M.A. Semester 3, 
Paper 9 - 
The Modernist Literature. 


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Relooking the research

Absurdity of Existentialism in the light if

Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and Shrikant Shah’s ‘ Apne Badha Akash Niche Ubha chhie’.

Bhumi Dangi

(Third Year B.A)

Existentialism

Existentialism is mainly a European philosophy that originated before the turn of the twentieth century, but became popular after World War II (1939 – 45). In simple words Existentialism is the term which contains theory of our existence. Nowadays science has its own vista and acknowledgement it is nothing else but collections of reasons. Slowly and steadily science developed as a stream, people started looking for the reasons behind every single incidence and some literary genius found life itself an incident. Although, I may not consider science to as the cause, of the firm but basically roots of Existentialism lies in the scientific bent of mind. The questions that make you feel agitated from within. Whenever you are coming on a maturity level in your life, such kinds of questions have to rise from your mind which may not have any answers.

 A more technical definition of existentialism reveals the reason for its name. Existentialism is the study of existence. If you take existence to be everything that exists — such as chairs and tables, people — all philosophy, science, and religion would seem to have the same subject. But existentialism isn’t the study of everything that exists; it’s the study of existence itself — the study of what it means for something to exist at all as opposed to not existing. It’s also the study of what it means for something, as opposed to nothing, to exist at all. Of course, the primary focus of existentialism is a particular kind of existence, the kind of existence that includes existing things like you, because you’re aware of your existence and capable of questioning it.

The seeds of existentialism may be traced back to an earlier period of the history of philosophy. During the 18th century reason and nature were given more importance, objectivity was very much emphasized, leading to industrial and technological developments and science was given utmost importance. From the scientific viewpoint, man was also regarded as an object. Man became a slave to machines in developing industrial society. Against this situation existentialism emerged as a protest against the society and asserted the supremacy of individuality of man.

It deals with the following fundamental issues

1.      Existence precedes Essence

2.      Importance of Subjectivity

3.      Man’s Freedom

4.      Criticism of Idealism

5.      Criticism of Naturalism

6.      Criticism of Scientific Culture

7.      Attention on Human Weakness and Security

Themes such as freedom, decision, and responsibility are prominent in all existentialist philosophers. These matters constitute the core of personal being. It is the exercise of freedom and the ability to shape the future that distinguishes man from all other beings that we know on earth. It is through free and responsible decisions that man becomes authentically himself. Another group of recurring existentialist themes includes such topics as finitude, guilt, alienation, despair, moods, changing feelings, emotional life of man and death. Discussions of these have not been prominent in traditional philosophy, yet they are discussed at length in existentialism. For the existentialist man is never just part of the cosmos but always stands to it in a relationship of tension with possibilities for tragic conflict.

Who is an Existentialist?

According to Alain Badiou-

A writer of absurd, of despair, of empty skies, of incommunicability and of eternal solitude in sum, on Existentialist.

Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Jean Paul Sartre, Harold Pinter are writers and founders of the term. As we all know the history of W.W.II, Existentialism came in existence by this horrific notable event. Divided into two parts, Existentialism is a strange philosophy because it contains question only every question are answered here ultimately nothing, it contains emptiness, solitude within.

If shows purposelessness of life. How strange is life! Which seem to be the most sensible things have no aim ultimately? That is why, a group of thinkers and critics consider the term as pessimistic.

 But think this emptiness, the nothingness is mystery because, once you got the answer, you’ll surely lose its charm. Life contains mystery with that emptiness its one of the most important psychological conditions to be survived. After all it is up to you that how you think about it.

Hence, the term may followed by the two different aspects, (point of view), Optimism or pessimism pessimistic point of view may lead us to an gloomy life but by expanding our limits of horizons, we may able to feel it on the other shades of colour.

Existentialism in ‘Waiting for Godot’

“Waiting for Godot” is Beckett’s despondently portrayed interpretation of how mankind derives meaning from life. Vladimir and Estragon believe they have made a conscious choice to wait for Godot. They find a lot of comfort in passing the time through their trivial conversations while munching on carrots and turnips. Even more importantly, though, they have each other to help pass the time. It is indeed the journey that makes life most meaningful: the freedom of choice, the trivial daily routines, and the inspirational companionships on the journey through life.

Beckett, throughout the play, presents human purpose through the bleakest possible fashion. The play is encompassed by uncertainty. Will Godot ever come? What day is it? How long have we been together? How old is he? Is Pozzo really blind? Did the same boy come yesterday? All these questions and many others are left unanswered. Beckett has also stripped theater to only its bare essentials. He casts only five total characters; all are introduced with little or no background information. All that is given for the setting is that it is evening on a county road.

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s book, Existentialism and Human Emotions, he says,

“I cannot be anything unless others recognize me as such. In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself” (Sartre 38).

