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Forum der Letteren. Jaargang 1972 (1972)

Forum der Letteren. Jaargang 1972

(1972)– [tijdschrift] Forum der Letteren–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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On the problem of evaluation of non-western literature
P. Gaeffke

Samenvatting. - In zijn artikel ‘Problemen bij de waardering van niet-westerse literatuur’ (Forum der letteren 1969, 63-81) heeft D.W. Fokkema kriteria genoemd die bij de beoordeling van werken van niet-westerse literaturen gehanteerd dienen te worden. Volgens hem moeten dat zijn een ‘afwijkend taalgebruik’ en de funktie van de literaire taal die naar een ‘verbeelde of gefingeerde werkelijkheid’ moet verwijzen. Deze benadering leidt in het geval van de (moderne) indische literatuur tot grote moeilijkheden.
Al in het beginstadium van de nieuwe literatuur deed Tulsīdās (1532?-1623) een succesrijke poging om in de volkstaal te schrijven en niet in het daarvan afwijkende literaire Sanskrit. Zoals uit zijn zelfverdediging blijkt, lette de toenmalige kritiek er bijzonder scherp op dat de dichters de eeuwenoude regels der poëtiek zouden eerbiedigen. Het is dan ook welhaast onmogelijk in de werken van Tulsīdās en anderen de originele bijdragen tot de literatuurontwikkeling apart te beschrijven. Men streefde veeleer naar identiteit met de toen verspreide ideeën en drukte zich in traditionele vormen uit, overeenkomstig de zeer oude opvattingen in India van de poëtische inventie.
Ook de hedendaagse indische literaire kritiek is normatief en kan ons daarom niet leren wat indische literatuur werkelijk is. Nochtans geeft zij aan welke werken de belangstelling van het indische pubiek hebben gewekt. Dit kan voor ons het uitgangspunt leveren voor het onderzoek van de struktuur van literatuurwerken die in India worden gewaardeerd. Daarbij zullen wij ontdekken, dat noch een defektief taalgebruik noch kunstmatige experimenten met de gewone taal bepalend zijn voor het indische waardeoordeel.
Fokkema's tweede kriterium, namelijk dat literaire taal naar een ‘verbeelde of gefingeerde werkelijkheid’ zou moeten verwijzen, is in die indische literatuur evenmin gemakkelijk terug te vinden. In religieuze teksten, zoals het Rāmcaritmānas van Tulsīdās, wordt juist de fiktie van god Rāma als de waarheid voorgesteld en onze wereld als een illusie. Daartegenover prijst men moderne auteurs, omdat hun romans qua taal en inhoud identiek zouden zijn met het leven op indische dorpen.
In verband met deze gegevens lijkt het wenselijk geen pogingen te ondernemen om op basis van abstrakte kriteria niet-westerse literatuur te beoordelen. Onze taak moet veeleer zijn de door de Indiërs zelf geselekteerde literatuur op haar struktuur te onderzoeken, om op die manier te weten te komen uit welke bijzondere elementen grote literatuurwerken in niet-westerse literaturen zijn opgebouwd. (Schr./Red.)

In an article in Forum der Letteren D.W. Fokkema1 has dealt with the interesting problem of evaluation of non-Western literature in order to establish new criteria for a history of literature. At a time when a stream of information about literature outside the literary traditions of the West is constantly

increasing, and scholars are in search of general notions in language and literature, it is highly to be appreciated that a specialist of Chinese, who is at the same time a literary critic, finds it worthwhile to discuss peculiarities of non-Western literatures in terms of comparative literature instead of following a modern school of thought which treats them as purely historical, i.e. without interest for general literature.

Of course, Fokkema, too, being a modernist, strives ultimately after what he calls his ‘eigen, moderne literaire waarde-oordeel’ (his own, modern... evaluation),2 which according to him and his authority, R. Etiemble,3 should be based on a generally acceptable definition of literature. However, with the help of two examples taken from recent Chinese poetry, he stresses the necessity of a thorough knowledge of literary traditions and an analysis of non-Western works of literature based on this knowledge as a preliminary phase of evaluation, before starting on the second phase, i.e. the application of our own, modern literary evaluation.

