The Novelty of Deception: Art and Artificiality

The very word "art" carries a sense of superficiality.  So the beauty of art consists in the beauty of novelty.  Again, what is the nature of this novelty?  It is the "novelty of deception".  This novelty may be compared to the one which Parvati uses to win over Siva.  On further reflection I find that artistic media were not originally meant for artistic creations.  They were simply meant for communication.  But as soon as these media were used as instruments of artistic creations, they immediately started imparting a particular kind of novelty to the rudimentary matter of communication, which in its final expression is inscrutable and unanalysable.  It is in this sense that language (and in an extended sense all other artistic media) retards communication.  Thus poetic language is the language of silence.  This is again due to the innate dynamism of the artist's medium.  It is in this sense that the task of a translator is not merely carrying the "sense" or "message" of the original work into the target language, rather translation is "transcreation" - it is the creation of novel superstructures on a rudimentary base, as it were.  This accounts for the individuality and novelty attached to different translations of a single work.  On these grounds we may also seek to justify Archibald Macleish's contention that "A poem should not mean but be".  It is, as the late Prof. R. K. Sen, M.A., D. Litt. (Department of English, University of Calcutta) remarked, "The rendering of mimesis as imitation is far from accurate.  Mimesis should be better interpreted as "birth" of a new existent world through the union of Lexis and Idea."  This "novelty of deception" also accounts for the difference lying between the "goodness" of an answer written to a question relating to a Navya Nyaya passage in a university examination and the "elegance" of a classical commentary (as that of Mathuranatha or Jagadisa) on the same Navya-Nyaya passage, or that between an idol-maker's clay idols and the potter's pots and jugs.  It is the difference between 'nirmana' and 'nirmiti', discussed so beautifully by Abanindranath Tagore in the first chapter of his "Vagisvari Silpa Prabandhavali." It is also the difference between "suskam kastham patati agre" and "nirasa taruvara purato bhati".  Thus the virtues of a work of art consists in its multi-dimensionality of interpretation, (synonymous with obscurity or ambiguity), which in turn is due to the inscrutable and inseparable "wholeness" that results from a perfect fusion of Form and Content, which may be compared to the Samarasya of the Tantrikas, or the Yuganaddha of the Tantric Buddhists.  It is in this sense that ambiguity is an essential precondition of a work of art.  Art is wholeness, Art is Brahman.