Strangely, though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its critics claim to possess, and the thing criticized is not the book Aristotle wrote but a caricature of it.
Aristotle himself respected Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the Iliad for his student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In his Rhetoric III, xvi, 9 , Aristotle criticizes orators who write exclusively from the intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes Antigone speak.
Those who take the trouble to look at the Poetics closely will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and characteristically powerful thinker. The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial marking out of dramatic poetry as a form of imitation. We call the poet a creator, and are offended at the suggestion that he might be merely some sort of recording device.
But Aristotle has no intention to diminish the poet, and in fact says the same thing I just said, in making the point that poetry is more philosophic than history. By imitation, Aristotle does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that approximate the sound of frogs.
He is speaking of the imitation of action, and by action he does not mean mere happenings. Aristotle speaks extensively of praxis in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is not a word he uses loosely, and in fact his use of it in the definition of tragedy recalls the discussion in the Ethics.
Action, as Aristotle uses the word, refers only to what is deliberately chosen, and capable of finding completion in the achievement of some purpose. Animals and young children do not act in this sense, and action is not the whole of the life of any of us. The poet must have an eye for the emergence of action in human life, and a sense for the actions that are worth paying attention to. They are not present in the world in such a way that a video camera could detect them. An intelligent, feeling, shaping human soul must find them.
By the same token, the action of the drama itself is not on the stage. It takes form and has its being in the imagination of the spectator. The actors speak and move and gesture, but it is the poet who speaks through them, from imagination to imagination, to present to us the thing that he has made. Because that thing he makes has the form of an action, it has to be seen and held together just as actively and attentively by us as by him.
The imitation is the thing that is re-produced, in us and for us, by his art. This is a powerful kind of human communication, and the thing imitated is what defines the human realm.
If no one had the power to imitate action, life might just wash over us without leaving any trace. How do I know that Aristotle intends the imitation of action to be understood in this way? There is the perception of proper sensibles-colors, sounds, tastes and so on; these lie on the surfaces of things and can be mimicked directly for sense perception.
But there is also perception of common sensibles, available to more than one of our senses, as shape is grasped by both sight and touch, or number by all five senses; these are distinguished by imagination, the power in us that is shared by the five senses, and in which the circular shape, for instance, is not dependent on sight or touch alone. These common sensibles can be mimicked in various ways, as when I draw a messy, meandering ridge of chalk on a blackboard, and your imagination grasps a circle.
Skilled mimics can imitate people we know, by voice, gesture, and so on, and here already we must engage intelligence and imagination together. The dramatist imitates things more remote from the eye and ear than familiar people. So the mere phrase imitation of an action is packed with meaning, available to us as soon as we ask what an action is, and how the image of such a thing might be perceived. In each of these developments there is a vast array of possible intermediate stages, but just as philosophy is the ultimate form of the innate desire to know, tragedy is considered by Aristotle the ultimate form of our innate delight in imitation.
His beloved Homer saw and achieved the most important possibilities of the imitation of human action, but it was the tragedians who, refined and intensified the form of that imitation, and discovered its perfection. A work is a tragedy, Aristotle tells us, only if it arouses pity and fear.
Why does he single out these two passions? Some interpreters think he means them only as examples—pity and fear and other passions like that—but I am not among those loose constructionists. Aristotle does use a word that means passions of that sort toiouta , but I think he does so only to indicate that pity and fear are not themselves things subject to identification with pin-point precision, but that each refers to a range of feeling.
It is just the feelings in those two ranges, however, that belong to tragedy. He does not try to prove that there is such a thing as nature, or such a thing as motion, though some people deny both. Likewise, he understands the recognition of a special and powerful form of drama built around pity and fear as the beginning of an inquiry, and spends not one word justifying that restriction.
We, however, can see better why he starts there by trying out a few simple alternatives. Suppose a drama aroused pity in a powerful way, but aroused no fear at all. This is an easily recognizable dramatic form, called a tear-jerker.