The ultimate goal of literary criticism is determined by his definition of literature which he describes in terms of the following ‘qualitative’ criteria: a) a usage of language which is different from normal but becomes normal afterwards and b) the language should refer to an imaginative or fictitious world. ‘Quantitative’ criteria for determining the differences of value between the various works of literature he derives from a comparison of the smaller or greater display of their ‘qualitative’ values as defined above.

The issue raised by Fokkema in his article is an important one to every scholar of Oriental literature because it is not unthinkable that the subject of our studies should correspond only to a small degree to his definition of literature or even fall completely short of it. If this is the case, one could speak of a modern, more rational Macaulianism which regards Oriental literature as belonging only marginally to literature proper and discusses its contents only in terms of historical interest. The Indologist, however, may advance here the argument that through many centuries Indian critics have developed several conceptions of literature which were derived somehow from the most important works of Indian literature, and critical writing is still being produced today. Therefore historical judgments could be reconstructed with regard to important works and thus a well-founded evaluation could satisfy any serious student of Oriental literature in and outside India.4

But if we reconstruct, for instance, the methods used by earlier critics in evaluating the famous Rāmcaritmānas by Tulsīdās (1532?-1623), we should be very disappointed. In the prologue to his poem, Tulsīdās refers to critics who blame him for not having written in a different (see above) language, i.e. in the artificial Sanskrit but in the dialect (bhāsā) spoken by him. Moreover, Tulsīdās himself admits that he does not know the rules of poetry of his time which he describes along the lines of traditional patterns. In spite of this, he says, his poem is great, simply because ‘the name of God’ is present in it and

therefore ‘people of pure mind and unpolluted intelligence’ will listen to it (I, 17-18).

Today there is little discussion about the evaluation of Tulsīdās as a great poet, even by traditional standards of poetry. The fact that he wrote in Avadhī and not in Sanskrit has kept his poem alive even today and it is the main characteristic by which the Rāmcaritmānas surpasses the vast Sanskrit literature of its time. But the argument advanced by Tulsīdās himself in favour of his book can convince no serious critic of today. On the contrary, the survival of the Rāmcaritmānas is mainly due to the fact that it was read and praised by readers and critics who do not belong to Ramaitic sects and who regard other religious works as authoritative. This proves the richness of the poem and we need not hesitate to state that our own evaluation cannot rely on a reconstruction of an evaluation of earlier times which in fact had little to do with the literary value of the poem.

Similar observations can be made with regard to modern critical writing in India. As I have pointed out elsewhere,5 R.C. Śukla (1886-1941), a critic of great influence among the writers of his time, who developed the old rasa-theory to a frame of reference for the evaluation of modern literary works in Hindi, dealt mainly with isolated motifs and their compatibility with Visnuitic ideology. More recently Nagendra (born 1910?), who plainly refused to speak of ‘value’ and ‘standards’ in connection with literature,6 referred to a traditional conception while saying that literature has a soul (ātmā) and a purpose (prayojana). He describes ātmā as: rasa (according to him ‘perception’ (anubhūtitattva)), dhvani (‘imagination’ (kalpanātattva)) and alankāra and vakratā (‘representation’ (abhivyañjana)) which are more applicable to separate motifs and small sections of a poem, and he defines the purpose (prayojana) of literature as creating pleasure (ānanda) and developing the intellect (bhaudhika vikāsa):7 In this manner the discussion does not advance beyond the position of Horace's delectare aut prodesse.

Consequently Gulābrāy (1888-1963)8 in a popular handbook of poetics says: ‘A critic has to tell the poets and writers the principles of faults and virtues of literature and those ideas according to which the poets should proceed,... he should spread just and new thoughts’ in order to help the reader to enjoy literature. R.C. Śukla's debasement of the so-called chāyāvād-movement,9 Nagendra's critical remarks on poets like Añcal (born 1915) and Narendra (born 1913),10 Vājpeyī's (born 1906) attacks11 on poets who do not display the ideas of Hindu nationalism in their works, and other writings by Indian critics make it clear that in India critics in fact mean to prescribe what literature under Indian conditions should be.

