The Tragic Paradox and Rasa

Much water has flowed since Aristotle propounded his concept of Tragedy maintaining “Mimesis” and “Katharsis” as its core. Ever since, through the ages, it has been the endeavour of literary critics and philosophers alike to pluck the heart of mystery from that baffling paradox, pleasure in pain, that at once characterises and distinguishes Tragedy as a genre unique of its kind. Yet, in spite of their best efforts, the matter of tragic relief still remains a Sphinx Riddle and an Oedipus is yet to come.

That the tragic involves a paradox was recognised even by the ancient Indian aestheticians. The statement of Viswanatha Suyanarayana in his “Sahityadarpana” unequivocally points to this.

“Karuna davapi rase jayate yat param sukham, kincha desu yada duhkham, na kopisyat tadunmukhah.”           

(Even from the most sorrowful themes that stir up the emotions of pity and fear, the highest joy results; for, if they had been sources of pain, no body would have been so eager to see them presented.)

This paradox is, in a way, an inversion of another which is implied in the emotional outburst of Jessica in The Merchant of Venice.

“I am never merry when I hear tweet music.”
(V. i. 70)

or of Dushyanta in Kalidasa’s masterpiece when he pensively reacts to the melody of a love Song.

“Ramyaani veekshya madhuramscha nisamya sabdaan
Paryutsuko bhavati yatsukhitopi jantuh
Tatchetasa smarati nuna mabodhapurvam
Bhaavasthiraani jananaantara sauhridaani.”

(“Strange! That song has filled me with a most peculiar sensation! A melancholy feeling has come over me, and I seem to be yearning after some long forgotten object of affection.”)

This paradox of pain in pleasure need not be viewed as the reverse of the other, though it does so seemingly. It is antithetical only apparently, not actually. It is a half-way-house on the path of aesthetic experience, a stage which precedes the consummation of a long-drawn psychological process which culminates in Ananda, Supreme Bliss, the sine qua non of any piece of art, let alone drama. There is something that operates behind this psychological process and alchemises both pain in pleasure and pain in pain into pleasure par excellence. What is this something, this phenomenon that has been eluding all along the grasp of the literary theorists, philoso­phers, psychoanalyst and aestheticians? It is amazing to note that the best efforts of these men have resulted in explanations that are at best only inadequate to unravel the mystery.

I. A. Richards tries to explain the problem by saying “pity,” the impulse to approach, and “Terror,” the impulse to retreat, are brought together in Tragedy to reconciliation which they find nowhere else. But the riddle is not so simple as that. If it were really so, “Terror” would have scared away from the theatre the audience that had approached it to see a tragedy enacted. Nor is a tragedy enjoyed, as Goethe says, for the simple reason that the sorrow presented is impersonal. Certainly, Tragedy is not a show of bear-baiting to be sadistically enjoyed by onlookers.

Schopenhaur holds that Tragedy pleases by inducing in the mind of the spectator a spirit of resignation to fate and a feeling that life is a bad dream from which we have to awake. (The World as Will and Idea) But viewed from the literary standpoint this explanation appears unconvincing, for, the pleasure of Tragedy is not merely the pleasure of the knowledge of truth. It is as much the pleasure of the enjoyment of beauty which is lost sight of by the German philosopher. Nietzsche’s explanation that Tragedy pleases by being “a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature.” (The Birth of Tragedy) is to some extent analogous to Schopenhaur’s. And it fails for the same reason; It also suffers the limitation of throwing no light upon the form and features of tragic drama as a type of literary art. With David Hume we stand on a less etherial plane. He tries to explain the strange phenomenon of Tragedy in terms of the magical property of “eloquence’ by which he means force and beauty of expression and imitation. (Essays–Moral, Political and Literary) But then, these are not characteristic of Tragedy alone. The former is common to all forms of art and the latter is shared by comedy also. P. K. Guha very rightly observes, “If eloquence and imitations are the only sources of dramatic pleasure, a comedy has a clear advantage over tragedy by reason of its joyous subject matter.” (Tragic Relief) Ever Hegel’s theory, with its philosophical vein fares no better. Hegel traces the pleasure of Tragedy to “a sense of reconciliation with the rightful vindication of eternal justice” which is induced in us at the close of the play! The vulnerability of this explanation lied in the fact that the pain involved in the occurrence of situations is too much for the sense of the assertion of a supreme ethical power. It cannot reconcile us to the situation and compensate for the pain of the great spiritual loss we witness all through the play.

