Showing posts with label Greeks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greeks. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Mentor and pupil

Classical theory and criticism starts off with Plato and Aristotle. 

While both Greek philosophers were preoccupied with the concept of poetry as imitation, or representation of nature, it is interesting to note how their ideas collided, which started the ball rolling for the classic/al clash between poetry and philosophy, or rather which allowed for more beneficial concepts in the study of literature.

In his dialogues Republic, Ion and Phaedrus, Plato banishes poets from his ideal state, based on several grounds. First, according to Plato, the poet’s works are an imitation, twice removed from the Ideal World of forms. Second, poets are said to compose under inspiration, or even divine madness, and without using reason, which is instrumental in finding Truth. Next, poetry is considered to be ignorant of what it teaches and therefore teaches the wrong things. And last, poetry is dangerous to the soul, producing the wrong emotions in the audience, and interfering with the striving towards pure reason which is the proper conduct of the good soul. Plato did not see the importance of poets in the Republic because they are said to just evoke such pleasures and emotions in the audience and not at all benefit the state as a whole.

From these attacks on poetry— two challenges arise. First, Plato raises the question why representations of people [who are] suffering is a pleasurable experience. Second, because he considered the poetic pursuit as irrational, Plato has issued a challenge to those who would argue for a rightful place for poetry in his philosophical utopian state.


Now, taking off from what his teacher laid out, Aristotle comes to the defense in his Poetics. Like Plato, Aristotle believed that imitation is the basis of pleasure derived from all forms of art. But unlike Plato, Aristotle says poetry is more than a simulated representation of reality.

First, Aristotle considers poetry as a skill, with rational rules (like shipbuilding), and not really a process of inspiration.

In Poetics, Aristotle attempts to explain 'poetry' through 'first principles' and by discerning its different genres and component elements, with an analysis of tragedy constituting the core of his discussion. Such principles of poetic composition demonstrate that poetry is not simply inspired. It is rather a skill which can be learned, and has rules that are comprehensible by reason.

Second, for Aristotle, poetry represents reality in a useful way from which we can learn. While Plato says poetry does not teach practical wisdom, and—since the poet does not understand horse bits and reins—he is two removes from the truth, Aristotle counters that the poet is [even] the one who approaches the truth more directly because he focuses on what is universal—rather than incidental or particular—about human experience. While history represents particulars, poetry represents universals.

Then, while it is true that poetry evokes pity and fear in the audience—more important, it also arouses these emotions in such a way as to increase our ability to control them. Aristotle’s concept of catharsis—either purgation cleansing, or even now, intellectual clarification, rather validates why poetry is a more interesting pursuit because of its ability for moral instruction.

What follows is a graphical representation of their arguments and/or counterarguments.

PLATO vs. ARISTOTLE


  1. Poet’s works are an imitation, twice removed from the World of forms.                
  2. Poetry is a skill, with rational rules (like shipbuilding), and not really a process of inspiration. The principles of poetic composition demonstrate that poetry is rather a skill which can be learned, and has rules comprehensible by reason.
  3. Poets compose under inspiration, without using reason.
  4. Poetry is ignorant of what it teaches—it teaches the wrong things.         
  5. Poetry represents reality in a useful way from which we can learn—the poet is the one who approaches the truth more directly because he focuses on what is universal.
  6. Poetry elicits in the audience emotions that are not in accord with reason.           
  7. Poetry arouses emotions in such a way as to increase our ability to control them.


With these two giant figures of the period, classical theory and criticism has mapped out two directions for consideration in the literary study—it emphasized, if not deliberately campaigned on understanding literature as a mode of representation; and it also highlighted didacticism, the property of literary works that seek to teach important tenets of life, hinged on its ability to render moral instruction to the audience.


Really, Speaking Greek


Notes on Aristotle’s Poetics

While some critics primarily consider Poetics a counterattack to Plato’s banishing of poets from [in] theRepublic, Aristotle’s treatise on art, poetry, epic, and tragedy clearly marks out the history of literary criticism. Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfect society, as does Plato, Aristotle attempts to describe the social function and the ethical utility of art.

Poetics places emphasis on the formative nature of art—while predecessor Plato esteems idealism and abstractions as the highest forms of truth to gain wisdom, Aristotle stresses the importance or primacy of the particular imitations of nature.

According to Aristotle, criticism should not be simply the application of unexamined aesthetic principles in its context within the work—but should pay attention to the overall function of feature of a work of art. Therefore, Poetics lays bare the anatomy of art, as in a scientist—carefully accounting for the features of each species cited in the text—most forms by the way are the ones that existed during those times.

Exploring the forms of art during Aristotle’s time, Poetics particularly discusses the practical details of the forms of imitation, which he termed mimesis.  The treatment of the forms or modes of representation is meticulous as Aristotle presents as many definitions as the terms themselves. For instance, Aristotle goes into detail, when he cites the types of tragic plots. He also names specific terms to explicate that unity of plot is indispensably necessary. In Book 17, Aristotle gives poets some pointers on how to construct a tragedy—or how tragedy is constructed by playwrights who were awarded in Dionysian festivals.

