“Modernist Writers”

in the Light of Prathyabhijna Thought

DR. N. S. SUBRAMANYAM

In this brief attempt at literary analysis, an approach is suggested to study British “Modernist writers” like W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and James Joyce, by applying the major aspects of the Pratyabhijnaa thought, associated with the illustrious name of Abhinavagupta (possibly between 990 and 1015 A. D., at least his important productive period). Abhinava was one of the most penetrating thinkers, hailing from Kashmir belonging to a period of Cultural Renaissance starting with the reign of Lalitaaditya Muktaapida of the eighth century, as another well known personality Ananda Vardhana the author of the famous treatise, Dhvanyaloka, dealing with the importance of Dhvani or “Suggestion” in aesthetic and literary criticism, “suggestion” standing for meanings which go much beyond the lexicon. Abhinava has had many works contributed to aesthetic and literary analysis as for example, his commentary, Dhvanyaaloka Lochana and Abhinava Bhaarati on the Naatya Saastra, and many writings on Metaphysics of Perception like his Isvara Pratyabhijnaa Vimarsini and Tantrasaara.

The term “Modernism” has been used in Western literary criticism, to include all those writers (poets, dramatists and novelists) who aimed at going beyond “Naturalism” – the realistic representation of various aspects of life. The modernists desired to enter deep into the layers of consciousness and see how experience of reality is different from mere objective sense perception. This sort of subjective view of reality did demand the use of devices like the revival and re-application of ancient myths, the evocative use of symbols to produce suggestive meanings, and also use of suitable images to throw light on new meanings than the use of ordinary words can. These modernists roughly belonged to the decades before the Second World War. It is suggested here that those modernist writers were different from the naturalists and those post-modernists of the later decades of our century.

This writer found in Abhinava’s explanations of Pratyabhijnaa a lot of similarity with the theoretical basis behind the writings of the famous “Modern Impressionists” among English creative writers already mentioned. Abhinava took up the role of a lucid commentator on Bharatha, keeping in view his deep and varied acquaintance with several dramatists who had been famous from Bhaasa to Raajasekhara, and lyrical works like Ghatakarpara (which he attributes to Kaalidaasa himself) as very suggestive in meanings, and in philosophy, he clarified the implications of the Pratyabhijnaa doctrine brought into usage by his predecessors like Somananda (early 10th century). In those days, critics like him were carried away by the idea of presentation on the stage ( like Aristotle’s ideas on Imitation and therefore wrote a good deal about the needs of performances like Rasa and musical elements, Raaga and Nritta, those semiotic features associated with the Gita Kaavya (poetry for recitation). Metre (Vastu) and rhythm (Anga) seemed to have attracted critics like Abhinava because these semiotic features greatly project evocative suggestions (Dhvani) and above all impressions collected and reproduced when favourable stimuli prompted them (what is termed Pratyabhijnaa).

Abhinava was the most famous among the Pratyabhijnaa thinkers of the 11th and 12th centuries A. D., for his lucid exposition of the doctrine of Pratyabhijnaa as the means to the highest degree of perception of Reality, the understanding of Chaitanya (Vimarsa) or consciousness at its purest. The physical or objective reality outside exists, but value is added to reality through the “state of mind.” Mrs. Virginia Woolf went to the extremes of proclaiming mental perception as the only reality – “Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind” (Mrs. Dalloway). From the Pratyabhijnaa point of view, physical reality exists in parallel with impressions produced within the consciousness. Mount Kailas exists far away in the Western Himalayan ranges, but without once observing it, no impression could be produced. While observing it even once, the mind is capable of building up various exotic possibilities of the mountain as the abode of Siva Mahadeva. Pratyabhijnaa is concerned with the building up of impressions within the consciousness, which has been made possible by the trigger of a mere physical view of the peak. A mere brief sight of the peak at sometime in the past, becomes so productive that at a later time-segment, the consciousness can build up a totally new idea, with even pictures in the mind of Isvara in eternal meditation, or undertaking a cosmic dance as Nataraaja. In Mrs. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Time-segments of a daytime are marked out at which different characters capable of diverse impressionistic possibilities, revive within their own memories of reality. This capability of Recognition of the multi-faceted reality is Pratyabhijna, which includes perceptions from the past, the present and the possibility within the world of conjecture also, and hence it is spatio-temporal in nature, a continuum within which man’s existence is placed, placed so to say, within a world of “flux”. In the Trika philosophy of Abhinava. Chitta or Supreme Awareness holds what is the highest possible in perception, similar to what W. B. Yeats postulates in his poem Byzantium–

And all complexities of fury leave

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Such a state is a “disembodied” one, with no “complexities of fury”. After the highest Chitta, there is the level of Viswottara, what is conceptuable, and there is Paramasiva, the form that is visualized. These mental states form the Trika the Thatthwa Thrayam, the Triad in human perception.

