On reading Fitzgerald's Vyasa.

• Author: Hiltebeitel, Alf
• Position: James L. Fitzgerald's translation of the Mahabharata - Critical essay

After an extraordinary twenty-six years' wait, the J. A. B. van Buitenen translation of the Mahabharata has been resumed by James L. Fitzgerald and it has been well worth the wait. Fitzgerald is to be congratulated for a vigorous, nuanced, and often deeply moving translation, one for which he had to draw on varied skills and impulses to animate not only the text's epical and edifying strains as he moves from the Striparvan to the Santiparvan, but, in the latter, the multigeneric character of the instructions of Yudhisthira. Although Fitzgerald makes it clear "that many of van Buitenen's translational conventions are not reproduced here" (p. xvii), one senses many debts and continuities, and, more than that, a similar commitment, even if it takes different forms and uses different idioms, to be daring and often enough amusing, as the text deserves. As van Buitenen did, Fitzgerald also provides well-thought-out introductions to the major parvans that include valuable state-of-the-field position pieces on their components. Only in the far more extensive and scholarly apparatus does the work feel resolutely different. Along with seven appendices, the endnotes are far more numerous and detailed, and many are signaled within the translation by the degree symbol [degrees] "to indicate the presence of a relevant annotation in the endnotes" (p. vii, n. 5). Scholars may find some of these changes more felicitous than the "serious general readers of contemporary American English" (p. xviii) whom Fitzgerald mentions as his primary target, but in my view they offer a balance that is good for both.

To resume this translation has not, however, meant picking up where it was left off. From the Udyogaparvan (Book 5), where van Buitenen exited, to the Striparvan (Book 11), where Fitzgerald picks up, the five books that recount the Mahabharata war still remain in limbo. Fitzgerald tides readers over this gap under the heading "What Happened in the War" (pp. xxiv-xxxi), and outlines the plan whereby the University of Chicago Press will bring out the epic's remaining books under his editorship (pp. xv-xvi). More interesting than this temporary jump over the war, however, is the exciting opportunity this volume offers for a new centering of Mahabharata interpretation. For, though the translation resumes with the Striparvan, Fitzgerald's interpretive center of gravity lies in his introduction to the Santi-parvan (Book 12). Fitzgerald brings special and rare expertise to the Santiparvan, for with this volume he has now not only translated and introduced the first two of its three main instructional components--the Rajadharma and Apaddharma sub-parvans, but has written his dissertation on the third--the Moksadharma sub-parvan, (1) his translation of which will be a further contribution to this overall resumption.

Thus, by an accident of publishing history, this resumption will focus interpretative attention on the Santiparvan. I shall argue in this review that this accident may have the fortunate result of encouraging "suspended" readers and reviewers to raise interesting new questions, and hopefully shake up some long-standing assumptions, about the relation of parts to the whole. With that in mind, let me mention a few of Fitzgerald's most broad-stroke interpretative strategies, situate them in relation to some other recent approaches, and turn to a couple of points where I think his approach is not as fruitful as it could be.

MAHABHARATA READING STRATEGIES

On the broadest scale, Fitzgerald uses the hyphenated term "prasamana-anusasana" to describe the double "cooling" and "instructional" character of the book's title term, santi ("peace"). Fitzgerald suggests a sacrificial dimension to this word, as an apotropaic bringing-to-rest or neutralizing of effects--in this case, the effects of war--that reorients Yudhisthira, beset after the war by grief (soka, from its root suc, related by Fitzgerald to things "burning too hot" in Vedic ritual), toward being "fit to rule" (pp. 94-100). Though he is cautious about the ritual dimensions of this interpretation (pp. 97-98, 99 n. 97), I believe it makes a sound contribution to our appreciation of the depth of Vedic resonance that the epic poets repeatedly call upon. More immediately, Fitzgerald speaks of this prasamana-anusasana's four main components--the three of the Santiparvan plus the Danadharmaparvan, the main sub-parvan of the following Anusasanaparvan (Book 13)--as "four large anthologies" that "make up the first canonical library of 'Hinduism'" (pp. 79-80). At this point, let me note only that in laying out these overarching terms Fitzgerald writes as if Bhisma and Yudhisthira were the only interlocutors in this vast span, leaving him grounds to impute lateness to features that do not fit the pattern. Finally, at the most local level affecting the many individual units within these anthologies, Fitzgerald sees a "tension" (pp. 103, 105) between an older sense of dharma (Law-based, often translated as "meritorious Lawful action," that "connects one to an important good, or goods, that do not lie completely within the reach of normal human effort") and a newer (yogic and virtue-based) one (p. 104). For Fitzgerald this tension has a great deal to do not only with the dharma teachings of the four raja-, apad-, moksa-, and dana-dharma anthologies but with the historical situation that "drove some brahmins to create the Mahabharata as we have it" (p. 105) (2) in its first written redaction (p. 103) and to construct the figure of Yudhisthira as the son of the god Dharma (pp. 136-37). It is not always easy to guess the reasoning behind Fitzgerald's "parsing" (pp. 138, 140) of dharma in particular instances of translation or to follow him from his discussion of a basic tension to his analysis of dharma as having three senses (pp. 641-43) and "primary forms and secondary forms" (p. 154), but it is clear that his analysis makes an important contribution to understanding the complexity of usages in the "didactic" anthologies, if possibly less of one in translating the "narrative."

