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APPENDIX-II
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The problem continues to exercise the minds of modern critics also. Dr. Avner Zis, a Marxist critic, writing in 1977, has taken a position similar to that of Butcher, when he says,
.... the artistic image presents us with an indivisible unity of features of cognition intrinsic both to immediate contemplation and abstract thought.... Yet concepts do not enjoy an independent life of their own in art. They cannot replace images... The artist as it were divests' the phenomenon which interests him from random and particular features that might obscure the essence of what he is seeking to portray. He does not reproduce phenomena of life in their actual entirety, but only those characteristic features which constitute their 'living soul.94
The balance between the universal and the particular is not easy to maintain; there is always the danger of slipping into either the universalist position, or the Crocean particularist position that the function of art is to reveal the individual physiognomy of things. Every individual combines both, the universal and the particular. The dispute between universalists like Aristotle and particularists like Croce may therefore be regarded as a dispute about the relative importance of the two, the Aristotalians subordinating the particular to the universal, the Croceans doing exactly the opposite. This shows that universalization, like particularization might be obtainable in different degrees. What degree of universalization do the defenders of sädhäraņēkarana expect? This is an important issue because not only the characters (vibhāvas), emoțions, and so on, but also the spectators (rasikas) are supposed to undergo sadharanikarana. That excessive preoccupation with his own personal problems would come in the way of the spectator's aesthetic experience may be readily granted. It would also come in the way of various other activities like watching a cricket match, solving a mathematical problem or taking part in a discussion. Excessive preoccupation with oneself is an obstacle because it makes concentration on anything other than the self, practically impossible. But this does not mean that complete transcendence of the empirical self is a precondition of literary experience. Careful observation will reveal that our empirical self is actively involved in the literary experience in varying degrees. In his well-known paper on "The Relation of the Poet to Day-dreaming " Freud has shown that readers of one variety of literary works derive vicarious satisfaction through the fantasy world the writer has created. Such literature is a universalized and beautified version of the writer's daydream. Owing to the reduction of what is too personal in it, a daydream becomes universally shareable. Of course, this shareability is also dependent on the reader's capacity for partial self-transcendence. If he is excessively preoccupied with his own self he may find it impossible to slip
4. Avner Zis, Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics (Moscow, 1977), pp. 77, 79, 82. 5. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Vision Press, Peter Owen,
1953), p. 5. 6. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), Vol. IV, pp. 173-183.
