POETICS by Aristotle

Aristotle  ((384-322 BCE)

·         is a much-disdained book

·         So un-poetic a soul as Aristotle’s has no business speaking about such a topic, much less telling poets how to go about their business.

·         reduces the drama to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, the story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables

·         written by someone who takes great delight in drama, but a writer of it Aristotle is not

·         To persuade the spectators of the play, it needs to be both written and enacted “under the influence of passion

·         Aristotle concludes that “poetry is the province either of one who is naturally clever, or of one who is insane.”

·         a term which in Greek literally meant "making" and in this context includes drama–comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play–as well as lyric poetry, epic poetry, and the dithyramb

·         specifically concerned with drama

·         genres of "poetry" in three ways:

o   their means

§  language, rhythm, and harmony, used separately or in combination

o   their objects

§  agents ("good" or "bad" ...) - human characters who have emotions (and bring moral to actions they do - "good" person kills child = remorse? X "bad" person kills child = just shows his power?) or things of daily life (skull in Hamlet, cake in slapstick comedies...) who have no emotions (humans put emotions on things - girl's father is killed by sword, girl hates swords) ...

§  actions ("virtuous" or "vicious" ...) - agents cause and are influenced by actions

o   their modes of representation

Tragedy

o   a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech(has rhythm and melody), with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play]; [represented] by people acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.

The six Parts of Tragedy

o   Plot (mythos)

o   tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality

o   the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.

o   plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy

o   Key elements of the plot are reversals, recognitions and suffering. The best plot should be "complex". It should imitate actions arousing fear and pity.

o   When a character is unfortunate by reversal(s) of fortune (peripeteia), at first he suffers (pathos) and then he can realize (anagnorisis) the cause of his misery or a way to be released from the misery.

o   when plot is not "very" convoluted (audience may be young and they might not keep track of events ...), it should have at least interesting characters or thoughts (so audience is not "bored")

Basic Concepts about Plot

      Completeness-an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; has a beginning, a middle, and an end

      Magnitude- comprised the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, that will allow a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.

      Unity- an action that in our sense of the word is one.

      Determinate structure- the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being imitated

      Universality- it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen - what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity

      Defective plots- 'episodic' -the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence

o   Character (ethos)

o   character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.

o   character comes in as subsidiary to the actions

o   Main character should be

§  good - Aristotle explains that audiences do not like, for example, villains "making fortune from misery" in the end; it might happen though, and might make play interesting, nevertheless the moral is at stake here and morals are important to make people happy (people can, for example, see tragedy because they want to release their anger)

§  appropriate–if a character is supposed to be wise, it is unlikely he is young (supposing wisdom is gained with age)

§  consistent–if a person is a soldier, he is unlikely to be scared of blood (if this soldier is scared of blood it must be explained and play some role in the story to avoid confusing the audience); it is also "good" if a character doesn't change opinion "that much" if the play is not "driven" by who characters are, but by what they do (audience is confused in case of unexpected shifts in behaviour [and its reasons, morals ...] of characters)

§  "consistently inconsistent"–if a character always behaves foolishly it is strange if he suddenly becomes smart; in this case it would be good to explain such change, otherwise the audience may be confused ; also if character changes opinion a lot it should be clear he is a character who has this trait, not real life person, who does - this is also to avoid confusion

o   Thought (dianoia)– spoken (usually) reasoning of human characters; can explain the characters or story background ...

o   required wherever a statement is proved, or, it may be, a general truth enunciated

o   Diction (lexis)- (delivery) metrical arrangement of the words: as for 'song,' it is a term whose sense everyone understands.

o   Melody (melos) -the Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action

o   Spectacle (opsis) -(costumes/props/lights/music/etc)

o   the production of spectacular effects

 Poetry as a species of imitation

·         Epic poetry and tragedy, comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects - the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation

DISTINCTIONS

·         Medium

o   the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or 'harmony,' either singly or combined.

o   art which imitates by means of language alone

o   People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all to the name.

·         Object

o   the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting.

o   comedy aims at representing men as worse, tragedy as better than in actual life.

·         Mode(MANNER)

o   the poet may imitate by narration - in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged - or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.

The anthropology and history of poetry

Ø  Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature.

Ø  the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated

Ø  Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature

Ø  Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, metres being manifestly sections of rhythm.

Ø  Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to poetry.

Early History

Ø  Tragedy

o   imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought

o   Component parts

§  persons acting

§  song and diction

§  the plot- is the imitation of the action - the arrangement of the incidents

o   Aeschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue.

o   Sophocles raised the number of actors to three, and added scene-painting

Ø  Comedy-an imitation of characters of a lower type - not, however, in the full sense of the word bad,

the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive

Ø  Epic- agrees with tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type.

o   They differ in that epic poetry admits but one kind of metre and is narrative in form.

o   They differ, again, in their length: for tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit, whereas the epic action has no limits of time

o   All the elements of an epic poem are found in tragedy, but the elements of a tragedy are not all found in the epic poem

Myth as Drama- the principles of the drama are present in myths, at least to the extent that those principles are meaningful to apply to them.

o   it is commonplace in cultures past and present, to enact their central myths – if not in pantomime, so in performances with more or less of a ritual structure.

o   the most firm indication of their dramatic nature is the structure of all those myths remaining with us, either in documents only, or in practice as well

The Three Unities

v  Unity of action- the combination of incidents which are the action of the play, should be one – one story told, which is not to say it has to be about only one person, since characters are not in the center of the tragedy, but action itself

v  Unity of time- the time of its duration is such as to render it probable that there can be a transition from prosperous to adverse, or from adverse to prosperous fortune

o   Aristotle divides into the following parts: prologue, episode, exode, and chorus, the last one divided into parados (entry of the chorus) and stasimon (chorus fixed on stage).

o   The first three, pretty much the beginning, middle and end are intervened by chorus

o   Complication-from the beginning until the moment where there is a “transition to good fortune,”

o   Development- from this point(transition)to the end

v  Unity of place- a drama should not occupy more space than what can realistically be arranged on a stage

o   (not present in POETICS by Aristotle) invented in the 16th century by Lodovico Castelvetro, the Italian translator of The Poetics, and by the French dramatist Jean de la Taille