Dr.
K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR
Literature
and myth are almost like flesh and blood, or body and soul. On a superficial
view, literature is no doubt an imitation of life. But wherefore this
imitation, this mimicry, this xerox-copy–when life
itself teems all about us, and all the time?
There
is surely more in literature than mere imitation. It cannot be that literature
is but the enthronement of the second-hand. Actually, the imitation is but the
appearance; the reality is quite different. What literature seeks to give us is
not so much a feeble copy of life but rather the rasa,
the subtle feel or the quintessence of life, or of the varieties and
possibilities of human experience. And this is easier done through the exploration
of racial, national or local myths than through what may readily pass for
factual recital or historical narrative.
A
wit once remarked that in imaginative fiction everything is true except for
facts and dates, while in history everything is false except for facts and
dates. The multiverses of the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, of the Iliad and
the Odyssey, of the Silappadikaram and
Jivakachintamani, of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Song of Roland are more deeply
implicated in our very nerve-cells than a factual record of the reign of an Ashoka or an Akbar or a Krishnadeva Raya. Does it mean
that we are being irrational, or relapsing into a second childhood? On the
contrary, this seeming irrationality may be the higher or truer sanity.
There
is beneath surface life and its vitalistic pulls and
mental gymnastics whole continents of consciousness, each with its own
autonomous organisation. The furthest or ultimate
region has been named the Collective Unconsciousness by the psychologist Carl
G. Jung. This not easily accessible area of the unknown is really “the
repository of man’s experience, and at the same time the prior condition of
this experience.” The memories of the race–the hopes, delights, hurts,
iniquities, indignities, holocausts, transcendences–are in suspension in this
primordial well of underground waters. And it is this, and not our
archives and newspaper files and case histories and shelves of historical
research, that truly inspire and sustain all the cycles of human experience.
Why
is it that the story of the siege and fall of
Indeed,
indeed, the old myths have still a strange way of pursuing and possessing us to
our distraction and humiliation. Did we not read of the children of
The
myths are here: it was our father’s name
The
maiden shrieked in horror as she turned
To
wrinkled bark; our dearest flesh that burned,
Straddling her legs inside the wooden cow.
Such
exploration of myth in literature is not confined to the evocation of pity and
terror alone; there are also intimations of elusive truth, sudden
illuminations, startling revelations. Pandora’s sin
was curiosity–or was it really a virtue? Casabianca’s
virtue was obedience–or was it really a blemish? What is the meaning of the
story of Abu Kasem’s slippers? Don’t the
oft-patched-up slippers really signify the lingering bank-balance of Abu’s
self-forged Karma? Isn’t the description of the Cosmic Being in Purusha Sukta a marvellous myth of the whole mystical tremendum
of Srishti or Creation? What exactly
was involved in Jason’s quest of the Golden Fleece? The
‘Exodus’ described in the Old Testament: was it a real event? And, on
the other hand, isn’t it always happening? Was the fabled, now buried, Atlantis
once a geographical reality? Wasn’t the great pyramid of Cheops
meant to embody a grammar of mystery in stone? Weren’t the deaths of so many
people connected with the discovery and renovation of Tutankamen’s
tomb, not just accidents, but punishments for the desecration of an ancient
monument? Was King Arthur, were the Knights of his Round Table – Sir Launcelot, Sir Galahad, Sir Bedevere
and the rest – real persons? Doesn’t the story of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight illustrate the truth that in order to save one’s life one
must be ready to lose it first–in order to occupy the sunlit heights one must
be ready to wade through the Valley of the Dark Shadow! As we thus explore the
implications of divers myths in the corridors and inner chambers of literature,
there is experienced a heightening of understanding, a deepening of sensibility
and an infusion of humility.
There
is, then, the Sanskrit sequence of tales, Vetala
Panchavimsati, whose theme is the initiation of a
king into the secrets of wisdom and sovereignty. Many are Vikramaditya’s
trials, till at last the great king, made wise by his harrowing nightly ordeal,
enlightened as to his true nature by Shiva, returns to his worldly throne,
human yet more than human, to bring his terrestrial task to its right fulfilment. You can read the Vikramaditya
tales as stories of suspense and excitement, but equally they are steps in the
journey towards self-mastery and world-dominion.
And,
of course, there is man’s inveterate search for his origins, for certitudes in
relation to the present and the future; there is man’s hankering after true
self, and there is his insistent hunger for God. Neither logic nor science can
help him to find and know his God, or help him to live the life Divine. It is
here that myths have exceptional value. In the words of Nicolas Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher:
“The
knowledge of the divine life is not attainable by means of abstract
philosophical thought based upon the principles of formalist or rationalistic
logic, but only by means of a concrete myth which conceives the divine life as
a passionate destiny of concrete and active persons...Only a mythology, which
conceives the divine celestial life as a celestial history and as a drama of
love and freedom unfolding itself between God and His other self, which He
loves and for whose reciprocal love He thirsts, and only an admission of God’s
longing for His other self, can provide a solution of celestial history, and
through it, of the destinies of both man and the world. Only such a freedom of
both God and man, only such a divine and human love in the fulness
of the tragic relationship, would appear to be the way to discover the sources
of every historical destiny.”
The
descent of the Divine into a human mould–the drama of the Divine accepting the
limitations of the terrestrial play–the entanglement of the
Divine in the love of the devotees –these
comprise the eternal theme of the Bhagavata
and other puranas. Likewise the lives of the
god-intoxicated saints and singers are the warp and woof of a significant
portion of the world’s literature.
The
old myths often return touched with a new radiance and immediacy of appeal.
George Seferis, the Nobel Laureate, has explored
ancient Greek myths in a modern context. T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion is
a fresh rendering of the myth of The Eumenides of
Aeschylus, The Cocktail Party of the Alcestis
of Euripides, and The Elder Statesman of the Oedipus at Coloneus of Sophocles. The
Ulysses myth figures in Joyce’s immense novel, in The Cantos of Ezra
Pound and in Kazantzakis’s modern epic. And the
magnificent Savitri story, which is a very gem
imbedded in the Mahabharata, has been
retold by Sri Aurobindo in mighty sweeps of thought and realisation
and in mantric heaves of spiritual intensity and
glow. To read poems like Savitri, it is
verily to invade the invisible and share a new vision and a new hope, and
indeed to participate in the drama of the Divine in our minds:
This
earth is full of the anguish of the gods;
Ever
they travail driven by Time’s goad,
And
strive to work out the eternal will
And
shape the life divine in mortal forms.
–COURTESY ALL