But a criticism which conceals modern developments under traditional conceptions or which is based on ideological criteria in order to regulate the content and the purpose of literature cannot teach us what literature actually is, but only what Indians think their literature ought to be, and these are in

fact two different issues. Modern Indian criticism, conditioned as it is by primarily social factors, is not essentially different from the criticism applied against the Rāmcaritmanas some centuries ago. It does not help us very much when analysing an Indian work of literature, to say nothing of evaluating it on the basis of appropriate criteria.

This does not mean that we could simply discard the writings of Indian critics. On the contrary, they are of great importance especially for students outside India. But for the evaluation of Indian literature, it is more important to know which works the Indian critics discuss than what they actually say about them. The simple fact that a novel, poem or play is the subject of literary discussion in India is a valuable indication for us that the work can somewho be regarded as representative and worthy of mention in the Indian context. It is useless for a student outside India to look for authors which are neglected by Indian critics but would please our taste, unless we could persuade the Indians to accept our predilection for a particular work or author not appreciated in India as yet. There are in fact propagandists of literary movements of the West who advise Indian writers what and how they should write. But students of literature outside the Indian scene who are conscious of their own point of view are aware of the fact that in India, imported movements have always got a distinct Indian turn12 and even works which are said to represent literary movements with Western names are indebted to Indian traditions.13

If we now restrict ourselves to literature that is generally accepted in India and try to evaluate it by using the criteria suggested by Fokkema, we meet with many difficulties. If we regard a language different from the colloquial as the main criterion of literature we could state that with the exception of a few commentaries and some chronicles, the bulk of the older literature in New Indian languages is written in versified language, regardless of whether the texts deal with poetical, religieus or historical subjects. It is practically impossible to compare the artificial language of these texts with the colloquial language (‘omgangstaal’, Fokkema, p. 71) of their times. Local dialects, as for instance the language of the Doab (Braj bhāṣsā), became literary languages used also outside their linguistic regions, while uniform or more or less standardized languages as Middie Bengali ‘coated’ the literature for centuries. If we could compare the texts with the language spoken by their authors we would certainly call them unusual with regard to their grammatical forms, their style and their composition. Moreover, these differences would have to be called positive (cf. Fokkema, p. 72), i.e. neither pathological nor deficient. Therefore, it would be practically impossible to exclude old texts from the field of literature on the basis of this part of Fokkema's definition.

If we now accept that difference in the case of old texts is not to be taken with regard to the spoken language of that time but with older texts of the same genre, we should remember Tulsīdās' self-defence at the beginning of

the Rāmcaritmānas which indicates that the ideal poet of his time was not expected to be different from his precessors but had to follow as closely as possible the age-old rules of poetic tradition. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to describe exactly what the original contribution of a poet like Bihārī Lāl (1603-1663) was to the genre of the Indian epigram, which was treated in a more or less identical manner by older poets in Sanskrit and Prakrit. But still Bihārī is praised in India for his ‘power of describing insubstantial thoughts and feelings, as well as objective realities’ i.e. for his ‘unique powers of expression’.14 The same could be said of Hāla (1st or 2nd cent.), Amaru (7th/8th cent.?) and Govardhana (llth cent.). We are confronted with exactly the same difficulty if we try to point out the differences between the innumerable poems of bhakti-poets. The very fact that identical couplets appear in the collections of various bhakti-poets shows that in place of individual originality, a sort of identity with the common religious feelings and the accepted forms of expression was desired by the poets.

Due to the Zeitgeist even the greatest poets of the Indian Middie Ages stuck minutely to motifs and composition of classical works as the Rāmāyana of Vālmiki (2nd cent. A.D.) and the Bhāgavatapurāna (lOth cent. A.D.) and passed off their original contributions for parts of the sacred tradition or hid them away in side stories. To single out what is original in their works would make it impossible to evaluate their actual achievement, which can be better described as a creation of a peculiar religious and aesthetic sphere by combining traditional and contemporaneous elements in a conservative manner.

