OIKOPOETIC METHOD*
Nirmal Selvamony
Though oikopoetics and tinai poetics are closely related to each other, there is a difference between the two. While all types of tinai are oikoses, all oikoses are not instances of tinai. This is so because, the members of a tinai community are indigenous to the land of the tinai region, whereas, they need not necessarily be such in the case of all oikoses. For example, the members of a scrub community, namely, the shepherds, the animals, birds, plants and other organisms indigenous to that region form a tinai, whereas, the members of an oikos (that is not a tinai) need not enjoy such aboriginal relation to the land they occupy. tinai poetics is well established in Tamil tradition from the time of tolkaappiyam or even before. The present paper does not restate that theory, but proposes to provide an introduction to oikopoetics. In fact, it deals with the most pragmatic part of this theory, namely, the method, which will enable us to read literary texts from an oikopoetic perspective. In order to facilitate this objective this essay seeks to explain the oikopoetic method as briefly as possible. Oikopoetic method involves the application of two basic principles, namely, oikos and poiesis in the criticism of art, particularly, literature.
Oikos:
Ontologically oikos consists of the members, namely, self (onru), other (veeru) and the emergent (onri uyarnta paal) (tolkaappiyam III.3.2: 1-2). These three members take different manifestations depending on the domain in question. In the domain of language, the oikic members can be identified as tanmai (t), munnilai (m), and patarkkai (p) (Selvamony 2001, 32-35). These are interdependent members that always stand in an inexorable relation. Human language is possible only within the nexus of this triadic oikos.
With regard to the interrelation among the members, oikos is basically of two types —the integrative and the non-integrative. In an integrative oikos the members stand in a relation that is conducive to unity, whereas, in a non-integrative oikos, the relation is not such. The integrative kind has two sub-types—the unilateral interrelation and the bilateral interrelation. The non-integrative may be also termed as 'anarchic oikos' (Selvamony 2001, 1-14).
A typical example of unilateral interrelation is found in hierarchic oikoses wherein the members stand only in a hierarchic relation to each other. In primitive tribal oikoses the interrelation is bilateral. The members stand both in a hierarchic and non-hierarchic/egalitarian relationship to each other. As in the case of a pair of lovers, the relation is both vertical and horizontal at the same time. If the authority of one spouse calls for obedience on the part of another, uniting them in a hierarchic relationship, the love they have for each other unites them in such a way that they can treat each other like equals and, at rare moments, even like subordinates. In non-integrative oikos, the relationship tends to disintegrate into an anarchic mode, which can neither be characterised as hierarchy nor as equality. The addresser is either found in a solipsistic world with no addressee (as in absurd theatre) or the identity of the addresser is so fluid that it is hard to locate him/her (as in The Waste Land) or there is inadequate contextualisation or sometimes none at all. Anarchic tendencies are found in various philosophical positions too. Some idealists do not acknowledge the physical presence of others and objects around them. The structuralists and the post-structuralists are happy to do away with the world. They recognise only signs. An atheist is unwilling to give what is due to the sacred. A formalist may recognise the presence of a personaic t, but not the personic (person-related) t. Michel Foucault has challenged the personic presence of the author in his essay, "What is an author?" (1998, 205-222). The aestheticians and the promoters of the art-for-art's-sake ideology dismiss the personic addressee (m), while the propagandists overwhelm the addressee too directly leaving the latter no room for interpretation. Consequently, literary works of art that reflect these assumptions are likely to be anarchic one way or the other.
In unilaterally interrelational oikos, one of the members occupies a dominant position. In order to maintain unity, it is necessary for the subordinate members to remain subservient, though they may not desire to be so. In bilaterally interrelational oikos the power circulates in two different ways facilitating a smoother relationship by bonding t, m and p both vertically and horizontally at the same time. It is the horizontal relationship that is emphasised by Bakhtin in his dialogistic mode (1994, 426). But true polyphony achieves a happy blend of authority and equality.
Having defined oikos and described its types, let us briefly deal with its three members. tanmai (t) is the source of all utterances. It may be either visible or invisible. Even as only one vowel can be present in a syllable, only one t can be present in an oikos. One way or another, every poem deals with more than one oikos, though the number of oikoses may be determined by the number of ts in a poem. t of one oikos (oikos 1) may become m of another oikos (oikos 2).
munnilai (m) is always the addressee of an utterance. It is either visible or invisible. An oikos may have more than one entity as munnilai. m of one oikos may become t of another oikos.
patarkkai (p) is the remote addressee of an utterance. It includes other persons, animate and inanimate things and the sacred in the oikos in question. The sacred is present either transcendentally or immanently. In the former mode, it is the spatio-temporal ground (land) of any action (see the author's note 2 on syntopos and diatopos on page 28 of tinai1). Immanently, it is either disembodied or embodied energy assuming human or non-human form. For oikopoetic purposes, the spatio-temporal dimension of the sacred is of very great consequence. Ironically, the transcendental patarkkai contributes to the concreteness in works of art by specifying place and time.
