BLITZ LITERARY GENRE
By: Shekhar Sarkar M.A (English);M.A (Linguistics) . University of Delhi.
Human responses in art have innate artistry in drawing attention that appeal the imagination to exploit the psyche. Since the evolution of humans , expressions in emotions and feelings as response have recorded excitement, awe, fear, joy, sorrow, hope, love or hate exhibiting human lives dating as early as 32,000 b.c through the Paleolithic age in cave paintings art by the prehistoric man . Although the precise nature of the raw or brut art could be debated and not recognised ; it is generally agreed as the emergence of an articulated genre both narrative and expository with socio-historical chronological significance through phases of human settlements in assemblages with cross components of human artistic expressions as facts, myths, legends or folklore that have flexible applications.
Classical Literary criticism may denounce them as natural formless impulses of the placid human creator devoid of sublime grandeur but the unique innate artistry overshadows other rigid art form and must be accepted as precursor to genres.
The categorization of genre as literary pronouncements are scattered in antiquity in terms of content , technique or tone of expression .No particular structure or format evolved till the Greeks deduced a method of ‘reduction ad absurdum’ to undermine diction or character as object of satire or to interspersed artistic merit.
Each artistic expression may exhibit embedded embellishments of different genres to metamorphose as another unique genre in itself.
The Greeks like Hesiod ,Homer, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Plato have paved the way to a broad interpretation of literary genres such as epic, comedy, tragedy with clear distinction between a prose and poetry within the rigid framework or genres with elements of satire, allegory and pastoral as artistic blend . Each social and historical period of change reflect new expressions as literary genre in religious, cultural or political movements both in prose narrative and poetic forms.
The etymology of genre has evolved from the combination of the Greek word genes translated from Aristotle’s term genos : to produce or cause to produce, giving the French a term to refer it with social and biological attributes in genre as unique kind , sort and independent style.
The human expression is influenced within the subconscious psyche encompassing the individual idea responsible for human behavior fluttering like butterflies viewed as motions in helplessness, search, freedom or joy.
A clear distinction must be made between the flexible innate unique content technique in style with artistry blend and the structural form .The former is unique within the stylistic domain of a language to express individual or social talent as art form ; the latter more standardized structural forms of narrative or expository literary composition.
It cannot be denied that both were the founding of articulated genre executed to depict lives and times of humans as indigenous expressions of art in oral traditions recorded in written forms as mythology, folklore, fables, poetry, legend, drama, humour, horror and all forms of fiction.
The category of fiction is differentiated by the structured format as in the unity of the plot or character centered fiction that have acceptance and mass appeal.
Evolution of new art forms emerge with the historical and social changes through turbulent civilization. Apart from the link between form and effect the flux within a language reveals the style . The stylistics of language in every civilization has undergone change but more evident in modern language.
Modern writers create their own genre as expression unlike the novices who attempt to enter the portals of literary art in dilemma to select a genre as expression with the sole objective of mass appeal and market.
Modern expressions are unique and deviate from rigid genre forms to note objectively the chaotic human civilization since Genesis , and with some levity suggest the disharmony of the Divine with creativity.The schism is not by poetic madness or rational realism , but by a paradigm shift in the human cognitive creativity , as genetic markers since evolution with the advent of man the creator and his own tribulations with the tragic fall .
Every age falsifies creativity in philosophical isms reflected in every school of thought .The caveman in weak wisdom and fear expressed his raw sensibility in parietal art with figurative or abstract images and idiomorphs. Each period from the Aurignacian to the late Magdalenian refined human expressions in pentimentos ; the Greeks in codified poetics , from Longinus , Plato, Socrates, Homer to Aristophanes only to ridicule the dignity of a poet in rhetorics of reductio ad absurdum.Horace in eloquent rhetorics eulogized the Emperor Maecenas in Doric Ecstasy . Shakespeare in his drama eulogized the Queen in Elizabethan romantic panegyric patronage . Henry Fielding in the good nature of man as ecclesiastical virtue: Dickens in Victorianism . Nietze in his madness and fear of alienation denounced all social and moral values in Nihilism with the death of the Divine creator.
The abdication of the deceitful Divine in modern literature implies no scope for mimesis in poetic sublime, nor for the cathartic purging of human emotions in sublime grandeur. The theories of Homer and Hesiod have gone overboard and no longer need Divine inspiration for pleasure or instructions nor does art invoke the muses today to inspire poetic sensibility of the Divine. They have become mute.
Modern fiction therefore in erudite impiety caters to the heterogeneous culture , ostensibly in cliché ridden pretentious forms to vulgarize the human sensibility and is itself insensitive to creativity. The complexities and incongruities in life become hackneyed journalese. The literary void is evident from the hackneyed prose in materialism and eroticism merely to excite and titillate.
The new Blitz Genre , both in art and literary writing serves as instinctual drive to express intense emotions that overshadow judgement and compress the human tribulations into concentrated intense duality of rational-emotional sensibility , not to charm away the human conflicts in archetypal extended metaphors or codified rhetorics but by archetypal psychological subtlety and unique style in tachistoscopic historical tableau vivant, and in use of asydetons to compress time in rapid events outstripping premeditated rationality, not only in the present but since Genesis to spatial time. The polyptoton draws the human victim rapidly into the unknown void to burst into sublime grandeur.The theme inspires a mathematical model toward cathartic purging of human existence
The witty acerbic style in literature unfolds the plot sans a protagonist as allegoric satire. The irony is obvious in the burlesque smug human morality and scurrility, employed as a technique for the organic unity in the plot that binds into a persuasive fluid force and expose the lustful human satyr through conceptual time & space.
Reference:
- Synopsis of ‘BLITZ LITERARY GENRE’ Ed. SAGI Published : SAGI PUBLICATION 2010.
- Introduction: CONUNDRUMS & CONCUBINES :SAGI Fiction in Blitz Genre Published by SAGI PUBLICATIONS 2010.
- CONTOURS & CURVES:SAGI Published by SAGI PUBLICATIONS.2010.
Blitz Genre 