Cumaratunga and The Power of rhetorical criticism

Last week, a new edition of Munidasa Cumaratunga's important work, 'Prabandhopadeshaya' was published by Visidunu Publishers. This is indeed a work that has shaped the thinking of many teachers of language and literature over several decades. It was first published in 1937.

The author, in the opening paragraph of the introduction claimed that the art of composition had been neglected in our schools, and that some teachers seemed to believe that it could be remedied without any planned guidance. To make matters worse, there were no texts that could guide teachers and students in confronting this task. Hence, the author said, he wrote this book in order to meet this need.

The 'Prabandhopadeshaya', as the title suggests, is a guide to composition. It has served that purpose admirably and influenced generations of readers. The book I have in front of me is my father's and going by the comments scrawled in the margins it is evident that my father found the pages to be deeply instructive. However, this book is more than a guide to prose composition. Beneath it, one can sense a model of literary criticism, and a theory of reading in embryonic form.

When one places this volume alongside Cumaratunga's other works such as 'Kavi Shikshava' and 'Virit Vakiya', one begins to appreciate this better. This is indeed an aspect of his achievement that has received scant attention.

The 'Prabandhopadeshaya' consists of eleven chapters. The first eight chapters are devoted to discussions of subject matter of compositions, the structure, the idea of a paragraph, the sentence, avoiding errors, increasing the aesthetic value, the adherence to conventions, and forms of ornamentation. The last three chapters are given over to ordered exercises dealing with various important aspects of composition.

In' Prabandhopadeshaya', there are useful insights presented in capsular form. For example, in discussing the structure of a literary composition, the author says that it could be understood most profitably as the expansion of content. While the content appeals to the mind, the structure, in oral compositions, appeal to the ear and in written ones to the eye.

What is interesting is that this thought can be extended further so as to analyze written poems that appeal equally to the auditory imagination. As a matter of fact, the strength of much poetry lies precisely in this dual allegiance or divided loyalty.

Similarly, in 'Kavi Shikshava', he discusses the important difference between the paraphraseable meaning (anvaya) of a poem and the finished poem (kavya) itself. This is an important distinction that has a pointed relevance to much Sinhala poetry being written today.

They operate at the level of 'anavaya' and not 'kavya.' For the 'anvaya' to be transformed into 'kavya' and achieve the full plenitude of poetic meaning, the writer needs to make use of imaginatively the full resources of the language-lexical, syntactic and phonological. Unfortunately, this is what is meaning in the generality of Sinhala poetry being written today.

As I stated earlier, there is a model of literary criticism, a theory of reading behind these works by Munidasa Cumaratunga. Within the brief compass of this column it is not possible to delineate this in detail. What I will try to do is to present in a very concise form four important facets of this model that I regard as important and that deserve our closest attention. The first is that long before New Criticism became fashionable, he was practicing a kind of literary analysis that paid very close attention to the words on the page. How words gain in emotional resonances, how they collude with other words, questions of contiguity, mellifluousness, and how obeying the jurisdictions of form are issues that stirred his deepest critical imagination. In that sense, Cumaratunga practised New Criticism 'avant la lettre.'

The second aspect that I wish to focus on is the idea of literary capability. Cumaratunga was a firm believer in the importance of literary capability of the reader as crucial for effective poetic communication. As one reads the 'Prabandhopadeshaya' as well as 'Kavi Shikshava' and Virit Vakiya, one realizes how much store he set by this desideratum. The various rules, conventions, codes, understandings, axioms of literary compositions that he underlines have a way of stressing the fact that the reader must be fully aware of, and alert to, these traits if he or she is to participate full in the sharing of the poetic experience.

The codified expectations play a central role here. When we hear someone speak a language we know, we are able to make sense of it as a consequence of our internalized ability to de-code it through our knowledge of its semantic, syntactic and phonological elements Cumaratunga subscribed to the notion that reading literature is a rule-governed process of meaning-making.

Similarly, we as readers are able to make sense, and going further, assess its importance, because we have not only the linguistic skills but also the understanding of codes, conventions, axioms, presuppositions subventing that work. Munidasa Cumaratunga placed great emphasis on this internalized skill of the reader. His discussions of various forms of ornamentation, the many blemishes that disfigure literary works as well as the discussions of codes and conventions governing literary production move in this direction. He emphasizes the fact that there is meaning in the artifice of a poem or story. Hence, this idea of internalized literary capability is the second important ingredient in the Cumaratunga model.

Third, if we pause to analyze works such as 'Prabandhopadeshaya', 'Kavi Shikshava', 'Virit Vakiya' as well as his critical editions of classical texts, we see that he was keen to stress the importance of the reader as a co-participant in a symbolic world. Literary works, according to him, construct symbolic universes.

In order to understand the nature and significance of this symbolic universe, the reader must possess the internalized capability that I referred to in the earlier paragraph, but also be a part of a privileged circle of readers who are familiar with the codes and conventions of literary production and are, for the most part, on the same wavelength. Readers are seen as being involved in a common enterprise that is concerned with laying down the horizon of possibility of meaning and explicating to themselves the rules of engagement in uncovering meaning. Clearly the act of reading is an act of situatedness. It is, among others, a situatedness in intelligibility and tradition. This is indeed an important pathway of inquiry that has an indubitably contemporary ring.

What Munidasa Cumaratunga is suggesting that there is no unalterable authenticating center in a literary work, and the meaning resides not with the writer or in the text but rather in the interaction between the text and a collectivity of readers who share the same perceptions and values. In order to make greater sense of a work of creative literature, we need to bring a certain frame of intelligibility to the de-coding of it. What Cumaratunga is asserting is that the collectivities of like-minded readers that operate as co-participants of a symbolic world, by that very effort, succeed in constructing that fame of intelligibility. Hence, his detailed explications of the rules, conventions, tradition-sanctioned presuppositions that govern literary creativity.

Cumaratunga's approach, adumbrated thought not fully developed, can be taken as an answer to extreme forms of post-modernism which posit an anarchy of meaning, semiotic anxieties, and the spectre of texts being divided within and against themselves. He points a way out of this impasse, this labyrinth of undecidability, by suggesting the possibility of a sharable public world. The circle of knowledgeable and skillful readers that he posits constitutes that public world.

Fourth, it is apparent that Munidasa Cumaratunga, in the works cited above, is making his way towards a kind of rhetorical criticism.

The idea of a rhetorical criticism and the important role that elements of rhetoric play in literary analysis has surfaced in recent times very vigorously. If we consider the critical writings of such eminent deconstructive and post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, J.Hillis Miller, Gayatri Spivak, we would surely realise the ways in which rhetoric has inspired and informed their work.

For example terms such as aporia, metonymy, prosopopoeia, catachresis, chiasmus that have become central concepts in contemporary deconstructive criticism have been taken directly from classical Western rhetoric. In addition, theorists such as Harold Bloom have drawn productively on the traditional Jewish texts - Kabbalah.

Similarly, Munidasa Cumratunga is also mining the riches of classical Sanskrit rhetoric as is evidenced by his use of such terms as 'uthpreksha alankaraya', 'vyathireka alankaraya' or his discussion of the concept of 'rasa' with its concomitant taxonomies. What he is seeking to do is to make use of concepts associated with classical Sanskrit rhetoric in a way that would productively illuminate our understanding of the dynamics of literary production and literary appreciation.

Some years ago, Prof. John Tam, with whom I have co-authored a number of books, and I were having dinner in Hong Kong with Prof. J. Hillis Miller, a close friend of Derrida and one of the foremost literary theorists in the United States.

During our dinner conversation, he said that deconstruction, which at times appears to be forbiddingly enigmatic, can best be understood as a form of rhetorical criticism. This is an important observation. What deconstruction points to - this fact becomes evident in the work of Paul de Man even more than in the writings of Derrida- -is that a text presents an ongoing battle between the literal meaning and metaphoric meaning, between logic and rhetoric.

For example, in de Man's widely-discussed book 'Allegories of Reading', he points out how the deconstructive moves are inextricably linked with the privileging of rhetoric and rhetorical analysis.

The idea of deconstruction as a form of rhetorical criticism is fully endorsed by the facts as we know them. It is interesting to note that Cumaratunga, some seventy years ago, worked towards a similar destination. Rhetorical analysis, of course, is not confined to literary studies alone. In philosophy, Richard Rorty ushered in an earthquake with his book, 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'.

Here the central argument rests on a rhetorical or tropological reading of the mind as a mirror. Similarly, Hayden White, in the domain of history, brought about a radical transformation in historiographic thinking by pointing out how historical narratives are constructed around master tropes - metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche, irony.

What is interesting about Munidasa Cumaratunga's works such as 'Prabandhopadeshaya', 'Virit Vakiya' and 'Kavi Shikshava' is that they are guided by a model of criticism, and a theory of reading, that are refreshingly modern.

To be sure, he has not developed this model fully; he has only hinted at the bare lineaments of it. It is up to us to flesh it out, and present it in a contemporary idiom, so that we can combine the authority of the past and the imperatives of the present in our common pursuit of critical illumination.