Literature: A Quest for Aesthetics of

Literature: A Quest for Aesthetics of Liberty

It is the function of the fine arts to provide us with pleasure, but pleasure of a distinctive kind and quality. Life offers many pleasures that are different in kind and are not here in question. The kind of pleasure provided by the fine arts is called aesthetic. The term is not easy to define, and ever since Aristotle, twenty-three centuries ago, attempted to analyse the nature of the aesthetic experience, philosophers and art critics have continued to debate about it. Nevertheless, even though we are as far away as ever from understanding why the arts affect us as they do, the fact is uncontested that in the presence of objects of art something happens to alter the quality of our consciousness. There is a marked intensification of the feeling­element, so marked on occasion that it may even produce physical reactions, such as the thrill which runs up the spine, or the inhibiting for a time of all other sensuous experience. The fine frenzy which possessed the artist at the moment of creation is in some degree reproduced in the observer.

Though the emotive nature of aesthetic experience is a matter of controversy today, many would concede that the art object does induce an evocation of the emotional side which our own experience corroborates. Many would agree, in this regard, with what Leo Tolstoy says:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so as to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling. It is the activity of art…..It is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well­-being of individuals and of humanity.¹

Aesthetic pleasure, then, is a function of feeling. We have under the influence of great art a sensation of living more abundantly. Some deep-down levels of our personalities, normally quiescent, are stirred so that we suddenly become more fully aware of ourselves and of the possibilities that lie in us. Through art the spirit of man is liberated from a concern with the practical issues of life, and he stretches his hands towards the ideal. As Susanne K. Langer has rightly pointed out: “Art is the surest affidavit that feeling, despite its absolute privacy, repeats itself in each individual life”.²

Literature is concerned not only with what is, but how it came to be what it is, and also with what it is in the process of becoming. It compares and contrasts, seeks analogies, makes judgments, explores the significances of things. There are no regions of experience or speculation into which literature does not penetrate and gather sustenance for the imagination.

Among all the arts, therefore, literature, invading time and space like a monarch, enjoys the widest franchise and wields the greatest power. Seeing the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end, it can move in all directions at once. It can bid us use our reason to follow a patient analysis of cause and effect, or it can, in a single flash of imaginative insight, illuminate the universe for us. This is the reason why Indian aestheticians argue that art gives us the privilege which only the gods and angels have: witnessing the artistic experience without getting personally involved in it. As Ananda Coomaraswamy discussing art in Indian life says “...art reflects and answers to man’s every need, whether of affirmation (pravritti) or denial (nivritti) being no less for the spectator than the artist a way (marga)...”. ³

Literature is the art which helps each one of us to create for himself a mental counterpart to the world of sense, a private universe of thought and feeling in which one may move freely and at ease, and which for many is far more vivid and palpable than the universe of things.

Literary modes of expression are generally considered to be cyclical alterations of human attitudes to the environment. More often than not, it is forgotten that literature itself is an education, a refinement of the human mind, interpreting human spirit in terms of beauty. Often literary categories are classified as Classicism or Romanticism, Realism or Naturalism, without realising that these expressions basically mean a certain kind of endeavour on the part of the human spirit. The literary embellish­ment in which this effort is expressed has a tendency to erect these categories as self-sufficient entities without any relation to the basic impulses that give rise to them. Hence we find literary discussion defining terms without realising that ultimately they imply urges of the mind that are constantly seeking creative self-expression at once free and unrestricted.

When the Romantic movement began to take shape with the publication of The Lyrical Ballads, (1798) of Wordsworth and Coleridge, it was taken to be a reaction to the 18th century age of reason. That it meant the quest for liberty which was denied by the restraint of reason was hardly comprehended. In fact, literature has always been a struggle to escape the bondages under which life labours in its practical preoccupations. It is true that on the level of day-to-day existence the considerations of practical life have to be paramount. But man is fundamentally an incarnate isolation, being essentially separated from others by his corporeal individuality. In realising and asserting this individuality lies the freedom and authenticity of human existence. Hence the human spirit always breaks out in rebellion against every form of restraint and tries to be free and uncontrolled. As we case a glance at the literary history of the western world, we realise that literature has always been a quest for liberty in spite of certain periods during which restraint became the dominant note of literary creation.

The Grecian world was basically an individualistic world in spite of the city states and the social consciousness that governed it. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides represent the individualistic heroism of the Greek mind achieving tragic majesty by defying every restriction, imposed not only by the society but also by Moira, the deity of Fate herself. Breaking away from bondage and experiencing the highest reach of human power in physical or spiritual spheres was the ideal that inspired the Greek heroes. For them the world was a prize to be conquered by the might of one’s own self by setting at nought the opposing will of even Zeus himself. This quest of might underwent a radical disintegration, during the one Hellenistic Period, when the pursuit of might turned to pursuit or pleasure on the one hand and pursuit of ascetic cynicism on the other. Even this expression of the self was a form of realizing one’s possibilities after having arrived at one ultimate in the heroic direction. Inevitably the Roman world brought in the Stoic restraint and the Augustan law and order. But the Latin literature was also a quest of realizing the unrestricted integration that the mind is capable of restraint for the sake of restraint ends in literature that is without the vitality of the spirit and turns out to be a kind of preaching or propaganda that lacks the creative impulse.

The Medieval world was essentially restricted in its theological outlook and as a result gave rise to a Chivalric literature that sought freedom in heroism and love. The tension between the Medieval theology and the Chivalric impulse constitutes one of the major illustrations of the literary urge for freedom in spite of oppressive social bondage.

The Renaissance asserted the right of man for absolute physical freedom even to the highest tragic extent. Marlowe’s plays indicated Tamburlaine’s lust for power, Faustus’s lust for knowledge, the Jew of Malta’s lust for splendour and Hero and Leander’s lust for passion. Unrestricted outward plunge into space from the earlier theological confinement marked the Renaissance quest for liberty. When this external adventure grew sadistic and masochistic, the age of reason stepped in to control the disintegration and contribute a new dimension in self-integration. By accident the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries supported the rational orientation of integration by discovering a universe characterized by law and order. But it was soon realised that the restraint of integration has a tendency to suppress the impulses and it was no surprise that the Romantic wave set in with a view to transcending every restriction. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott sought a physical orientation by identifying themselves with the multiplicity of nature the supernatural and the historically remote. Byron, Shelley and Keats went still beyond and sought a spiritual freedom through egoism, mystical love, and pagan identification with the sensuous and the concrete. The Romantic age indicated literature’s essential character to seek liberty and found that with the restraining society that was emerging, literature was never to be at ease in the social practical sphere. The literary man began to find himself alienated and an outsider.

Since the 19th century, the individual artist has realized that he is a unique existent and that his genuineness lies not in conformity but in authentic freedom of experience and expression. The literature of today is basically turning to existentialism because of the human spirit’s uncompromising quest for freedom. It is only when we realize the character of literature as quest for liberty that we begin to under. Stand the nature and dimensions of literary terms.

References

¹ Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? Tr by Aylmer Mande (Oxford University Press, 1905. p. 86.)
² Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. 1967. p. 64)
³ Ananda Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1977. Indian edition, OUP, 1977. p. 94)