Aristotle's Poetics

I General Facts and Problems

Date: Written about 335 B.C. (Aeschylus had been dead for over a century; Euripides and Sophocles had been dead for about seventy years.)

Significance: The Poetics is especially important because it is the only critical/ theoretical work on tragedy that comes from the civilization that produced the tragedies. It is later than the plays: theory (criticism) must have subjects to theorize about.

Problems:

1. Style: The work is generally believed not to be a polished literary composition, but a set of lecture notes.

2. Loss: a second book on comedy and other topics is lost.

3. Influence: is greater through misunderstanding and misapplication by later "Aristotelians" (esp. from the 16th to 18th centuries) than through anything it says.

For example, the "three unities" (of time, place and action) are simply not there. Aristotle's one unity is the unity of plot. What he has to say of "unity of time" is "tragedy tries as far as possible to limit the time of its action to one revolution of the sun or to depart only slightly from that rule, but epic poetry does not so limit itself in time."

II Aristotelian Causes

Aristotle sees the inquiry into problems concerning art as a "science" because there is a science wherever there is a subject whose properties can be examined in order to reach conclusions about the nature of that subject as a thing. The Poetics is on the problems of making (the productive science). [See Telford's edition and commentary.]

In general Aristotle posits four causes to be a complete list of factors which enter into any problem:

1. Material cause: the parts which constitute its material.

2. Formal cause: the form (or structure) of those parts which give them unity.

3. Efficient cause: the way in which the material takes on the form (or structure); the source of motion by which the form and matter are brought together to make the existing thing.

4. Final cause: the function or purpose of the thing.

III A brief outline of the Poetics

1-5 The origin of Tragedy: Imitation: the natural desire to imitate, the universal enjoyment of imitation; imitation and learning. See also Plato, Republic X.

Analogues for Comedy and Tragedy:

Tragedy: Homeric Epic, both Iliad and Odyssey.

Comedy: Invective, mock-epics (Margites, a mock-epic, see the extant "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," Batrochomyomachia). That is, comedy is parody.

6 The Definition of Tragedy: the parts of Tragedy:

• muthos plot, THE SOUL OF TRAGEDY
• ethos character (seen through choice)
• dianoia thought
• opsis spectacle (part of the producer's art)
• lexis diction
• melopoieia song-making, music

"Tragedy is not the portrayal of people, but of action, of life."

7 Arrangement of the plot: beginning, middle, end: that is, it cannot just start anywhere and end anywhere, nor is it an on-going saga, a slice of life. Tragedy starts "at the end" of something. In tragedy something happens.

8 Unity of plot

9 Poetry and History: poetry is more serious than history.

10 Simple and complex plots: complex plots contain reversal (peripeteia) and/or recognition (anagnorisis).

11 The Tragic Experience (pathos "suffering"):

Reversal: the action veers around in the opposite direction. "It is the fact of change that Aristotle finds essentially tragic and not the direction of change." (Jones)

Recognition: those marked for good or bad fortune pass from a state of ignorance into a state of knowledge.

12 Parts of Tragedy: prologue, etc.

13 The Tragic Character #

14 Spectacle: opsis is inartistic. Pity and fear should be aroused through the arrangement of incidents.

15 Character in Tragedy: good, fitting, like (that is, verisimilitudinous), consistent; Iphigenia in IA is an example of inconsistency.

16 Kinds of Recognition

17 Visualizing the whole plot (unity)

18 Complication and denouement: involvement and solution (or desis and lusis, "tying" and "loosening")

19 Diction and Thought

20-21 Diction and Grammar

22 Uses of words

23-4 Epic and Tragedy: both poems of Homer are models for Tragedy; neither Homeric epic is a model for comedy.

25 General criticism, probability

The Poetics combines two functions: it is a textbook for dramatists on how to write tragedies, which it does by describing the best examples of the art and what faults are to be avoided. And it is a textbook for critics in that it teaches them what to look for and gives a vocabulary of criticism. It is also a defense of poetry.