Children ultimately grow and end up finding out that the father is as fallible as the bumbling schoolteacher who did not know what was the exchange rate of the Tuvaluan Dollar to Euro or Yen. Nevertheless, it takes some time for the realization to dawn that the Internet search engines are better at providing answers than their fathers. The cut-off point is usually the high school. Once they get into the college, kids become sure that mom’s outlook is extremely conventional and pop mostly holds outdated views.[break]
Being typical of her cohort, an inquisitive teenager wanted to know why she was expected to do what she had been asked to do by her teacher of literature. “Papa, why do we analyse poems? Aren’t they beautiful just to read?” The question sounds innocent. Its possible answers—unlike in physical sciences, there is seldom only one definitive answer in arts and humanities—complicate rather than clarify the idea of appreciating creative expressions.
The science of poetry
Songs are easy to recognise. Prose too is self-evident. Poetry, however, is difficult to define. The only thing sure about poetry is that it is an art. An eleventh grader would then naturally want to know the meaning of art. Perhaps the simplest way of defining art is that it’s a way of expressing feelings or making sense of one’s imagination through shapes (art and architecture), sounds (music and songs), movements (dance and theatre) and words (poetry and literature) put into an aesthetic order. If that were so, a work of art would have no higher purpose than being what it is. Analysis is then pointless and merely another form of art in itself.
Chandra Shekhar Karki
The way analysis is commonly understood—a detailed examination of elements, constituents, and structure—however demands the detachment that can transform a work of art into an object of scientific inquiry. Scientific knowledge is accumulated by systematic study, organised around general principles, which are testable, predictable and repeatable. Poems would then be like mathematical formulas: Beautiful by itself for its practitioners, but without the mystique that, according to Dylan Thomas, “…helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone´s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
Poetry is said to emerge from the depths of heart that the mind cannot fathom. Verses work in magical ways when recited. Chanting transforms Sanskrit Shlokas into sacred rhymes. The music of English sonnet, Urdu Gajals, Chhandbaddha Nepali poems and rhythmic Maithili Geet are impossible to discover by reading them in silence. Performance is the integral part of most traditional forms of poetry. The free verse—poetry without form—however has to capture the essence and force of poetry in plain words. Words that can be read in silence, recited aloud, or reflected over in a crowd and in solitude. Free verse, by necessity, requires ‘work’ to compose as well as to read. Poets build word-pictures and use allegories to create imagined realities.
Metaphors are to poets what concepts are to philosophers, narratives to storytellers and rhetoric to intellectuals. Even when art is what it is, the moment words are used, some message is invariably conveyed. Poets may not like to admit it, but their methods closely resemble techniques of intellectuals.
User of rhetoric—the ‘rhetor’ was the word that seems to have gone out of use—relies upon logos (using logical arguments such as induction and deduction), pathos (creating an emotional reaction in the audience), ethos (projecting a trustworthy, authoritative, or charismatic image) or a combination of these methods to get the intended message across.
Marxism is claimed to be a ‘science’. That could be one of the reasons Marxists rely primarily upon logos. Exceptions apart, poems flowing out of Marxist school often read like briefs of lawyers in the courtroom of time. “Isn´t the rhetorical art, taken as a whole, a way of directing the soul by means of speech, not only in the law-courts and on other public occasions but also in private?” asked once a Greek Master of another. Most Marxist poets seem to have taken that question as a canon of their craft. Traditionalists compose rhymes and pass them down as authoritative anthems.
Dominated by Brahminism, the poetry scene in Nepal is depressingly full of logos and ethos categories. Once in a while, a Shrawan Mukarung does come up with something as striking as Bise Nagarchi Ko Bayan evoking deep pathos; but by and large, Nepali poems tends to be preachy and ‘scientific’.
Immense physical and intellectual investments have been made in creating authoritative, scholarly, and charismatic images of Bhanubhakta Acharya, Lekhnath Paudyal and Laxmi Prasad Devkota respectively. Poet Laureate Devkota’s lyrical but short epic Muna Madan continues to outsell most published works in Nepali of either prose or poetry. The second most read and by far the most quoted poet, however, must be Bhupi Sherchan.
Krishna Bhattachan is a distinctive exception—a Janjati Bahun in the characterization of his critics—who can use argumentative techniques with the confidence and conviction exceeding his interlocutors from twice-born castes. Late Harka Gurung could wrestle with ideas of the best of Brahmins and beat them at their own game. By and large however, people on the lower ladders of caste hierarchy are often expressive rather than argumentative.
Despite flashes of pure scholarship, Devkota’s Paagal uses powerful imagery. Mohan Koirala and Bairagi Kaila deserve their notoriety and fame for the mystic of symbols and power of allegory. Banira Giri and Sharda Sharma never fail to surprise with their word pictures. But Bhupi is the true master of metaphors. Little wonder, his Ghumne Mech (revolving chair) and Sano Chok (small courtyard) are two symbols with which at least two generations of urban Nepalis have made sense of their world, and consequently, attempted to change it, bear it or run away from it all, blaming circumstances that made them flee. Among the younger poets, Buddhisagar holds immense promise. Buddhi, however, has to survive in “a world that has been abandoned by God” and has fallen for the epic charms of novel form.
Gopal Parajuli is an innovative wordsmith. He often gives aesthetic order to the chaotic world through his words. His recent anthology, Arko Bishwako Prastab (Nepali Sahitya Vikash Parishad, 2012, 226pp, NPR 250) however is representative of the lure of learning among renowned litterateurs. “I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression,” declares Dylan Thomas somewhat plaintively. That statement is perhaps more ambitious than having an alternative proposal for a better word.
The art of prose
When Patrick French wrote an authorised biography of VS Naipul, it was titled The World is What it is (Picador India, 2008, 576 pp, IRs. 595). Christopher Hitchens termed it “Cruel and Unusual”. Unfortunately, so indeed is the world, which makes the task of writers excruciatingly daunting. Finding beauty of darkness is difficult enough, but to depict it with sensitivity through factual account or in fiction tests the integrity of a writer. Creators of prose are not given poetic licences.
Michael Hutt has been ‘reading’ Nepali literature for quite a while and writing about it sporadically. His anthology Eloquent Hills: Essays on Nepali Literature (Martin Chautari, 2012, 193 pp, NPR 500) deals with poems of Devkota, Koirala and Bhupi in innovative ways. He also ‘reads’ BP Koirala in some detail through Sumnima and Shankar Lamichhane in passing, perhaps two of the best prose writers in Nepali language. Reading, however, makes one to look for meanings. In the process, appreciation for the beauty of the work itself tends to get diluted.
Analysis then is perhaps not the right way to approach literature, be it prose or poetry and works of words that fall in-between. Understanding requires close examination of an idea or a concept so that it can then be accepted, rejected, kept on hold or treated with indifference. Appreciation of art is a voluntary activity. That is literature’s strength as well as its weakness. Minds can be swayed with competitive rhetoric, but when a song reaches the heart, dislodging it from there is fraught with risks of upsetting the order of the world.
Lal contributes to The Week with his biweekly column Reflections. He is one of the widely read political analysts in Nepal.
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