Aristotle did not invent literary criticism with Poetics (late 4th c. BCE, maybe) – we just read The Frogs – but for centuries it was the base of Western literary criticism, not a source of insight but rather a set of rules. The Unities, the Tragic Flaw, catharsis, the ranking of forms, with the epic poem on top. The medieval importation of Aristotle from Muslim Spain was a great advance for European civilization, but it was not always so good for literature.
How prescriptive did Aristotle mean to be? I am not sure. His initial impulse is the central one of the
enterprise: experiencing a powerful work of literature, he wants to know why it
affected him so much. “What are the
conditions on which the tragic effect depends?” (13, 681) So he assembles the
evidence, arranging the tragedies by how they affected him, and begins to generalize. Perhaps he is just describing his own taste,
but the patterns he sees are clear enough.
One central action as opposed to many; stories about families; tragic
results caused not by “depravity” but “in some great error on [the protagonist’s]
part” (13, 682); writing that is a mix of the simple and ornate.
These, the strange word, the metaphor, the ornamental equivalent, &c., will save the language from seeming mean and prosaic, while the ordinary words in it will secure the requisite clearness (22, 699).
Aristotle is the originator of “make it strange” (but not
too strange).
Oedipus the King is the perfect tragedy for Sophocles,
with other plays approaching it in power.
It is the best, so other plays should be like it, and then it is
just a small step to must. But it
is clear enough that Aristotle valued other kinds of plays. He criticizes Euripides in many ways but is
fascinated by – finds a kind of catharsis in – Iphigenia in Tauris, a
tragedy that is not even tragic. But he
has a strong taste for scenes of “discovery,” where the emotional effect turns
on sister’s recognizing long lost brothers and so on.
That is one example of taste as prescript. Here is another where Aristotle is obviously
wrong, when he argues that a story should not be about:
… an extremely bad man [] falling from happiness into misery. Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity of fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves… (13, 681)
His assumption that the bad man is not like ourselves is
kind. But my point is that many people
absolutely love such stories, and also stories about virtue rewarded and for
that matter vice rewarded. Who am I to
judge the catharsis of others? But
perhaps those stories are more common in a later, not less but differently
fatalistic, Christian culture.
I have been quoting from the Ingram Bywater translation as
found in the Modern Library Introduction to Aristotle. Bywater conceals the key Greek terms. A different translation might well look like
a different argument. I don’t know
Greek, but I can see where they are hidden, where “fear and pity” translates “catharsis” [completely wrong! see comments below, please] – “The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear” (14, 683). Up above is the “tragic flaw” or “hamartia” concealed
by, translated as, “some great error.”
I’m going to round out my look at Classical Greek literary criticism
with On the Sublime or On Great Writing by Longinus (1st c. CE),
whoever he was. On the Sublime is
not as play-centered as Poetics, so a bit of a tangent, but it is the
major alternative to the aesthetics of Aristotle. It is full of interesting things, and is
perhaps sixty pages long. I will try to
write about Longinus at the end of the month, after the last Menander play.
I am also beginning to wonder if it would be a good idea to
take a fresh look at Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which
is directly related, or about two-thirds related, to this last year of reading,
so maybe that will be the final text in the aesthetics series. Please join me if interested.
Aristotle only uses "catharsis" once in the Poetics, and for most of it he talks about how tragedy should evoke "wonder," which is a different thing. When he talks about "fear and pity" he means, I think, what you and I mean when we say the words. In my reading of Poetics this weekend, I came away thinking that Aristotle had a much broader definition of "tragedy" than I'd thought (which was the boiled-down simple definition I'd been handed in school). Somewhere in Poetics (I don't have my notes with me right now), Aristotle piles happiness onto the possible legitimate outcomes alongside that of downfall. I think that his comments on "action" are really the key to the matter, "action" being a decision, an internal change in a character's worldview, which brings about either an attempt to change the character's world, or a commitment to preserve the status quo. Things fall out, plotwise, based on this decision. Oedipus' decision to investigate his father's murder (hence investigate himself, though he doesn't know it), is the action of OR, and the "wonder" it produces in the viewer is the fear that we also have secrets that would destroy us if we looked too closely at ourselves. Something like that. I feel a lot more kindly to Aristotle than I did a week ago. He's much less prescriptive than I remembered him being.
ReplyDeleteHoly cow did I get that wrong. Here is Bywater in Sec. 6:
ReplyDelete"A tragedy, then, is... [many things]; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to encourage its catharsis of such emotions."
At least I see why every time I later saw "pity and fear" I thought "there it is again."
People have sure put a lot of weight on what may have been a throwaway idea in a college professor's lecture.
You succinctly describe why I wanted to revisit Poetics. Received Aristotle, Renaissance Aristotle, is almost a villain; actual Aristotle is much more interesting.
I'm working up a post on other misrepresentations/misunderstandings of Aristotle that have made it into common use ("show, don't tell" and "action is character") and done considerable mischief in fiction.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, when I read him talking about wonder and how the point of drama is the internal activity of the protagonist, I felt like I'd been reunited with a lost sibling. Or some feeling not quite that powerful but still noteworthy.
It's remarkable how, in 30-odd pages, this book lays down so many ideas that are cornerstones to how literature and other arts are talked about over the next 2,000+ years. Especially given that a handful of the pages are given over to what feels like an invention of linguistics.
ReplyDeleteI too got the sense reading this that it was less prescriptivist than I remembered, although it's hard to tell. Certainly Aristotle seems to take his opinions as established facts, even when, to me, he's obviously wrong (Menelaus in Euripides' "Orestes" isn't needlessly base!).
One of the most interesting things to me about this book, and the history of literature in general, is that Aristotle spends a lot of time talking about what kinds of people can have tragedies written about them, how there needs to be the right kinds of stories out there about them - but it never occurs to him that one could just make up people and whatever stories about them one wants. As much as Aristotle tries to work from first principles, he's still restricted by the tradition he's familiar with. (See also the description of which meters are best, which admittedly was mostly lost on me.)
So true. Aristotle wants to know why the tragedians return so often to the same characters and the same families. And since he figures out why they do it, they must, I guess, keep doing it. He does note that Agathon, who we met in the Symposium, made up his own stories (he was apparently the first tragedian to do so).
ReplyDeleteThis would be a landmark work even if Renaissance critics had not turned it into law.
Scott, thanks so much for the correction. It has been enormously educational, as errors so often are. Errors are a good part of how I learn.