Editing The Author in Literature Part 2 (section)

==== There is No New Story ====
While other disciplines of ancient art like sculpture, architecture, or painting seldom bore the name of the artist, literature is a discipline in which the creator’s name has been relatively more present. In Greece, the three greatest of the ancient playwrights – Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles – were all known by their names. The same was true about poets like Homer or Ovid.

In India the playwrights were famous by their names too, the most popular name being of course Kalidasa. About others like Bhasa no clear historical details are available. Some traditions say that there is little indication that they were persons or just honorific titles for a tradition or a sect.

In literature the artist disappeared not in name, but in content

Most of these Indian and Greet playwrights and poets did not claim to invent new stories and novel plots. They just took incidents out of the great epics or the great Puranic stories and played on a particular aspect in the contemporary idiom to enthrall their audience.

Kalidasa used the Mahabharata story as the plot of Abhijnana Shakuntalam. Similarly, Bhasa based six of his plays on the Mahabharata focusing on various different incidents of the Mahabharata, the most famous being Urubhanga where the killing of Duryodhana at the hands of Bheema is described in heart-rending detail. He also based three plays on the Ramayana. Bhavabhuti based his plays on the themes from the Ramayana too.

Post-Renaissance European literature was no different. Though playwrights were very famous by their own names, they seldom created their own stories, at least in the genre of tragedy. Most of the stories and plots of Shakespeare are picked from the classical myths. Similarly, the story of Faust is played on by various great playwrights.

Only in comedy, we see that the playwright was coming into full vogue. The comedies were considered lighter in vein, less serious, and less exalted, just like in ancient Greece and it is here that we see the imprint of the playwright slowly emerging. Though this was true of ancient Greece too and Aristophanes also created new ‘plots’ and ‘stories’ with his extremely irreverent comedies.

India had always steered clear of the very restricting division of comedy vs. tragedy that is the benchmark in Western classical literature. No true tragedies exist in Sanskrit theatre and till date Indians cannot comprehend the point of an absolute tragedy. Teaching by catharsis, the point of the Greek tragedy, is beyond the understanding of an Indian.

To come back to the point, even the pagan West understood that ‘there can be no new story under the sky’ and playwrights always played on the familiar themes to which everyone could identify with. Except for comedies there was no claim of ‘creating something new’. Only artistic expression was important. Even the comedies fed on making fun of some classical themes and rituals accepted upon by all.

It was commonly understood in India that retelling the classical story was neither plagiarism nor blind copying. Goswami Tulsidas has never been ‘condemned’ for his ‘lack of originality’. He took the classical story and not only did he tell it in the vernacular, but also added a fresh way of looking. He made the entire story more devotional. He took a story, relived it, and made it his own by meditation, my inner experience, and by divine contemplation. As Coomaraswamy says:<blockquote>“A copyright could not have been conceived where it was well understood that there can be no property in ideas, which are his who entertains them: whoever thus makes an idea his own is working originally, bringing forth from an immediate source within himself, regardless of how many times the same idea may have been expressed by others before or around him.” (Coomaraswamy 112-113)</blockquote>This was largely the trend in all traditional societies until the dawn of the modern West. The celebration of classical stories and archetypal myths came to an end in the West with the advent of a new medium – the novel.