Akshayjha at 19:07, 19 July 2024

2024-07-19T19:07:46Z

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	Authored by Pankaj Saxena.		Authored by Pankaj Saxena.
	Published by IndicaToday.		Published by IndicaToday.[[Category:Art and Culture]]

Akshayjha: Created page with "==== There is No New Story ==== While other disciplines of ancient art like sculpture, architecture, or painting seldom bore the name of the artist, literature is a discipline in which the creator’s name has been relatively more present. In Greece, the three greatest of the ancient playwrights – Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles – were all known by their names. The same was true about poets like Homer or Ovid. In India the playwrights were famous by their names..."

2024-07-19T19:07:41Z

Created page with "==== There is No New Story ==== While other disciplines of ancient art like sculpture, architecture, or painting seldom bore the name of the artist, literature is a discipline in which the creator’s name has been relatively more present. In Greece, the three greatest of the ancient playwrights – Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles – were all known by their names. The same was true about poets like Homer or Ovid. In India the playwrights were famous by their names..."

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==== There is No New Story ====
While other disciplines of ancient art like sculpture, architecture, or painting seldom bore the name of the artist, literature is a discipline in which the creator’s name has been relatively more present. In Greece, the three greatest of the ancient playwrights – Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles – were all known by their names. The same was true about poets like Homer or Ovid.

In India the playwrights were famous by their names too, the most popular name being of course Kalidasa. About others like Bhasa no clear historical details are available. Some traditions say that there is little indication that they were persons or just honorific titles for a tradition or a sect.

In literature the artist disappeared not in name, but in content

Most of these Indian and Greet playwrights and poets did not claim to invent new stories and novel plots. They just took incidents out of the great epics or the great Puranic stories and played on a particular aspect in the contemporary idiom to enthrall their audience.

Kalidasa used the Mahabharata story as the plot of Abhijnana Shakuntalam. Similarly, Bhasa based six of his plays on the Mahabharata focusing on various different incidents of the Mahabharata, the most famous being Urubhanga where the killing of Duryodhana at the hands of Bheema is described in heart-rending detail. He also based three plays on the Ramayana. Bhavabhuti based his plays on the themes from the Ramayana too.

Post-Renaissance European literature was no different. Though playwrights were very famous by their own names, they seldom created their own stories, at least in the genre of tragedy. Most of the stories and plots of Shakespeare are picked from the classical myths. Similarly, the story of Faust is played on by various great playwrights.

Only in comedy, we see that the playwright was coming into full vogue. The comedies were considered lighter in vein, less serious, and less exalted, just like in ancient Greece and it is here that we see the imprint of the playwright slowly emerging. Though this was true of ancient Greece too and Aristophanes also created new ‘plots’ and ‘stories’ with his extremely irreverent comedies.

India had always steered clear of the very restricting division of comedy vs. tragedy that is the benchmark in Western classical literature. No true tragedies exist in Sanskrit theatre and till date Indians cannot comprehend the point of an absolute tragedy. Teaching by catharsis, the point of the Greek tragedy, is beyond the understanding of an Indian.

To come back to the point, even the pagan West understood that ‘there can be no new story under the sky’ and playwrights always played on the familiar themes to which everyone could identify with. Except for comedies there was no claim of ‘creating something new’. Only artistic expression was important. Even the comedies fed on making fun of some classical themes and rituals accepted upon by all.

It was commonly understood in India that retelling the classical story was neither plagiarism nor blind copying. Goswami Tulsidas has never been ‘condemned’ for his ‘lack of originality’. He took the classical story and not only did he tell it in the vernacular, but also added a fresh way of looking. He made the entire story more devotional. He took a story, relived it, and made it his own by meditation, my inner experience, and by divine contemplation. As Coomaraswamy says:<blockquote>“A copyright could not have been conceived where it was well understood that there can be no property in ideas, which are his who entertains them: whoever thus makes an idea his own is working originally, bringing forth from an immediate source within himself, regardless of how many times the same idea may have been expressed by others before or around him.” (Coomaraswamy 112-113)</blockquote>This was largely the trend in all traditional societies until the dawn of the modern West. The celebration of classical stories and archetypal myths came to an end in the West with the advent of a new medium – the novel.

==== The Introduction of the Author ====
By the eighteenth century, the novel emerged as a primary mode of literature in the West. And with the novel, the author is truly born. The novel, long-winding and detailed, focused not just on the heroic and the exemplary but also on the mundane and the banal. And it is precisely this focus on the mundane and the banal which made it famous.

With the proliferation of the printing press and the elevation of the secular life where literature was taken as a refined entertainment, the novel emerged as a means to entertain primarily the ladies of the higher class.

These petite women of the elite class were divested of the daily chores that the lower class was engaged in and had plenty of free time to acquire greater literary and artistic skills. Reading novels in those days was a means to do that: to gain skills and knowledge about the world.

This was not just true about Jane Austen but also about Charles Dickens. The working class seldom had the education, taste or money to indulge in such pleasures as reading a novel. And there was hardly a middle class in this era.

The Industrial Revolution was just starting. Novel reading was the exclusive realm of the elite. Unlike drama, the novel remained confined to the elite of the West.

