AFTER THE WORDS: A COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS OF PINTERISQUE SILENCE IN THE POETICS OF JAYANTA MAHAPATRA (Pages 170-183) by Mr. Sreekanth Kopuri in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Jayanta Mahapatra’s inter-generic operation of Pinterisque silence, which is a postmodern art, explores the enigmatic spaces in the transcendental ‘laws of motion’ with a technique that extends the question-silence strategy of Harold Pinter. Mahapatra re-presents poetry with a paradoxical device of silence to elaborate his angst about life’s absurdity with pinterisque seriousness. While Pinter opens a possibility of exploration into the depths of human pain in drama through the famous “Pinter pause” and “Pinter silence” between the characters; Mahapatra does it in his poetry with silence exercised through various devices of poetic diction between the self and “the other” of the cleft self – a dramatic monologue-like technique. The excellence of this postmodern art form culminates in the expressions of fear and uncertainty which are autobiographical and which hold an empirical value in the comparative analysis of both the poets. The artistic equivalence perpetuates a similar sobering experience; the portrayal of which in the art forms of both the writers underpins what Elie Weisel (another nobel laureate) says: “to unite the language of man with silence.” Further, the inflexion of the technique of silence and its pliability with the expertise of his “kitchen-wrench” introduces a commendable innovation to dissect the recurring mystery beyond human grasp. The objective of this proposal focuses on how the affinity of a literary technique by two artists, which is “beyond Ashberrian word-play”, contributes to an affective holistic expansion of the portrayal of contemporary human plight with an inter-textual approach in the autobiographically intercultural poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra which is in many instances even interdisciplinary, experimenting with the Einsteinian techniques. The seriously experimental art of Mahapatra opens a wider possibility for a substantial research in Comparative Literature. Key Words: Silence, Pinterisque, Absurd, Language, postmodern, transcendence.