is thus seriously conditioned by properly conceived design. In other words, the design must evolve out of

170 A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

highly conventionalized and often stylized forms and symbols.

Furthermore, the context in which Bharata first uses the word Anukarana through Prajāpati he is mainly concerned with the scope of drama rather than technique. But in Aristotle the emphasis is more on the technique than on the content. Kantak has rightly remarked:

"If one may interpret this somewhat freely (without fear of inviting ridicule!) the explication may run on the following lines: ‘The fiction must take into account our actual world’s commerce with the other two. It must be shot through with them; that is to say, the drama should adequately project these all-important linkages and affliances. So that the dramatic structure so evolved may be like a graph of the deepest insights and beliefs of the race, of the community – its [W]eltanchauung as it were – in the same way as the structure of a Greek Tragedy is seen to be the diagrammatic representation of the Greek view of man’s destiny. In the Indian case such a structure conforms neither to Western Comedy nor Tragedy but has elements of both. And its characteristic poise and resolution is miles away from the crisis-ridden drama of the Western tradition. What is firmly eschewed is an exclusive pre-occupation with the three-dimensional reality, the world of man’s activity in the raw, in favour of a scrutiny, a refined sense of the state, an apprehension of its Rasa, its true being in the light of whole, of all the three worlds!’ (In Dani 38-39).

What, then, is of supreme importance in the theory of imitation as propounded by Bharata is the creation of the right kind of Rasa. Dance, music, dialogues and gestures, etc. must be presented in such a fashion that it creates the desired Rasa. Otherwise drama fails as imitation fails. It is this functional aspect of Imitation that has a direct relevance to poetry. The idea of

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Imitation: Bharata and Aristotle

171

Imitation, then, involves all the aspects of poetry in which all the elements must act in unison to produce the right kind of Rasa which is as much the desired goal of drama as it is of poetry.

Now to come to Aristotle. Towards the end of Book X of The Republic Plato throws a challenge to the lovers of poetry who are not poets themselves, to defend poetry in prose. Aristotle seems to have accepted the challenge. The fact that Aristotle does not name Plato only shows his deference to his teacher as his Poetics is a brilliant defence of poetry in prose by one who is not a poet himself. In Book X Plato rejects poetry mainly on the grounds that it is an imitation of an imitation, a shadowy thing, because for him only eidos is real and the phenomenal reality or the objective world is an imitation of the eidos. For every object the idea is one but the manifestations are many; the idea takes various forms. So poetry by imitating the objective world only imitates an imitation. It is the echo of an echo, the shadow of a shadow, and thus it is twice removed from reality.

Aristotle also admits that the ideal which means the universal, alone is real. He also admits that poetry is an imitation but he is able to turn the tables and show that poetry is precisely valuable because it is imitation. In other words, while Plato condemns poetry on the grounds of imitation, Aristotle commends poetry on the same grounds of imitation. For Plato poetry is bad because it is imitation, for Aristotle it is good exactly for the same reason - imitation. Evidently then what Aristotle means by imitation is very different from Plato’s meaning.

By imitation Plato means a faithful representation or a photographic reproduction of the object imitated. But one could ask why would not a photograph of a landscape better than or superior to painting? And

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Ransom has something very significant to say in this respect. He writes: “the idea is that the photograph would be both fuller and more accurate as a presentation. But it is not fuller, strictly speaking; to be particular at all is to be infinitely full of detail, and one infinite is as full as another. And it does not matter about the meticulous accuracy of representation; the painter’s free version may be for the eye the more probable version and the more convincing, by the same reasoning by which Aristotle prefers poetry as an imitation to history. The great difference between the two versions lies elsewhere. The photograph is a mechanical imitation perhaps but not a psychological one. It was obtained by the adjustment of the camera and the pressing of the button, actions so characterless that they indicate no attitude necessarily, no love; but the painting reveals the arduous pains of the artist. We are excited by these pains proportionately; they give the painting its human value; and carrying this principle a little farther, we never discover in the work a single evidence of technique, discipline, deliberation, without having the value enhanced further. The pains measure the love” (TWB 208-209). For Aristotle imitation is recreation, because imitation in poetry in particular and all fine arts in general occurs in a medium peculiar to itself, and every art has its own particular medium in which it exists in nature or in life. The medium of poetry is sound, the medium of painting is colour, the medium of sculpture is stone. So the imitation in art amounts to the transference of the being (da-sein) of an object from one medium in nature or in life to another in art. Aristotle’s theory of imitation thus amounts to aesthetics of transformation.

