Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Criteria of Literary Criticism

D. Anjaneyulu

In any discussion of literature in general, or a branch thereof, there is inevitably a throwto life itself, of which it is a reflection or criticism or interpretation, as it is generally termed. But often times, there is evident a tendency to repeat the word ‘life and literature’ in season and out of season, as if the terms were identical and could be mechanically equated in any context. Instinct is perhaps a safe guide in quite a few of the elementary activities of life (like eating, sleeping, procreating and so on), though we cannot quite say even that, in modern times, when the business of living has become so complex. It requires all the skills of science and art to be able to go through the livelong day without achieving anything in particular. Mere human instinct may or may not be adequate for the enjoyment of life at many of the levels now open to man. It certainly is not enough for a real enjoyment of literature. It is trite enough to observe that the appreciation of literature is a matter of acquired taste, but simple enough to forget. Actually, it is a fashion with quite a few of the self-styled modernists to make a virtue of losing sight of it.

At the risk of being ticked off as an outmoded pandit or a self-conscious pedant, I maintain (what must be familiar enough to any student of literature, worth the name) that it is the function of the critic to increase this appreciation and intensify it in a fruitful and significant manner. Not that literature cannot be enjoyed without the aid of the trained critic and all his critical theories. Far from it. Indeed, as David Daiches puts it, “It would be absurd to maintain that no Greek appreciated Sophocles until Aristotle had written the Poetics or that English playgoers had to wait for A. C. Bradley or Prof. Heilman before they could appreciate and enjoy King Lear. Appreciation can be independent of critical theory, although the development and application of critical theory can help to clarify, focus and increase appreciation.”

Changing Theories

Critical theories about the nature of literature have a way of changing from time to time, like so many other things, and can be conflicting and confusing to the average writer or the general reader, if he cares to bother himself about them. Accord­ing to Plato, poetry is far removed from truth, and springs from improper knowledge, and lack of understanding, of both how to use and how to make what it describes. It is, therefore, not surpris­ing that the poets were banned from Plato’s Republic. On the other hand, his successor Aristotle spares no pains in his struggle to demonstrate that poetry (and all imaginative literature by implication) is true, serious and useful, instead of being false, trivial and harmful, as it was deemed to be earlier. But, both of them would have been astonished, with some reasonable degree of difference, at Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions” and emotion recollected in tran­quility.” And T. S. Eliot (in his essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) has a greater surprise ready for Wordsworth and the other adherents to the School of Romantic Revival when he says, with all the emphasis of a neoclassicist, that poetry is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, nor tranquility. He argues that emotions which the poet has not experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. In spite of the conscious striving to be paradoxical, and score a point over Wordsworth, Coleridge and company, one cannot deny the element of truth in his observation:

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

The true and the other

Sometimes, we have before us poetry the real thing and some times, something else, which is not poetry but has all its trappings and insignia of office and is therefore able to pass for it in the market-place as well as the political platform, or may be the socialite’s salon and the ceremonial kavi sammelan. Dr. F. R. Leavis (whom I do not fancy as a writer in his own right) has that uncanny knack for telling the fake from the genuine in English. poetry in particular and literature in general. He does this according to his own lights, which are never dim, and has earned an enviable reputation for being a dyspeptic critic who needs little provocation to become cantankerous. He quotes a sonnet of Andrew Lang from The Oxford Book of English Verse and dissects it with all the clinical (and cynical) perfection of a surgeon demonstrating to an audience of medical under-graduates. The last three lines of the sonnet are as follows:

“And through the music of the languid hours
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odessey.”

Commenting on this sonnet, Leavis says of Lang that he was a scholar and a man of taste, with a feeling for language and a desire to write poetry with, in short all the qualifications of a poet except the essential one, the need to communicate something of his own. I can myself think of a few men of taste in Telugu, as in many other languages, who have the cultivated taste to write poetry and are accepted for poets, because of their constant association with well-known poets, and love for poetic objects (like the rose, lotus, honey-bee, the night, darkness, crescent moon and so on) familiar to the Indian tradition. It is indeed a problem to tell literature from a bewildering mass of what passes for it in many quarters including respectable magazines and influential publishing houses.