This approach to literature is also reflected in the traditional Indian theory of poetic invention. When reading the article on the ‘inspiration’ of Indian poets by Gonda,15 one is struck by the contradiction between the Indian definitions of pratibhā (‘inspiration’) as ‘het intuitieve beschrijven van telkens nieuwe dingen’ or ‘het vermogen om iets geheel nieuws te scheppen’ (i.e. an intuitive description of ever changing things or the ability to create something completely new) (p. 13) and the identification of this inspiration with the realisation of the ‘Al, de Totaliteit, het Ene, waarop alle veelheid teruggaat’ etc. (i.e. the Universe (the ‘All’), the totality, the One which is the source of all diversity) (p. 16). Whether the inspiration is called dh-i, pratibhā or sphoṭā, the most important characteristic of these terms is that they are all centred around the same ‘hoogste Woord-Principe ..., dat één en ondeelbaar is’ (the highest Word principle... which is one and indivisible) (p. 19). Therefore, a poet who was asked by the critics to listen to the voice of his intuition and also to follow the tradition as represented in the rules of the books on poetics, could express, in fact, only the one and unchanging truth in a traditional form. Of course, there are clear differences between the poetry of the Vedas, the Epics and the period of kāuya-literature. But it will be clear that a literary theory which stresses the ‘unchanging truth and the traditional rules’ produces or reflects another type of literature than a theory

which makes difference i.e. novelty and modernity, the most important criterion.

In modern Hindi texts one can observe another type of deviation from the usual language which for a long period was far from well-established. In the beginning of OUT century M.P. Dvivedi (1864-1938), the leading critic of that time, had a heated controversy with Bālmukund Gupta (1865-1914) and others about the correct use of grammatical forms,16 and even in more recent times some authors have had to rely on their readers in order to get the language of their books improved. Not only Upendranāth Aśk (bom 1910) whose mother tongue is Panjabi, remembers gratefully the assistance of his readers,17 but also the Rāṣṭtrakavi Maithilīśaran Gupta's (1886-1964) most popular poems had to be corrected carefully by his mentor M.P. Dvivedi.18 Only recently R.L. Khandelvāl published a strickingly long list of grammatica! mistakes from the works of Jayśaṅkar Prasād (1889-1937).19 Slips of language which in the West even a printer would correct of his own accord could not bar a great number of Indian critics to write books praising Prasād as one of the greatest poets of India. So, we can conclude that a negative difference of language, in the above cases a detective usage of Hindi, does not necessarily exclude a work from the range of literature.20

Intentional distortions of language, however, as practised by the poets of the so-called Nayī kauitā, which immitates the disconnected and at the same time provoking style of modern Western lyrics are sharply criticized because of their linguistic incomprehensibility.21 There may be social factors responsible for the fact that readers do not care about linguistic norms in the one case and overestimate the role of grammatical correctness in poetry in the other. But if acceptability is made the criterion for distinguishing positive and negative differences in literature we cannot simply substitute the pattern of our system of references for the judgement of the Indian critics who should be regarded in this respect as ideal readers of their literature, as Fokkema puts it (p. 73).

In addition to the term different language Fokkema in his definition of literature also uses the expression ‘which refers to a fictitious reality’ (‘verbeelde of gefingeerde werkelijkheid’, p. 71). For him different language and different reality are closely connected in so far as literature, which by definition deals with some other reality than the reality around us, needs a language different from the usual one. For this reason Fokkema proposes to exclude certain religieus texts (‘Heiligenleben’) and philosophical texts from the study of literary history, because ‘they speak directly about the world around us’ (p. 72). But even if we do not deal here expressly with Old Indian texts like the Vedas and the Upanisads, which could be called religious, philosophical and at the same time poetical, also in other Indian literary contexts, Fokkema's suggestion should be applied with great care. The tradition of Vedānta-philosophy which ruled over the mind of most of the authors of the Indian Middie Ages did not fix the line between reality and illusion very sharply, and if we refer again to the Rāmcaritmānas, a religieus book and at the same time a great poem, we

find its author hammering on his vision that the common facts of life are an illusion and only Rāma, as presented in his poem, is real. We may reverse his point of view in accordance with the more rational approach of our time, but even today Tulsīdās advises innumerable Indians not to take the world as it is but as a ‘disease of OUT eyes’ and to learn from a true Gum the real facts behind this delusion. Even if we could agree that a religious point of view as displayed by Tulsīdās is also some sort of fiction and that the realm of Rāma is nothing but fictitious reality, this fiction is not only an integral structural element of the poem but can also be described as an ideology outside literature, regarded by many as the only truth (satya). I do not speak here about social behaviour which can be better studied from other sources. The literary conception of this ‘fictitious’ reality is, of course, not an invention of Tulsīdās. All the important philosophical ideas of the Rāmcaritmānas can be traced back to the Adhyātmarāmāyana (15th cent.). This, however, is a scholarly sectarian text in Sanskrit with little poetical pretension, whereas the Rāmcaritmānas is still being read and praised by millions of Hindus of different sects.

Truth and reality is also the slogan of modern critics in dealing with the novels and short stories of Premcand (1880-1936) and his followers. This writer is famous in India for his 'realistic' representation of the life of the Indian lower middle class and the small farmers.22 To indicate that his descriptions are identical with life, one uses the term yathārthavād which means a literary approach which is ‘accordant with reality’ and also ‘conformable to truth’ (Monier-Williams). It is used as the Indian equivalent of realism. The language of Premcand, too, is regarded as being so near to the Hindustani of the masses that to many people his best books represent life as it was in the first half of our century; this in contrast to his predecessors who wrote novels with fantastic settings, with unrealistic plot construction and in an artificial language.23 It will not be possible here to discuss Premcand's realism seriously. But it is worthy of mention that Indians did not appreciate his writings because they were different from that what these Indians experienced in their own lives, but they stated the identity, at least, of their conception of the world with what they read in Premcand's novels.

The transition from tilasmī (magie) and jāsūsī (spy) novels to more realistic ones is not a purely historical problem. In the same year that Premcand published his most realistic novel Godān (1936), Jaysankar Prasād finished his Kāmāyanī, which is regarded as one of the greatest poems of Indian literature because it represents, in a mythological setting and in a highly sanskritized language, the world as seen by the thousand-year-old Śaivaism of Kaśmīr. Here again critics do not praise the originality of this poem but on the contrary, the identity of ideas in it with what is accepted as truth by the Śivaits and by tradition. The fact that the Kāmāyanī is called a mahākāvya indicates that the poem at the same time conforms to the rules and regulations

of the old theoreticians of literature and that it can be compared with the greatest poems of Sanskrit literature. Such an evaluation does not consider the question whether Prasād was really different from other poets or whether he only combined well-known or traditional elements in a clever and pleasing manner. In the eyes of his Indian critics he revealed truth, truth, which cannot be new or different, with the help of poetical means sanctioned by an age-old tradition.

It will be necessary to remember P. Warren's24 careful distinction between novelty and surprise as referred to by Russian critics, and his own conception of an imaginative integration of many different elements. Complexity indicates much more than only an ‘original contribution to the usage of language’ (‘oorspronkelijke bijdrage ... tot het taalgebruik’ Fokkema, p. 73), even if we use the term ‘language’ in such a wide sense as Fokkema does. For instance the peculiar place the narrator has taken in the structure of certain short stories by Prasād can hardly be connected with linguistic arrangements. It indicates a typical Hinduistic point of view according to which life offers warning examples to an observing narrator whose reactions are principally more important than the story told. The structure of the narrative based on it will not surprise a student of Hinduism; but it contributes considerably to the complexity of this type of stories, which can only be evaluated after a careful analysis.

I believe that linguistic elements, too, which by their nature are shared by the whole linguistic community, increase the peculiar complexity of Indian literature.25 If, for example, linguistic structures such as verbal clusters, absolutive constructions, parataxis etc. are more apt for facet-like descriptions or statements about a static truth than for differentiadons full of subtle shades of meaning and dialectical thought developments, the impact of language may, in combination with literary elements and the intention of the author, result in extremely interesting textures, especially if observed from outside the Indian literary scene. To analyse and describe these complex unities of works of art accepted by Indians seems to me more important than to separate the so-called invariants littéraires (Etiemble) from the historical material or to strive after one's own modern evaluation of non-Western literature.

A critic who lives in different cultural surroundings from those of the writer had better not call himself an ideal reader (Fokkema, p. 73) and set himself up as a critic of the acceptability of foreign literature. He cannot differentiate between positive and negative deviations from the normal use of language and from the accepted conception of reality. His task is more that of an interpreter of already accepted works of a foreign literature, works which by their very nature are strange and new and to which the Western mind is unaccustomed. If in so doing he contributes to the revelation of truth and to a responsible evaluation he will at least be helping to demolish the Europe- centred point of view of literary studies in the West.26


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