Abhinavagupta goes even further, arguing that even at the level of syntactic units or the basic building blocks of a language, poetry is not always bound to the principles of coherence, meaning, and verification. “Poetic sentences,” for instance, “do not require validity so as to motivate [hearers] by communicating a true meaning … because they culminate only in pleasure.”23 So even language that does not cohere or produce mundane meaning may produce rasa. This is true, for instance, in language or sound poetry. Illegibility has its own pleasures, incomprehensibility may exalt. It is at the end of denotation that rasa manifests, as in Hindustani and Carnatic music, where the repetition of a single phrase by the singer — sometimes for hours — so empties the words that finally nothing is left but the fullness of the emotion, that which lies beyond words.
The grammarians of Sanskrit — the eternal, formal language — were, as one might expect, obsessed with correctness, precision, clarity. The proponents of the rasa-dhvani theory — from Anandavardhana onwards — faced fierce opposition from the orthodox on the grounds that there was no need to introduce a new semantic power to account for the suggestive functioning of art. Connotation, context, the speaker’s intent, and inference, the argument went, already accommodated this functionality. A ninth-century logician summarily dismissed Anandavardhana’s arguments and added, “In any case, this discussion with poets is not appropriate; even learned people become confused in this difficult path of sentence meaning.”24
Our logician was understandably annoyed by the fuzzing up of the difficult but clean lines of sentence-meaning, least of all by poets, who — it must be admitted — can tend to be somewhat unlearned in logic. Nevertheless, what Anandavardhana tries to achieve in his analysis is completely in keeping with his intellectual tradition, which modeled all knowledge after Panini’s grammar: he tries to provide a systematic, algorithmic understanding of literary beauty and its effects. At the end of the Dhvanyaloka, he quotes a critic who declares, “We may speak of dhvani whenever an ineffable beauty of certain words and certain meanings is perceptible only to special cognizors, just as the rarity of certain gems [is known only to special experts].” Anandavardhana says bluntly that this critic is wrong, and argues that the
special [virtues] of words and meanings can be explained and have been explained in many ways [by himself]. To imagine that there is some ineffable virtue over and above these is to admit that one’s power of analysis has ceased … As for the definition sometimes given of ineffability, that it is the appearance of a thing [viz., of a unique particular] which cannot be referred to by a word for a mental construct (vikalpa) which is based on … the general or universal, this can no more apply to the special virtues of poetry than it can to the special virtues of gems. For the virtues of the former have been analysed by literary critics, while no estimate can be made of the value of a gem by reference merely to the general or universal. It is true, however, in both cases that these special virtues are recognizable only by experts. For only jewellers are knowers of gems and only sensitive critics (sahṛdaya) are knowers of the rasa of poetry. On this point no one will argue.25
Perhaps the logician would have agreed, but I can’t help thinking that what also irritated him about Anandavardhana’s investigation was what it made of poets. In response to Anandavardhana’s assertion that dhvani provided endless freshness to language, Abhinavagupta observes that there are a limited number of things worthy of description
but by the multiplicity [of dhvani] … these same things become limitless; hence there arises an infinity of poetic imagination taking them at its object … This can come about only if the poetic imagination is endless, and that only if the objects to describe endless; and that only because of the variety of dhvani.26
Ingalls writes:
What is notable here is that the variety of suggestiveness is placed outside the human mind; it is the cause, not the result of poetic imagination. It is as though our authors thought of the objects of the world as existing in a pattern which rendered them amenable to mutual suggestions when viewed by a great poet. The poet’s imagination, in this view, would be the medium, not the primary cause, of the creation of new worlds. The worlds would already be there through the magic which underlies dhvani. Such a view is in harmony with the origin of the Sanskrit word for poet, kavi. A kavi is a seer, a revealer.27
“No being (animal or deity) exists with which man has no affinity of nature,” Abhinavagupta writes.
The saṃasāra (world) is beginningless, and every man, before that which he actually is, has been all the other beings as well. The consciousness of the spectator thus possesses (in other words, is varied by …) the latent impressions of all the possible beings and he is therefore susceptible of identifying himself with each of them.28
Abhinavagupta’s assertion that “everybody’s mind is indeed characterized by the most various latent impressions” is elsewhere more amenable to a purely materialist interpretation which requires no belief in rebirth; but, always, memory — selves which have been forgotten, experiences suffered and cherished and half-buried — is the limitless pool on which the reverberating dhvani of art enacts its surges and churns out rasa.29
This susceptibility toward identification with the other, this conjuring up of beings from the endless depths of the self, is what makes
the educative effect (vyutpādana) [of poetry] … different from that which comes from scripture through its mandates and from history through its narrations. For in addition to the analogy which it furnishes that we should behave like Rama [and not like Ravana], it produces in the final result an expansion of one’s imagination which serves as the means of tasting the rasas.30
This expansion of the self is available only through the pleasure of rasa, and so “the end of poetry is pleasure, for it is only by pleasure, in the form of an otherworldly delight, that it can serve to instruct us.”31
Poetry as moral instruction gets scant attention from the theorists of rasa-dhvani; when Abhinavagupta does discuss the issue in passing, it is to assure us that
of instruction and joy, joy is the chief goal. Otherwise, what basic difference would there be between one means of instruction, viz., poetry, which instructs after the fashion of a wife, and other means of instruction, such as the Vedas which instruct after the fashion of a master, or history which instructs after the fashion of a friend? That is why bliss is said to be the chief goal. In comparison with [poetry’s] instruction even in all four aims of human life, the bliss which it renders is a far more important goal.32
To the objection that there was no way to know if rasa really existed, Abhinavagupta replied, “Wrong. It is proved by our own self-awareness, because savouring is a form of knowledge.”33
The urge to savor is universal, but its expression is culturally shaped. Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song. According to Anandavardhana: