Reality is the state of being actual or real. It could be what the Vedic philosophy calls the absolute reality (Paramarthika satta), relative reality (Vyavaharika satta), or illusory reality (Pratibhasika satta). The absolute (Consciousness) appears as the empirical world, the objects in the empirical world cause illusions, and what is illusory appears to be real. At the same time, one cannot say that this is all illusion, for within the illusion could be the Real. In other words, if the Real is absolute and hence unlimited, the illusion (Maya) is ineffable, and human experience which exists in the overlapping spheres of the reality is neither ultimately real nor completely illusory.

The history of Western philosophy too has its beginnings in the panoptic question about reality—Is reality essentially one or made up of many parts? While Parmenides argued that reality is one, eternal, and unchanging and Democritus held that reality is made up of many indestructible substances, Plato’s conception of supersensible Forms sounds very much similar to Paramarthika satta, which he believed can be perceived only through the transcendent science of dialectic. German philosopher Hegel, one of the greatest influences on American thought, believed in the unreality of separateness and in the reality of the whole (‘the Absolute’), which to him was not a simple substance but a complex system composed of apparently separate things having a greater or lesser degree of reality, with each of their reality consisting in an aspect of the whole. Which brings us to where we began: the Vedic philosophy of India. Interestingly, as Kenneth Chandler writes in his book Origins of Vedic Civilization, “…there is much evidence of a link between the early Greeks and the more ancient Vedic civilization of India, suggesting that Vedic culture flowed west to Persia and Europe.” What then is reality? Is it a synergistic experience, the whole of which is greater than the sum of its parts? As the Rig Veda says, “Who knows truly? Who can here declare it? / Whence it was born, whence is this emanation?” (X, cxxix, 6). ‘Reality,’ by the way, is the predominant theme of the current issue.

The one frequent issue that runs through the body of Wallace Stevens’ works is the relationship between reality and imagination. To Stevens, imagination is a medium to reality. Echoing Hegel, he says in a Harvard lecture, “What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.” In the first paper, “Three Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens,” Hoshang Merchant traces how Stevens moved from apprehending reality to asserting the supremacy of imagination to bidding farewell to unbridled imagination, using Stevens’ early, middle, and late period poems.

Reality also means the state of the world as it really is rather than as one might want it to be. Privatization has been one of the unfeeling realities of the world—privatization of business as well as of the public sphere—which has contributed to alienating people from their traditional and natural way of living, imposing on them the insatiable consumer culture of the markets. In the second paper, “The Eco-Ethical Paradigm in Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden,” Shimimoni Doley takes a close look at the (w)holistic vision of nature presented by Emerson and Thoreau, which stresses the spiritual as well as the material aspects and benefits of nature, underlining the need for human beings to respect the unity of Spirit implicit in the visible processes of nature and lead a life of integrity.

Following Emerson’s anthropocentric view of nature as “the endless circulations of the divine charity [that] nourish man” and Thoreau’s penchant for voicing nature’s voice, locating human concerns on the fringes of “nature’s infinite self-referentiality,” comes Paula Gunn Allen with her gynocratic worldview. In Allen’s own words, “the woman-centeredness of Laguna culture is important” to her works, and naturally she views the earth as being feminine and seeks to forge a unified existence with nature that is in tune with the spiritually-based gynocratic practices. In the third paper, “Remapping Boundaries: A Study of Paula Gunn Allen’s Ecophilosophy,” Tessy Anthony C examines the ecophilosophy of Allen, where everything that exists in nature is interrelated and is part of an orderly and balanced whole, as opposed to the Euro-American worldview that seeks to pigeonhole the creations of nature. Abstract painting uses a unique visual language of form and color to create a work that often exists independent of the visual references in the world.

In this sense, abstract painting is about the paint, as modern music is often about the sound and modern poetry about the language. In their constant search for newer ways to express themselves, artists often stretch their canvas, experimenting with techniques, charting a new path. American poet cummings is one such, “whose only happiness,” in his own words, “is to transcend himself.” And in his quest to transcend himself, he transcends the conventions of language and redefines absurdity. In the fourth paper, “Lexical and Semantic Deviations in e e cummings with Reference to Some Select Poems,” Samina Azhar elucidates how the poet, through idiosyncratic use of language and linguistic techniques, creates a distinct identity for his poems as well as himself.

Diane Glancy, like cummings, charts her own course to form a narrative that reanimates and gives a distinct and authentic identity to those voices that were long considered unfit for literary agency. In her book The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, Glancy writes: “I was born between two cultures … But we weren’t Cherokee enough to be accepted as Indian, nor was I white enough to be accepted as white. I could walk in both worlds;

I could walk in neither.” So she chooses to work in the in-between—”between genres, identities, systems of belief.” In the fifth paper, “American Travel Narratives and the ‘Problem’ of History: Diane Glancy, Compulsory Postcoloniality, and Sacajawea,” Pramod K Nayar discusses how Glancy, by giving a voice to the ‘invisible’ Sacajawea, the Shoshoni woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark during their 1804 cross-continental expedition, introduces a fictional narrative that interrupts the mainstream/white narrative and asserts the racial identity of the silent voice without whose guidance the whites’ expedition would have been impossible.

“Native American voices and Biblical women,” writes Glancy, “are two disconnected areas from which I write, though there are many similarities. I like to give voice to those that have been erased or bypassed by history.” Incidentally, in the sixth paper, “‘Creative Midrash Forces the Students to Read, So They Realize They Aren’t the First to Feel, Think, or Write Anything Down’: Biblical Archetypes in Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls,” Gustavo Sánchez Canales draws an interesting parallel between four female characters and three male characters in two of Goodman’s novels and their namesakes in The Bible and explores the biblical archetypes in these novels.

Commenting on the sociological approach to criticism, Taine made the famous statement, “Literature is the consequence of the moment, the race, and the milieu.” New Historicism, which started gaining currency in the 1990s, in addition, seeks—basing itself on Foucault’s technique of examining a broad array of literary and non-literary texts in order to determine the episteme of a particular time and on Derrida’s view that every facet of reality is textualized—to understand a work through its historical context. In the seventh paper, “Tracing the New Historical Tenets in Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: A Critical Assessment,” Rajani Sharma analyzes the similarities and dissimilarities between Trilling and the New Historicists, and Trilling’s possible contribution to New Historicism.

-- R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor