As I learned about the beauty of event sourcing, I was reminded of other discussions of identity-over-time that had bent my mind. The Buddhists of the Yogachara school (fourth century CE) were among the proponents of the doctrine of “no-self,” arguing: “What appears to be a continuous motion or action of a single body or agent is nothing but the successive emergence of distinct entities in distinct yet contiguous places.”32 There is no enduring object state, there are only events. To this, Abhinavagupta—whom we’ve already seen commenting on Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka—responded with the assertion that there could be no connection between sequential cognitive states if there were not a stable connector to synthesize these states across time and place.33 There may be no persistent object state, but there needs to be an event-sourcing system to integrate events into current state. For Abhinavagupta, memory is the preeminent faculty of the self: “It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember.”34
And, according to Abhinavagupta, it is memory from which literature derives its powers.
7 THE CODE OF BEAUTY: ABHINAVAGUPTA
The most prominent of Anandavardhana’s successors in the field of rasa-dhvani theory was the towering polymath Abhinavagupta (literary critic, aesthetic philosopher, metaphysical philosopher, theologian, poet, musician, and—according to his late-tenth-century contemporaries—a realized yogic master). In his commentaries on the Natyashastra and Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka, Abhinavagupta explored the role of memory in the psychology of rasa. Just as Anandavardhana had claimed a distinctiveness in the way vyanjana or suggestion worked in poetic language, Abhinavagupta claimed that the commonplace workings of memory, when directed by the poet, gave literature a power that was unique, an ability that was available nowhere else.
Abhinavagupta asserted that all minds contain infinite layers of samskaras and vasanas—“latent impressions” left by one’s experience and past lives; it is these impressions that are brought alive or manifested by dhvani. The aesthetic experience allows the viewer, this cognizing subject, to set these latent impressions in motion within itself, to conjure them up out of sub- or un-consciousness and render them active; the subject becomes a participant in the fictional event, it feels, it relives. Yet, according to Abhinavagupta, this event and its evoked emotions are, for the participating subject, free of all ego-driven considerations: “I am afraid, he—my enemy, my friend, anybody—is afraid.”1 The viewer or reader, then, is able to engage with the specifics of the art in a way that is profoundly felt and is yet—paradoxically—removed.
So, to a playgoer who hears some lines about a hunted deer
there appears, immediately after the perception of their literal sense, a perception of a different order, an inner [mānasī] perception, consisting in a direct experience [sākṣātkāra] which completely eliminates the temporal distinction, etc., assumed by these sentences. Besides, the young deer … which appears in this perception is devoid of its particularity (viśeṣa), and at the same time the actor, who [playing the role of the deer] frightens [the spectators by appearing to] be afraid, is unreal (apāramārthika). As a result, what there appears is simply and solely fear—fear in itself, uncircumscribed by time, space, etc. This perception of fear is of a different order from the ordinary perceptions … for these are necessarily affected by the appearance of fresh mental movements … consisting of [personal, egoistic] pleasure, pain, etc., and just for this reason are full of obstacles (vighna). The sensation of the fear above mentioned, on the contrary, is the matter of cognition by a perception devoid of obstacles (nirvighna) and may be said to enter directly into our hearts, to dance (viparivṛt) before our eyes: this is the terrible rasa. In such a fear, one’s own self is neither completely immersed (tiraskṛ), nor in a state of particular emergence (ullikh) … As a result of this, the state of generality involved is not limited (parimita), but extended (vitata).2
This generalization, this trans-personalization, sadharanikarana, is the essential basis of the aesthetic experience. The framing of an object as art produces this necessary detachment from the limited ego. For a viewer, “the tasting of pleasures, pains, etc., inhering in his own [limited] person” prevents the relishing of rasa.3 The attachment to limited self prevents universalization; if you are grieving over your own long-lost mother, you are not relishing the rasa of the tragic death scene in the movie you are watching.
