Re: About amaraavati kathalu - part 6 (final)
Jagdish Bisa (jbisa@bbnplanet.com)
Mon, 24 Nov 1997 18:51:25 -0500
Sri K.V.S. Ramarao gAru said:
> ..... But if one is looking for some "prayOjanam," then I believe
> that many of the stories do not meet that need. Same is true to a large
> extent about "vastuvu" as Sri Chowdary garu himself alluded to many
> times.
Ramarao gAru brings up a couple of extremely subtle characteristics of
creative writing. Namely, "vastuvu" and "prayOjanam." Injecting a new life
in to an otherwise dying thread.
I'd like to amplify that we may be using "vastuvu" to denote "plot" here -
as opposed to "theme". If we do, then we're wrong. Please correct me if I'm
wrong, but in literary analysis, the term vastuvu is generally used to
denote "theme" rather than the plot. For a simple reason, that fiction can
be either character based or plot based. But in either case it may have a
well defined theme. If I'm correct, then each one of those 100 stories
(amaraavathi kathalu) as well as srI ramaNa's "midhunam" has a well defined
vastuvu.
prayOjanam can be hard to detect, particularly in sophisticated fiction.
Sophisticated fiction almost always works by indirectly manipulating the
mental states of readers, and never makes its effect explicit. Since the
changes occur inside our minds, we seldom notice them. The only difference
being, that after reading such a piece, one fails to look at certain place,
person or object with the same way as one used to.
It helps a lot if Sri Ramarao gAru takes a specific example regarding the
vastuvu and prayOjanam from the above stories.
-Jagdish (When we analyse, we deconstruct!) Bisa