Vladimir recognizes Estragon as a necessary companion and vice-versa so each is able to qualify himself as a meaningful person. The two characters derive much of their self worth from their companionship and what they do for one another. Estragon seems week and irresponsible, so Vladimir always comes to his aide. For example, Vladimir helps Estragon get his boots on saying, “Yes yes. Come on, we’ll try the left first.” (77). Vladimir is also the one that seems to be responsible for feeding Estragon. When Estragon violently says, “I’m hungry,” Vladimir cheerfully responds, “Do you want a carrot,” as if feeding Estragon is his most appealing duty (18, 16). Both these examples contribute to Vladimir feeling that his life is meaningful. Vladimir and Estragon certainly share the strongest desire for companionship.

This is apparent in the following dialogue:

Vladimir: Gogo!

Estragon: Didi!

Vladimir: Your hand!

Estragon: Take it!

Vladimir: Come to my arms!

Estragon: Your arms?

Vladimir: My breast! (85-86).

Waiting for Godot is an existentialist play because it has all the ingredients of existentialism per se in it. It is an existentialist play because ‘Existentialism’ as a term stands for one’s awareness of one’s being and questiong it at the same time. ‘Waiting for Godot deals not only with the existence or identity but also deals with man’s mental condition. For instance, Vladimir and Estragon continuously complain of the slowness of the time passing and do their best to hurry it with their futile diversions.

No one comes in the play t the very end and waiting becomes the only way of humans which may define their existence. Here we find existentialism knit closely to the content of the play and the outcome is the absurdity of the reality of human existence.

Exitentialism in Gujarati Literature by focusing upon Shrikant Shah’s ‘Aapane Badha Akash Niche Ubha Chhie’

Shrikant Shah is one of the most revered Gujarati Existential writers others like Adil Mansoori,  Chinu Modi (Dayal na pankhio, Photographer), Hasmukh Baradi (Kalo Kamlo); Labhshankar Thaker (Pilu Gulab ane hu) ; Mahesh Dave (Mane Orishyo Dekhay chhe) shrikant shah (Tirad); Madhu Ray (Into na sat rang),

Gujarat writers used to read this philosophy and they were very much influenced by the works and the term itself.  Gujarati writers, therefore, tried to feel it without going through the pain of it and as a result the end product is a body without its soul.

‘Apane…’ is an existential play by Shrikant Shah. The style of writing is absurd. In this play, there are six characters and here, we should take protagonist as an existential person.  Protagonist Rajesh is dead before 2 years at the time shown in setting of the play. He had a family consisting of a wife, a daughter, a brother and a friend, in a way a complete happy family, a ‘perfect family’ but the problem is raised with the death of Rajesh not for the vacuum that is created by Rajesh, but the problem for Rajesh as being an existential character.  His friend, utpal was taking his place in the life of his wife. Her brother was handling his business. The problem is not that he is absent but his ‘absence’ has not affected their lives. First phrase of the play suggest that his existence lies only in the memory of their family members.

mari hasti mari pachhal a rite visrai gai,

angali jal mathi nikli ne jaga purai gai”

utpal: jara agal chali ne radiyogram upar padela tara patidenva photo ne undho padi de ne?

rekha: kem ? rajesh no dar lage chhe?

utpal: rajesh dar lage tevo manas kyarey na hato. rekha tu mara mitra ne anyay kari rahi chhe.

rekha: kem jane hu tm rajesh ne olakhati j n hou?

(radiogram pase jai rajeshna photo ne undho padi de chhe, pachhi najik avine utpal pase besi jay chhe)

With the presence of Utpal, Rekha felt a new world building around her. Utpal then talks with Ashu, who was very well settled in business. Nothing as such changed in the lives of rajesh’s family members; his nonexistence was irrelevant to all of them.

Existence of human being is just like a bubble in the water, he/she wouldn’t matter one he/she is no more. Rajesh s spirit wanted to note the changes and the influence upon his family members on evening his spirit came and noticed these things

rajesh          : (motethi hase chhe.,,) ha..ha..ha…

rajesh hasto hoy a vakhete sampurn andharu thai jay chhe ane farithi sampuran light thay chhe tyare rajesh khurshi par hoto nathi, rekha, beera, utpal ane aashu ae chare jana vato kare chhe. parantu temno avaj sambhlato nathi… matr mime.

turantj andhkar thai jay chhe ane aek spotlight radiogram par pade chhe tya photoframe tatha pani na glass padela chhe.

This play tries a lot to be existential at its core but unfortunately its outcome is soulless. Gujarati Existential writers made an attempt to be existential in their approach but it should not be forgotten that it is to be felt, and not merely produced.

This paper, therefore attempts to take a stand that existentialism as a philosophy (if it can be termed so) cannot be borrowed, as the outcome would mean that it is a lifeless skeleton of thoughts.

