Mahimabhaṭṭa's Analysis of Poetic Flaws

The revolutionary Dhvanyaloka of the mid-ninth-century Kashmiri literary theorist Anandavardhana challenged many of the doctrines and presuppositions of both earlier Sanskrit literary theory (Alamkara'idstra) and general linguistic philosophy. While Anandavardhana's radical views eventually gained more or less universal acceptance among Sanskrit literary theorists, they at first drew a good deal of hostile response from defenders of earlier modes of literary theory as well as non-literary language theory. The most aggressively determined, and also the last, major critic of Anandavardhana's views within the tradition of Ala.mk;rasastra is the mid-eleventh-century Kashmiri Mahimabhatta. Mahimabhatta's only surviving work, his Vyaktiviveka (An Analysis of Suggestion),' is a concerted attack on one of the central components of Anandavardhana's theory. Anandavardhana argues that the beauty of literary language depends crucially on its capacity to convey certain meaning-elements that are not explicitly stated-unstated vastus (narrative elements), alaimkaras (figures of speech), and, most importantly, rasas (aestheticized emotions). One of the primary objectives of Anandavardhana's work is to show that the capacity of poetry to convey these unstated meanings cannot be explained in terms of the two modes of signification generally recognized by theorists of non-literary language (the literal [abhidha] and the figurative [laksand or gunavrtti ]), and that it is therefore necessary to postulate a third, specifically poetic, mode of expression, which he calls (dhvani or vyalijana). It is around the question of the existence or non-existence of suggestion as a distinct mode of signification that controversy most hotly rages in the two and a half centuries following the appearance of the Dhvanyaloka. Mahimabhatta, like many of Anandavardhana's critics, defends orthodox language theory against the challenge presented by Anandavardhana's semantics of language. According to Mahimabhatta there is no need at all for literary theorists to postulate as a previously unrecognized and specially mode of expression; the facts of expression can be accounted for entirely in terms of already recognized semantic and cognitive processes. While fully accepting Anandavardhana's claims for the importance of unstated meaning, particularly rasa, in poetry, he argues that all the types of allegedly suggested meaning dealt with by Anandavardhana are, in fact, understood through a process of inference. Mahimabhatta explicitly states in the opening verse of the Vyaktiviveka that the objective of his work is to demonstrate that Anandavardhana's dhvani is entirely reducible to inference. Yet, surprisingly, a huge portion of the work is devoted to a topic that bears no obvious relation to this stated objective-the detailed analysis of a particular set of poetic flaws

Art · Literature · Poetry · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy

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