The Dialectics of Literary Consciousness

Dr. K.P. Krisnankutty’s latest collection of essays on literary theory, The Dialectics of Literary Consciousness, deals with the philosophical aspects of writing, reading, interpretation and translation in the light of Marxian dialectical and historical materialism. Till its advent in the nineteenth-century, artistic creativity used to be explained in terms of Idealism. It was considered mysterious and indefinable. Artists were the chosen prodigies, divinely bestowed with the power of creative imagination. Metaphysically, they were extricated from their social background and fascistically privileged. This idealistic over-simplification precluded all rational analysis of literary creativity. The recent loosening of its hold on human thought was due to the Marxian philosophical revolution. Using the tenets of rational materialism, Marxism undermined all forms idealist philosophy and redefined all aspects of Being and Consciousness. It accorded literary aesthetics its rightful place in human history and social development. The Dialectics of Literary Consciousness draws on structural linguistics, semantics, hermeneutics and ideology to foreground the dialectical and historical content of literary consciousness. The first chapter “Literary Consciousness: A Dialectical and Historical Introduction” of the book sets the theoretical and philosophical premises for further studies. The materialistic conception of Nature, History and Human Consciousness enables Krishnan Kutty to build up his thesis. He anchors his views on the labor theory of language and literature and treats linguistic signs as the building blocks of human consciousness. With examples from four centuries of English poetry, the second chapter “Nature and Environment: Poetic Imprints of Shifting Perspectives”, sensitively reflects on the impact of capitalist production relations on human consciousness. All major English poets have noted the changes in human environment consequent on bourgeois methods of production. They have expressed their anxious misgivings about the extensive destruction of nature and the erosion of moral values in the wake of aggressive capitalism. The paper lucidly marks the evolution of English poetry to an eco-political focus. The essay “Matthew Arnold: The Voice and the Victim of Bourgeois Culture” provides a rare insight into the complex ways in which economic production relations mould social and individual character. Contradictions, inherent in and inevitable to bourgeois production relations, had left their indelible impact on Arnold’s views on poetry, criticism and culture. The abstractions and romantic mystifications in his criticism prove that he was ideologically interpellated by the contradictions of his age and that he was its hapless voice and victim. With the essay “The Dialectics of Interpretation: Aspects o Linguistic and Semantic Convergences” Krishnan Kutty passes on to the realm of interpretation where the semantic function of literature gets utmost consideration. Historically, he traces the origin of hermeneutics to ancient theological texts. But along with the progressive democratization of the society, there has been more and more democratization of the epistemological experience literary texts. Briefly touching upon the semantic contribution of I.A.Raichards and the New Critics, he passes on to the structuralists and poststructuralists. The works of Saussure, Jakobson, Barthes and Derrida are considered critically. But he finds his sure semantic stay and support in the studies of Mikhail Bakhtin who does not approve of the dictatorship of the author or the waywardness of the reader. Instead, he finds the signs of semantic clarity in the dialectical union of the author and the reader. The two subsequent essays, “Barthes and Bakhtin: Monologic and Dialogic Searches for Meaning” and “The Reader and the Sahrudaya”, are logical extensions of the finding that interpretation is not a monologic, but a dialogic, process. Of these the former compares and brings out the contrastive features of the views of Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin. Beginning as a structuralist, Barthes had ended up as a champion of Derrida’s Deconstruction. His opposition to authority led him to the linguistically illogical declaration of the death of the author. Bringing in Bakhtin’s ideas of Dialogism and Utterance, Krishnan Kutty maintains that an author “texts” himself in a work. Like the author, the reader has also certain linguistic competence. Therefore, in the reading process, it is a battle of linguistic wits, the author’s and the reader’s. And meaning emanates from this meeting of minds. “The Reader and the Sahrudaya” invokes the principles of ancient Sanskrit literary theory to restate the view that meaning is born from the dialectical confluence the author and the reader. For a text to mean, it should be read by a person with kindred sensibility. The reader should be well-versed in the linguistic code that the writer has used for communication. The Sanskrit concept of the Sahrudaya has its modern correspondence in the “composite reader” of F.R.Leavis and Wolfgang Iser. The last essay in this collection is “The Philosophy of Translation”. Translation, Krishnan Kutty submits, is a semantic exercise in which the translator reads, interprets and converts a linguistic code into another linguistic code. Translation is governed by historical factors and political motives. In ancient Babylonia and India the translated texts were imperial decrees to the defeated subjects speaking strange languages. Similarly, the translation of the Bible into different European languages was marked by democratic political upheavals there. Citing the Indian example, the article ascertains that language has always been an instrument of political authority. In ancient India, Sanskrit was treated as the privileged language of the Brahmins alone. During the colonial period English was used for the dual purposes of dominance and domestication. The colonial atmosphere paved the way for the exchange of ideas through translation from Indian languages, especially from Sanskrit, into English and vice versa. The struggle for India’s independence could assume democratic character only because modern political ideas could percolate into the Indian polity through translation of English texts into native languages. In this age of globalization, the article suggests, the translator has to make an existential choice of the book to be translated. As translation has become commercially profitable and mechanical, the translator has to make a morally valid philosophic choice of the book to be translated. The article offers a new translation perspective which holds within its purview the communistic alternative of human equality and unity.