Art recreates the object imitated. Sometimes it so happens that the medium of a particular art is of a kind that cannot be accommodated in the target medium. An object in nature, for example, is three dimensional; but

the canvas on which it is to be transferred is two-dimensional. How then is it possible to transform a three dimensional object to a two dimensional one, and yet that is what a good painter does. Therein lies the miracle of art. A Turner or a Constable as landscape painter or Michel Angelo or da Vinci as portrait painter does just that. Within the limited canvas of two dimensions they create an illusion of a three dimensional reality, forming in the spectator ‘a willing suspension of disbelief.’ Again, an object in nature may be dynamic but canvas is static, and yet an artist like Hokusai or Cezanne can create a tremendous sense of movement in their paintings. The same is true about the sculptures of Rodin or Ramkinkar Bei or Michel Angelo. The way they capture the sense of movement is simply remarkable. Good art thus defies the limitation of the medium and aspires to the aesthetics of transformation so profoundly that the object imitated is captured in its concrete individuality in a medium in spite of the intractable nature of the object in relation to that medium.

The medium of poetry is sound, for a poem is meant to be read. While a poem creates the object that it imitates by a structure of sound transforming the object into a verbal artifact, it simultaneously imitates the action, the mood, the situation through an imaginative collocation of sound. In good poetry, therefore, there is always a perfect correspondence between the sound and the sense. As Pope had so nicely put it:

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw

The line too labours, and words move slow.

Take for example a line from Macbeth, - “Amen stuck in my throat.” Macbeth says that he tried so say Amen but could not, and the idea is abundantly borne out by the sound pattern of the line. Amen gets really

stuck as the tongue touches the palate (st) and gets stuck with the locking consonant ‘k’. But Macbeth says that he tried to say Amen. The evidence of his struggle to say it is in the cluster ‘thr’; so difficult to pronounce. As we try to pronounce ‘thr’ the tongue, caught between the two rows of teeth keeps on throbbing till we are able to pull it in and pronounce ‘thr’ The tongue throbbing between the teeth for release replicates Macbeth’s struggle and makes the statement true. But ultimately he fails because word ‘throat’ ends with a locking consonant ‘t’. To take another example: this time from Hopkins. In “The Windhover” at one point Hopkins describes how the bird ‘rebuffed the big wind.’ Now, let us look closely at the word. What happens in the sky is that the bird is caught in a storm and its wings are furled in by the force of the wind.’ It struggles hard to unfurl them and ultimately succeeds. Now remember, ‘b’ is a voiced bilabial plosive, ‘f is fricative, and ‘d’ is a plosive. We should also remember that while articulating an English ‘f which is labio-dental; we practically bite the lower lip which is sucked in first and then is suddenly released. In order to pronounce the word “rebuffed” we have to close our lips at ‘b, suck the lower lip in with ‘ff and release it free with the plosive ‘d’ The curling in of the lip, and the later release after struggle remarkably replicate the action of the bird in the sky. What happens to the wings happens to the lip here and thus we get a fine sound analogous of the action that is imitated. Take an example from Tennyson:

By the margin willow veil’d

Slide the heavy barges trail’d

By slow horses; and unhail’d

The shallow flitteth silken sail’d

Skimming down the Camelot.

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175

There are two pictures: one of heavy barges and the other of a light shallop. A close look will reveal that the collocation of sound in the first two lines is such that it makes the reading tedious and difficult while the abundance of liquid ‘l’s and short vowels makes the reading of the lines describing the movement of the shallop fast and facile. One could even feel for the horses, because the barges are so heavy that the horses have to stop in the middle of the line, for breath as it were. Since Aristotle has made a universal statement it is equally true in regard to the poetry of other languages.

