A Centenary Tribute

K.D. Sethna: The Creative Critic

RESEARCHERS of critical theories must remember that Sri Aurobindo has touched virtually on every critical issue. Because he has condensed his material, the purpose of the researcher would be to pick up the clues for detailed explanation of them. Unfortunately, most of the academic projects on Sri Aurobindo have ended up with long passages with insufficient and irrelevant commentaries on them. Some of the critical works of K.D. Sethna will teach us how we should go about investigating the Master's work in an academic way, which may also be an original way of expanding the condensed texts of Sri Aurobindo. If we look back at the earlier prose of K.D. Sethna, this quality does not-seem very obvious. There was, of course, a very strong original note even when Sethna was explaining the overhead aesthetics. But because the subject was new, the essays did not abound in references to Western writers. They were spontaneous, inspired, often revelatory essays.

In Sethna's critical prose a modern academic style has been combined with a perceptive voice, which seeks to relate Sri Aurobindo with the major critical tradition of the West. After Blake's Tyger, he has taken up Wordsworth's A Slumber, and here too he shows how a single-poem survey may lead up to a book-length study. A Slumber turns K.D. Sethna into a literary detective, who coolly moves on with his search for the exact girl from Wordsworth's neighbourhood. He seems as comfortable with Robin Skelton as with Sri Aurobindo. He examines the biographical details from all major interpreters of the Lucy-poems and uses his own eyes and brain to know whether the poem was inside the cluster or outside it. The eyes of a detective never miss a

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small thing. The mystic as detective may suddenly start concentrating on an apparently unimportant verb. Who knows what cosmic mystery remains hidden in that bare lone verb or a pronoun? The mystic researcher becomes a laborious linguist. If you wish to see this strange combination in a literary critic, you have to read the latest critical works of Sethna.

The one-poem-analysis scheme of Sethna has never been the touch-and-go gesture of a casual writer who has read or taught just one poem from a writer. This scheme shows us the author's acquaintance with the major works of the writer concerned and indicates how a modern Ph.D. student will have to tackle a single poem if he or she takes that up for the field of research. However, the most important lesson that a modern Ph.D. student may learn from Sethna is the art of expanding the concealed critical principles of Sri Aurobindo. On reading Sethna's explanations, I understand how Sri Aurobindo's art of criticism has remained a closed book for many of us who have struggled with him over the years. Classical and Romantic, which came out in 1997, is such a bright book of research. In his "Foreword", Sethna briefly indicates that the book is a search for Sri Aurobindo's credo, which still remains unclarified for the literary audience. Since it is an "expanded version" of Sethna's earlier prose, the later prose style has coloured the book.

The last paragraph of Sethna's "Foreword" to Classical and Romantic is the first lesson for our PhD. students, who seldom know that the "Preface" to a book should be brief and clear and expressive.

An expanded version of this attempt constitutes the present book. As Sri Aurobindo is not only a scholar in many languages, a penetrating literary critic, a far-reaching philosophical thinker and profound poet but also a master of spiritual illumination, a guide to the all-round inner development which he terms the Integral Yoga, it has been felt that concentration on an approach to the

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subject of "Classical" and "Romantic" through him is most likely to yield what is new as well as true.

The attentive reader of Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism will remember that he has never used the title, Classical and Romantic, for any of his essays in The Future Poetry. The words appear here and there in the book and in the letters along with Sri Aurobindo's passing thoughts on them. While reading him deeply, Sethna has tried to understand what Sri Aurobindo would have meant by the words, Classical and Romantic, and in this effort at interpretation Sethna's own thinking mind and vision have created an authentic Sethna-stamp, his own voice, the voice of the creative writer as critic. It is not hard to see the modification of Sri Aurobindo's style and the effort at clarity:

According to Sri Aurobindo, the subconscious or the unconscious is not all that lies beyond our wak:' condition. He refers to the subliminal being, a hidden domain much greater, with powers like those of our wakeful state but intenser, wider, finer, more varied and with rarer ones too that are either absent from that state or present there only in embryo. Poetry, like all art, draws considerably on the subliminal and discloses that domain's surprising realities in diverse patterns of image and sound.¹

Sethna then points out in very clear terms where Sri Aurobindo departs from Freud. Later, within the texture of the same argument he goes on to clarify, once again in his own style, the point of the mixed inspiration of which Sri Aurobindo has spoken on various occasions. He does not copy or just alter a passage like most of our modern Ph.D. students. Instead he thinks it out again, lives with the idea received from his Master, and discovers his own voice:

1. Sethna, K.D., Classical and Romantic: An Approach Through Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997, p. 6.

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But it is seldom that the whole word leaps from the source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin, - ordinarily it goes through some secondary process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed substance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed some superior power born of the excitement of the higher possession, but also some alloy too of our mortality.²

Not that he is writing about this mixed inspiration for the first time. He had done this in his preface to Overhead Poetry and elsewhere in his early writings. But there had been that rhythmic Aurobindonian efflux everywhere, a touch of the classic Victorian which had once come out through the pen of Ruskin and Newman, a style which had reached its culmination in Sri Aurobindo. Sethna knows how to curb his inspired efflux, how to combine revelation and argument, •how to subdue as much as possible the Master's voice even when he is out to explain his grand themes. Let us listen to that controlled voice:

There is emotion in the Classical poets too. Indeed, with- out a moved language no poetry can exist, just as no poetry can exist without the wings of the imagination in the word. Both may be controlled, both may be let loose - but they must be present. In the Greeks and Ro- mans, in Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, they are controlled, though often very intense - and the controlling actually adds at times to the effect of the intensity. In the Elizabethan Romantics they are mostly let loose, though even in the letting loose there is the Shakespearian way and there is the Chapmanian...³

2. Ibid., p. 8.

3. Ibid., p. 83.

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Such is Sethna, who manipulates the language masterfully, switching off there, switching on here, shows keenness when he needs poetry and is expansive when clarity is of prime necessity. The problem is he demands too much from his readers. His intellectual logic is as powerful as his poetic sight. The reader must know that Sethna is not just another Indo-Anglian prose writer in the literature supermarket. He demands our concentration. For instance in the following passage, he deals with a very subtle issue relating to Mallarme's not-too-apparent spontaneity. He explains in his high serious style of exposition how Mallarme's work has an appearance of "premeditation".

The premeditation is an appearance only, because what it does is just to employ a certain mode of transmitting the inherently spontaneous: the spontaneous is not always that which leaps out at once from within but simply that which is inherent in the activity of a power beyond the superficial subjective being and this spontaneity can be reached either with effort or without it and does not change its essential character according to the way it is reached. All that is necessary is that no trace of the pedestrian, the laborious, the heavy-handed should remain in the result: no matter how achieved, poetry must bring an inevitable facility, a smiling certainty.⁴

How many in the post-Aurobindo Indo-Anglian scene have this subtlety and high-seriousness? Sethna was the first to start a systematic exploration of Sri Aurobindo's theory of art and literature. He taught us how to reject rehash by concentrating independently on the texts from Sri Aurobindo. Poetry had long ended with the passing of Sri Aurobindo. After that it was time for prose. For more than fifty years, he has spent hour after hour, trying to write prose that would not go bad. He has thus ensured a permanent place for himself in the literary firmament.

4. Sethna, K.D., The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 1987, p. 64.

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