Function of Criticism

In this rather unpleasant, but necessary, function of distinguishing the good from the less good, as well as the indifferent and the bad, the critic has a vital role to play, if he is true to his vocation and is qualified for it–i.e., by his intellectual equipment and his capacity for empathy (or sympathetic understanding). His activity may be ontological, functional, normative, descriptive, psychological or appreciative. Each of these activities has its place and usefulness, but is not an end in itself. Nor all of them together, for criticism is not ‘autotelic’ in the words of Eliot. The professional critics, especially of the academic school, tend to establish a method and set more store by the meticulous handling of the method than by the increased perception, understanding and appreciation it yields. It defeats its purpose if it petrifies into the study of different kinds of specialised vocabulary or different kinds of professional tricks. The function of criticism is much wider than one is led to believe by these unsparing formal exercises in rhetoric and prosody, poetics and linguistics. As David Daiches remarks in this connection, it is a process of illumination, admitting of a wide variety of techniques of appreciation.
Spirit of the Age

In connection with the use of words in poetry and their association value, J. C. Squire said (in his review of Robert Bridges’ The Testament of Beauty):

“For generations, owing to the reaction of the aesthetic against the new scientific, industrial, and largely materialistic world, we have become accustomed to the idea that certain things are ‘not poetical’, that a poet can mention a rose, but not a Rolls-Royce, that poetry is a refuge and not an attack, that a poet is a sensitive refuge and not a man facing life, the whole of it, and sounding a clarion call to his more speechless and encumbered fellows.”

The converse can also be equally true, as pointed out by Dr. Leavis. The expression of the spirit of the modern age is not automatically achieved by the mere mention of modern objects, like the internal combustion engine or the electronic computer, the jet plane or the sputnic, the atomic bomb or the ballistic missile, or so many of the other apparatus of modern cvillisation. The Rolls-Royce or the TV Camera, or be it stengun and the brengun, must enter significantly into poetry and not merely as convenient modish labels as in the case of some popular successful contemporary poets in our own languages. He must be able to compel the words to express an intensely personal way of feeling, so that the reader responds, not in a general way, but in a precise, personal, particular way that has a significance. The sensitive and sympathetic critic should be among the first to respond or react to this poetic experience, whether it be modern or ancient, contemporary or classical.

Samskrit Poetics

Now to turn our attention to the state of literary criticism in Telugu, for a moment. As in the etymological composition of the Telugu language, so in the evolution of art forms in its literature, the influence of Samskrit has been a dominant factor, even more so in distant past than in recent years. It is hardly surprising that the accepted canons of literary criticism until the close of the 19th century were only those of the Samskrit Aalankaarikas of old like Mammata, Kshemendra, Anandavardhana and Jagannatha Pandita. The theories of Rasa, Dhwani and Auchitya were very much in the field, and perhaps rightly so. But the unimaginative pandits and pedants (with more learning acquired by rote than perspective or judgment) were never tired of indulging in disputes over words and word compounds, as well as over metre and rhyme (yati, gana, praasa and other ingredients of Chhandas), rather like the medieval clerics of Europe, who used to break their heads on such problems of earth-shaking importance as the exact number of angels that could conveniently stand on the point of a needle. Communal affiliations, sectarian affinities and personal equations used to vitiate the Telugu criticism of the days gone by, as also of the present day, though less blatant and obvious than before.

Telugu Literature

With the publication of Kavitva tattva vicharamu (an enquiry into the nature of poetry) by Dr. C. R. Reddi (a rare scholar in Telugu, who combined a modern sensibility with a genuine classical ground) in the early years of this century, begins the modern age of literary criticism in Telugu. For the first time, perhaps, he placed the accent on the role of imagination (rather than dry scholarship, musty and moth-eaten) in poetry and on unity of structure in all works of literary art. He tried to get at the heart of the matter by placing the real spirit of the poet on a much higher footing than all the figures of speech (alamkaaras), turns of expression and modes of description. R. Anantakrishna Sarma, an early associate of Dr. Reddi, did his utmost to retain the best in the Indian tradition and rationalise it by relating it to the Western ideas brought in by Dr. Reddi. An impartial outlook, an impersonal approach and an objective analysis, with due respect for tradition, were the main elements of his critical method. We cannot, however, say that he has been able to keep his mind uptodate and is a rapport with the contemporary trends in Telugu literature.

Social Purpose

The coming into vogue of vers libre, the popularity of prose dramas (and one-act plays) and the shedding of the poetic diction Kaavya bhaasha and bookish prose Krithaka graanthika bhaasha bear testimony to the fact that the language of writing is fast approximating to the language of every day speech. Literary criticism too is, likewise, coming down from the ivory tower to the arena of daily life (even to the market place). That poets need not sing only of princes of noble birth and damsels of angelic form, but of “cottage lamps, postage stamps, a slice of bread, a piece of wood, a rotten plantain etc.,” (in the words of Sri Sri) is a bad enough formula which does not offend the canons of literary criticism, as understood now. But a merely ‘progressive’ outlook is not everything in creative writing and ‘dialectical materialism’ is confined only to the Marxian school of criticism. The aesthetic theory of ‘Art for art’s sake’ has gone out of fashion, and Romanticists have had their brief but glorious spell. ‘Art for life’s sake’ is a much more acceptable slogan nowadays, and an implied social purpose, as distinguished from direct moralising and naked didacticism, has come to be accepted as one of the main criteria of contemporary literary criticism. There are not many standard books of modern criticism in Telugu, which are not some kind of a rehash of books in English available on the subject.

