Paphos - is it a literary past or present?

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Most are familiar with such words as "pompous", "pathetic", "pathetic", "pathetic". However, not everyone knows their exact meaning. All these words are many transformations derived from the word "pathos". And their synonyms have become "pompousness", "pomp", "empty suggestiveness", "hypocrisy".

By origin, the word "pathos" is Greek and literally means "feeling, suffering, passion." More familiar to us is the concept of uplift, enthusiasm, inspiration. Paphos is a creative, inspiring source (or idea), the main tone of something. Paphos means, although sometimes giving the impression of falsehood, it nevertheless expresses inspiration, albeit external. Playing in front of the public without any hesitation, putting the personal on public display, life in the game - this is pathos. The meaning of this word describes a way of perceiving, as well as displaying one's own attitude towards various things, with partial aloofness and ostentatious pomposity.

At the very beginning of the word"pathos" in literature was defined as a high passion that ignited the creative imagination of the author and was transmitted to the public in the process of the artist's aesthetic experiences. In the old fashioned way, textbooks continue to define pathos as patriotic, moral and educational, optimistic, international, anti-petty-bourgeois and humanistic.

However, critics, qualified readers and publishers are saying more and more that pathos is rather cloying, sweetness, "candy", which need to be diluted, softened, shaded, balanced, supplemented, necessarily sincerity, and belittled with irony and muffle. Moreover, it is absolutely natural to mention irony and sincerity as antonyms and opponents of pathos. Indeed, in modern art there are no, or almost none, those who set themselves the goal of evoking high feelings in the reader, noble thoughts, spiritual uplift, inspiration. But this is exactly what the primordial concept of "pathos" requires. As Dmitry Prigov notes: “Any frankly pathetic statement now immediately throws the author into the zone of pop culture, if not completely kitsch.”

And yet the modern reader's need for the uplifting and sublime remains, and popular literature does little to provide pathos to the unqualified readership majority. Although, of course, the qualified have to be content with a low-calorie and meager emotional diet. Deep suffering and the struggle with it, the concept of "catharsis" can no longer be foundin the XX and XXI centuries in the dictionary of world culture. Therefore, more and more often, authors come out in defense of pathos and pathos as not just synonymous with empty pomposity, but as a desire to get rid of, to overcome postmodernism. In other words, they want to show that pathos is an integral part of the literature of big ideas, vulnerable and meaningful, far above irony. And while pathos in a work can be funny, it should not be avoided.

Unfortunately, decent artistic practice so far has little support for these and similar statements. But it is expected that prophetic, preaching, educational, messianic, accusatory, sarcastic, and any other pathos will return to Russian literature. This is a reasonable prospect.