The means of eliminating this obstacle are the so called theatrical conventions (nāṭyadharmi), which include a number of things not found in ordinary life, as, for instance, the zones (kakṣyā) dividing the pavilion (maṇḍapa), the stage (raṇgapīṭha); and … also the different dress of the actors—the headwear, etc.—by which they hide their true identity.4
It is the very artificiality and conventionality of the aesthetic experience, therefore, that makes the unique experience of rasa possible. Abhinavagupta observes:
In the theatrical performance there is on one hand the negation of the real being of the actor, and on the other—since the spectator’s consciousness does not rest entirely on the represented images—there is no rest on the real being of the superimposed personage; so that, as a result of all this, there is eventually just a negation both of the real being of the actor and of the real being of the character he is playing.5
And yet the spectator experiences the full panoply of emotion and thought induced by the action of the play, and simultaneously, the spectator’s perception of the aesthetic objects (the story, the actors, the stage) and of his or her own reactions is marked by wonder, chamatkara, and a willingness, an openness toward these perceptions. The result is pleasure that exists “through the suppression of our [usual] thick pall of mental stupor and blindness” as we encounter the aesthetic object. This pleasure consists of “the states of fluidity, enlargement, and expansion, and is also called ‘tasting,’ and is of a non-ordinary [alaukika] nature.”6 So, rasa is a supra-mundane mental state that is “not a form of ordinary cognition, nor is it erroneous, nor ineffable, nor like ordinary perception, nor does it consist of a super-imposition.”7 Rasa differs from “both memory, inference and any form of ordinary self-consciousness.”8
During the experience of rasa, according to Abhinavagupta, “what is enjoyed is consciousness itself.”9 That is, the aesthetic object, through the process of generalization, allows us to experience the emotional and cognitive fluctuations within ourselves without attachment, without obstacles, with a harmonious density (ekaghana) that we cannot find in the chaos of ordinary life. When we watch characters experiencing grief, for instance, we have
a thought-trend that fits with the vibhāvas and anubhāvas of this grief, [which] if it is relished (literally, if it is chewed over and over), becomes a rasa and so from its aptitude [toward this end] one speaks of [any] basic emotion as becoming a rasa. For the basic emotion is put to use in the process of relishing: through a succession of memory-elements it adds together a thought-trend which one has already experienced in one’s own life to one which one infers in another’s life, and so establishes a correspondence in one’s heart.10
Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr., points out that this reflective, mirroring response of the heart, this hrdaya-samvada, is differently understood by Abhinavagupta than a viewer’s “empathy” in the West (“I feel Hamlet’s emotions as my own”); here, one’s own latent and personal memories of grief are liberated into “a universal, impersonal flavour.”11 It is precisely this impersonality, this ego-less emotion, experienced in tanmayi-abhava, total absorption, which is desirable—the sahrdaya wants the state of objectivity, not increased subjectivity. He doesn’t want to experience grief at a personal level, he wants to relish the stable emotion of grief within himself, made available to him because of his heart’s concordance with the suffering of the characters. “The feelings of delight, sorrow, etc., [produced by the representation] deep within our spirit,” Abhinavagupta says, “have only one function, to vary it, and the repre
sentation’s function is to awaken them.”12
The aesthete rests in rasa in a kind of meditation, tasting the waves of emotions within consciousness, and the bliss he or she experiences is the same as the yogi’s beatitude. The difference is that the sahrdaya’s limited self is not “completely immersed” or vanished; the accomplished yogi, on the other hand, goes beyond the self altogether, and exists in a state of complete transcendence which is nirvikalpa, “without support”—without object, without subject, without ideation and verbalization. This does not mean the yogi’s experience is necessarily “better”—the relishing of beauty cannot happen when there is no subject and no object, and there is a harshness often associated with the yogi’s effort, with the sheer enormity of the exertion. But within the aesthetic experience, “This rasa is poured forth spontaneously by the word which is like a cow, for love of her children; for this reason it is different from that which is (laboriously) milked by yogin.”13
One of the protagonists in Red Earth and Pouring Rain participates in an event usually referred to as the First Indian War of Independence (by Indians) or as the Great Mutiny of 1857 (by the English). The memory of an entire culture includes certain events that become shared samskaras or latent traces, and these too can be mobilized by the poet. As I wrote about the 1857 war, there was both a sense of great power from resurrecting iconic events, and a feeling of unease from the still-palpable pain of that long-ago trauma.
Jacques Lacan broke from the psychoanalytic establishment with his famous manifesto “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” and in this speech he refers directly to Abhinavagupta and dhvani theory, invoking “the teaching of Abhinavagupta” to elaborate upon “the property of speech by which it communicates what it does not actually say.”14 Lacan argued that the unconscious “does not express itself in speech; it reveals itself through suggestion,” and that the analyst should deploy the power of dhvani “in a carefully calculated fashion in the semantic resonances of his remarks.”15
According to Lalita Pandit, through dhvani, “poetic language reaches the condition of silence. It functions like a meta-language, generating many meanings by deploying collective and individual memory banks, latent impressions, mental associations.”16
Like the Lacanian analyst, the poet can direct dhvani at the depths of what a culture leaves unsaid, and thus manifest in the sahradaya’s consciousness the echoes of those great silences.