Here are the first two lines of Kalidasa’s Meghadutam:

‘Kaścit kāntā virahaguruṇa svādhikārapramattah̆

Śāpenastam gamitamahimā varṣabhogyeṇa bhartuh̆’

Kālidāsa here is describing the pangs of separation of a lover. Yakṣha is separated from his beloved, and so his mind is heavy. And when the mind is heavy the movement is slow. That precisely is the reason why Kālidāsa employs a particularly slow moving metre (mandākrāntā) for the poem. There is no need to multiply examples. The poetry of Shakespeare and Tagore, in fact, all great poetry is full if it.

Now, since the medium of poetry is sound it ought to be impossible for poetry to evoke a total silence. For, in that case, poetry has to make sound express the absence of sound. In other words, in that case poetry has to make sound negate itself. Though it looks prima facie impossible there are many instances of poetry achieving the miracle. In Keats, for example, take the concluding lines of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

….and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

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The silence which follows after the word 'silent' is an eloquent silence giving us an idea of the speechless enchantment of Cortez (or Balboa) on discovering the Pacific off Panama.

What to speak of nondramatic poetry one finds abundant examples of it in drama as well. Take, for example, the Cassandra scene of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Cassandra there stands speechless for quite a long time at the ancestral house of Agamemnon and her silence makes a tremendous impact on that part of the drama. It creates, in fact, a fine moment of enormous dramatic significance for the tragedy. In Satyajit Ray's Chārulatā (a film version of Tagore's “Naṣṭanīḍ”) Charulata does not speak for a long time. She moves about, she acts, but she does not speak. And her silence reveals her state of mind, her profound lack of communication – language being a mere verbal means of communication – much better than words. Shakespeare is a past master in the art of using silence for dramatic purposes. Silence may be due to a character's introspection. He may be turning the whole thing over in his mind as in the lines,

Since Cassius first did what me against Caesar

I have not slept,

(Julius Caesar Act II Scene 1)

The second line falls short of the blank verse form of ten syllables and Brutus's silence enables us to have a glimpse of his disturbed state of mind. In Hamlet when Horatio asks 'What news, my lord?' Hamlet refuses to tell it: 'No, you will reveal it'. During the silence indicated by the shortage of syllable, we can visualize the speaker closing his lips tight. Similarly in As You Like it when Rosalind asks Celia as they plan to go to Arden, 'But what will you be call'd?' Celia takes a little time to think out, and in the pause after 'call'd' we

almost see her brooding over it. Shakespearean speeches are often closely punctuated when it is uttered by someone fumbling for expressions, groping for words, or the character is physically weak (like the bleeding sergeant in Macbeth). The pauses or the silences reflect the mental or physical condition of the speaker.

An important aspect of Aristotle’s idea of imitation can be discerned in his distinction between poetry and history on the ground that while history deals with the particular, poetry deals with the universal. Therefore, while the historian relates what a particular man, Alcibiades, for example, did in fact at a particular time and place, poetry would imitate what a man like him might probably say or do in a circumstance, more or less similar. This is Aristotle’s retort to Plato’s indictment of poetry on the ground that it is wanting in truth value in that it imitates the particular whereas the universal alone is real. Aristotle’s exact point is that what poetry imitates is not in fact the particular, but the ‘eidos’ inherent in it. There is an ideal form inhering each individual person and phenomenon, but imperfectly manifested. The poet seeks to give it a more complete expression, to realize the ideal which is only half-revealed in the world of reality. His distinctive mark as an artist lies in stamping the given material with the impress of the form which is universal. Imitation thus is an expression of the concrete thing in its universal form. To seize the universal, and to reproduce it in simple and sensuous form is not to reflect a reality already familiar through sense-perception. It is rather a rivalry of nature, a fulfillment of her unfulfilled purposes, a rectification of her deficiencies. What art imitates thus is not in fact nature but the central principle of nature. It creates a mimic world in which the essential creative process of nature repeats itself on a different plane of reality. Thus art is

an idealized representation of life, and the function of poetic imitation thus is to translate the particular into the universal in strict conformity with the criteria of probability and necessity, and that constitutes the aesthetics of transformation.

