"In Defense of Naïve Reading"

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/in-defense-of-naive-reading/

Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”

Likewise—and this is a much more controversial thesis—such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge … is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing—an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.

The “restatement of the aesthetic experience in formalized, theoretical or generalizing language” is precisely what Sanskrit literary theorists like Abhinavagupta and his rasa folk do. The nature of the aesthetic experience generated in the sensitive connoisseur (sahṛdaya) by a drama or literary piece is theorized at great length in these works and in scores of modern secondary literature on the topic.

What interests me, though, is the author’s second claim, that literature “can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding”. Sheldon Pollock argues in his epic article “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out” that the Sanskrit literary understanding tends not to attribute such epistemological powers to kāvya in general. Now, Sanskrit theorists do claim that kāvya can potentially teach us how to act. As Viśvanātha Kavirāja states in his Sāhitya-darpaṇa: rāmâdivat pravartitavyam na tu rāvaṇâdivat—“one must conduct oneself like Rāma and his like, and not like Rāvaṇa and his like”—and kāvya is of course a major source of such information.


However, Pollock points out that what the Sanskrit tradition is far more likely to claim for kāvya is its ability to present such information in a unique form. This is best presented in a table:

Text	Veda	Technical texts (śāstras, purāṇas, itihāsa)	kāvya
Author	Authorless (apauruṣeya)	Sages and seers (ṛṣis)	Human authors
Primacy	sound (śabda)	meaning (artha)	expression
Manner of instruction	commands “like a master”	counsels “like a friend”	coaxes and cajoles “like a lover”

We see in the two opening verses of Mammaṭabhaṭṭa’s Kāvyaprakāśa (“Illumination of Literature”) a definition of literature (or at least of poetic language) and a statement of the purposes of literature:

niyati-kṛta-niyama-rahitāṃ hlādaîkamayīm ananya-paratantrām |
nava-rasa-rucirāṃ nirmitim ādadhatī bhāratī kaver jayati || 1 ||

kāvyaṃ yaśase ’rtha-kṛte vyavahāra-vide śivêtara-kṣataye |
sadyaḥ para-nirvṛtaye kāntā-sammitatayôpadeśa-yuje || 2 ||

(1)
Unconstrained by the laws of nature,
Composed of pure enjoyment,
Dependent on no external source,
Luminous with the nine rasas—
        may the Poet’s Poetic Eloquence that fashions such a work triumph!

(2)
Literature is for:
(a) fame
(b) [worldly] ends
(c) knowledge of proper conduct
(d) destruction of all things inauspicious
(e) immediate attainment of the highest state [Heaven]
(f) instruction [in a manner] like a lover.