Especially drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristotle cites the six salient parts of tragedy in order of importance—plot, character, thought, diction, music or melody and spectacle.  Zooming in on the good plots, Poetics prefers the plausibility and logically connected order centered on one unified action, simultaneously frowning on multiple, divergent plots which it also deems unnecessary. Poetics suggests that the best kind of resolution to these plots is one that shows a reversal (peripeteia) of position for the main character—and a character’s recognition (anagnorisis) of his or her fate. For best effect, so to speak, characters should come from high positions in order to render remarkable tragic circumstances, and their fates must be linked to their own error, and not some accident or wickedness (hamartia).



According to Norton’s Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Aristotle’s seminal work on art renders us a number of implications for the modern critics.  First, its systematic categorization of genus and species and its comparison of tragedy and epic are said to now underlie all genre theory—“undergirding modern considerations of the historical movement from epic to the novel. Second, its systematic description of plot and its component parts basically ground contemporary narrative theory, especially the technical field of narratology. 


Third, its scientific examination of poetry—championed by the American New Critics—rather just validates it as a legitimate branch of study.  Next, it affirms that poetry is a source of universal knowledge of human behavior, i.e. unlike history that produces knowledge of specific situations, poetry describes actions of characters who might be any human beings.  Lastly, to which most critics agree, good poetry renders us catharsis, primarily read as purgation of unwieldy emotion. 

Through time, catharsis, roughly a sense of moral purification that arises in an individual from being exposed to tragedy has come to mean ethical or intellectual clarification.



***

Aristotle’s Poetics clearly marks out the beginnings of literary theory and criticism. 

In this age-old treatise, Aristotle provides both a history of the development of poetry and drama, and a critical framework for evaluating tragic drama. It is considered the first systematic essay in literary theory because it is full of insight and shows a high degree of flexibility in the application of its general rules.

More inclined to forming categories and organizing them into coherent systems than his teacher Plato (who highly esteemed a cerebral Theory of Forms), Aristotle conversely treated the discussion of poetry as a natural scientist, carefully accounting for the features of each “species” of text.

In the twenty six books perhaps gathered as notes by his pupils, three points stand out as probably the most important. First is the interpretation of poetry as mimesis. In Chapters 1–3, all poetry, Aristotle argues, is imitation or mimesis. Poetry springs from a basic human delight in mimicry. Humans learn through imitating and take pleasure in looking at imitations of the perceived world. The mimetic dimension of the poetic arts is always representational. As artistic representation, mimesis in poetry is the act of telling stories that are set in the real world. The events in the story need not have taken place, but the telling of the story will help the listener or viewer to imagine the events taking place in the real world.

Furthermore, representations of human beings in poetry can be sorted into three categories—depictions of humans as better than they really are, depictions of humans as they are in reality, and depictions of humans as worse than they really are. It then distinguishes three types of poetry—tragedy, comedy and epic poetry, perhaps just like an anatomist labels parts of the human body.

In particular, Aristotle focuses his discussion on tragedy, which uses dramatic, rather than narrative, form, and deals with agents who are better than us, ourselves. Aristotle writes the famous opening line in Book 6, which sums up the centerpiece of his work—
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

Aristotle lists six components of tragedy—plot or mythos,character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. While diction and melody are the style of the text or lyrics, and the music to which some of them are set; spectacle refers to staging, lighting, sets, costumes, etc. Thought refers to the indications, given primarily through words but also through other means, of what the characters are thinking.

Of the six parts, Aristotle insisted on the primacy and unity of plot.  While plot as representation of human action can either besimple or complex, Aristotle stresses that complex plots are required for successful tragedies. Here, the plot must be unified, clearly displaying a beginning, a middle, and an end, and must be of sufficient length to fully represent the course of actions but not very long that the audience loses attention and interest.

Unfolding through an internal logic and causality, a complex plot should consist of a hero going from happiness to misery. The hero should be portrayed consistently and in a good light (and the poet should also remain true to what we know of the character).For Aristotle, then, action—represented as the plot—must be consistent with character—and more importantly reveal character.

Furthermore, a number of terms can illuminate how complex plot works successfully for tragedy. Hamartia, translated directly as “error,” is often a “tragic flaw” on the part of the hero that causes his very downfall—this error need not be an overarching moral failing, rather only a matter of not knowing something or forgetting something. Employed along with it is anagnorisis or“recognition,” a part in tragedy—often at the climax—where the hero, or some other character, passes from ignorance to knowledge. This could be a recognition of a long lost friend or family member or a sudden recognition of some fact about oneself, as the case of Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Therefore, the concept of mythos is about how the elements of a tragedy come together to form a coherent and unified whole—in such a way that the overall message or impression that we come away with is what is conveyed to us by the mythos of a piece.

Equally prominent in the Aristotelian treatise is the notion of catharsis. For him, such tragic plot must serve to arouse the emotions of pity and fear and effect a catharsis of these emotions. While some critics forever debate the meaning of the term,Aristotle’s reference to the purging of the emotions of pity and fear aroused in the viewer always links it to the positive social function of tragedy—in general, the ethical utility of art.

Thus, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Aristotle’sPoetics established the beginning of literary theory and criticism, in that it started the discussion of poetic art as representation of reality, a contention held true even today.

Its “species-concerned” treatment of the components of poetic art also initiated the recent and ongoing discourses on the classification of literary forms and types or genres, or genre theory, a structuralist approach to literary, film and cultural theories.

Its concept of the three unities—those of action, place and time—was even taken to its most austere limits during the Renaissance and the succeeding European periods.

Above all, it ushered in for the succeeding eras the importance of the value of art itself, which is one of moral instruction, a concept taken always seriously in the discussion of literature.




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