In brief we may say that while Bharata’s idea of imitation is governed by the principles of the theory of Rasa, Aristotle’s idea is mainly governed by what he believes to be the universal principle of nature. While it cannot be gainsaid that Bharata’s idea of imitation, so far as drama is concerned is radically different from Aristotle’s, there is basic affinity between Bharata and Aristotle when we consider imitation in poetic terms because the ingredients, excitants and ensuents that for Bharata would create the right kind of Rasa leading to aesthetic rapture, would for Aristotle would lead to the right kind of pleasure.

11

Conclusion

We started with the hypothesis that since literature, though culture-specific, has a universal and timeless appeal across lands and cultures there must be something like a literary universal, a hard core in poetry that transcends time and space. It is also a historical fact that great thinkers in the West and in the East, particularly in India, have written extensively on the nature and function of poetry, its energy dynamics and the secret of its appeal. It is interesting to note that great thinkers across space and time — like Aristotle in Greece and Bharata in India — wrote treatises on drama, and in the process made utterances which shed light on the nature and function of poetry as well and introduce ideas in embryonic forms which are later developed into elaborate theories and schools, both in the West and in India.

One of the basic issues that have engaged the attention of the aestheticians or poetician in different countries is the locus of literariness, or what constitutes the poesis of the poem. In the West great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Cicero have thought deeply about it and have expressed their opinions in clear and generally unambiguous terms. The problem, at bottom, is that a poem is both a cognitive discourse as well as an aesthetic object. How to reconcile these two aspects so that we can produce a poem which can at once be identified as a poem? One test whether it is a

legitimate poem is to note whether it gives us the experience of aesthetic rapture. If it does then what are the conditions that must be fulfilled to create the right kind of mood for producing the poetic relish? So, one thing is certain: poetry must give us pleasure. Aristotle says that the end of poetry is pleasure. Bharata also talks about Rasa leading to aesthetic relish. It must, however, be borne in mind, that what Bharata or Aristotle says in the context of drama are, by and large, applicable to poetry as well. If Bharata talks about the Guṇas and Doṣas that one must bear in mind while writing a play, Aristotle also writes in Rhetoric about the various uses of words which one must remember for the purpose of successful persuasion, and in the process implies the effects of the right and wrong uses of words. Thus there is a common agreement that it is the effective and successful use of language that can lead to the aesthetic pleasure. So, ultimately it is the use of language on which everything depends. Indian poetics broadly developed into eight schools — Rasa, Alaṃkāra, Rīti, Guṇa/Doṣa, Vakrokti, Svabhāvokti, Aucitya and Dhvani —corresponding roughly to the Western theory of pleasure, rhetoric or figures of speech, theory of form, oblique poetry, statement poetry, propriety and suggestion respectively. But it should be noted, however, that while Rasa or pleasure is concerned with the effect of poetry other theories are concerned with the linguistic means by which this effect is produced.

The early speculations about poetry, like the speculations about painting, were confined to casual attention to different elements of poetry. The exponents of the Alaṃkāra school held that the mode of figurative expression, grammatical accuracy and the sweetness of sound constitute poetry. Although the idea of Alaṃkāra can be traced back to a period before Bharata, it is Bharata who used these ideas in his theory of

dramaturgy. The early history of Sanskrit poetics started with the theory of Alamkāra and developed into a system with Bhāmaha in the sixth century A.D.

