Poetics E-Book

Aristotle

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 90

Beschreibung

Part of the Nick Hern Books Dramatic Contexts series: important statements on the theatre by major figures in the theatre. One of the most influential tracts in world theatre, Aristotle's Poetics is crucial to an understanding of how drama works, and how it has evolved. It is the source of the doctrine of the Three Unities – of Time, Place and Action – and the concept of catharsis in tragedy. Writing only a hundred years after Sophocles and Euripides, Aristotle's insights into Greek drama are endlessly rewarding. This English translation by Kenneth McLeish makes the famous text more accessible than ever before, without cutting or paraphrasing. Important passages are highlighted, while key words and concepts are glossed within the text, without the need for intrusive footnotes. The result is an authoritative text of Aristotle's Poetics that allows readers to experience his arguments directly for themselves. Also included is a compact introduction by McLeish to Aristotle and his ideas.

Leseprobe

Aristotle

Poetics

translated and introduced by

Kenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Translator’s Note

For Further Reading

Poetics

Key Dates

Who’s Who

About the Author

Copyright Information

Introduction

Aristotle (384-322BC)

Aristotle was a Macedonian, son of the royal physician to King Philip. He studied with Plato in Athens, and after Plato’s death spent some years as a travelling professor. (Among other things, he tutored the Macedonian prince Alexander, the future Alexander the Great.) In 335, aged 49, he set up a teaching institution of his own in Athens; it survived for almost a millennium, one of the longest-lasting ‘universities’ of the ancient world.

Like most other intellectuals of the time – the Greek word ‘philosopher’ means no more than ‘lover of knowledge’ – Aristotle held that nothing lay outside his interest or the scope of his science. His chief researches were into the phenomena of Nature, and he made minute study of rocks, plants, animal form and movement, the stars and the morphology of the Earth. He was interested in human behaviour, and wrote about character, relationships and politics. He lectured on ethics, morality, religion, psychology, grammar and the techniques of persuasion. To all this work he applied a research method of his own, partly derived from the techniques of Socrates and Plato (who discussed each topic in a way designed to strip away inessentials until a core of ‘truth’ was left) and partly anticipating modern scientific method. He and his assistants amassed as much information as was available about each chosen topic, studying first-hand evidence and reading all writings and opinions they could find. From this mass of material, by a rigorous process of logic, they formulated theories and principles, testing them against other people’s views and new evidence as it came along. The method could be applied equally well to physical phenomena (such as variations in types of rock or animal behaviour), to abstractions (such as the nature of change or what ‘virtue’ is) and to human artefacts (such as political constitutions), and it was open-ended, allowing scope for alternative opinions and for constant reassessment.

Poetics

Poetics appeared some time in the 330s. In Aristotle’s catalogue it was a minor work, probably unrevised and possibly incomplete. Like others of his surviving writings, it is less a polished and finished book than notes, possibly assembled for the lecture-room. It is repetitive, stylistically inconsistent and veers between passages which are fully written out and others where complex arguments are compressed into single sentences or phrases. Comparisons with other artforms, for example painting and sculpture, are tantalising as much for their brevity as their acuity. The appeal of Poetics is partly for the pithiness and mind-expanding nature of its pronouncements – Aristotle must have been an inspired teacher – and partly because it is the earliest piece of literary criticism from the ancient world, closer in time than any other to the artform it discusses. For modern readers, a second point of attraction is the wild way it was misinterpreted by later theorists on drama (notably in the Renaissance), and the overwhelming influence that their views – not always Aristotle’s – had on subsequent dramatic theory and practice. Poetics may be hard, at times, to relate to the practice of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in their surviving plays, and both Aristotle’s theories and those derived from them may sometimes appear eccentric or wrong, but the book is seminal for Western drama.

The Nature and Purpose of the Arts

In the last book of his Republic, produced some forty years before Poetics, Plato brought to a conclusion a series of meditations on the nature and purpose of the arts, meditations which had preoccupied him for half a century. In summary, he said that if you believe that the prime human objectives are to discover what ‘virtue’ is and then aspire to it, you should deal only in truth, in actuality. Since the arts, by definition, are confected, they are distracting at best and at worst destructive. God creates the ideal – for example the ideal of a table or the ideal of ‘virtue’; human beings create practical examples of that ideal – a functional table or a life ‘virtuously’ lived; art creates merely a simulacrum of such examples – a picture of a table or a ‘virtuous’ dramatic character. Furthermore, the arts encourage emotional response, far from the rational and considered stance of the genuine seeker after truth.

