What the Gyan Books chap amounts to is a semi-dialectic—
Elegies, Odes, Elegies— that, without a synthesis, leaves questions in the air
difficult to handle. In terms of alignments, when we align the Elegies with
phenomenology— inside the mind/outside the mind dichotomies, played out in or
with the dramatic intensity of a Protagonist’s revelations of Otherness— and
then align the Odes with transcendentalism— Keats’ configuring a play of
archetypes in his consciousness, which grants him access to an ability to
create and maintain a certain kind of poetic music— as a thesis and an
antithesis, uncompleted, in the chap, by a synthesis (not to mention the
humanism of the Elegies offset by the formalism of the Odes), the difficulty of
making them relate is the sense that what they share is less substantial than
what differentiates them. The freezing of moments into immortality— pairs of
lovers— stillness or quietness or a “hushed” quality— the pastoral and the
suburban— rigorous music with rigorous narrative-thematic elements— visions and
the visionary— all these constituent factors which bind the Elegies and the
Odes together still, in the context of the Gyan chap, have a way of configuring
a kind of textual jigsaw puzzle, where pieces must be connected slowly and with
care. One facile interpretation— that the Odes constitute an intermission or
intermezzo period against the bleak, hard darkness of the Elegies— has to fail
and fall if we grant the Elegies and Odes commensurate power.
When Drama is aligned with phenomenology and Music with
transcendentalism, and both are given equal representation in a gestalt unit
like the Gyan chap, the reader response effect (to paraphrase Wolfgang Iser)
must be a varying one, and, if the puzzle pieces can never settle into easy
interlocking patterns, it is a challenge to the individuality of the reader to
discover if the thesis and the antithesis can be made to synthesize. The
challenge is a call to define an individual’s sensibility, both towards Drama
and Music; the down in the dirt phenomenological challenge of Otherness with
the transcendental lunge towards the higher, abstract, mathematical realities
of the most exquisite forms of musicality. The sense of the Gyan chap as a kind
of test or divining for different synthesis notions in different readers takes
the chap out of the realm of standard and standardized textuality and into a
realm in itself both phenomenological and transcendental.
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