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INTRODUCTION
rhetorical manner which was introduced into Latin poetry by the practice of
declamation in the oratorical schools, which Juvenal so forcibly derides.**
'Paronomasia' is footnoted as follows: "English lends itself only to comic
effects, but Greek and Latin authors alike use this device with serious
efforts at beauty ..."
It is questionable whether such justifications enhance our appreciation
of the literary role of the pun, or clarify its peculiar place in classical
Sanskrit literature. Keith and De are evidently quite ashamed of the pun;
their grudging acceptance of it illustrates once again how alien is their
critical judgment to their poetic subject matter. Recent literary develop-
ments in the West, however, have focussed more attention on the capacity
of the pun. It is no longer possible, after Finnegan's Wake, to say that
the pun in English lends itself only to comic effects. The critic John Wain,
in terms which might apply almost literally to the maligned Subandhu or
Kavirājā, says of Joyce:
With Finnegan's Wake Joyce moved the pun in to the center and made it the
main instrument of his writing ... He wanted to present human life as an indi-
visible simultaneity and to banish the idea of linear time, so that the last sen-
tence of Finnegan's Wake comes back to the first, and the language is given an
extra dimension to convey that sense of density, that refusal to isolate experi-
ences and take them one at a time. 1
Commenting on the rational view of time and events which pun con-
tradicts, he says further: "A narrative, unilinear view of experience, which
underlay the work of both novelist and historian in the 18th and 19th
centuries, is an abstraction. It results from standing back and reasoning
about experience, sorting out its thick, knotty textures into manageable
threads". The critical attitude with which one is invested and which
seems so devastatingly appropriate and normal, is often in its more
fundamental aspects a function of intellectual history. Wain rather
romantically attributes the "unilinear view of experience" to the invention
of printing and a consequent degradation of the voice and its many-
levelled apprehension. "In literature only people from backward oral
areas had an [sic] resonance to inject into the language-the Yeatses,
the Synges, the Joyces, Faulkners, and Dylan Thomases". The language
is being remade to serve the purposes of new apprehensions of reality:
91
*
**
Keith, SL, p. 351.
New Republic, Aug. 7, 1965, p. 20.
Ibid. The influence of McLuhan is obvious.
Ibid., p. 21.
INTRODUCTION
rhetorical manner which was introduced into Latin poetry by the practice of
declamation in the oratorical schools, which Juvenal so forcibly derides.**
'Paronomasia' is footnoted as follows: "English lends itself only to comic
effects, but Greek and Latin authors alike use this device with serious
efforts at beauty ..."
It is questionable whether such justifications enhance our appreciation
of the literary role of the pun, or clarify its peculiar place in classical
Sanskrit literature. Keith and De are evidently quite ashamed of the pun;
their grudging acceptance of it illustrates once again how alien is their
critical judgment to their poetic subject matter. Recent literary develop-
ments in the West, however, have focussed more attention on the capacity
of the pun. It is no longer possible, after Finnegan's Wake, to say that
the pun in English lends itself only to comic effects. The critic John Wain,
in terms which might apply almost literally to the maligned Subandhu or
Kavirājā, says of Joyce:
With Finnegan's Wake Joyce moved the pun in to the center and made it the
main instrument of his writing ... He wanted to present human life as an indi-
visible simultaneity and to banish the idea of linear time, so that the last sen-
tence of Finnegan's Wake comes back to the first, and the language is given an
extra dimension to convey that sense of density, that refusal to isolate experi-
ences and take them one at a time. 1
Commenting on the rational view of time and events which pun con-
tradicts, he says further: "A narrative, unilinear view of experience, which
underlay the work of both novelist and historian in the 18th and 19th
centuries, is an abstraction. It results from standing back and reasoning
about experience, sorting out its thick, knotty textures into manageable
threads". The critical attitude with which one is invested and which
seems so devastatingly appropriate and normal, is often in its more
fundamental aspects a function of intellectual history. Wain rather
romantically attributes the "unilinear view of experience" to the invention
of printing and a consequent degradation of the voice and its many-
levelled apprehension. "In literature only people from backward oral
areas had an [sic] resonance to inject into the language-the Yeatses,
the Synges, the Joyces, Faulkners, and Dylan Thomases". The language
is being remade to serve the purposes of new apprehensions of reality:
91
*
**
Keith, SL, p. 351.
New Republic, Aug. 7, 1965, p. 20.
Ibid. The influence of McLuhan is obvious.
Ibid., p. 21.