The Taken-for-Grantedness of the Social Conditions of the Aesthetic Suggestion

It appears as though I have come down with a cold, and passed out while doing the readings yesterday evening. Not good. Especially since this is my week to be presenter! So I apologize for the very late post, and hopefully I will be better tomorrow to be coherent and able to talk.

Each week we progress further and further into rasa theory, continually building on the knowledge we attempted to gain the week before. Sheldon Pollock’s article was a very interesting discussion building on what we read last week. Although he often mentions how he disagrees with Ingalls – who was the translator of the text and author of the introduction – he continues to hold the scholar in high respect. “If I disagree on occasion with Daniel Ingalls in my understanding of some of these issues, it is a disagreement made possible only by the strong and serious arguments he himself provided in his magisterial scholarly oeuvre.” (199) Going on to praise Ingalls’ “fine translation” (201). The only reason I mention this is because of its parallels to the Sanskrit tradition of commentaries. Each scholar built upon the work of the last, their own opinions shaped by their disagreements with others. Yet common lacunae in subject matter often seem to be passed down through the generations of scholars. Here I am talking particularly about the main theme of the Pollock article, and that is the social and moral context of the works - or the social conditions of the aesthetic suggestion.

The first section of the article was the one I found most interesting, concerning itself with what the theorists were unconcerned to theorize about. Throughout reading the section I kept saying to myself: well they probably do not talk about the importance of the social context because they are not so far removed from the original context that they did not come into the same problems we experience as readers today, distanced by time and space. The subject was omitted because it was seen as too obvious by the Sanskrit scholars, a given, a “no-duh”, simply not worth spending the effort commenting on – even though they overanalyzed everything else!

Yet it is so pertinent to our modern day understanding. We are so far removed from the original social context that we do not immediately identify the alluded to social conventions that must have been more obvious to the originally intended audience - as well as the commentators who still lived in a similar social environment.

We are given the original poem, followed by these seemingly crazy commentaries discussing what the poem is really about. To the modern reader – here I am referring specifically to me – these leaps in inference often seem absurd. How are they getting all these little details out of a few simple lines of poetry? For example, in Mahima’s commentary (given on pg 204) all of a sudden flowers come into the equation, yet nowhere are flowers found in the poem. Maybe these seemingly large leaps in assumption only seem absurd to us, yet maybe they were once accepted as simple “no-duhs”. Thickets meant lovin’ spots – I just had to put that one in there! – women were always the adulterer’s therefore it was a woman talking – hello double standard, can men even be unfaithful? – etc.. The commentators did not feel the need to justify their leaps to assumptions because they were living in that context, and the little hints were obvious to them.

Finally after pages of me saying this to myself Pollock concludes what I felt to be the obvious – my own “no-duh”, or the wonderful Pollockism “taken-for-grantedness” – “It is the very taken-for-grantedness of this world, for its part, that renders it invisible to readers like Ananda; the sphere of social (or literary) convention was one they inhabited too deeply to see... it is a world occluded to theory because it is too far inside consciousness to be rendered an object of consciousness.” (208) Thank you Pollock, I agree wholeheartedly.