Bhāmaha, and later Dandī, confined themselves mainly to what they called Kāvyasarira or the body of poetry and held that the two factors that go to the making of Kāvyasarira are Śabda (word) and Artha (meaning), and

that poetry is born when there is a perfect harmony beween these two factors-śabdārthasaḥitaukāvyam, and further held that the Alamkāras or the poetic figures of speech are essential ingredients of this harmony. As it

began to develop into a system there appeared endless divisions and subdivisions of these Alamkāras. However the Alamkāra in its finest manifestation has an affinity with the Western concept of metaphor. The view that

metaphor is a trope can be traced back to Aristotle. While in Rhetoric Aristotle writes at length about the value of rhetoric or figures of speech in creating the mood of the listener, in Poetics he says that a metaphor

consists in giving a thing a name which belongs to something else, and holds that the greatest thing was to be the master of metaphor. He further believes that it is one thing that cannot be learned from others. According

to Aristotle the use of metaphor is a sign of genius since good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilar. In Coleridgean terms also it is born out of the esemplastic power of imagination that

dissolves, diffuses and dissipates in order to recreate and unify.

Since a poem is written in words, and a word has both sound and meaning, it has naturally Śavdaguna and Arthaguna. Bharata's enumeration of various Gunas are meant to be borne in mind depending on the

kind of mood one is interested in inducing in the auditor as well as the context in which the speech is uttered. Gokak, an eminent scholar, has rightly remarked that

mere language is “just lexis and syntax; there are no Guṇas in it” (In Khushwaha 145), and language acquires or fails to acquire Guṇa depending on how effectively it is used in a particular situation.

It is only then that the language is transformed into a style. A comparison of the Western rhetorical school and the Indian Alaṃkāra school shows how profoundly and meticulously the Indian Alaṃkāris have analysed the language in terms of the figures of speech and their functions in contributing to the poesis of a poem.

Bharata’s treatise on drama thus, and particularly his notions of Guṇas and Doṣas, practically involve all the subsequent schools of poetry— whether be it Rīti (style) or Vakrokti (oblique poetry or deviations), Svabhāvokti (statement poetry), Aucitya (propriety), etc.

We have already seen that the idea of Rīti is embedded in Bharata’s notions of Guṇas and Doṣas. In other words, he implies, though he does not state it explicitly, that the style must be commensurate with the matter presented and the prevailing mood of a particular situation. Daṇḍi, Vāmana and Kuntaka only provide an elaborate and slightly varied interpretation of the ideas suggested by Bharata. In Poetics Aristotle also puts enormous emphasis on diction as one of the six important elements of a drama. But Rīti is not just diction. Kapoor has insightfully remarked: “Basically it is a theory that handles the psychoponetic fitness of language for speakers, themes and sentiments, and therefore becomes a study of craftsmanship and psychology of approach” (Kapoor 20). Here again, when one compares the Western theories of style with the Rīti theory one is amazed by the threadbare discussion of the exponents of the Rīti school of the subtle nuances of stylistic variations and their effects on the texture and the poesis of a poem. To say this is not to undermine the

remarkably valuable work done in the West on Style so that it has become an independent discipline known as Stylistics ranging over phonology, morphology, prosody, syntax, lexicology and the study of figures and tropes. From Longinus to Coleridge and from Coleridge to Pater, and from Valéry to Remy de Gourmont, critics have all been concerned with style. But what distinguishes the Indian exponents of the Riti school is that while the Western critics are generally concerned with style the Indian theorists are mainly, if not solely, engaged in the relation of style to poetry; how it makes or mars it.

The same is largely true about Dhvani which may be compared to the Western theory of suggestion. Stephane Mallarmé is the greatest exponent of the theory of suggestion in the West. His credo that poetry should not state but suggest, has become the shibboleth of modern poetry. It has to be admitted, however, that although Mallarmé in his letters and various writings repeatedly reaffirms his position he does not care to develop his doctrine either systematically or scientifically. But, Ānandavardhana, on the other hand, develops a whole treatise on the solid foundation that good poetry must suggest and not just describe. There are as many as 5355 subdivisions of suggestion!

We have also noted how Derrida’s concern with the peculiar nature of language and particularly his idea of écriture was anticipated by Bharṭhari in Vākyapadīya where he develops the theory of Sphoṭa at great length.