The name is meant to disparage this sort of drama, but why? Imagine a well written, well made play or movie that depicts the losing struggle of a likable central character. We are moved to have a good cry, and are afforded either the relief of a happy ending, or the realistic desolation of a sad one. In the one case the tension built up along the way is released within the experience of the work itself; in the other it passes off as we leave the theater, and readjust our feelings to the fact that it was, after all, only make-believe.
What is wrong with that? There is always pleasure in strong emotion, and the theater is a harmless place to indulge it. We may even come out feeling good about being so compassionate. But Dostoyevski depicts a character who loves to cry in the theater, not noticing that while she wallows in her warm feelings her coach-driver is shivering outside. She has day-dreams about relieving suffering humanity, but does nothing to put that vague desire to work. If she is typical, then the tear-jerker is a dishonest form of drama, not even a harmless diversion but an encouragement to lie to oneself.
This is again a readily recognizable dramatic form, called the horror story, or in a recent fashion, the mad-slasher movie. The thrill of fear is the primary object of such amusements, and the story alternates between the build-up of apprehension and the shock of violence. And while the tearjerker gives us an illusion of compassionate delicacy, the unrestrained shock-drama obviously has the effect of coarsening feeling. Genuine human pity could not co-exist with the so-called graphic effects these films use to keep scaring us.
The attraction of this kind of amusement is again the thrill of strong feeling, and again the price of indulging the desire for that thrill may be high.
Let us consider a milder form of the drama built on arousing fear. There are stories in which fearsome things are threatened or done by characters who are in the end defeated by means similar to, or in some way equivalent to, what they dealt out. The fear is relieved in vengeance, and we feel a satisfaction that we might be inclined to call justice.
To work on the level of feeling, though, justice must be understood as the exact inverse of the crime—doing to the offender the sort of thing he did or meant to do to others.
The imagination of evil then becomes the measure of good, or at least of the restoration of order. The satisfaction we feel in the vicarious infliction of pain or death is nothing but a thin veil over the very feelings we mean to be punishing. This is a successful dramatic formula, arousing in us destructive desires that are fun to feel, along with the self-righteous illusion that we are really superior to the character who displays them.
The playwright who makes us feel that way will probably be popular, but he is a menace. We have looked at three kinds of non-tragedy that arouse passions in a destructive way, and we could add others. There are potentially as many kinds as there are passions and combinations of passions. That suggests that the theater is just an arena for the manipulation of passions in ways that are pleasant in the short run and at least reckless to pursue repeatedly.
At worst, the drama could be seen as dealing in a kind of addiction, which it both produces and holds the only remedy for. But we have not yet tried to talk about the combination of passions characteristic of tragedy. When we turn from the sort of examples I have given, to the acknowledged examples of tragedy, we find ourselves in a different world.
The tragedians I have in mind are five: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Shakespeare, who differs from them only in time; and Homer, who differs from them somewhat more, in the form in which he composed, but shares with them the things that matter most. I could add other authors, such as Dostoyevski, who wrote stories of the tragic kind in much looser literary forms, but I want to keep the focus on a small number of clear paradigms.
When we look at a tragedy we find the chorus in Antigone telling us what a strange thing a human being is, that passes beyond all boundaries lines ff. I could add more examples of this kind by the dozen, and your memories will supply others.
Tragedy seems always to involve testing or finding the limits of what is human. This is no mere orgy of strong feeling, but a highly focussed way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of what is human as such. I suggest that Aristotle is right in saying that the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us are pity and fear. For Polygnotos used to make images of the better, while Pauson of the worse, and Dionysius of the similar.
Homer, for example, made them better, Cleophon similar, and Hegemon the Thasian, who first made parodies, and Nicochares, who made the Delias , worse. And in the case of [15] dithyrambs and nomes, someone might likewise imitate just as Timotheos and Philoxenus did the Cyclopes.
Further, how someone might imitate each of these is a third difference of these. For even if the imitation is in the same things and of the same things, it is possible sometimes to imitate when reporting either becoming some other as Homer does [ poiei ] as the same and not changing or else to imitate with all those imitating [22] acting [ prattontas ] and [25] being in action [ energountas ].