When oikos is classified on the basis of agency, we have two kinds—the external and the internal. External oikos is that of the person (personic oikos) and internal that of the persona (personaic oikos). The former is the real-life context of the artist-person who may be either a single person (identifiable or anonymous) or a corporate person such as an institution. It may also refer to the real-life context of the narrator-person who may either be identical with the artist-person or a person other than the artist. Internal oikos is known variously as "kosmos" or the world within the work (Welleck and Warren 214), "mythos", "plot", and rarely as "design". In Tamil aesthetics, the equivalent of plot is "kalam", the arena where the personae act and interact occupying their assigned roles. Though there are different types of kalam, the basic structure is floral with petal-like parts radiating from a centre (Selvamony 1998-1999).
A literary text is made up of four types of kalam (internal oikos), the phonic, the syntactic, the tropic, and the agentive. The phonic kalam is defined metrically; the syntactic in terms of ordering the subject, verb the object and related adjuncts; the tropic in terms of the figures or tropes; and the agentive is made up of elements like exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution (usually used to describe the parts of a dramatic plot) or absentation, interdiction, reconnaissance, and so on (used to characterise narrative plots).
The phones of a literary text should be plotted in order to derive the maximal aesthetic potential of the language employed. The Tamil word for literature, namely, ilakkiyam illustrates this point. Literature involves both end (ilakku), and musicality of word (iyam). Every literary text uses the musical word to point towards an end just like the arrow its target (Selvamony, TV interview; "Visiting Pastures Green", tinai 1). Literature that does not pay attention to the sound element does not please the listener. In this it differs from ordinary language and prose, which are content with communicating their meaning. Plotting the sound stratum involves organising such aspects of the phonic units (or speech sounds) as the distinct vocalic or consonant (like /u/, /k/, etc.), duration, stress, pitch, volume, timbre, qualities such as harshness, softness, liquidity, sibilation etc. Free verse and prose fiction, for example, in this regard, are not fully literary as they do not plot their sound stratum (Selvamony 'Free Verse").
Usually, the phonic kalam is composed of metrical units like syllables or feet. In other words, syllable or foot is regarded as the organising principle of literary language. If so, can parallelism be considered an organising principle? Bishop Robert Lowth who studied ancient Hebrew poetry "believed that the original meter had been wholly lost", and that he could recognise only "the counterbalancing of verse members", to which he applied the technical term parallelismus membrorum (parallelism of members). The Hebrew poet balanced "thought against thought, phrase against phrase, word against word" instead of adopting a specific meter (Gottwald 830). Does this mean that the organising principle of the phonic kalam in ancient Hebrew poetry is not meter but parallelism? This is implausible because as Lowth himself says, parallelism is only a semantic or tropic principle. It certainly does not organise the phones of a Hebrew poem. Moreover, like the ancient Tamil, Chinese, and Greek poetry, Hebrew poetry was also sung to traditional musical modes, and this would have been impossible without a shared sense of quantity.
Tamil poetry employs two basic metrical systems, acai(syllable)-based, and cantam-based (based on rhythmic syllabic units). The former deploys two basic syllables, neer and nirai with stipulated rules for linking (talai) them in a line, whereas the latter uses a specified number of such durational syllabic units as tanana (3 beats), tattattana (4 beats), taanatana (5 beats), and so on in a line.
The phonic structure of the texts of primal societies is governed by the praxis of akaval (invocation) and ootal (chanting). In both, musical time was quite flexibly organised to enable collective participation. Later, when groups of persons known as akavan makalir and ootuvaar who specialised in these performances emerged, musical time underwent strict regulation. The concept of the seven-note musical scale had not evolved in early societies though a strong sense of the tonic prevailed (for a contrary theory, see Wellesz 15). The tonic was the central pivot of the tonal (including the phonic) kalam around which three or four musical notes were added to complete the structure. This is evident in the Native American chants, in most folk songs which have survived the onslaught of the influence of the music of other cultures, and in the Saman chants of the hierarchical Vedic society (Tarlekar; Gass 224-228).