Aristotelian theory of Katharsis is by far the most adequate of the explanations offered by tbe great men of the West, despite its antiquity. What exactly Aristotle meant by Katharsis we can never know. He never explains it fully and the result is that one may read into it any meaning one likes. The interpretation of Bywater that Tragedy arouses pity and fear wherewith to accomplish its Katharshs of such emotions means that Tragedy serves as a sort of medicine curing and relieving the soul of the accumulated emotions (pity and fear) by arousing the same emotions. It is evident from this that Katharsis refers to some sort of curative process. This homoeopathic interpretation presupposes some malady on the part of the audience and ignores the fact that we enjoy the experience of witnessing a tragedy. It reminds us of the Ayurvedic principle “ushnamushnenasamyati” (heat neutralises heat) and finds a parallel in the position taken by Bhatta Tauta in respect of the values of poetry in his “Kavya Kautuka” – “just as dust is used to clean up a rust, mirror, the mind of the critic is purified of passion through passion itself.” Speaking of Katharsis, Butcher says: “It is not unlikely that originally the ‘Katharsis’, viewed as a refineing process, may have implied no more to Aristotle than the expulsion of the disturbing element, namely the pain, which enters into pity and fear when aroused by real objects.” Of these two most widely accepted interpretations we may bypass the none-too-healthy pathological interpretations of Bywater in preference to the more sensible view of Butcher’s. Does Butcher mean by “purification” the diversion of feeling from all considerations of self-interest so that the feeling is enjoyed for its own sake? If Aristotle’s Katharsis really means it, to quote Prof. Humayun Kabir, “It would enable him to explain why experiences which in real life are painful and evil become in art noble and exhilarating. But it can be called ‘purification’ only by an abuse of language.” (“Poetry, Katharsis and Creativity” – essay published in The Moving Finger) Aristotle’s “Mimesis” should not be taken as mere imitation but an imitation of the conception of a poet’s imagination. Tragedy imitates not life but a conception of life. An experience is perceived by the imagination of a poet. Detached from its relations with practical life, it is enjoyed for its own sake. This imaginative enjoyment, not practical utilisation, ia what is expressed in art. In this process, as Prof. Kabir explains, sensation is cut out with the result the emotional and perpetual aspects of experience arc apprehended. According to him Aristotle’s doctrine of “Mimesis” and “Katharsis” indicates freedom and disinterestedness as the essence of art. “Katharsis” the counterpart of “Mimesis.” The latter provides us with vivid imagination of significant experience and the former is our ability to withhold the act at the height of energy and enjoy experience for its own sake. Hence we are able to enjoy the tragic or a tragedy free from all complexes. The concept of Rasa goes a step further and explains the riddle more elaborately and lucidly.

The most systematic statement of the Rasa concept in a few words can be found in the utterance of Shelley: “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” This line of Shelley embodies the profound aesthetic truth that even the saddest thought ceases to be sad when it becomes an aesthetic experience and remains forever “a sweet song” in our experience yielding positive pleasure. This is exactly what the Rasa concept explains in a subtler way. This fact accounts forour enjoyment of the tragic or the tragedy without any complexes, perversions or libidos on our part. In his monumental work “Natyasastra,” Bharata dealt at length with dramaturgy with emphasis on “Rasa” as its central principle. According to him production of Rasa should be the chief concern of drama, whatever might be its type.

The origin of the concept of Rasa can be traced to the Vedic reference to the soul as enjoying the flavour or essence (Rasa) of experience. This concept had its elaborate development both in Upanishadic meditation and aesthetic speculation. Just as a beautiful object in nature it relished, the aesthetic creation is also savoured. The Longinian transport conditioned by the transcendental experience of the aesthetic object, Rasa, is somewhat akin to the sage’s intuitive experience of the self-luminous consciousness which forms the substratum of the superimposed universe though its stimulus belongs to the mundane world. This is what Krishna Chaitanya also states in his work “Sanskrit Poetics.” In the “Natyasastra” speaking of the Rasa, Bharata states:

“Vibhavanubhava vyabhichari
            Samyogadrasa nishpattih.”

