Yakshagana

     Yakshagana is a unique traditional form of dance theatre prevailed in Karnataka. It was very popular in the southern districts of Karnataka. It combines dance, music, stage technique with a distinct style, costume make-up etc.  Yakshagana consists of Himmela (background musicians) and Mummela (dance and dialogue group). Traditional music instruments like hand drum, harmonium, pipes etc were used in the drama.

     Yakshagana literally means the song of yaksha (the song of the nature spirit). The main essence of this form of dance is its attachment with religion, which provided the most common themes for the plays. Stories of battles taken from the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata were used to portray. Traditionally this music drama played in temples and village squares. A bhagavata (story teller) used to narrate the story while actors dance to the music.  

     The performance used to begin at midnight and would go on all night. For almost one hour the drums were being used in a particular rhythm. After this the actors would appear on the stage wearing costumes ready to enact various roles. The costumes are rich in colour, decorated with pieces of mirror and colored stone. Sari and other decorative ornaments are also being used in the performance.   

Ecriture Feminine: Helene Cixous

     

     In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) Helene Cixous introduces a new ways of thinking and writing about women and literature.  It is called Ecriture feminine (feminine writing). A feminine text is designed to smash and shatter all the frame work of institutions created by the male authority.

     Feminine writing acknowledges its rootedness in the body. She urges the women saying, “Write yourself, your body must be heard”. Since it is the female body, it has been repressed historically by male theology, philosophy and social system. Theology openly repressed the body advocating the negation of body and desires and in particular the female body, which is regarded as a source of temptation and often as unclean. Writing with the body implies a return of the repressed. It expresses the individuality of the self. This new writing expressing the new woman will resist the myths and language introduced by men

     This new insurgent writing will cause a break in the history of woman at two levels

• It will affect a return of woman to her body, whereby she can realize ‘decensored’ relation to her sexuality
• When she seizes the occasion to speak, this will mark her “shattering entry into history”. It will confirm a place for her other than that is reserved by the male institution and history

The Laugh of the Medusa: Helene Cixous

     ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) is a seminal essay by the French writer and feminist Helene Cixous. Her peculiar contribution to literature, Ecriture feminine (feminine writing) is expressed in this work. The work is structured like a poem as a refusal to the conventional rhetoric formats of argumentation. The ‘arguments’ of this text is based on the materiality of language, the texture of words and effects of word combination etc. The work is not circling around any central metaphor, since according to Cixous the very notion of centrality is transitory.

     Cixous charges that “Men have riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss”. The ‘Abyss’ refers to the connotation of Freud’s designation of women as a ‘dark continent’ – difficult to analyze and understand. She denies this myth.

     Medusa was traditionally portrayed as a monster; with snakes in place of her hair. She was once renowned for her loveliness. Her hair was attractive. Poseidon (God of the Sea) robbed her of her virginity and punished her by changing her hair into revolting snakes and made her face so terrible.

     The myth of Medusa represents the repression of female sexuality and beauty. Cixous concentrate on the Medusa prior to the repression of her sexuality, prior to her changing into a monster. For Cixous laughter is a symbolic mode of refusing the male concept of history and truth as defined by masculine traditions of thought. She adds that A feminine text is designed to smash and shatter all the frame work of institutions, to blow up the truth and break up the ‘truth’ with laughter

     Cixous urges for the breaking of myths related to women. to redeem woman from the degraded status in the history of male mythology she has to demolish all such myths and start writing. She urges the women saying, “Write yourself, your body must be heard”

Kirtanya Natak

Kirtanya Natak was one of the indigenous performing arts of India. The word kirtanya is derived from the word kirtan. This form of art is prevailed in the North Bihar from the 14^th to the 20^th century. It is a dramatic performance of the acts of Lord Krishna. It was enacted on certain special occasions. The play is introduced by a Suthradhara. By his entry the benedictory song (Nandi Geeth) would stop. As far as language is concerned, the use of Maithili, Sanskrit and Prakrit can be detected. The male characters used Sanskrit while the female and lower characters used Prakrit. The songs were generally in Maithili.

The troops are generally called Jamati that contained between three to eleven members. They perform the roles of nayak or hero, nayika or heroine, sakhi or female confidant, clown, orchestra etc. the themes were mostly taken from the puranas and other legends. 

Dissociation of Sensibility

The phrase Dissociation of Sensibility appeared in Eliots essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. A good poetry is the result of the fusion of thought and feeling. Such fusion is called ‘Unification of Sensibility’. It is the opposite of dissociation of sensibility. Metaphysical poets have strictly followed this unification, but according to Eliot this fusion of thought and feeling characteristic had been progressively lost in the 17^th century. It is a loss from which we have never recovered. Eliot complained that the influence of Milton and Dryden caused this dissociation of sensibility. Bad poetry is the result of this dissociation of sensibility, lack of fusion between thought and feeling.

By ‘sensibility’ Eliot means a synthetic faculty which can amalgamate and unite thought and feeling, the sensuous and the intellectual. The acceptance of the Elizabethans is due to the unified sensibility that they possessed. This capacity is visible in the works of John Donne. After Donne and Herbert poets lost this power of unification, they could either think or they could feel. The 18^th century poets were intellectuals, they though hardly felt. The Romantics felt but did not think.

For Eliot if the poets of the 20^th century are willing to imitate the metaphysical poets this breach might be healed. 

Objective Correlative

     Objective Correlative is one of the most important critical concepts of T.S.Eliot. Eliot’s idea of poetic impersonality finds its formulation in this concept. Eliot described this concept in his famous essay “Hamlet and his Problems”. He believed that the poet is unable to transfer his/her emotions and ideas directly to the reader. Thus there must be some sort of mediation. 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 which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

     

     Through this objective correlative the transaction between the author and the reader takes place. Thus what the author has to say is objectified. These objects can be a situation, certain inanimate objects, and characters etc. The external actions or objects are representing the internal emotions of the characters. The sleep waking scene, candle, comments relating to the perfumes of Arabia, smell of blood etc. in Macbeth gives us the picture of Lady Macbeth’s emotional and mental state.

     Shakespeare has failed to find suitable objective correlative in his drama Hamlet. Hamlet’s suffering is not conveyed properly by any character or any action in the play. Thus for Eliot Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an artistic failure. Eliot admired Dante’s poetry and its visual imagination because Dante did not lose his grasp over the objective correlative.

     The worldwide loss of vision in José Saramago’s Blindness, the car in Stephen King’s Christine, Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird etc. are examples of objective correlatives.  

Pathetic Fallacy

A literary device wherein something nonhuman found in nature like animals, plants, natural forces etc. functions as if from human feeling or motivation or thought. The term was coined by John Ruskin in his book Modern Painters. The description will be imaginary and fanciful. The term pathetic here uses in a derogatory senses- as imparting emotions to something else. In literature inanimate objects found in the nature are often being used to mirror the mood of a person. E.g. angry tides, smiling stars etc. Victorian writers and Gothic novelists abundantly used this technique in their works. 

Examples

Wordsworth uses the image of cloud to picture the feeling of loneliness.

 I wandered lonely as a child

 That floats on high o’er vales and hills

Mary Shelley in her Frankenstein has used the pathetic fallacy effectively. 

 The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have  wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not  fear, are  a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does  not grudge

The creature tells his pathetic and desolate life to his creator, Frankenstein. The desolate glaciers and desert mountains explains his status to the reader.