The Suggestive Power of Language

Hey Mr. Tambourine man play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you.

Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand
But still not sleeping.

~Mr. Tambourine Man, Bob Dylan

Dylan the poet versus Dylan the recording artist shaped this song, many speculate, to sound like it’s saying one thing while it’s actually saying something quite different. The particular song has become, in pop culture, a mythical drug-referencing poem. A Rasa for the Woodstock generation, one might say! I begin with this reference not only because I’m a Dylan fanatic but because it was important for me to culturally contextualize the concepts about which I was reading for this week’s class. It is only through the lenses that I wear that I can hope to interpret any incoming information!

Seeing as how I am desperately late in the posting of this blog, I will focus entirely on the Raja article, and be prepared to discuss the Dhvanyaloka articles in class. I felt that there was enough meat to the Raja article that I could sufficiently provide some fodder in one blog post without embarking on the epic adventures that Raj and Jackie seem to have taken! So here goes…

Mimamsaka-s and Naiyayika-s – the original developers of literary theories in India – cannot say that, according to Raja, that the literal meanings of words induce the emotions that language often provokes. Nay. Rather, these emotions are nursed out by what lies around, between and under these literal words. This Raja calls the “suggestive power [of] language” (Raja, 281). This suggestive power (vyanjana) is what Anandavardhana extrapolated upon in the Dhvanyaloka, albeit the work focuses mainly on poetic composition rather than all of language. His (Anandavardhana’s) inspiration for this dissertation came from another great literary theorist – Bhartrhari, who developed the sphota doctrine, which emphasized the importance of the whole utterance, rather than a singular, as one unit of language (Raja, 277).

What vyanjana is to linguistics, dhvani is to poetry. This is the foundation of Anandavardhana’s theory of poetic suggestion. Raja mentions that just as “the sound of utterances reveal integral linguistic” (283) similarly the sound in combination with the literal sense makes a good poem. This marriage of sound and sense is what draws out the true aesthetic value of poetry. One might even call this the flavour of the poetry – the Rasa! Indeed as Anandavardhana says, the integral function of the singular words when in the form of poetry is to aid in the development of Rasa (Raja, 307).

Criticism of the dhvani theory, to my understanding, comes from the fact that it tries to tackle too large a portion of language and the way in which it behaves in different situations. Furthermore, it is difficult to express and comprehend how a theory of linguistics could fathom entrance into the emotive and psychological realm. To which, my response is to point to the Dylan song that I quoted at the beginning of this post. No, there may not be a theory to explain why the song resounds with college students, criminals, and everyone in between…however, for some inexplicable reason, it does. Its meaning means something, even though its words are saying something else.