References

1.     Beckett Samuel, Waiting for Godot

2.     Shah Shrikant, Aapde Badha Ek Aakash Niche Ubha Chhie

3.     Macquarrie, J. (1968): Existenatialism, Pelican Book.

4.     Sartre, J.P. (2007) Existentialism Is A Humanism, tr. C. Macomber, New Haven: Yale University Press.

5.     Barry Peter (2008), Beginning Theory, New York: Manchester University Press.

-----------------

n  Research was conducted while I was conducting my bachelors. There are several things to add after re-visiting the text. This would go in informal way as these are abstract points which occurred to my mind while studying it in class.

-                     A text is something which has so many things to cater with each n every reading. A text is never static. It always moves on with layers of meanings and the layers opens up itself while visiting again and again. Some of the time it happens we get something totally different than what we have seen before.

-                     As Gandhiji says ‘if in case, I contradict in my statements, consider the last one.’ Because the latest one comes after more sanity, more experience.

-                     Earlier while I was conducting the research work, I found existentialism a very passive, pessimistic, negative term to think upon. But this time, while discussing the text in class, we were given numerous examples and explanation what existentialism would mean. Knowing the fact that what we are doing is of no mean, we are to play our role very skilfully. It is a new vision towards life. It is never pessimistic term but what it does with our mind is – “it is alarming us” as two of the character uses in their dialogues frequently in ‘Waiting for Godot’.

-                     In my research work, I have taken the work “Apne badha akash niche ubha chhie” by shrikant shah. Here i would take another work by equally valent Gujarati writer ‘Labhshankar Thakar’ – ‘vriksh’. First let me introduce writer in brief. Labhshankar Thakar is well-known Guajarati playwright as well as poet, who is very much influenced by the movement Existentialism. He is the one who brought existentialism in Guajarati literature with his contemporary authors like ‘Madhu Rai’.

Visiting play ‘vriksh’ very briefly -

Vriksh is also an absurd play in which a person suddenly becomes a tree. At first family members of that person gets shocked. After some time they realise that this is the matter of news out of which we can earn lots of money. Now they are happy. And they had enough money out of that incident. Now in order to build a bigger house, his own father and wife were ready to cut him (in form of tree) off from roots.

The story otherwise seems very much interesting but what we must feel here is, it cannot go under the umbrella named ‘existentialism’ or ‘theatre of absurd’. Rather the idea of presenting the thing in such a way itself becomes absurd. Lot many perspectives.

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Victorian Literature.

PRESENTATION SEM - 2

PAPER-5 ROMANTIC LITERATURE from Bhumi Dangi

Paper 6 Victorian Literature. from Bhumi Dangi

Paper.7 criticism from Bhumi Dangi

Paper.8 cultural studies from Bhumi Dangi

PAPER 8- “Post-Modernist theory applying to a short-story – ‘The Guest’ by Albert Camus”

PAPER 8- CULTURAL STUDIES.

“Post-Modernist theory applying to a short-story –

‘The Guest’ by Albert Camus”

Post-Modernism

Postmodernism, especially in terms of its use for Cultural Studies, rejects the opposition between ‘high’ or elite culture and ‘low’ or mass culture. It questions the criteria by which certain forms/terms/assumptions are projected as ‘good taste’, ‘classics’, permanent (‘for all time to come) and universal. Postmodernism is closely aligned with cultural studies in its rejection of ‘high/low’ distinctions between cultures, and its focus on the moods by which certain cultural artefacts come to occupy higher status.

It interrogates any notion, philosophy or ideal of a general, universal and overarching nature (such as Marxist idea). It celebrates plurality, heterogeneity, and the small, local, innovative, marginalised and unfinished narratives that respect differences and specificities of cultures, individuals and religions. Meaning is seen as differential, contingent and purely arbitrary. The process of repress nation seeks not to offer any insights into reality or truth.

In literature it collapses the distinction between genres and conventions. The thriller format becomes part of the serious novel. Comic element and absurdity mark the author’s attitude to tragic events like death, suffering, the Holocaust (Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut,  Jr). Myths, fairy tales, legends and contemporary realities merge (Donald Barthelm, Salman Rushdie & Gabriel Garcia Marques). Historical figures jostle with contemporary people (for instance, the use of Goethe and Hemingway as characters by Milan Kundera). It becomes impossible to distinguish between reality and illusion, for both the characters and the reader. The distinction between ‘real’ history and ‘mere’ fiction is called into question (Graham Swift’s Water land). The narrator continually undermines his own apparently ‘reliable’ narrative & we are left wondering: can we trust this story at all?

Postmodernism suggests that power relations structure all social truths, approaches and even conceptions of reality.

Jean-Francois Lyotard and the Postmodern Condition:

Jean-Francois Lyotard characterises the postmodernism as disbelief in and resistance to metanarrative (narrative that seek to explain and address universal conditions while assuming that these explanations suit all contexts and locations).

1 The disbelief towards metanarratives is the disillusionment with totalizing explanations of reality. This includes the narrative of science, philosophy and religion. For instance, the Marxist ideal of an emancipatory agenda and aim for communism or the Christian narratives of redemption are totalizing narratives because they ignore levels in favour of an overaching universal programme or explanation.  