At this stage the quantitative (durational) aspect of the phones was significant because it helped measure the units of invocation or chanting by means of recognisable "breaks". Thus evolved the musical bar, which is discernible in almost all invocations and chants however vaguely. The bar that gave rise to the idea of the line and its internal segments is necessary to aid collective performance. However, the flexibility of its boundaries must have depended upon the commonly shared notions of musical and cultural knowledge. With the emergence of the musical bar, the number of beats coincided with the number of syllables. Accordingly, while the monosyllabic word could have been the unit of chanting and invocation, the basic idea of the song/verse line that emerged from this monosyllabic word stipulated the number of beats in a Chinese song line (poem). There are four-word-line songs and seven-word-line songs in Chinese tradition. The four-word-line is the most common in folk songs.
A similar structure characterises pre-imperial Japanese verse. The number of syllables in a line is the basic prosodic principle. For example, the three-line Haiku, popular in English and Tamil, has five, seven and five syllables respectively. The songs feature varieties of parallelism. There are several which praise clan heroes. Early clan structure included guilds of reciters to repeat the history of the clan (Princeton 423) even as there were maatakar and cuutar who performed similar tasks in early Tamil society (tolkaappiyam III.2.35: 2.Comm.).
Greek poetry and later Latin poetry were also structured on the principle of quantity. A long syllable was equal to two short ones. A line consisted of specified number of feet made up of syllables. For example, the dactylic hexameter (taatana, taatana, taatana, taatana, taatana, taa taa) was the measure of lyric, gnomic, elegiac, philosophical and satiric poetry. Being the basic meter of the epic, the Iliad, and Odyssey were all composed in this measure. At this stage, there was no distinction between art and ritual and the song was part of the latter. Early Arabic poetry was also quantitative, sung to specific tunes accompanied by appropriate gestures (Princeton 42). Rajaz is a common Arabic meter in which the first line has three feet (bars) of seven beats each. In mutaqaarib, the meter of Shaah-naama, a Persian poem, the basic line has four feet of which the first three have five beats and the last has three (for information on Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin, and Arabic poetic traditions, Princeton). The distinct ending is a matter of musical evolution. The ending was, in all probability, differentiated to facilitate group participation. In South Indian music the ending has been sophisticated considerably.
From what has been said so far about the phonic structure of the texts of the primal societies, it is evident that it met the requirements of that society. This was possible because there was a direct relation between the nature of the society and the nature of the phonic structure. The integrated society worked on the principle of complex kinship and this was reflected in the musical organisation of the texts. A definitive structure as well as a certain amount of flexibility were necessary for serving collective ends, and this was evident in the inchoate musical bar of utterances/song units which could not be strictly adhered to in invocation or chanting. This allowed improvisation, an important feature of all forms of orality.
At the next stage, when society became stratified, music and song become part of the imperial cults of such cultures as Babylonian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican (of the Mayans and Aztecs), Peruvian, and early Vedic. Professional classes of persons were identified to perform the rituals and ritual texts. A clear distinction evolved between courtly music and popular music. Of the two, the former was more representative of this society than the latter. Perhaps, the latter included survivals from the earlier integrative society also. Due to the clear distinction between the sacred and the secular, non-ritualistic songs and poems also now became a possibility. It is true that there was the shaman in the primal, integrative societies to perform rituals. But in hierarchic societies, an ecclesiastical group took that place. They are not shamans but professional intermediaries between humans and the sacred.
With the formation of the state, authority was more centralised than in tribal chieftaincy, and soon found its parallel in the musico-literary domain. The song and ritual were no more part of a collective practice, but a specialised praxis performed either by a single priest or an ecclesiastical organisation. When the song came under the dominion of the individual performer (very often a male), he performed on behalf of the community or the ruler in an enclosed and manageable space (instead of the large open spaces where the primal rituals were performed). Now the congregation attentively followed his actions including his spoken word. The performative praxis became ceppal (speaking) and the "meter" that enabled it lacked rhythmic regularity. The Tamils called such a metre venpaa (literally, verse without rhythmic regularity; ven, devoid of + paa, verse). Rhythmic regularity found in the previous meter (akaval) was absent in venpaa. Without such rhythmic regularity, now verse approximated the spoken word as in the case of blank verse in English poetry.