A question that might naturally arise in a discussion of this kind is how far it is possible to reconcile the modern principles of Western literary criticism with the traditional concepts of Samskrit aesthetics. Would it be necessary, even if it were possible? Or, could we choose to apply the yardstick of unity of time, place and action and such like to works from the rest of the world, while we continue to think only of Rasa, Auchitya and so on in relation to conventional literary exercises in Telugu, Samskrit and other Indian languages? The struggle is, however, on among some of the research scholars to evolve a new set of criteria by a happy marriage of the East and the West. As at present, Western values certainly have the upper hand, though the fact might not be readily admitted in public. Casteism and sectarianism, which formed the basis of literary criticism in the past, are being gradually replaced by schools of thought and intellectual coteries. Where the former still seem to survive, they have to function rather sneakily, under some plausible modern camouflage or another.

Limits of subjectivity

One talks of ‘objective criticism’ and ‘subjective criticism’ but all criticism takes on something of the elements of both these categories. There is no harm, not much any way, if the subjectiveness is intellectual and not personal in a tribal or denominational way. I know of a famous Telugu poet and critic (happily still alive), who approves of Nannaya because he was born into the right group (or sub-group) and does not approve of Tikkana for the sin of having been born into another sub-group. Here is a demonstration of critical scholarship with a tribal motivation (of totems and taboos and degrees of endogamy and exogamy), that is strongly imbedded in the unconscious or the sub-conscious. Speaking of the good critic of his conception, Eliot says, “The critic to whom I am most grateful is the one who can make me look at something I have never looked at before, or looked at only with the eyes clouded by prejudice, set me face to face with it and there leave me with it. From that point, I must rely upon my own sensibility, intelligence and capacity for wisdom.”

Chaff and grain

If every reader could be his own critic, which he should ultimately be in the best of circumstances, there would hardly be any need for the specialised functionary known as the professional literary critic. But, almost nowhere in the literate world has the general reader all the unlimited time or the variety of intellectual and other equipment to struggle through the endless mass of publications that go under the compendious title of contemporary literature and sift the grain from the chaff. Nearly all the new books are launched by their authors and publishers as if they were the classics of all time. But in less than a decade, the vast bulk of them are unceremoniously consigned to the limbo of oblivion. Even among those that manage to survive, the evaluation of relative merit is no easy task. In addition to the timelag in sensibility there is always the fickleness of reader’s fashion to reckon with. At one time, it might be Spenser, Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Bridges, Yeats, Spender and Auden, or whoever it might be, that hold the reader’s fancy in quick succession.

While generations have a climate of taste, as well as individual readers of the same generation. There is a kind of ebb and tide in this current of popular favour and Shaw as well as Shakespeare are subject to this phenomenon. Students of English literature are familiar with Wilde revivals and Conrad revivals. Hardy and Thackeray were hot favourites of their generation of readers. Now, perhaps, they are not yet relegated to the haunted attic in Indian universities. Does it immediately follow that there is a lamentable timelag of sensibility here? Maybe there is, to some extent. But it does not quite explain the whole situation. It is just possible that there have been critics and students here, who could bring to bear a refreshing social attitude to Thackeray and Hardy, who had come to be taken for granted by a generation of readers in England, in whom the familiarity of locale might have bred a needless contempt. In any case, can any intelligent critic or thoughtful reader, say with an air of finality that both of them are ‘played out’? By the same token, will not Hemingway and Faulkner, John O’Hara and Saul Bellow be played out much sooner, if they had not already been in their lifetime?

A critic, with a keen awareness of the literary tradition and a panoramic view of the world’s contemporary writing available to him, should certainly be in a position to decide for himself and help others to decide who is ‘played out’ and who is not. He could not at least tell the general reader that there was something worth looking at before it could be dismissed off-hand as ‘played out’, mainly on hearsay evidence. If this could give a helpful choice for the reader of intelligence to exercise his own sensibility, it would not have been done in vain.

Imagination and Integrity

For the vast majority of the readers who cannot claim the sensibility of Eliot, other critics will do as well. The main qualities of the highest value in a critic are: (1) A sympathetic imagination; (2) Keenness of perception; and (3) A fair degree of intellectual integrity. It is alright to have a good grasp of the first principles of Indian aesthetics and the Western categories of critical appreciation. But there’s the rub in applying them to individual cases. If a critic, on a professed application of the wisdom of Aristotle and Anandavardhana, of Longinus and Croce, of Bradley and Abercrombie and of Henry James and Eliot and of Velery and Sartre, comes to the excellent conclusion that himself and a couple of friends in his own coterie are the current immortals of contemporary literature, it should make everyone think seriously about the state of mind necessary in the handling of the criteria for literary criticism, His primary function should be to help his readers to understand and enjoy. The critic, like the poet or the philosopher, must be a whole man, a man with convictions and principles, and of knowledge and experience of life. A good critic with a healthy mind is no creative writer manque, but a creative writer, with a difference.

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