2 These knowledge and explanations are therefore tyrannical and oppressive because they ignore differences in order to impose a false unity on knowledge and reality. These knowledge also conceal beneath an apparent objectivity; their tactics of ‘terror’. Lyotard suggests that scientists and scientific discourses are not employed to disseminate Truth but to argument power. That is, scientific discourse seek to legitimize certain kinds of knowledges and actually suppress oppositional knowledges in order to retain their stranglehold.

Postmodernism acknowledges that all knowledge is fragmentary, partial and incomplete. One can only utilize local knowledge to know a part of the truth. Thus the individual’s experience, knowledge and voice is to be retrieved as a resistance and delegitimation towards grand narratives that simply pass off one version of knowledge and reality as universal.

Jean Baudrillard and the hyperreal

Baudrillard’s central argument is that in the age of perfect reproduction (the photography, the digital copy) and endless repetition of images, the distinction between the real and the illusory, between original and ‘copy’, between superficiality and depth has broken down. What we now have is a culture of ‘hyperreal’.

Baudrillard suggests that a sign merely refers to other signs. The entire system is constituted by such signs that are ultimately empty because they only refer to other similar signs rather than ‘Truth’. ‘Truth’ is truth a simulacrum of the real image/model becomes more real than real. It is the generation of copies and models of the real without origin or reality, or what is called the ‘hyperreal’.

Virtual reality, global communications, the infinite reproductions of data banks and holograms are examples of the redundancy of the distinction between real and imagined, between ‘Truth’ and copy.

In a consumer society objects are not simply consumed. They signify a status rather than satisfy a need. In a consumer society objects become signs and what we consume images, and the exchange value is transformed into sign-value.

For Baudrillard, then, the postmodern is characterised by the hyperreal, by the collapse of distinction between the private and the public (home, office, and now homeoffice). This is the ‘implosion of meaning in the media: where signs without referents enchant us.

About ‘The Guest’ by albert Camus

The Guest follows the story of Daru, who is a schoolteacher in a remote plateau region. The area has gone through a draught, but recently a blizzard has passed through, leaving everything covered in snow. This has kept away Daru's pupils.

The narrative opens as Daru watches two men approach his schoolhouse. He watches them climb the hill. One of the men, a gendarme named Balducci, is very familiar to Daru. He leads an Arab prisoner who has been accused of murdering his cousin in a family squabble. Balducci has been ordered to bring the Arab to Daru, and then return immediately to his post. Likewise, Daru has orders to turn in the prisoner to police headquarters at a town approximately twenty kilometres away. Daru refuses this task, considering it dishonourable. Balducci agrees with the schoolmaster, but insists that in war men must be prepared to do many different jobs. The gendarme is insulted by Daru's stubborn refusal, and leaves in anger.

Daru feeds the Arab and spends the night sleeping in the same room as the prisoner. During the night the Arab gets up for water, and Daru mistakenly thinks he has escaped. The next day Daru leads the Arab to a point on the plateau, and equips him with money and food supplies. He points him in the direction of imprisonment, and then also points him in the direction away from police headquarters, where he will find shelter with the native people. He leaves the Arab with the choice, but when he looks back, he is upset to see the Arab ultimately chooses the direction leading towards imprisonment. The story ends with Daru looking out the window of his schoolhouse.

Daru

He watches Balducci and the Arab approach the schoolhouse at the start of the narrative. The schoolhouse is his home, although with the sudden snow none of his pupils attend anymore. He spends the blizzard in his room, only leaving it to feed the chickens, get coal, or go to the shed. The administration has given him wheat to distribute to his pupils. During the draught he felt like a lord in his crude house because he was surrounded by complete and utter poverty. He is from this region, which is described as cruel, but he feels exiled anywhere else. Daru argues against delivering the Arab to Tinguit, and is plunged into a state of moral despair at the end of the narrative when he realizes that the Arab has chosen certain imprisonment.

Balducci

Balducci is the man on the horse who leads the Arab up the hill to Daru. He holds the horse back so not to hurt the Arab. Once within earshot he shouts a greeting to Daru. He is an old gendarme and has known Daru for a long time. He looks upon Daru as a son, but is insulted by Daru's refusal to turn in the Arab. It is Balducci who first speaks of a revolt, and speaks about the obligations that men face during war. He clearly longs for a peaceful retirement, but is resigned to his duties.

The Arab

The Arab is being led by Balducci. He walks while the gendarme rides a horse, and his hands are tied. He keeps his head bowed, which fascinates Daru, and does not raise his head once during the ascent. He wears a blue jellaba, sandals, and a cheche on his head. He is very timid and fearful throughout the narrative, and even does not try to escape despite many opportunities. At the end, he decides to walk towards imprisonment, and in this way symbolizes the absurdity and despair of the human condition.

