Criticism, Edward Said, Jagannatha Pandita

It seems in one way that Literature is the highest achievement of us as human beings, in whatever way different groups approach it and hold it. Just pure appreciation, involved and empathetic, is discounted nowadays in preference to operating upon the literary creation, dissecting, boring into, peeling off, dismembering and critical investigation. Many literary theories of all hues and purposes serve the modern transacting with Literature. Of course I am aware of the gains by such processings and I do appreciate to a large extent the panoply of theories applied. But when all operations are over and various readings got and verified, there is nothing to compare with the alter-awareness that we achieve through a pure, simple and straight aesthetic involvement in a literary piece. We may think of mixing the two ways but it will be a hard mix even then and the elements resisting each other. Man is not only a 'heady' being but also a 'hearty' being and it is perhaps an art really, how he manages the two beings of his own identity from the vantage of what being of his inner reality, supra or meta or composite. Perhaps solving this in the literary world will empower the human being to face more drastic issues of the concrete world with more wisdom. 

What is Criticism and that too literary criticism? Where does a Critic find his own position? Is it a simply negative stance or wakeful being in the now or an alteration between two negations? Is it just positioning oneself against all aesthetic appreciative involvement, a pretense to make good the absence of a heart quality? But I know too well the clarification that the critical theories give and also the pure delight in aesthetic involvement. What Edward Said is saying is very much adding to my cogitations on the status and efficacy of criticism in general.

"Criticism in short is always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings. This is by no means to say that it is value-free. Quite the contrary, for the inevitable trajectory of critical consciousness is to arrive at some acute sense of what political, social. and human values are entailed in the reading, production, and transmission of every text. To stand between culture and system is therefore to stand close to - closeness itself having a particular value for me - a concrete reality about which political, moral, and social judgements have to be made and, if not only made, then exposed and demystified. If, as we have recently been told by Stanley Fish, every act of interpretation is made possible and given force by an interpretive community, then we must go a great deal further in showing what situation, what historical and social configuration, what political interests are concretely entailed by the very existence of interpretive communities.This is an especially important task when these communities have evolved camouflaging jargons.'
(Edward W Said, The World, The Text and The Critic pp 26, Harvard University Press, 1983)

Whereas in Sanskrit literature, critics have been distinguished from creative authors. Creative authors were attributed with creative spark of cognition, whereas the critics were attributed with critical reading and understanding spark of cognition. A great critic and creative genius of Sanskrit poetry, Jagannatha Pandita in his Rasa Gangadhara talks about the nature of poetic delight or elation of aesthetic communion, which in Sanskrit is called Rasa. He says Rasa is nothing but Consciousness made free of its blindfold of ignorance. This concept of Jagannatha Pandita teams with what Edward Said is trying to say above in the excerpt from his book.

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