In imperial Rome, the pitch (musically sung) accent was replaced by stress accent in Romance poetry. The unobtrusive stress (an aspect of syllable) of the primal phonic text now became prominent due to counterpointing. Over against a group of musicians or chorus, as the case may be, who maintained the periodic ictus (beat) of the line, the priest-performer stressed certain syllables, probably to emphasise certain ideas. Such stress should be distinguished from the improvisation that marked tribal and oral poetry. Due to specialisation the phonic structure was codified meticulously and increasingly disallowed improvisation.
Even as there were differentiated strata in the society, different phonic strata such as the quantity, stress and beat were manipulated and centrally controlled by the performer. Accordingly, in a Latin verse line, which was quantitative and stressed, the beat did not necessarily coincide with the stress. Music was only accompaniment to the performer's recitation or declamation of the text. Due to the growing prominence of the spoken word, the quantitative difference in vowels was lost sometimes as in Late Latin and Romance poetry. In Vedic meter, quantity was still the guiding principle, but the first syllables of the paada (a significant unit like a hemistich within a line) were not subject to very strict laws compared to the last four (Griffith 655).
The earliest Germanic verse was purely accentual with a basic four-stress line. Initially the number of unstressed syllables remained indeterminate, but later during the twelfth century the line achieved a standard pattern of either 4 main stresses or 3 main stresses with a secondary stress on the last syllable. However, like Greek and Latin poetry, German poetry was also inseparably linked with music. The nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice" preserves Old Germanic prosody. Against a four beat line, the rhyme gives us three stresses and varying number of unstresses in each line. Hopkins adopted this prosodic strategy and called it 'sprung rhythm'.
Several poems are based on a propositional or sentential structure like SVO. In other words, SVO is a common syntactical plot of poems. A case in point is the third poem in kuruntokai. Translated, the propositional base of the poem reads, "The love for naatan (the chieftain of the mountains) [S] is [V] such ("bigger than the earth", "higher than the sky", "unfathomable than the waters", Ramanujan 19) [O]. While the O is elaborated in this poem, another one in Ainkurunuuru (95) expands on the S of the simple syntax. Out of the four lines the first three form an expanded S.
Though not all literary texts use tropes, most do. For example, Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall" does not have a single trope. Here is the poem:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
But Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" is entirely based on the trope of analogy between the human and the summertime. If personification provides the kalam in John Donne's sonnet, "Death Be Not Proud", paradox does in Shakespeare's sonnet, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun". The following Shakespearean sonnet exemplifies the structuring potential of apostrophe:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time.
To the wide world and all her fading sweets:
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:-
Oh carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
In the tropic kalam of integrative tribal societies parallelism was a recurrent trope as in ancient Hebrew poetry. Here is an example:
The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, /
the world and those who dwell therein; //
for he has founded it upon the seas, /
and established it upon the rivers. //
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? /
And who shall stand in is holy place? //
Each of these six lines (six stichs) has two distichs: The earth is the Lord's (distich 1), and the fullness thereof (distich 2). The parallelism in the distichs can be shown with the help of the letters of the alphabet in the following manner:
a . b
a1 . b1
c . d
c1 . d1
e . f
e1 . f1
Though parallelism involves dualism, its dualism is the continuous type whereas the dualism of antithesis of texts of hierarchic societies is discontinuous in nature. Two entities, which are irreducibly distinct, are set in opposition to each other in this trope. The best example is the heroic couplet of Pope who was a distinguished poet of the imperial Britain affirming its sovereignty over the colonies it had acquired. Here are two examples:
1.Some foreign writers, some our own despise;
The Ancients only, or the Moderns prize.
2.A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. (An Essay on Criticism 395-396; 215-216)
In sum, analogy, personification, paradox, apostrophe, parallelism, antithesis are some of the tropic plots of poems.
Agentive kalam was elaborately dealt with by Tolkaappiyar (in Tamil), Aristotle (in Greek) and Bharata (in Sanskrit) and probably by other ancient theoreticians in other cultures too. In the twentieth century, formalists, protostructuralists (like Lord Raglan, James Frazer, Cornford, Weston and Gaster) and structuralists (Propp, Claude Levi-Strauss, Etienne Souriau, Roman Jakobson, Greimas, Claude Bremond, Todorov among others) have attempted to describe agentive kalam. Northrop Frye has also tried to unravel the mythic structure of literary texts. For example, Propp has identified thirty-one basic narrative units, which constitute the structure of the fairy tales. These are "functions" (such as absentation, interdiction and so on) or agentive units ascribable to seven personae [(1) the villain, (2) the donor, (3) the helper, (4) the princess and her father, (5) the dispatcher, (6) the hero, and (7) the false hero, the seven "spheres of action" occupied by eight character roles].