This perfectly represents the most-modernism in itself. The writer belong the pioneers of post-modernism. Camus has worked for absurdist literature the most. His contribution is remarkable. This is very important aspect to be studied. 

PAPER 7 - “Application of Theory – structuralism on A Gujarati Suspense novel ‘Lajja Sanyal’ by Ashvini Bhatt”

PAPER 7 - LITERARY CRITICISM

“Application of Theory – structuralism on A Gujarati Suspense novel ‘Lajja Sanyal’ by Ashvini Bhatt”

"Structuralism and Literary Criticism"

The pagination in brackets refers to the text as republished in David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory.

1: The critic and the literary: Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception of the bricoleur as opposed to the engineer; it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur , working with what is to hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer, a rather literary-critical thing to do.

Genette then makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use, it is in fact a metaliterature, a literature on a literature. Poststructuralists will challenge the distinction between the two, and Genette here refers to Barthes distinctions to suggest that some literary criticism may be literature.

He then defines literariness in a way much like a formalist would: literariness is language production in which the attention is addressed to spectacle rather than message -- something one supposes like Jakobson's poetic function, or meta-poetic; in fact to put it right into Jakobson's terms, the attention is on the poetic rather than on the referential function, on medium rather than on message. Genette will later in the essay insist that this does not degrade the meaning-function of the language.

Genette as well refers to that aspect of literature which is so close to the New Critical understanding of ambiguity, the 'halt', the attention to the constitution of meaning under a different aspect, that also characterizes the literary; so it is that there is only a literary function , no literariness in any essential or material sense. Genette's sense of the ambiguity of literature is similar to Jakobson's in "Linguistics and Poetics", in which essay he writes that "Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary feature of poetry...Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee become ambiguous." (pp 49-50 in Lodge).

2: The role of the critic: The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer's engineer, but in a position therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treats as signs what the writer is creating as concept: the attitude, the disposition is different. The critic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed according to various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does not ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, not directly encountered. (65T) Where the post-structuralist will differ is in their denial that anything can be transparent: all concepts are themselves constructed of signs, there is no unmediated thought, all mediated thought is social thought, there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.

3: Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise. While structuralism historically (in Europe) is a linguistic phenomenon, and it would seem reasonable th at structuralist criticism would then be linguistic in its nature, this is too simple an assumption.

First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certain function and therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and the relationships of sounds and meaning in a particular way. The ends then are important. As he writes on page 66, structuralist method as such is constituted at the very moment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices. (Poststructuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.)

Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is an analogy between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but because both deal with:

the relation between forms and meanings,

the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of experience,

the cultural perception of reality, and

the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.

Genette writes on p. 67 of the idea of a table of concordance, variable in its details but constant in its function: it is the function, not the detail, that concerns structuralist thought. One of the elements of literature that Genette deals with later is genre, which segments experience in certain ways, and controls the attitudes towards it. What is the place of this individual work in the systems of representation? That is a key question.

4: Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form. Genette is at pains to point out that structuralism is not just about form, but about meaning, as linguistics is about meaning. It is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture. (67 ft) When Jakobson writes of the centrality of tropes to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart of the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we say something by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity, which is a meaning-function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in #1 above. Finally in this section, Genette looks forward to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of the analysis of narratives, for instance -- "an analysis that could distinguish in them [that is, larger units], by a play of superimpositions [and hence knowledge through difference], variabvle elements and constant functions, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system, familiar to Saussureanlinguistics, of syntagmatic relations (real connections of functions in the continuity of a text) and paradigmatic relations (virtual relations between similar or oposed functions, form one text to another, in the whole of the corpus considered)>"[68t]

5: Structuralism is a general tendency of thought (Cassirer) Structuralism is, however, not necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking; [68] structures are"systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discovering them" -- that is, structures are explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what they seek to explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. as we can only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of texts or events in their own terms (as those terms are conceived), not in relation to external causes.

When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field of meanings, and to the coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally. Structuralist reading abandons pyschological, sociological, and such explanations. One can see New Criticism as a structural methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structural analysis of theme, for instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes, that is, of certain elements of filaments of the configuration, or network or matrix of, of social meanings, which meanings constitute culture.

6: Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing itself. Genette mentions the other form of intrinsic criticism, phenomenological criticism, in which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. Ricoeur refers to this, Genette writes, as the hermeneutic method: the intuitive convergence to two consciousnesses, the authors and the readers. This is a little confusing, because this is not hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather phenomenological hermeneutics. When there is hermeneutics, Genette says, when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, then structural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, becomes dominant -- literatures [71t] distant in place and time, children's literature, popular literature. Genette goes on to suggest that the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical position of the critic -- (between identity and distance, say). Structuralism is an intrinsic reading free from subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture (71).