‘Rasa or aesthetic object is a configuration of which Vibhavd, Anubhava, Vyabhicharibhava are the constituents.” (K. C. Pandey: Comparative Aesthetics). In other words “When the Vibhavas, Anubhavas and the Vyabhicharibhavas combine to awaken the Sthayibhava, the awakened Sthayibhava finally develops into Rasa.” (Krishna Chaitanya: Sanskrit Poetics)

Sthayibhava may be rendered as sentiment with some special qualification. It is the abiding sentiment which can develop into emotins when confronted by appropriate stimuli. In short, it is a latent emotive reactivity which is potential and complex. It is potential in that it exists prior to the aesthetic situation as an abiding reality of our psychological organisation. It is “Ayyakta Rasa” or Rasa in its unmanifested form. “Vibhava” is emotive situation with human focus and setting consisting of the physical cause of the sentiment. It is the prime stimulus which activates the “Sthayin.” “Anubhavas” are mimetic changes which are inspired by the aroused basic mental state and as such indicate the internal state of mind. If Vibhava is the basic stimulus, Anubhavas are its behavioural features. They are the results of the excitation produced in the Vibhava as the dramatic situation develops. “The perception of the excitation transfers it to the spectator by sympathetyc induction, in a parallel movement. (Krishna Chaitanya: Sanskrit Politics).The “Vyabhicharibhavas” stand for transient but ancillary emotions. These are those that come face to face with the spectators in the course of aesthetic experience. They are determined in their feeling-tone by the basic emotion and in turn reinforce it. The most important point we have to bear in mind here is that Rasa is a “unity in multiplicity,” the sentiment (Sthayibhava) being the unifying force. It is not a mere juxtaposition of the various constituents. In simple the position taken by Bharata may be stated thus: Activated and developed by the prime stimuli, their congruent behavioural features and the transient emotional reactions in an aesthetic presentation, the latent sentiment emerges as emotion “Rasa.” The emergence of Rasa is facilitated by such artistic devices as poetry, music and histrionics. When it develops to a climax, through complete imaginative sympathy with the situation, the audience forgets all difference of person, time and place and the climax of emotion reveals itself in a sort of blissful consciousness. This is the process to be gone through by every latent sentiment or basic mental state, whether it be of eroticism, pity, terror or something else, when it emerges as Rasa. This Rasa of the Sanskrit poetics is nothing but what W. B. Yeats calls, unanalysable essence– “True art is expressive and symbolic and make every form, every sound, colour, every gesture, a signature of some unanalysable essence.” (Yeats quoted by George Whalley in “Poetic Process.”) This like a thought or image cannot be communicated by discourse which is analytical, but has to be integrally embodied in form. The only way by which it can be aroused in the spectator or reader is by managing an ideal revival in him of the identical emotion.

Abbinavagupta, the famous commentator on Bharata, has analysed the aesthetic experience and the involved levels in a very lucid manner from the standpoint of the spectator. He has recognised in all five levels in the process of aesthetic experience from the sense-level to its culmination in pure and unmixed aesthetic experience, Ananda. Here we have to note carefully the distinction between Rasa and Rasasvada–aesthetic object (this is essentially a product of dramatic art and is not to be found in the creations of nature) and aesthetic experience. The former is only the medium through which the latter is had. According to Abbinavagupta aesthetic experience is not the experience of the basic mental state with the universalised self as its attribute as has been wrongly attributed to him as his opinion by Pandita Jagannatha in “Rasagangadhara.” Abbinavagupta holds that substance-attribute relation cannot be attributed to self. No doubt, he admits of a stage in the aesthetic experience in which the self experiences itself as affected by the basic mental state, but that is not the final stage. He maintains that aesthetic experience at its culmination is the experience of the self itself when the basic mental state is in the subconscious. On the basis of this varying subconscious element drama is divided into various types. The function of the drama is only to awaken this subconscious element. To conclude, according to Abbinavagupta, the final stage in aesthetic experience is that in which there is the experience of “Paramananda” and even the basic mental state, awakened by dramatic presentation, sinks into the subconscious. It is a state of aesthetic Samadhi as against the Upanishadic meditative Samadhi. It is this that accounts for the pleasure yielded by drama, whether it be a tragedy or a comedy. On account of this phenomenon–the experience of supreme bliss with the awakened basic mental state in the subconscious–whether it be “Sakuntala” or “Othello.”  “Urubhanga” or “King Lear,” we equally enjoy and get dissolved in the raptures of aesthetic beatitude. Viewed from the standpoint of the concept of Rasa, whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy, it is all one. They provide us whit the same aesthetic experience.