2023-03-29 18:09:38 by ambuda-bot
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41
multidimensional, simultaneous, at once abstract and concrete like a
Picasso painting.
The life history of Yuri Zhivago is told in a manner as far removed as possible
from the old linear narrative form which progressed from one event to the next
against a tidily arranged 'background'. Quite apart from the fact that the story
itself lurches from one coincidence to another there is no separable 'foreground"
or "background'. Everything that happens the death of a man, an idea occur-
ring to a philosopher or a line of verse to a poet, a storm, the birth of a child, an
outbreak of street fighting, an evening party at which people make speeches-
seems to occur on the same level of significance and at the same level of
significance and at the same closeness to the camera-eye.**
HISTORY OF THE SEARCH FOR SYSTEM
The notion of time itself is being broken down into a new model which
resembles in principle the pun.
I do not want to suggest that this apprehension of time, which is really
non-time, the irruption of non-history and immediate experience into
art, was that which in medieval India favored and selected the pun above
all other manners of literary expression. Differences must be admitted.
The history of our recent "anti-history" is itself peculiar; for it is a reaction
against the extreme rationalistic view of time expressed in the theory of
progress in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the newer literary
expressions, emphasizing inchoate experience, do serve as a more sugges-
tive approach to the understanding not only of classical Indian literary
modes, but also to the metaphysical and philosophical apprehensions
which they imply their ideals. By all accounts, the notion of linear time
was not one of the leitmotifs of Indian civilization. On the contrary, it
expressed in myriad ways not the sequential but the total existential
implication of each moment: the entire responsibility of the karmic act;
the cyclic return of all the worlds to their pre-created state; the eternal
transmigration of souls, the de-emphasis of "this moment" and its claim
to exclusive metaphysical validity, the doctrine of creation as "play", au
fond inexplicable all these puzzling aspects of Indian intellectual
history suggest why the pun is appropriate in Sanskrit literature.
The theory of signification which honored the pun was itself a reflection
of such a view of reality. If manifestations are themselves simultaneous
aspects of a whole, the meanings by which we respond to them will
likewise emphasize multi-dimensionality and simultaneity. The theory
of imagery we have been discussing is one attempt to deal with language
as a total instrument. Still, the realization of the pun in Sanskrit literature
is a far cry from its more recent enshrinement in English. For generations,
Ibid.
multidimensional, simultaneous, at once abstract and concrete like a
Picasso painting.
The life history of Yuri Zhivago is told in a manner as far removed as possible
from the old linear narrative form which progressed from one event to the next
against a tidily arranged 'background'. Quite apart from the fact that the story
itself lurches from one coincidence to another there is no separable 'foreground"
or "background'. Everything that happens the death of a man, an idea occur-
ring to a philosopher or a line of verse to a poet, a storm, the birth of a child, an
outbreak of street fighting, an evening party at which people make speeches-
seems to occur on the same level of significance and at the same level of
significance and at the same closeness to the camera-eye.**
HISTORY OF THE SEARCH FOR SYSTEM
The notion of time itself is being broken down into a new model which
resembles in principle the pun.
I do not want to suggest that this apprehension of time, which is really
non-time, the irruption of non-history and immediate experience into
art, was that which in medieval India favored and selected the pun above
all other manners of literary expression. Differences must be admitted.
The history of our recent "anti-history" is itself peculiar; for it is a reaction
against the extreme rationalistic view of time expressed in the theory of
progress in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the newer literary
expressions, emphasizing inchoate experience, do serve as a more sugges-
tive approach to the understanding not only of classical Indian literary
modes, but also to the metaphysical and philosophical apprehensions
which they imply their ideals. By all accounts, the notion of linear time
was not one of the leitmotifs of Indian civilization. On the contrary, it
expressed in myriad ways not the sequential but the total existential
implication of each moment: the entire responsibility of the karmic act;
the cyclic return of all the worlds to their pre-created state; the eternal
transmigration of souls, the de-emphasis of "this moment" and its claim
to exclusive metaphysical validity, the doctrine of creation as "play", au
fond inexplicable all these puzzling aspects of Indian intellectual
history suggest why the pun is appropriate in Sanskrit literature.
The theory of signification which honored the pun was itself a reflection
of such a view of reality. If manifestations are themselves simultaneous
aspects of a whole, the meanings by which we respond to them will
likewise emphasize multi-dimensionality and simultaneity. The theory
of imagery we have been discussing is one attempt to deal with language
as a total instrument. Still, the realization of the pun in Sanskrit literature
is a far cry from its more recent enshrinement in English. For generations,
Ibid.