The Indian theory of Vakrokti which can be traced back to the critical speculations of Bhāmaha, Vāmana, Daṇḍin, Rudraṭa and others, and reaches its finest exposition in Kuntaka, has affinity with the importance of deviation or obliquity in poetry. But the way Kuntaka develops the theory and shows fine insight into the nature of poetry is just not available either in Tillyard or in any other theorist for that matter. The same is true

about Svabhāvokti which is often compared with statement poetry. But there, too, the meticulous care and alert attention to the minutest details that we find in the Indian theoreticians is simply absent in their Western counterparts. The idea is more or less the same, but there is a world of difference in the brilliance of the systematic exposition.

What is poetry if it does not produce Rasa or give the reader an experience of aesthetic rapture? Both the Indian theoreticians and the Western theoreticians are of the opinion that the end of poetry is pleasure which according to the Indian aestheticians arises out of the experience of Rasa in poetry. But while starting with Bharata all the Indian aestheticians have broken their lances on how this pleasure is created, and have taken great pains in describing the nature of different moods leading to different kinds of Rasas, the Western theoreticians have been rather reticent about these aspects. About some other ideas, like imitation or catharsis, Aristotle speaks very little compared with the volumes that we get in Bharata and the subsequent theorists.

To sum up then. Theorists of all ages and all schools of poetic thought have felt that the language of poetry is different from the language of ordinary prose. They further agree that the sonic and the semantic — the sound and the sense — are the two most important elements of poetry, and that poetry is born when they are blended harmoniously together. The speculations about how this blending can be effected lead to different schools — Alamkāra, Rīti, Svābhāvokti, Dhvani, Vakrokti, etc.

The fact of the matter is that neither Alamkāra nor Rīti nor Vakrokti, etc. individually accounts for the poesis of a poem. An Alamkāra or embellishment cannot be superadded; it must be integral to the poem.

Similarly a particular style cannot make poetry unless it is in keeping with the cultural level of the speaker or the nature of the thought-content of a poem. There are various factors that would determine the style. Again, just deviation or stating a thing in an oblique way cannot make poetry unless what is stated is modified by a predominant passion or in the words of Coleridge, “by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion.” In other words, the production of Rasa demands the use of some or all the elements depending on the nature of the idea envisioned in the poem, because a poem is an organic unity. We must have suggestion, we may have rhetorical figures of speech, or deviation also; we may have a particular style, and so on, but all these elements must be integrated into the matrix of the poem.

To compare the correspondences between the Indian schools and the Western schools is to be amazingly aware of the immensity and profundity of the systematic study of the Indian aestheticians. By comparison the Western poetics appears perfunctory in spite of occasional bright insightful flashes that we find in Aristotle, Coleridge, Croce or Mallarmé for that matter.

