3. 12. RASA PAST AND FUTURE

12. RASA PAST AND FUTURE

There is a proclivity in a certain strain of postcolonial thought to assert claims to conceptual priority: the precolony is always supposed to have preempted colonialism in its theoretical understanding of the world. This is demonstrated for classical Indian aesthetics by awarding it a kind of superior insight and universal applicability ("Rasa in Shakespeare" is the genre of study I have in mind). To understand rasa as a historical form of thought, however, as I try to enable the reader of this Reader to do, is to confront a theory clearly contingent on a nonmodern worldview and understanding of literary art. Its full conceptualization is intimately tied to a number of primary, uncontested, and largely nontransferable Indian presuppositions-about the threefold psychophysiology of Samkhya, for example, or the storage of memories of past lives, or even transmigration. That said, rasa theory does offer an account of widely shared mental processes and an analytic procedure that enable us here and now to think through more clearly and talk more precisely about features of our own aesthetic experience for which we have no ready-to-hand concepts or language. Even more fundamentally, it allows us to admit that we have such experiences in the first place. For in fact, reading with emotion in the modern West was until recently viewed as a fallacy- indeed, it was called the "Affective Fallacy." Even before W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the phrase in their well-known essay, René Wellek sought to proscribe the "emotive" criticism of literature, reducing it to "the labeling of works of art by emotional terms like 'joyful,' 'gay,' 'melancholy,' and so forth," and denying that "even if we define these emotions as closely as we can, we are still quite removed from the specific object which induced them." Emotion "has nothing to do with the actual object" of literary study; in addition, its analyses are unverifiable and cannot contribute to a "cooperative advance in our knowledge."160 For Wimsatt and Beardsley, attempting to understand what a poem is from what the poem does, far from being a route to overcome the obstacles to objective criticism, actually leads "away from criticism and from poetry" toward impressionism and relativism. What counts is referential meaning, not emotion: "It may well be that the contemplation of this object, or pattern of emotive knowledge, which is the poem, is the ground for some ultimate emotional state which may be termed the aesthetic .... But it is no concern of criticism, no part of criteria."161 In the last decade there has been a growing unease with these grand dismissals.162 Emotion, in literary criticism, philosophical aesthetics, and even social theory, is staging something of an insurgency, with the rise of an "affective turn" prompting new histories of the emotions, new studies of the emotions in history, and new cognitive theories of the emotions.163 And here rasa theory and its history may have some role to play. The theory offers an acute dissection of the elements that produce-as they undeniably produce-emotion in the literary artwork, and a perceptive analysis of the psychological process of viewer or reader response, while the very disputes that marked the theory's historical development contain a whole universe of enduring, contending assessments. In the best of cases it may even help us unlearn old modes of reading while gaining new ones, to better understand what it means to experience art and hence to be a full human being.