7: Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meanings of the culture. (72) Genette suggests that topics is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to -- the traditional subjects and forms of the culture (from the Greek topos, 'place'; I prefer to refer to culturally-constucted sites of meaning as topoi, to try to retain the full meaning of the idea). Topics, or topoi, are structural in that they underlie the way we talk and think about things in our culture. They are in a sense psychological, Genette says [72], but collectively so, not individually. Throughout, in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides, Genette has been suggesting that 'high' literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary, location for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun.

8: Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light. Different genres predispose the reader to different attitudes, different expectations [cf. the saying, attributed to Voltaire, that life is a comedy to he who thinks and a tragedy to he who feels, which saying suggests a way in which genres might look differently at experience]. Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values. Without conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise, the reversals which mark the more brilliant exercise of creativity. Hence creativity is in a sense structural, as it depends on our expectation, which it them plays upon.

9: Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning system. Structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture.

10: Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness. Structuralism studies literature historically by studying it as it were in cross-section at different times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of the cultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature, as the Russian formalists thought; what the change registers is the alterations of the relations of meaning within the culture.

Lajja Sanyal.

-Ashvini Bhatt.

Lajja Sanyal is suspense thriller novel best can be studied with concept like structuralism in mind. Lajja Sanyal is the protagonist. By profession she is an actress. In other works also we may see that characters belong to film industry. Other novels like ‘Angar’ and ‘Othar’ by Ashvini, there are characters that belong to film industry.

The novel starts at the room of court and the judgement was passed that Lajja is a murderer. She was carried by a van and she eloped from the van. Then readers are introduced with the incidents one by one. Actually that murder was not done by Lajja that was revealed at last. That murder was a part of a mission regarding Army. The frequency, order all parts are carried out in the novel. 

Paper. 6,- “Comparative study of writing style of Tennyson and Browning”

Paper-6

·       Victorian Literature

·       “Comparative study of writing style of Tennyson and Browning”

 ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-92)

Ø His Life

Alfred Tennyson, the son of a clergyman, was born at his father's living at Somersby in Lincolnshire. After some schooling at Louth, this was not agreeable to him; he proceeded to Cambridge (1828). At the university he was a wholly conventional person", and the only mark he made was to win the Chancellor's Medal for a poem on ‘Timbuctoo’. He left Cambridge without taking a degree; but before doing "so he published a small volume of mediocre verse. During the next twenty years he passed a tranquil existence, living chiefly with his parents, and writing much poetry Pleasant jaunts--to the Lake District, to Stratford-on-Avon. And other places - varied his peaceful life, and all the while his fame as a poet was making headway. In 1844 he lost most of his small means in an unlucky speculation, but in the nick of time (1845) he received a Government pension. He was appointed Poet Laureate (1850) in succession to Wordsworth, married, and removed (1853) to Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, which was his home for the next twenty years. In his later years recognition and applause came increasingly upon him, and he was regarded as the greatest poet of his day. In 1884 he was created a baron, sat in the House of Lords, and for a time took himself rather seriously as a politician, falling out with Gladstone over the Irish question. He died at Aldworth, near Haslemere, in Surrey, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Ø His Poetry

When he was seventeen years old Tennyson collaborated with his elder brother Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1827): The volume is a slight one, but in the light of his later work we can already discern a little of the Tennysonian metrical aptitude and descriptive power. His prize poem of Timbuctoo (1829) is not much better than the usual prize poem. His Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), published while he was an undergraduate, are yet immature, but in pieces like Isabel and Madeline the pictorial effect and the sumptuous imagery of his mature style are already conspicuous.

The later stages of his career are marked chiefly by much longer poems. The Princess (1847) is a serio-comic attempt to handle the theme that was then known as 'the new woman.' For the sake of his

story Tennyson imagines a ladies' academy with a mutinously intellectual princess at the head of it. For a space a tragedy seems imminent, but in the end all is well, for the Princess is married to the blameless hero. The poem is in blank verse, but interspersed are several singularly beautiful lyrics. The humour is heavy, but many of the descriptions are as rich and wonderful as any Tennyson ever attempted.

In Memoriam (1850) caused a great stir when it first appeared. It is a very long series of meditations upon the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's college friend, who died at Vienna in 1833. Tennyson brooded over the subject for years; and upon this elegiac theme he imposed numerous meditations on life and death, showing how these subjects were affected by the new theories of the day. For the first, and probably the only, time,

Tennyson's feelings were stirred and troubled. The result was the most deeply emotional, and probably the greatest, poetry he ever produced. The poem is adorned with many beautiful sketches of English scenery; -and the metre--now called the In Memoriam metre--which is quite rare, is deftly managed. Maud and Other Poems (1855) were received with amazement by the public. The chief poem is called a 'monodrama'; it consists of a series of lyrics which reflect the love and hatred, the hope and despair, of a lover who says his mistress's brother, and then flies broken to France. The whole tone of the work is forced and fevered, auu of war and bloodshed. It does not add to Tennyson's fame. In 1859, 1869, and 1889 Tennyson issued a series of Idylls of the King, which had considered and attempted a great theme that Milton abandoned--that of King Arthur and the Round Table. Many doting admirers saw in the Idylls an allegory of the soul of man; but in effect Tennyson drew largely upon the simple tales of Malory, stripping them of their "bold bawdry" to please his public, and covering them with a thick coating of his delicate and detailed ornamentation. It is doubtful if this unnatural compound of Malory-Tennyson is quite a happy one, but we do obtain much blank verse of noble and sustained power.