On one hand these readers wanted to read about the life with which they were familiar with. This is why the novels of Jane Austen were that famous. On the other hand, they also wanted to know what was going on in the life of the less fortunate, the hoi polloi.

This is the reason that Charles Dickens was so famous in these circles. His stories about the seamier side of London; about the underbelly of the country, were something which entertained the elite too. It was only in later centuries that his works became more famous in the general public.

On the other side of the continent, the Russian salons of St. Petersburg would not be complete without reading or the discussion about The Captain’s Daughter or Eugene Onegin by their greatest poet Aleksandr Pushkin.

The environment was infectious. Growing up in balls and parties like this, Lev Tolstoy created some of the greatest gems: War and Peace and Anna Karenina. War and Peace are often claimed to be the greatest novel ever written if there can be such a list or comparison.

==== A Scene from War and Peace ====
These salons were mainly run by the most famous and prosperous women of the elite society of St. Petersburg. It was considered an obligation of the rich women to throw soirees, or parties of this kind where every influential personality from politics, arts, literature, and music would be invited.

In the pre-mass media, pre-mass publishing, and pre-internet era, these intellectual salons were the only places where young, poets, novelists, musicians, and artists could show off their talent. These salons made or broke artists and poets.

Getting invited to these ‘art scenes’ of the days was very important. The ladies who ran these salons may not necessarily be of great taste but they completed their social obligation in throwing off these soirees and inviting all the great artists of the day. These salons were known by the names of these ‘socialites’.

The poets, novelists, and artists visiting these balls and parties created some of the greatest works ever created analyzing human behavior in all its minutiae, both good and bad.

And even though their readership may be limited to one gender and to the elite during their times, they have given us gems which are quintessentially classical – independent of time and space. They are truly universal.

The breathtaking variety of aesthetic stories that the world had the luck to witness during the late half of the 18th and the 19th centuries is something to cherish. Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, Turgenev, Poe, Melville, London, Twain, Proust, Flaubert, Maupassant, Saki, Akutagawa, etc. are just some of the very famous ones.

==== The Degeneration Sets In ====
Not before long, the most important stories were told. The national characters were written about. The stories were exhausted. The narratives had taken all the plausible twists that they could take. Nineteenth-century like much else in the West was the heyday of the novel.

Starting out at various times from early 18th century most of the great nations of the West: Britain, Russia, America, France, Germany, Italy, Spain etc. had exhausted themselves by the closing of the 19th century.

The early 20th century saw some great works, but the great literary flowering of the modern West was already on a decline.

V S Naipaul has remarked that much written cultures have their own problems. It is hard to find a ‘new theme’, a ‘new story’ in a culture which has produced giants like Austen and Dickens. One would do well to remember that in a classical world this would not be a problem as no author, dramatist or artist was under pressure to create ‘something new’.

The old stories had to be told in the new idiom. The universal archetypes had to be delivered in contemporary language. With the advent of the novel as the primary vehicle of literature in the 18th century, this had changed. With the focus on the banal and the mundane, the authors were after finding a new story. This led them to a race to find ever novel ways to entertain their audience.

The search soon degenerated into a search for the strange. Like in other disciplines, the good was replaced by the strange. The old stories had to be told in the new idiom. The universal archetypes had to be delivered in contemporary language. With the advent of the novel as the primary vehicle of literature in the 18th century this had changed. With the focus on the banal and the mundane, the authors were after finding a new story. This led them on a race to find ever novel ways to entertain their audience.

The search soon degenerated into a search for the strange. Like in other disciplines, the good was replaced by the strange. At first, the experiments were limited to the stories. Then the narrative style was experimented with too. At last even language was not left alone. Deconstruction is a process not stopped easily.

One reason for the crisis in literature was the advent of the cinema. The cinema had taken the wind out of both the theatre and the novel. The fast-moving plot of the cinema could hardly be matched in the theatre.

The action that could be shown in cinema was out of the question on a stage. And the emotions became subtler too. What took poets many pages to describe, for example, a great beautiful landscape, would be shown in five seconds without any words in cinema.

Thus the drama and the novel were left to do what the cinema couldn’t do. Even then they could have settled on their own if not for some postmodernist theories that started floating during the same decades.

For the 20th century saw the rise of post-modernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction in which many universal props of the traditional novel and ancient theatre were destroyed. The post-modernists claimed that there is no objective truth and thus no good or bad.

As a result out went the hero and the heroism from the play and the novel. The deconstructionists claimed that the world is unreal and our eyes, our minds, and our senses lie to us. They also claimed that every story is a narrative presenting one point of view, none of which is correct and none of which can be conclusively proved wrong.

The traditional drama or the novel had a hero and a villain. Its author had very clear ideas about good and bad. The plot was central to the story, although not paramount. The language was refined and lofty. Uncertainty was occasional and little. There was a definite conclusion and a takeaway message.

The postmodern theories destroyed all of these conventions, breaking all of the legs on which a traditional drama or novel would stand. The result was the modern novel with no noble hero, not even a sympathetic common man, no clear idea of good or bad, no plot, no story, no chronology, and no definite conclusion or message.

Authored by Pankaj Saxena.
Published by IndicaToday.

The Author in Literature Part 2 - Revision history

Akshayjha at 19:07, 19 July 2024