Agentive kalam falls under two major categories, conflict-oriented and those that are not conflict-oriented. The Aristotelian plot, most western plays and narratives, fairy-tales, and several epics and poems are based on conflict-oriented plots. The German critic Gustav Freytag described this type of a plot diagrammatically as a pyramid in his Technique of the Drama (1863). The non-conflictual plot is found in texts that are based on some primordial, universal structural model. The mythic structure constituted by the sequence of the seasons or the stages of life provides archetypal models for literary compositions. For example, John Keats's "Four seasons fill the measure of the year" is not based on any conflict but the seasonal sequence found in the western hemisphere. Besides its metrical kalam, one also finds an agentive kalam configured by the sequential arrangement of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (Garrod 423). Ancient Tamil akam (love) poetry is also of this type. Though there are conflictual elements like unrequited love, sulking, and so on, the basic plot does not need the element of conflict to structure itself. Besides conflict, some geometric shapes have also served their turn as types of kalam. Poetry based on such shapes is known as concrete or pattern poetry or carmen figuratum (literally "shaped poem"), (and as "cittirak kavi in Tamil). George Puttenham shows fifteen such shapes, the lozange, called rombus, the fuzie or spindle, called romboides, the triangle or tricquet, the square or quadrangle, the pillaster or cillinder, the spire or taper, called piramis, the rondel or sphere, the egge or figure ouail, the tricquet reuerst, the tricquest displayed, the taper reuersed, the rondel displayed, the lozange reuersed, the egge displayed, and the lozange rabbated (96-97).
The non-conflictual plots, apparently, are founded on some primordial structure that is either static or kinetic. The geometric shapes are examples of the static type whereas seasonal sequence or life-stages (birth, growth and death) exemplify the kinetic kind. The organic plot model found in ancient Tamil and Sanskrit texts belongs to the latter variety. In cilappatikaaram plot is canti consisting of mukam (sprout), pratimukam (sapling), karuppam (ripened sapling), vilaivu (grain), and tuyttal (enjoyment) (III.12. Commentary). The equivalents in The Natyasastra are mukha, pratimukha, garbha, vimarsa, and nirvahana (Ghosh xxiv).
It is possible to surmise that the non-conflictual plot derives from a worldview that is entirely different from the one that informs the conflictual. The latter presupposes a dualistic ontology in which the two primordial entities stand in an agonistic as well as a hierarchic relation as in Zoroastrianism where Light and Darkness are not only the two primordial entities of a pair, but also constitute a hierarchy privileging the former over the latter. Accordingly, Ahura Mazdah (also Ormazd) headed the gods of goodness and Ahriman (also Angra Mainyu) the gods of evil and both groups vied for supremacy (Runes 343).
The non-conflictual plot is holistic allowing differentiation within unity. The whole is nothing but a differentiated unity as in the case of an organism with distinguishable, differential members. Chronologically, non-conflictual ontology precedes the conflictual. The transformation of the persona of Biblical Satan will substantiate this view. The earlier Satan of the Joban narrative is a functionary in God's court opposing or standing over against God, unlike the later deteriorated Satan (who is the Evil One) of the New Testament. A verse in the book of Numbers illustrates this: "The angel of the Lord took his stand in the way (literally, stood as a Satan) against him (22:22; Paterson 25-27). In the case of Zoroastrianism, the dualistic philosophy "emerged from the spirit worship of the Neolithic tribes that settled Persia and India sometime in the second or third millennium BCE" (Stebben 6). By this argument, the absence of an antagonist in the metanarrative of early Tamil love poetry shows its antiquity. The personae of this metanarrative can be distinguished from their Sanskritic counterparts (the nayaka, nayika and their satellites). While the latter are hierarchically categorised as uttama (perfect), madhyama (both imperfect and perfect) and adhama (imperfect), among the former there is no such categorisation. Obviously, these categories are based on a hierarchic dualism involving perfection and imperfection. Consequently, it is possible to see a persona like Ravana as the equivalent of the antagonist in the conflictual plot.