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Index

A

Abhidhā, 116

Abhinavagupta, 57, 78, 133

Act of Abhijnānaśakuntalam, 108

Ajax's Struggle, 112

Ākṣepa, 118

Alaṅkāra, 49

Ames, V. M., 66, 174

Ānandavardhana, Patwardhana, 83, 110, 114, 120-21, 133

Ancient European Classics of Aeschylus, 1

Anitya, 133

Anubhāvas, 108

Apahunti, 120

Aristotle, 22, 24, 44, 104, 152, 177-78

Arthavyākṭi, 59, 61

Atkins, J.W.H., 106, 186

Aucityavicāracarcā, 106

B

Barthes, Roland, 131

Bhāmaha, 14, 80, 134, 181

Bharata, 108

Bhartrhari, Chakraborti, 160

Bhaṭṭanāyaka, 149

Bradley, A.C., 67

Brahman, 159

Briggs, W. D., 76

Buddha, 2

Butcher, H., 187

imitation, 9

C

Caesar, Julius, 176

Campbell, George, 20

Cassandra Scene of Aeschylus's Agememnon, 176

Cicero, 104, 113, 179

Coleridge, 53

Comlètes, Deuvres, 128

Coppee, Francois, 126

D

Dani, A. P., 187

Dasgupta, S. N., 187

Davie, Donald, 68

De, S.P., 80, 110

Derrida, 157-58

Index

Dharmadatta, 139

Dipaka, 118

Doṣa, 49, 109

Dushyanta, 83

E

Eliot, T. S., 101, 150, 188

European literature, 12

F

Fish, Stanley, 131

Freeman, D. C., 188

G

God, 166

Gokak, 60

Greek Classical Art, 42

Guṇa, 49, 109

H

Herrick, Marvin T., 113

Holland, Norman, 140

Hopkins, Gerard Monley, 3

'Horaçe, 179

Hughes, Ted, 103

I

Indian aestheticians, 185

Alaṃkāra, 182

poetic tradition, 114

theory of Vakrokti, 80

Iser, Wolfgang, 131

J

Janaki, S. S., 138

Johnson, Barbara, 164

Joyce, James, 133

K

Kālidāsa, 9

Kantak, V. Y., 30

Kanti, 59

Ker, W. P., 65

Khan, Kubla, 128

Khushwaha, 182

Krishnamoorthy, 122

Kṣemendra, 108-10

L

Lahiri, 56

Lakṣaṇa, 49

Lord Shiva, 121

M

Macbeth, 174

Mādhurya, 58

Mahimabhaṭṭa, 98

Mallarmē, Stephane, 124-27, 183

Māmmata, 153

Maritain, Jacque, 10

Mekan, Keith, 72

Melville, Herman, 77

Milton, 112

Mukherji, Ramaranjan, 118-19, 190

Murry, Middleton, 22

N

Nāṭyaśāstra, 135

196

A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics

O

Ojas, 58, 61

Orsini, G. N. G., 64

P

Pacific Off Panama, 176

Paryāyokta, 118

Plato, 43, 171

Poe, Edger Allan, 129

Pope, 136

Prajāpati, 170

Q

Quintilian, 26, 35, 106, 179

R

Raghavan, V., 138

Rāma, 27

Reader, Response, 130-31, 140

Richards, I.A., 110

Romantic Age, 18

Ruzzante of Padua, 113

S

Samādhi, 57

Samāsokti, 118

Samatrā, 57

Sańkuka, 146

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 66

Shakespeare, 66, 167

Shakespear, Macbeth, 149

Sītā, 27, 137

Sivarahiah, B. K., 63

Śleṣa, 61

Spring Morning, 102

Strindberg, 167

Svabhāvokti, 96

U

Udāra, 59

Upamā, 120

Upasarga, 109

V

Vāmana, 57

Vedas, 134, 163

Vidyācakravartin, 137

Viśvanātha, 115, 153

Vyāñjanā, 114

W

Wellek, René, 128-29

West, R. W., 66

Western, World, 18

Whalley, George, 20

Wilde, Oscar, 5

Winters, Yvor, 68

Wordsworth, 136

Wyatt, 92

X

Xenophon, 38

Y

Yaksha, 9

Yamaka, 50

Yeats, 101

Z

Zola, 127

Copyrighted material

The fact that literature, though culture-bound and period-based, has a universal and timeless appeal implies that there is something in a literary work, which, for lack of any better term, may be called literary universal that transcends time and space across lands and cultures. The speculations of the aestheticians of the West and of India, about the locus of literariness or what constitutes literariness, though in all probability developed independently, have many ideas in common.

The book explores the affinities and differences between the Western literary theories and the Indian literary theories through a study of the correspondences between Alamkāra and the Rhetorical School; Indian Theory of Guṇa and Doṣa, in Kāvyśarira, and Stylistics and the Western Theory of Form; Vakrokti and Oblique Poetry; Svabhāvokti and Statement Poetry; Aucitya and Decorum; Dhvani and Suggestion; Rasa and Pleasure;

Indian Theory of Sphoṭa and Derrida’s Theory of Écriture; the Idea of Imitation in Bharata and Aristotle, and concludes that compared with the Indian poetics the Western poetics is perfunctory in spite of occasional bright and insightful flashes that we find in Aristotle, Coleridge, Croce or Mallarmé for that matter.

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