The only other poem of any length is Enoch Arden (1864), which became the most popular of all, and found its way in translation into foreign languages. The plot is cheap enough, dealing with a seaman, supposedly drowned, who returns and, finding his wife happily married to another man, regretfully retires without making him known. The tale, as ever, is rich with Tennysonian adornment. In particular there is a description of the tropical island where Enoch is wrecked that is among the highest flights of the poet:

“The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,

The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes.”

Among the shorter poems, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886) and The Death of

CEnone (1892) are sad echoes of the sumptuous imaginings of the years preceding 1842.

His Plays

Tennyson's dramas occupied his later years. He wrote three historical plays- Quern Mary (1875), Harold (1876). Becket (1884). The last, owing chiefly to the exertions of Sir Henry Irving, the actor-manager, was quite a stage success. None, however, rank high as real dramatic efforts, though they show much care and skill. The Falcon (1879) is a comedy based on a story from Boccaccio; The Cup (1881) is based on a story from Plutarch, and scored a success, also through the skill of Irving. The Foresters (1892), dealing with the familiar Robin Hood theme, was produced in America.

His Poetical Characteristics

(a) His Choice of Subject. Tennyson's earliest instincts, as seen in the volumes 'of1830, 1833, and 1842, led him to the lyric and legendary narrative as his principal themes, and these he handled with a skill and artistry which he rarely surpassed.

Already, however, in the 1842 volume, there are signs of the ethical interest which was to be the mainspring of his later work. As a thinker, Tennyson lacked depth and originality. He was content to mirror the feelings and-aspirations of his time, and his didactic work lacks the burning fire which alone can transform the didactic into truly great art. The requirements of his office as Poet Laureate led to the production of a number of occasional poems which have caused him to be. Described contemptuously as the newspaper of his age Of them, all that need be said here is that it is surprising that they are as good as they are. For the rest, with notable exceptions such as Ulysses and In Memoriam, Tennyson's poems are best when he reverts to the lyric or narrative themes which were his original inspiration.

(b) His Craftsmanship. No one can deny the great care and skill shown in Tennyson work. His method of producing poetry was slowly to evolve the lines in his mind, commit them to paper, and to revise them till they were as near perfection as he could make them. Consequently we have a high level of poetical artistry. No one excels Tennyson in the deft application of sound to sense and in the subtle and pervading employment of alliteration and vowel music. Such passages as this abound in his work:

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees.

The Princess

This is perhaps not the highest poetry, but shows only a kind of manual, or rather aural, dexterity; yet as Tennyson employs it it is effective to a degree. His excellent craftsmanship is also apparent in his handling of English metres, in which he is a tireless experimenter. In blank verse he is not as varied and powerful as Shakespeare, nor so majestically as Milton, but in the skill of his workmanship and in his wealth of diction he falls but little short of these great masters.

c) Tennyson's lyrical quality is somewhat uneven. The slightest of his pieces, like The Splendour Falls, are musical and attractive; but on the whole his nature was too self-conscious and perhaps his life too regular and prosperous, to provide a background for the true lyrical intensity of emotion. Once or twice, as in the wonderful Break, break, break and Crossing the Bar, he touches real greatness:

Break, break, break -

“And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still I

Break, break, break,”

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-89)

His Life

Browning was born at Camberwell, his father being connected with the Bank of England. The future poet was educated semi-privately, and from an early age he was free to follow his inclination toward studying unusual subjects. As a child he was precocious, and began to write poetry at the age of twelve. Of his predecessors Shelley in particular influenced his mind, which was unformed and turbulent at this time with the growing power within. After a brief course at University College

Browning for a short period travelled in Russia (1833); then he lived in London, where he became acquainted with some of the leaders of the literary and theatrical worlds. In 1834 he paid his first visit to Italy, a country which was for him a fitful kind of home. In 1845 he visited Elizabeth Barrett, the poetess, whose works had strongly attracted him. A mutual liking ensured, and then, after a private marriage, a sort of elopement followed, to escape the anger of the wife's stern parent. The remainder of Browning's life was occupied with journeys between England and France and Italy, and with much poetical activity. His wife died at Florence in 1861, leaving one son. Browning thereupon left the city for good and returned to

England, though in 1878 he went back once more to Italy. His works, after suffering much neglect, were now being appreciated, and in 1882 Oxford conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L. He died in Italy, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

His Poems and Plays

His first work of any importance is Pauline(1833), an introspective poem, which shows very strongly the influence of Shelley, whom, at this period, Browning held in great reverence. Paracelsus (1835), the story of the hero's unquenchable thirst for that breadth of knowledge which is beyond the grasp of one man, brings to the for Browning's predominant ideas that a life without love must be a failure, and that

God is working all things to an end beyond human divining. The style of the poem is diffuse, but the blank verse contains many passages of great beauty and is interspersed with one or two charming lyrics:

Thus the Mayne glideth

Where my love abideth.