It is [30] for this reason that the Dorians also make a claim [25] to tragedy and comedy For the local Megarians make a claim to comedy as having emerged at the time of their democracy. The Dorians make names the sign. And they say they name doing [ poiein ] dran , but that the Athenians name it prattein. And 1 since they do [ poiountai ] the imitation by acting [ prattontes ], the ordered arrangement of the opsis [33] would in the first place be of necessity some proper part of tragedy.
Next, 2 song-making and 3 talk would be as well, for they do [ poiouontai ] the imitation in these. And these are story, [10] characters, talk, thought, opsis , and song-making. Two parts are those in which they imitate, one is how they imitate, and three are what they imitate, and besides these there are none.
Concerning problems and solutions; [38] it should become apparent by contemplating them in the following way both out of how many and out of what kinds they are. And these are reported in a talk in which there are foreign words, metaphors, and many modifications [39] of talk.
For we allow these things to the poets. First, there are the criticisms directed against the art itself: "If it has made impossible things, it has made a mistake.
The pursuit of Hector is an example. If, however, it was either more, or not less, possible for the end to exist even in accordance with the art about these things, then it has not rightly made a mistake. For it ought, if it is possible, generally to be without any mistakes. Further, to which of the [30] two does the mistake belong?
Is it according to art or according to something else accidental? For it is less if he did not know that a female deer does not have horns than if he depicted non-imitatively. Socrates: And the likely, my comrade, holds Pan to be the double-natured son of Hermes. Hermogenes: How is that? Socrates: You know that logos signifies everything and is always circling and revolving around everything, and is double, true and false.
Hermogenes: Yes, of course. Socrates: Isn't the case that the true part of it is smooth, divine, and dwells above among the gods; but the false dwells below among the many of human beings and is rough and tragic; for most muthoi and falsehoods are there, about the tragic life.
Hermogeries: Yes, of course. Because of the weight of this tradition and the obvious concern of the book with poetry and especially tragedy, we have retained this translation. However it should be kept in mind that poiein is a very common verb in Greek, and that in principle the art dealing with it could have as much to do with making or action as with poetry in the narrower sense.
Where an ambiguity of meaning seems possibly intentional, the Greek verb will be placed in brackets after the translation. Virtually every occurrence in the translation of any form of the verb "to make" is a rendering of the Greek poiein , and all appearances of English words cognate with "poet" are translations of words cognate with poiein. At a Aristotle indicates that imitation comes to be not only by art but also by habit.
In Plato it is used for "form" or "idea. Tragedy and Epic poetry fall into the same categories: simple, complex driven by reversal and recognition , ethical moral or pathetic passion. There are a few differences between tragedy and epic, however. First, an epic poem does not use song or spectacle to achieve its cathartic effect. Second, epics often cannot be presented at a single sitting, whereas tragedies are usually able to be seen in a single viewing.
Finally, the 'heroic measure' of epic poetry is hexameter, where tragedy often uses other forms of meter to achieve the rhythms of different characters' speech. Aristotle also lays out the elements of successful imitation. The poet must imitate either things as they are, things as they are thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The poet must also imitate in action and language preferably metaphors or contemporary words.
Errors come when the poet imitates incorrectly - and thus destroys the essence of the poem - or when the poet accidentally makes an error a factual error, for instance. Aristotle does not believe that factual errors sabotage the entire work; errors that limit or compromise the unity of a given work, however, are much more consequential.
Aristotle concludes by tackling the question of whether the epic or tragic form is 'higher. In reply, Aristotle notes that epic recitation can be marred by overdone gesticulation in the same way as a tragedy; moreover, tragedy, like poetry, can produce its effect without action - its power is in the mere reading. Aristotle argues that tragedy is, in fact, superior to epic, because it has all the epic elements as well as spectacle and music to provide an indulgent pleasure for the audience.
Tragedy, then, despite the arguments of other critics, is the higher art for Aristotle. Discuss the elements of drama according to Aristotle.
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