In the writings of the Impressionists, the same problem is seen in poem after poem, play after play and novel after novel – all forms Genres having this in common, the “Quest” for Absolute Perception. Perceptions are not only those derived directly through the five senses, but more important, others like dreams, hallucinations, archetypal behavioural patterns. As already stated, Abhinavagupta’s idea of Pratyabhijnda includes these aspects of perception as part of Reality. Realization of the nature of Self means Recognition or Pratyabhijnaa which as Dr. K. C. Pandey, the authoritative interpreter of Abhinava to our times, is “recollection of impressions” – the same as Marcel Proust’s title to his mammoth work: Remembrances of things past. The human consciousness, as is well known, is a vast storehouse of varied impressions derived from diverse time-segments, and sometimes it includes also vague images from the twilight-side, representing racial memory, from regions beyond the three states of Jagrat, Swapna and Sushupti. Abhinava uses the term “Anuttara” to denote a state in which there is subject-object identification or overlapping. As Dr. Radhakrishnan puts the problem lucidly in his An Idealist View of Life, writing of “pure awareness” or pure duration which is not just memory, but “it is the undivided present to which categories of Time are irrelevant.” In modern Western thought also, Space-Time is the matrix the stuff of things from which aspects of reality like matter, life, mind and Deity have emerged and for Henri Bergson, it is “duration” (Duree) – which, the present writer feels, is equivalent to Abhinava’s Anuttara.

The writers of the impressionist period had developed an immense sensibility, a kind of spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue”, as Henry James has written in his House of Fiction. They were great experimentalists with the “form”, whether in fiction, play or in poetry. No emphasis is laid as in the olden days, on the typology of the literary form. The main pursuit for all, whether writing fiction, or play or poetry, was the quest for the nature of Reality. Yeats was always concerned with a serious search for evocative symbols from various sources, because for him “every symbol is an evocation which produces its equivalent expression in all worlds”, as he explains in his Autobiographies. In his poem The Tower, he extols the power of images all stored up for they compliment one another when occasions demand and this is what Abhinavagupta demarcated as Pratyabhijna experience.

“…images in the great memory stored

Come with loud cry and panting breast

To break upon a sleeper’s rest.”

Yeats went to the extent of postulating the presence of a “supermind of humanity of which all individual human minds are partial manifestations”, as Louis MacNeice puts it in his work, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. He even postulated a theory of experience suited to his own artistic vision, with two planes of Reality, what he termed, The Will and The Mask, equivalent to Abhinava’s Chitta, and the two Viswottara and Paramasiva. In the celebrated poem, already mentioned, “all complexities of furies” inhabit the lower levels, but the true life of reality becomes visible beyond “time’s filthy load”, on the higher plane of bodiless pure conscious state.

A similar idea is found in his contemporary, not a poet, but an “Artificer” with the novel, James Joyce. In Stephen Dedalus in his early work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman, the mind wanders with freedom to collect impressions, “image finding and image transmitting”. There is the famous passage when Stephen is bewitched with the sight of a bathing beauty on the beach in Dublin, leaving an indelible impression of beauty. It takes all kinds of impressions some beautiful and some others repulsive, some moral and others immoral which crowd into the consciousness, out of which an idea of Reality could be framed which is comprehensive.

