Editing The Author in Literature Part 1 (section)

==== The Wisdom of India ====
In India under the aegis of Sanatana Dharma, the agency of the author as a vessel and as a conduit was always recognized and thus we always hear the names of the dramatists, poets and authors but not much attention is given to their personalities. Their stories and their message are considered more important than their personality.

It was also commonly agreed upon that a piece of great art is created only with divine inspiration and not through the individual innovation of the author or the poet. This is evident in almost all epics and poems where the agency and authority of Shri Ganesha or some other deity is always invoked.

The story is also said to be only ‘heard’ by the poet from some divine sage or a primary deity. No claim of originality is made. The idea of ‘genius’ in the modern sense was missing in ancient India. What was valued was the effort to approximate most to the ideals of the Sanatana civilization. Coomaraswamy once again explains:

“For what is a masterpiece? Not as commonly supposed an individual flight of the imagination, beyond the common reach in its own time and place and rather for posterity than for ourselves; but by definition, a piece of work done by an apprentice at the close of his apprenticeship and by which he proves his right to be admitted into the full membership of a guild, or as we should now say trade union, as a master workman. The masterpiece is simply the proof of competence expected and demanded from every graduate artist…” (Coomaraswamy 98-99)

The sanctity of the language is also maintained. The Sanatana tradition has always maintained that reality is far beyond the powers of the description of any language, even Sanskrit. Even Sanskrit is said to be only the Vaikhari form of language, which has three other, deeper planes of existence.

The first arises from the primal source, from the Universal Consciousness and in this form it is inexpressible. This stage is called Para. It is then visualized as an image or a picture which is the stage of Pashyanti. It then goes to another stage called Madhyama where it is verbalized but unspoken. When it is uttered in human language it is called Vaikhari and even in this last stage it is changed and is not expressed as is thought in Madhyama.

Having maintained this, the Rishis of India recognized that even in Vaikhari it was necessary to convey the divine message in whatever form possible. And thus the Vaikhari form of language was completely mastered. Sanskrit was refined as much as a human language can be refined and the spiritual and eternal message is more easily conveyed in Sanskrit than in other languages.

The point is that that the tools of expression, that is language, were never deconstructed in India. Along with recognizing that the Ultimate Truth is inexpressible in human language, ways of reaching that Truth was indicated as much as possible in human language.

In the West, starting with Christianity, it was claimed that Ultimate Truth is expressible in human language and was expressed once and for all in the Bible. When the Bible was proved false the West went in the opposite direction. Now they started claiming that no fact can be expressed in any language, however banal or mundane the fact is.

Ever going to one extreme of the pendulum Sanatana Dharma never went to another in reaction. But the West sadly did. This in a way was a result of the Christian insistence that the Ultimate Truth can be expressed completely in human words. By doing that they took divine inspiration out of any artist’s work.

Once that had happened, revolts started coming and in the post-Renaissance world, the author started overpowering literature and gradually degenerated to the current state. At the core of this are the introduction of the author, the introduction of the individual agency, and the claim that something new can be created by sheer intellectual innovation.