A closer look at the dualisms available in several cultures shows us that they are all not the same. Two basic varieties are discernible. In one, the two members of the binary are irreducible and discontinuous as Plato's sensible and intelligible worlds, or Descartes's thinking and extended substances, or Kant's noumenon and phenomenon. In the other, they are two substances with a certain degree of independent existence but are also fluid at the same time and enjoy an ontic continuity. The two entities, namely, onru (One), and veeru (Other) in early Tamil thought are 'segments' or 'divisions' (paal), as if of an organism, which make possible the emergent 'onri uyarnta paal' (the segment that emerges in the unity) (tolkaappiyam III.3.3: 2). Another example is the Chinese binary consisting of yin and yang. The former is the negative, female principle and the latter positive, male principle. All things could be classified on the basis of their partaking of either of the two principles. For example, the sun and fire are yang, while earth, the moon and water are yin. However, this dualism is "not of the Occidental sort, like that between good and evil or spirit and matter. On the contrary, yin and yang complemented each other to maintain the cosmic harmony, and might transform into each other; thus winter, which is yin, changes into summer, which is yang" (Creel 173).
Further, these two kinds of dualisms, the ontic discontinuous type and the ontic continuous type, are inseparable from the nature of the oikos each emerges from. Accordingly, if the continuous type characterises the integrative oikos where the members of the oikos enjoy an ontic continuity, the discontinuous type is associated with the non-integrative oikos where the oikic members do not enjoy such continuity. It must be added that all types of heterogeneity should be viewed ultimately from the ontological perspective in order to understand them clearly. For example, when cultural contact results in heterogeneity in various domains like religion, value systems, politics, economy and so on, unless one examines the type of ontology pertaining to the respective cultures, one cannot understand the true nature of heterogeneity. The role of Christianity in a non-Christian society was a major issue in the intellectual circles in Tamilnadu in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it was in the Tambaram conference of 1938. Those who debated this issue fell into two camps, the evangelicals (led by Kraemer) and the 'rethinking' group of Madras (including Chenchiah and Chakkarai). These two groups could not address the issue convincingly because their discussion did not go beyond the domain of religion. They were trapped in the maze of religious dissimilarity. But the dissimilarity in religions itself derives from the ontic heterogeneity that marks the oikoses these religions presuppose. Christianity presupposes an oikos of discontinuous ontology whereas the Tamil society has been traditionally used to an oikos that is ontologically continuous. This being the case, any debate (such as the Tambaram conference) on the place of Christianity in Tamilnadu cannot ignore the ontological question. However, there could be dissimilarities between two religious systems, which are based on the same type of ontology. But such religious systems are more likely to coexist and reciprocally interact with each other, than two religious systems with different ontological frameworks. Sustained interaction and dialogue may resolve cultural differences, but not ontological difference.
When the white settlers took two million acres of the land of the Suquamish Indians, Chief Seattle made it very clear that "we are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies. There is little in common between us". He did show how there were fundamental ontological differences. He spoke of the continuity among the sacred, the humans and nature his people respected, and the discontinuity he saw among these three entities in the white settler's worldview. In other words, the heterogeneity that marked the oikos of the white settlers was radically different from that which marked the oikos of the tribal people.
Poiesis:
To say that the members of an oikos 'stand in relation' is to say that they are already engaged in action and interaction. Since action-free relation is implausible, oikos is available to humans only through action and in a literary work of art, through verbal action. By virtue of the structuredness of literary verbal action, it may be designated as 'poiesis'.
Any action, according to tolkaappiyam, involves some or all of the eight following factors: action, agent, product, instrument, place, time, patient, and end (II.3.29). Some actions like cooking will involve all the eight factors: cooking, cook, food, utensils, kitchen, cooking time, and consumer. These actions are comparable to the actions denoted by transitive verbs. But others like walking involve these factors in less obvious ways: walking (action), walker (agent), body (instrument?), walking space (place), walking time (time), reaching a destination or exercise (end). These actions are like the ones denoted by intransitive verbs.
Actions may also be put under two other categories, namely, vilaiyaatal (game) and aatal (play) (Selvamony, "The Ontology"). The former is consequence-oriented act (vilai-consequence) that tends to bring about a desired result. Therefore, all aspects of the act are manipulated in such a way that the goals, scores or targets (like the bull's eye) set by the agent can be achieved by rational control following certain accepted rules. The rules may be explicit as in the case of chess, or implicit as in the case of conventions or customary acts like riding a bus. In certain other acts the rules may exist in an inchoate form only as unspecified skills, which are nevertheless necessary to perform the act well.