Great art is distinguished by its resonance, by the depth of its dhvani. But the rasa that the viewer will experience also depends crucially on his own capability and openness: “The word sahrḍaya (lit. ‘having their hearts with it’) denotes persons who are capable of identifying with the subject matter,” Abhinavagupta writes, “as the mirror of their hearts has been polished by the constant study and practise of poetry, and who respond to it sympathetically in their own hearts.”17 The sahrdaya’s education and erudition has not made his heart or hrdaya impervious, it is able to “melt” in response to art; this is in contrast with the “scholar” whose heart “has become hardened and encrusted by his readings of dry texts on metaphysics.”18
Abhinavagupta insists that rasa cannot be “caused.” That is, mimesis—of things, of events, of people—offers us an opportunity for savoring, and this gustation is not a fixed or “frozen” mental state, a simple matter of stimulus and response, such as the joy one might feel in response to the words, “A daughter is born to you.” The sensitive viewer or reader inhabits the imitated action through an act of concentrated sympathy, and so
the relishing of beauty arises in us from our memory bank (saṃaskāra) of mental states which are suitable to the vibhāvas and anubhvās of those basic emotions [that are being portrayed in the characters of a literary work] …
So what is born here is a rasyamāṇatā (a being tasted, a gustation, of beauty), that is, a savouring that eclipses such worldly mental states as the joy that might be produced by reunion with a constant stream of old friends. And for this reason [viz., because of its super-normal character], the savouring serves to manifest something, not to inform one of something, as might be done by an established means of knowledge (pramāṇa). It is not a production such as results from the working of a cause.19
The poet’s pratibha or intuitive genius—which harnesses craft and training—therefore depends on the sahrdaya’s intuitive receptivity—which is polished by learning—to become complete. It is for this reason that Abhinavagupta begins his commentary on the Dhvanyaloka with an evocation of “the Muse’s double heart, the poet and the relisher of art.” The coming together of the poet and the reader is what creates “brave new worlds from naught and even stones to flowing sap has brought.” Beauty is imparted by the “successive flow of genius and of speech” from the poet to the sahrdaya.20
Since rasa cannot be “caused” in a deterministic manner, you cannot produce art through test-driven development; your true sahrdaya may be born a hundred years after you die.
There are other qualities of poetic language that make verification difficult or impossible. The speech of the poet can be effective even when it doesn’t obey the rules of everyday language. According to Abhinavagupta, even denotative and connotative meanings are only aids to the production of rasa, unessential props which can sometimes be discarded: “Even alliterations of harsh or soft sounds can be suggestive of [rasa], though they are of no use as to meaning. Here, then, there is not even the shadow of the metaphor.”21 So music alone, without lyrics, can be the occasion of rasa. Even when language is used to construct an aesthetic object, when meaning and metaphor are necessarily present, to want the object—the poem, the story, the play—to convey coherent, verifiable information about the real world, as a treatise might, is to fall into a category error. Poetry’s meaning does not need any external referentiality or validation to produce pleasure. “[In poetry] the savouring … arises like a magical flower, having its essence at that very moment, and not connected with earlier or later times.”22
Abhinavagupta goes even further, arguing that even at the level of syntactic units or the basic building blocks of a language, poetry is not always bound to the principles of coherence, meaning, and verification. “Poetic sentences,” for instance, “do not require validity so as to motivate [hearers] by communicating a true meaning … because they culminate only in pleasure.”23 So even language that does not cohere or produce mundane meaning may produce rasa. This is true, for instance, in language or sound poetry. Illegibility has its own pleasures, incomprehensibility may exalt. It is at the end of denotation that rasa manifests, as in Hindustani and Carnatic music, where the repetition of a single phrase by the singer—sometimes for hours—so empties the words that finally nothing is left but the fullness of the emotion, that which lies beyond words.
The grammarians of Sanskrit—the eternal, formal language—were, as one might expect, obsessed with correctness, precision, clarity. The proponents of the rasa-dhvani theory—from Anandavardhana onwards—faced fierce opposition from the orthodox on the grounds that there was no need to introduce a new semantic power to account for the suggestive functioning of art. Connotation, context, the speaker’s intent, and inference, the argument went, already accommodated this functionality. A ninth-century logician summarily dismissed Anandavardhana’s arguments and added, “In any case, this discussion with poets is not appropriate; even learned people become confused in this difficult path of sentence meaning.”24
Our logician was understandably annoyed by the fuzzing up of the difficult but clean lines of sentence-meaning, least of all by poets, who—it must be admitted—can tend to be somewhat unlearned in logic. Nevertheless, what Anandavardhana tries to achieve in his analysis is completely in keeping with his intellectual tradition, which modeled all knowledge after Panini’s grammar: he tries to provide a systematic, algorithmic understanding of literary beauty and its effects. At the end of the Dhvanyaloka, he quotes a critic who declares, “We may speak of dhvani
whenever an ineffable beauty of certain words and certain meanings is perceptible only to special cognizors, just as the rarity of certain gems [is known only to special experts].” Anandavardhana says bluntly that this critic is wrong, and argues that the
special [virtues] of words and meanings can be explained and have been explained in many ways [by himself]. To imagine that there is some ineffable virtue over and above these is to admit that one’s power of analysis has ceased … As for the definition sometimes given of ineffability, that it is the appearance of a thing [viz., of a unique particular] which cannot be referred to by a word for a mental construct (vikalpa) which is based on … the general or universal, this can no more apply to the special virtues of poetry than it can to the special virtues of gems. For the virtues of the former have been analysed by literary critics, while no estimate can be made of the value of a gem by reference merely to the general or universal. It is true, however, in both cases that these special virtues are recognizable only by experts. For only jewellers are knowers of gems and only sensitive critics (sahṛdaya) are knowers of the rasa of poetry. On this point no one will argue.25
Perhaps the logician would have agreed, but I can’t help thinking that what also irritated him about Anandavardhana’s investigation was what it made of poets. In response to Anandavardhana’s assertion that dhvani provided endless freshness to language, Abhinavagupta observes that there are a limited number of things worthy of description