Abstraction at Non-verbal/ Object Level in Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to explore the implications of General Semantics (GS) in literary works through Beatrice and Virgil a fictional work by Yann Martel, the celebrity writer of Life of Pie.General Semantics is a discipline that holds specific views on language use and its implications in Teaching/ Learning and the Media.It is a method for internalizing the mental habits recommended by Alfred Korzybski (in Science and Sanity and Manhood of Humanity) and to evaluate the role of GS in psychology and psychotherapy. Korzybski’s STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIAL, the path breaking invention that brings general-semantics into being: A 3-Dimensional structure that differentiates-and-relates the event level (“what is going on”), the object level, where living beings abstract from and transform the event to construct their experience, and the label levels, where human beings construct meaning-in-language as an abstraction from and transformation of their sensory experience. Beatrice and Virgilis a good example of employing the language at Object Level--GS defines ‘sanity’ in terms of an ‘extensional’ orientation which facilitates a proper relation between the vivid particularity of the life world and the symbolizations of common-and-conventional-scientific sense. Practices of attention to the objective level disclose possibilities occluded by conceptualization. Beatrice and Virgil employs acomplex narrative technique with a central character, a creative writer who happens to evaluate an allegoric play written by the reader, a taxidermist, to unfold the ghastly experience of holocaust. The study would add on more to the analysis of literary texts with the help of GS which is basically a multidisciplinary field of knowledge with an approach to reach the manhood of humanity.