In E. M. Forster, he was clear about the duty of a writer, that is “to reveal the hidden life at its source”, “to descend even deeper into the subconscious...”. In his well-known work, A Passage to India, Forster has remarked that “we exist not in ourselves but in terms of each other’s minds” (ch. xxv). This view of an individual’s reality agrees with the Pratyabhijnaa idea of “Recognition” or “Self-Realization”. In Forster’s novel, there is no great significance in what happens on the external plane, as for example, the arrival of Mrs. Moore with her young son Ronny Heaslop, appointed Magistrate in Chandrapore, bringing the young girl Adela Quested. Her intention is to see the two young persons get into a marital relationship. But this is not to be, because an “unseen hand had impacted on the seen” (ch. xi). Mere objective world leads to frustration, as nothing in it is extraordinary – “Everything exists; nothing has value” (ch. xiv). In A Passage to India, the external event which obstructs human relationship is the usual Indian communal disharmony. The riots break out fed only by vague rumours about Dr. Aziz, a simple honest mind, who only arranges a trip for Mrs. Moore and Adela to the Marabar Caves at the outskirts of the town, has tried to molest the modesty of Adela! What terrified Miss Quested within the Marabar Cave was just an echo in the empty granite space within. Out of this peurile episode, come a social disturbance, the trial of Aziz, the departure of Mrs. Moore and Adela with the abandonment of the marriage proposal and all! Mrs. Moore realizes, an example of Pratyabhijnaa Recognition that marriages, so dominating the fabric of human relationships, are really not meaningful, never made in Heaven– “Why, all this marriage ... The human race would have become a single person centuries ago, if marriages was any use. (ch. xxii) Almost as a symbolic act, Mrs. Moore dies while sailing along the Red sea!

In his other famous novel, Howard’s End, there is again the contrast between two sets of values, the life of material prosperity of the Wilcoxes with their motor cars and stocks and shares, and of the world that lies at the periphery of the material sphere, suggested by the Fifth Symphony which touches the sensitive chords in Mrs. Wilcox. Real Recognition in the Pratyabhijnaa sense, comes only if one quotes Forster’s motto to this novel: Only connect, interweave what is seen and what is just suggested.

If one turns to Mrs. Woolf, “life is a luminous halo”, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”, as she herself comments in her work, Common Reader, Series I. At each moment of time, some external event acts as the trigger to set in a ‘stream of consciousness’. In her well-known work, Mrs. Dalloway, set within the duration of a day-time, a list of personalities–Clarissa Dalloway, her husband, her daughter, an old lover, and someone she just comes across being mentioned – Septimus Smith, experience ordinary external events of no significance like sitting on a bench in a public park. But within the consciousness, it is not the spatial co-ordinate that matters. For example, in the case of Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucrezia, there are impressions which come from the battlefields of Italy. Smith outwardly suffers from shell-shock, though he is decorated for bravery. But the so-called shell-shock has left his consciousness crowded with images of disaster, and symbols of a new hope – those inward signs which an ordinary psychiatrist will not understand. Smith commits suicide which externally is only putting an end to this physical being. He is a telling example of the sense of Anuttara experience when the impressions embedded within the consciousness, have greater play than direct experience of physical reality.

The pursuit of Reality, the Pratyabhijna experience, led T. S. Eliot to the contemplation of the role of myths, symbols and images in understanding truth of experience and the ability to express that, in appropriate language. This struggle for Reality and suitable expression, one finds in his Four Quartets. About his lifelong pre-occupation with the role of time, one finds in the opening lines of the first quartet,

Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past

If all time is eternally present,

All time is unredeemable.

Consciousness is like a running river with flotsam and jetsam floating being carried away. In the consciousness, it is “Garlic and sapphires in the mud/clot the bedded axle-tree”. As he realizes, “to be conscious is not to be in time ...” because that brings impressions in a crowd. True consciousness is to move from the temporal into the timeless – Only through time, time is conquered.” This coincides with Yeats’s “sailing” and arriving at the “Byzantium” of disembodied existence.

One gets a feeling while reading Four Quarters, as though one is going through lucid commentaries on some of the concepts put forward by our ancient critics and philosophers like Abhinava and Anandavardhana. Abhinava’s concept of Pratyabhijna, though made for giving a theoretical background to an important Hindu school of theology – Kashmir Saivism, explains convincingly man’s experience of Reality – the place of the objective and how the subjective impressions are based on it, and how the fusion of the two could form a “timeless” mental state. The essence behind life or reality, is extracted and taken out of time. What is past is only what we perceived in the past, and only impressions continue within the consciousness. If an elephant with a Mahant sitting on it, going out to have his ceremonial bath in the Ganga, is perceived, this leaves an impression. It is possible then seeing simply an elephant alone sometime later without the Mahant, the mind remembers the older impression with Mahant earlier. That’s how time past and present become blended into a continuum. A Jivanmukta is one who is able to take consciousness outside the framework of the Space Time continuum or Flux and have an unrestricted experience of Reality:

But to apprehend

the point of intersection of the timeless

with time, is an occupation for the saint–

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. (Dry Salvages)

Eliot expresses the concepts of Pratyabhijnaa and Anuttara in Abhinvagupta’s thought when he concludes his Dry Salvages–

And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

Back