His next work was the play Strafford (1837), which was produced by the actor Macready, and which achieves real pathos toward the close. Sordello (1840), an attempt to decide the relationship between art and life, is Browning's most obscure work. The story of the hero, a Mantuan troubadour, is cumbered with a mass of detailed historical allusion, and the style, in spite of occasional passages of descriptive beauty, is too compressed.

It is convenient next to deal with the entire group of eight volumes, which, published separately from 1841 onward, were collected in one volume as Bells and Pomegranates in 1846.  Luria and a Soul's Tragedy (1846), none of these is without its moments of drama, and they all show considerable spirit in their style. Pippa Passes, which was not intended for the stage, has an idyllic charm, and it contains fine songs. His amazingly subtle analysis of character and motive is not adequate for true drama because he cannot reveal character in action. His method is to take a character at a moment of crisis and, by allowing him to talk, to reveal not only his present thoughts and feelings but his past history.

Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) show this faculty being directed into the channel in which it was to achieve perfection--that of the dramatic monologue. In the latter volume appeared The Italian in England, the Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint

Praxed's, and Pictor Ignotus among many others.1 Dramatic Lyrics consists mainly of lyrics, such as Cavalier Tunes, and, most striking of all, those-love lyrics which, though impersonal, were really the fruit of his happy marriage with Elizabeth Barrett. Of the love lyrics of this period Meeting at Night is typical:

“The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,”

Now at the height of his powers, Browning produced some of his best work in Men and Women (1855), which, with the exception of the dedicatory One Word More, addressed to his wife, consists entirely of dramatic monologues. Here are to be found the famous Fra Lippo Lippi, An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician, Andrea Del Sarto, Cleon. Most of them are written in blank verse. The year 1864 saw the publication of his last really great volume, Dramatis Persona, again a collection of dramatic monologues. To illustrate their quality mention need be made of only such works as Caliban upon Setebos, A Death in the Desert, Rabbi Ben Ezra, and Abt Vogler. In style the poems have much of the rugged, elliptical quality which was on occasion the poet's downfall, but here it is used with a skill and a power which show him at the very pinnacle of his achievement.

The remaining years of Browning's long life saw the production of numerous further volumes of verse, few of which add greatly to his fame. To-day they are read by none but his most confirmed admirers. Balaustion's Adventure (1871), Prince Hohenstiel- Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871).

In too many of them the style betrays a wilful exaggeration of the eccentricities which he had once turned to such great account, but always the reader is liable to stumble across

passages which, in striking lanscape of lovely lyric, show that the true poetic gift is not completely absent.

His long life's work has a powerful close in Asolando. (1889), which, along with much of the tired disillusion of the old man, has, in places, the firmness and enthusiasm of his prime. The last verses he ever wrote describe him in the character he most loved to adopt:

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work time Greet the unseen with a cheer! Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "Strive and thrive!" cry, "Speed,--fight on, fare ever There as here!"

Features of his Work

(a) His Choice of Subject. Browning's themes divide themselves broadly into three groups as in The Pied Piper of Hamelin. His philosophical poems, on which his reputation rested in his own day, all bear on his central beliefs that life must ever be a striving for something beyond our reach, and that it is "God's task to make the heavenly period perfect the earthen." The obvious optimism of What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me. has been resented by more modern critics as a facile shirking of life's complexities. His love poems are, perhaps, his greatest achievement. They have a calm authenticity of tone.

Always, his first concern was with the human soul. He was particularly interested in abnormal people, and was able to project himself into their minds and to lay bare their feelings and motives. Yet his characters are not often completely objective. because so many of them are mouthpieces for his own philosophy.

He shows a fondness, too, for out-of-the-way historical settings and for foreign scenes, which, at his best, as in The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's and Karshish, are recreated with a vivid accuracy. Along with this interest in the unusual goes an obvious relish for the grotesque and macabre, which is seen at its most striking in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower.

b) His Descriptive Power. In this respect Browning differs widely from Tennyson, who slowly creates a lovely image by careful massing of detail. Browning cares less for beauty of description for its own sake. In most of his work it is found only in flashes, where he paints the background of his story in a few dashing strokes, or crystallizes his meaning in an image whose beauty staggers us. He is fond of striking primary colours which startle by their very vividness, and as a painter of movement he has few equals. The passages which follow show two very different examples of his descriptive skill:

“Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;

Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,

That floats and feeds; a certain badger brow”