Whether an act is transitive (like cooking) or intransitive (like walking), it could be either vilaiyaatal or aatal. For example, the movement of the human feet may either be deemed walking or dancing (Paul Valery, 'Poetry and abstract thought: dancing and walking'). If the former, it is termed vilaiyaatal, and if the latter, aatal.
aatal is a type of act without a pronounced purpose (vilai) (Gadamer 94). If the agent moves consciously towards an end in vilaiyaatal, (s)he does not do so in aatal. For example, as Valery shows, one walks in order to reach a destination, whereas, one does not set a similar goal while dancing. Therefore, walking becomes an end-oriented act (vilai-y-aatal); whereas, dancing has no such avowed goal.
However, both acts may use instruments. If a guitarist uses a guitar while 'playing' (aatal) guitar, a guitar maker uses tools other than the guitar itself. The latter is not 'playing' like the musician, but only, shall we say, 'gaming'. By and large, poiesis is aatal, though, not entirely. It alternates between aatal and vilaiyaatal. There are some moments when the person plays or performs spontaneously and others when (s)he acts consciously in order to achieve certain desired ends.
The action in a literary text is basically of two types: personic and personaic. If the literary praxis of the artist is the former, the action(s) of the personae within the text are the latter. While western aesthetics is preoccupied with personic praxis, particularly the creative act right from the classical times, Tamil aesthetics hardly pays any attention to it. Though it is possible to analyze the praxis of the artist with the help of the eight agentive parameters, and the conceptual pair consisting of aatal and vilaiyaatal, this essay will focus only on personaic action.
The personaic action in a poem involves the narrator-persona, and other personae in addressorial oikoses. Each addressorial oikos consists of the addresser (tanmai, represented by the letter t), addressee (munnilai, represented by the letter m), and the context (patarkkai, represented by the letter p). Each addressorial oikos may generate a set of actions of personae and all such actions constitute an agentive/addressorial plot. The addressorial oikoses form a system in which the central place is occupied by the protagonist. Usually, all the personae stand in a hierarchic relationship; with one of them being the major persona (protagonist) and the others, minor. Occasionally, the protagonist may be a dyad, like a pair of lovers, or spouses, but usually, a monadic entity or a single persona. The actions of the protagonist and other personae are composed by the artist to form a plot. This means that the actions of the agents other than the protagonist are subordinated to the actions of the latter. Such subordination is what is commonly known as plotting of action.
The major difference between personaic praxis in drama and personaic praxis in other genres like poetry and fiction is the presence of the embodied persona in the former and its absence in the latter. In drama the actors who embody the personae of the plot perform on stage (kalam) by addressing the other actors or the audience directly. In non-dramatized poetry and fiction, the disembodied narrator-persona "reports" the actions of the personae to an embodied reader. Further, the role of the narrator-persona may vary from text to text. In some (s)he may be one of the agents of the plot, while in others (s)he may not be one such. For example, in D.H.Lawrence's 'Snake', the narrator is the protagonist who is narrating not only his own actions but also those of the other personae -- the human, the snake, and the voices.
Method:
Having explained the concepts of Oikos and Poiesis, let us show how these can be applied in the appreciation of specific texts. Such application involves performing the following tasks:
I. Identification of the Oikoses:
I.0.Type of Oikos (integrative/non-integrative)
I.1.Personic Oikos (External Oikos)
I.2.Personaic Oikos (Internal Oikos)
I.2.1. Oikos 1 (members)
I.2.1.1. Description of kalam (phonic, syntactic, tropic, agentive)
I.2.1.2. Constituents of act
I.2.1.2.1. Type of act (play/game)
I.2.2. Oikos 2
I.2.2.1. Description of kalam (phonic, syntactic, tropic, agentive)
I.2.2.2. Constituents of act
I.2.2.2.1. Type of act (play/game)
II. Establishing relation between Oikos 1 and other Oikos(es);
III. Comparison of Oikos(es) of the given text with Oikos(es) of other comparable texts.
Application:
Now let us apply the method to D.H.Lawrence's 'Snake'.
