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SOME ASPECTS OF THE RASA THEORY
that art experience is the result of the co-mingling rather compounding of the vibhāvas (the characters and the environment), anubhāvas (the bodily manifestations of emotions) and ryabhicāri-bhāvas (temporary states or emotions feeding the dominant emotion), it has already hinted at the process of the poetic creation as well. For example, the vibhāvas, the hero, the heroine and other characters and the environment, the situation and events that follow-all should be adequate if the work is to satisfy as a work of beauty.
If one looks at how a competent modern critic of the stature of T. S. Eliot gropes for neatly articulating what involves the creative process, one would feel grateful to the Acāryas for having given a clear and authentic description of it. Eliot has a difficulty with Hamlet.' He lays the blame at the door of Shakespeare's creative faculty and suggests that we are let down by it. Somewhere it falters, he feels, and locates it in the poet's inability to discover, to use Indian terminology, an appropriate or adequate vibhāva. Let us hear. him as he struggles to articulate it with the help of the, by now, popular phrase 'Objective Correlative,' which, incidentaily, was, not his coinage but was first used in 1850 by Washington Elston in his 'Lectures on Art'-a fact later acknowledged by Eliot also. Eliot says: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an, objective correlative', in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events whïch shall be the formula of that particular emotion such that when the external facts, which mustterminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."5:
Eliot succceds in formulating the need for finding vibhāvas, commensurate with the original emotion, which is to be expressed in the form of art. Thus far his account of the process of poetic creation is correct and finds support in the words of the Ācāryas. But he is on no sure ground if he means that the Vibhāvas when presented will evoke the same emotion in the mind of the reader or the spectator, for the emotion while being presented through the medium of the 'Objective correlative,' the vibhāvas, has suffered a seachange. It is now no more the original emotion. (This is one example of how the fullest understanding of the reader's art-experience is necessary for a proper understanding of the creative process). Valery knew better. He alerts us, "We must contrast as clearly as possible poetic emotion with ordinary emotion."
Valery's statement of the creative and reproductive processes (for it aims possibly at covering both) comes very near to the truth of the matter. He says that a sort of a 'sense of a universe' is characteristic of poetry and adds: “I said: sense of a universe. I meant that the poetic state or emotion seems to me to consist in a dawning perception, a tendency toward perceiving a world, or complete system of relations, in which beings, things, events and acts, although
5. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1953, p 145. 6. Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1958, p. 179.
