Sunday, December 27, 2020

Borrowed viewing

It is interesting, how any thought or system or a book by any author comes to be viewed through another author or thinker, who happens to hold the attention and emulation of readers or hearers at a given period of time. That is, when we begin to subscribe quite emotionally to a thinker, then what that person opines, what that person considers becomes the lens through which as enthusiastic readers we tend to see 'purvapaksha' (prima facie or opponent) ideas or authors. You may later add on by your homework further direct studies about the 'other' authors. But some sense of 'us' will be dominating still in your grasp and stance regarding the 'other' author's thoughts and arguments. But of course you can by great efforts absolve yourself from any colours of your 'preferred author' and do justice to your own understanding. But for that you have to come to a neutral territory in your mind, which would have been exactly the thing condemned in the first instance by the preceding preferred author of your own choice. So to say, our own mind acts like a magic prism, in that it allows you to see only what you decide to see as you have been subtly programmed to decide by your very act of immersive participation in any author, without which you will not be able to do justice in understanding any author in the first instance. That is we are weak and imperfect, gullible to all kinds of influences, by the very nature of our psyche. I think it is better to 'see' this consciously rather than being carried by our own assumptions of our own standpoint and state of mind. One lazy fallout of this 'sane realistic' is gyrating relativism, which becomes heavily coded by bromides of external vested interests. These thoughts come to my mind when I read Stanislaw Eile's book Modernist Trends in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction. In that the author talks about how the polish authors of fiction have not been accorded due attention in the literary world and how the Eastern and Central European literary writings are generally viewed with regard to their political positions. "Apart from a few academic books, such as Daniel Gerould’s on S.I. Witkiewicz (1981) or Russell E. Brown’s on Schulz (1991), little attention has been paid to the position of Polish fiction within the history of the twentieth-century novel, or to its contribution to the modern plurality of vision. Habitually regarded as belonging to a somewhat provincial culture, it has often been considered important only insofar as certain political points can be made." (pp 1, Modernist Trends in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction, Stanislaw Eile, 1996).
Srirangam Mohanarangan
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