Form or Mere Illusion?* - the Annual of Urdu Studies

12 • The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 25should not be revealed to othersówhich is the chief characteristic of theBaudelairean ìDandy.îWariness of emotions led the new artist to adopt one of two methods:either forage for totally new and vague emotions no one had experiencedbefore and present them as riddles so the degenerates would not evensuspect they had anything to do with themóa method opted for by Verlaineand Mallarmé; or, alternatively, try to rid oneself of subject andmeaning altogether. So the notion was floated that, like music, poetry tooshould be free of associations. Listening to a composition, a person hardlythinks about the fact that a particular sound is from a partridge or a quail,one hears it as pure sound and enjoys the manner in which it is arrangedand harmonized with other sounds. Poetry should aspire to that so whenit is heard it does not call for meaning, and sound alone provides completegratification. Flaubert tried to free fiction, or prose, of semantic baggage.He felt the present time was hardly congenial for the production ofgreat literature. It was so sordid, filthy, and grotesque that a person couldnot even conceive of thinking about it and beauty together. And yet thepresent was the only time the new artist could draw on for his subject.The only recourse left now was to push the filth and ugliness of his subjectas far away as possible, or at least neutralize it through his art andstyle. This does away with the importance of subject itself and makes styleparamount. Can one not create a work without subject merely by writing?Flaubertís fear of his own emotions is worth examining. On the one hand,all his life he kept saying that his novels amounted to nothing. Theysought to represent the middle classóa trite and vulgar subject. If hecould find a subject he liked, he would be able to do a lot. On the otherhand, he longed to write a novel that had no subject, one that survived onthe strength of pure style. So we find a strange phenomenon during thisperiod: artists bending over backwards to create without any substance.This is an absurd struggle, especially in literature. While in music andpainting it is perhaps possible to a degree to confine a work to the domainof aesthetics (after all sounds, lines, and colors do possess somemeasure of autonomous objectivity; one can arrange lines in a way thatmay not result in great art, but their arrangement does appear pleasing,which may be enough), words do not have such independence or suchautonomy as lines and sounds. Words are not pure sounds, and neitherare they natural. They are an invention of man and they are invented for aspecific purpose. They are signs. They guide the mind to a particularthought and a specific meaning. Making them ìpureî means divestingthem of their semantic content, which would obliterate all distinctionbetween words and sounds. That is to say, literature would meld into musicand disappear. Thus literature, if it must keep its status intact, cannotrid itself of subject and meaning. Literature without meaning is a rarity