I would characterize Fitzgerald's interpretative work, along with my own (3) and Madeleine Biardeau's, (4) as one of three attempts in the last three years at "strong readings." (5) By this I mean readings that acknowledge their hypothetical character, situate the text in history, and are proposed as "revisionist" advances for offering a plausible degree of coherence to the whole text in relation to its parts (philological readings of segments and of segments in relation to larger units do not provide strong readings in this sense). These three readings are quite close in their historical contextualization (6) and agree on many things in their interpretation. There are, however, important differences in the ways they conceive of the parts-whole relationship. On the hypothesis of a coherent subsurface authorial design and the messages conveyed through it across the text, (7) Biardeau excludes two units of the Mahabharata from discussion--the Narayaniya and the Anugita--mainly because she finds them off-message. (8) On the hypothesis that the text was composed by a committee over a shorter time than is usually conceived, I hold off on excising anything, on the premise that the whole remains elusive so long as we have yet to discern the conventions by which its parts are interrelated. And on the hypothesis of an historical link between Asoka Maurya and the situation that "drove some brahmins to create the Mahabharata as we have it," Fitzgerald would excise many passages either because they do not reflect these politics or because they adumbrate it in supposedly later formulations. In other words, although all three share common historical reflections, one is a semiological hypothesis, one a literary hypothesis, and one a political hypothesis. These are of course not mutually exclusive categories. Biardeau and Fitzgerald speak quite similarly of their readings as "apocalyptic," though with opposed views on how the apocalypse would relate to bhakti. And all three readings are in one or another sense political. There is thus the possibility that each is strong enough to strengthen the others, but each would also have its weaknesses. (9)

TWO PROBLEMATIC HYPOTHESES

There are two points where I think Fitzgerald's approach is not as fruitful as it could be: his "hypothesis that the Bhagavad Gita is a later amelioration of the ksatriyas' ethical horizons over those set for them by The Laws for Kings" (p. 141) or Rajadharma, and his idea that the four anthologies of Books 12 and 13 would have been composed sequentially over a considerable time through what he has recently called "growth-rings." (10) Let me begin with a few of the arguments by which Fitzgerald supports these hypotheses, and then turn to the opening of the Santiparvan, up to Yudhisthira's first exchanges with Bhisma, where I believe these topics deserve to be put in a different light.

As regards the Gita hypothesis, Fitzgerald repeatedly advances the following view of bhakti passages, elements, and themes: rather than being part of what he posits as the epic's quite capacious "original post-Mauryan written redaction" (p. 113, n. 139), which he also calls "the putative Sunga or post-Sunga text that likely knew nothing of the Bhagavad Gita" (p. 141, n. 242), Fitzgerald considers such bhakti features to be uniformly "later" (11) than the "original," having become piecemeal parts of an alleged "Gupta text" (p. 114) that he posits to be the proximate archetype recovered by the Pune Critical Edition (see xvi n. 2). Since I address his view on bhakti elsewhere, (12) I leave it aside here other than to make one observation that applies equally to the growth-rings hypothesis: whereas Fitzgerald presents external evidence for the post-Mauryan/post-Sunga background of his "original redaction" (lately called the "main Mahabharata" (13)), he presents no such...