I.1. Personic Oikos:
Oikos of D.H.Lawrence/Narrator-Person
agent: narrator (reader)
patient: listener (oneself/others)
space: outside plot
time: of reading
instrument: text
end: virtue/meaning/pleasure
product: recreated text
action: reading
I.2. Personaic Oikos
I.2.1. Oikos 1
human agent (protagonist, t), snake (m), spatio-temporal context in
Sicily (unilateral and bilateral integrative)
I.2.1.1. Description of kalam:
phonic: unmetered
syntactic: mimetic at places
tropic: similes like cattle, king, god
agentive: narrative plot
I.2.1.2. Constituents of act:
agent: human persona
patient: snake, voices
space: Sicily
time: July
instrument: pitcher, log
end: solving the problem of encounter
product: meyppaatu (expression of emotion), knowledge, power balance
action: encounter with snake
I.2.1.2.1. aatal : human x snake
vilaiyaatal: human x snake
education x snake
other voices x snake
I.2.2. Oikos 2 (of snake) (integrative)
I.2.2.2. agent: snake
patient: human persona
space: earth fissure in Sicily
time: Sicily
instrument: -----
end: drinking water
product; ----
action: moving towards and away from water trough, drinking
I.2.2.2.1.vilaiyaatal
aatal
I.2.3. Oikos 3 (of voice of education)
I.2.3.2. agent: voice
patient: human persona
space: Sicily
time: July
instrument: -----
product: ----
end: killing the snake
action: persuading human persona
I.2.4. Oikos 4 (of other voices)
I.2.4.2. agent: voices
patient: human persona
space: Sicily
time: July
instrument: ----
product: ----
end: killing the snake
action: persuading human persona
II. Relation between Oikos 1 and Oikos 2:
The encounter between the two oikoses not only teaches the speaker about the snake's oikos, but also helps him/her critique his/her own oikos. Only this encounter makes him/her debunk some of the false, anti-ecological assumptions of human individuals, and social institutions like education. The encounter also shatters the sacrosanct, hierarchical notion of the chain of being, whereby the humans are the crown of all creation. The human is humbled by his ignorance of the earth wisdom; he is rendered powerless by the numinous power of the secret earth through its delegate, namely, the snake.
III. Comparison:
Edwin Muir's 'The Horses' records a similar interspecies encounter, between a family and horses. The horses are in stark contrast to the human world of machines and modern science. They also restore the Edenic innocence humans lost along the way long ago. Like the speaker in Lawrence's poem, the speaker in Muir's poem also expresses a similar puzzlement at the sight of the horses. They are strange 'as fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield/Or illustrations in a book of knights'. The speaker and the speaker's family members 'did not dare to go near them'. The horses 'waited, /Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent/ By an old command to find our whereabouts/ And that long-last archaic companionship'. The anthropocentric assumption regarding non-human life found in the poem figures in Lawrence's poem also.
If the speaker in 'Snake' learns that a venomous snake need not necessarily be looked upon as a foe to be vanquished at first sight, the humans in 'The Horses' begin a new life with the coming of the horses. The 'free servitude' of the horses does touch the lives of the humans and pierces their heart.
One may profitably compare Lawrence's 'The Mosquito' with 'Snake'. If the latter veers between game and play, only to resolve the dilemma in favour of play in the end, the former poem is wholly an exercise in game, in deed, showing remarkable variations.
Other pieces worth comparison would be Emily Dickinson's 'A Narrow Fellow in the Grass', Denise Levertov's 'To The Snake', Walt Whitman's 'I saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing', and such contemporary Tamil verses like paavannan's 'ovvaru teetalukkyup pinnum' (Behind Every Search') (azhakiyacinkar 74), caa. arankanaatan's 'taccuur pooneen' (I Went to Taccur) (azhakiyacinkar 168), and 'en paciyum cila paravaikalum' (My hunger and some birds) (azhakiyacinkar 169), and cinnakkapaali's 'ippatiyum cila vishayankal' (A few things like these) (azhakiyacinkar 100), aatmaanaam's 'cetiyutan oru uraiyaatal' (A Conversation with a Plant) (pirammaraajan 77), teevateevan's 'velikkatavin matil meel oor anil' (A squirrel on the compound wall with a door) (teevateevan 16), among many other similar ones. For an epiphanic encounter between a human and a tree, Martin Buber's I and Thou is greatly resourceful.
Usually, in a poem one finds more than one oikos. In that case, oikos 1 will be the primary oikos and the other oikos(es) will be secondary in nature. This is so because, all works of art target unity of structure, and unity is impossible when there are oikoses of equal significance. Exceptions to this rule will be those works of art, which juxtapose similar oikoses or mere variations with equal significance.
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*First introduced as a critical method in the course 'Ecoliterature' offered at the Department of English, Madras Christian College in 1995-1996; revised as an unpublished paper entitled, 'Oikopraxis', and presented in the UGC-sponsored Refresher Courses both in the University of Madras (15 November, 2001) and in Bharatidasan University at Tiruchirappalli (21, 22 March 2002).