In Poetics, briefly and bluntly, Aristotle challenges this view. The pleasure offered by the arts – something Plato deplored – is, for him, a moral and didactic force. We see imitations of reality and compare them with reality; this is both pleasurable in itself and also morally instructive. From infancy human beings learn by imitation, and the process does not stop with maturity, but is ironically layered and enhanced by it. The pleasure, and the learning, are similar whether what is imitated is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – discrimination in the beholder is the deciding factor. The chief duty of artists is to provide imitations technically as perfect as they can make them, and in Poetics Aristotle offers hints and suggestions for how this should be done, at least in literature. The starting-point may be moral or aesthetic philosophy, but Poetics is for the most part a discussion of ‘best practice’ in the literary artforms. Aristotle rates highest, of those he discusses, tragedy and epic.

The moral implications of all this must have been even sharper for Aristotle’s audiences than they are for us today. By his time, in his opinion at least, theatrical writing had become jaded and degenerate, falling far short of the aims and achievements of the previous century. The work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and others, so far from being a goal to which other writers aspired, had come to be regarded as out of tune with the sensibilities and style of the new generation; spectacle had begun to take the place of substance. In part, this process reflected a change – felt by many thinkers as a decline – in the moral status of the Athenian population itself. The people of today were not the equals of their parents, grandparents and especially the great-great-grandparents who had defeated the Persians and ushered in the era of Pericles, the Parthenon, Thucydides, Pheidias and Socrates. Plato’s attack on the arts, in part, was for fostering and abetting this perceived decline; Aristotle in Poetics seems persistently to imply, without ever saying explicitly, that if more writers of the present followed the routes taken by geniuses of the past – routes he sets out in detail – both drama and its spectators would be far healthier.

The Place of Logic

Aristotle’s guiding principles throughout Poetics are his passions for logic and for order. This is seen most obviously in his remarks on form and content. A work of art should be a unified and congruent whole, eliminating the random and of a size appropriate to its content (see here). Length in tragedy should be measured not by arbitrary means such as clocks – though if it is, the writers should accommodate their work in a shapely manner – but by the needs of the material (see here). There are six constituent parts of tragedy (see here), six types of recognition scene (see here), half a dozen kinds of choral utterance (see here) – and they can be placed in hierarchical order according to specific logical criteria. Character-drawing is a schematic skill, articulating themes and ideas in ways which can be codified and learned (see here). The argument about whether epic or tragedy is the nobler form of art can take place according to exact rules of rhetoric, each side balancing the other (see here). There are a dozen ways of countering hostile criticism (see here).

A modern writer might comment that all this is fine and fair enough, that Aristotle’s summaries and recipes are persuasive, but that they still add up to a critic’s and not an artist’s view of how art is made. The arts in general, and performing arts in particular allow far more room than he seems to acknowledge for nuance, surprise, irony, inflection and challenge. By the nature of theatre, drama is ironical from start to finish, and the space between performers and spectators is essential to the medium, allowing an interplay of thought and response which is not apparent in the written text but which gives the performed work its life. Aristotle’s claim (see here) that tragedy makes just as much effect when read as when experienced in the theatre does not take into account that the two effects, while of similar intensity, may still be of a completely different kind. A great tragedy, a King Lear or an Elektra, say, is precisely not the same play in the theatre and on the page. Aristotle talks of critical distance in his discussion of ‘imitation’ (see here), and has a sharp appreciation of metaphor, at least in its literary manifestations (see here); it would have been instructive to have had his views – directly answering Plato’s offensive against the arts – on the wider aesthetic question of the nature and force of metaphor in life in general, of the respective merits of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ as ways of articulating our whole imaginative and emotional relationship with the world around us.

Universal Order and Hamartia

It was axiomatic in Aristotelian thinking that chaos is inferior to order and that there is an orderly, organic progression from one state to the other. By implication, everything in the universe and in human imagination has its hierarchy. In Poetics men are superior to women and both are superior to slaves. ‘Good’ people are superior to ‘bad’ people, and the reasons can be defined. (Aristotle’s main reason why the hero of a tragedy should be a person of distinction is that only such a person’s fall from eminence is morally instructive; we are not moved by reversal in ‘little’ lives. It has taken over two millennia for this view to be challenged in Western literary fiction, first in novels and then, much more recently, in ‘serious’ drama.) Universal order depends, in part, on everyone and everything in creation maintaining its hierarchical position – if gods descend to the level of mortals, for example, or mortals aspire to the condition of gods, order is replaced by chaos. Universal order is like an embroidered cloth in which each stitch has its place; if one stitch is dropped or the cloth is torn, the whole is damaged and must be repaired.

This tearing of the cloth is what Aristotle means by hamartia. The word was originally used of ‘falling short’ in archery or spear-throwing, but came to mean any lapse from the ideal state of things, any missing of any target or error of judgment. If you tripped over a stone or called someone by the wrong name or spilt crumbs or lost your way in the street, this was hamartia.