Poetics by Aristotle

Source of book: I own this

 

There are essentially two kinds of people in the world: those who are still pissed about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and those who are “uh, what?” 

 

I am clearly in the first category. (H/T to my friend Tai for reminding me about this recently.) 

 

The library fell victim to a series of setbacks, over a several-hundred year period. Some, like the fire that started during the siege by Julius Caesar that spread to the building, were individual catastrophes caused by war. Others were death by a thousand cuts: the funding for the library was reduced, leading to the selling of books to support what remained. 

 

Whether the burning ordered by Muslim fundamentalists ever happened is debatable, as is a competing story of Coptic Christians ordering the destruction of secular books. 

 

Whatever happened, the library eventually disintegrated, and with it was lost much of the literature of the ancient Mediterranean world.

 

I mention all of this because this post is about only the first half of Poetics by Aristotle. The second half, which is all about comedy, has been lost to us. As have thousands of plays, poems, and other works of the time. There are several mentioned and quoted in Poetics, and those quotes are all we have left of plays that Aristotle thought were the finest of Greek antiquity. 

 

Sigh. What might have been…

 

I’m not a big fan of the so-called “classical” education thing. Too much of it is steeped in white supremacy, a nostalgia for when higher education was a way of maintaining social status for wealthy white males, when the emphasis was on learning Greek and Latin and the old classics in order to be “educated” in the subculture of the aristocracy. 

 

This was a time, after all, when even a premier institution like Harvard didn’t even require a knowledge of arithmetic, let alone any higher math or science. It was about cultivating the air of a gentleman, not practical knowledge. 

 

That said, I do believe that a working knowledge of the thinkers of the ancient world are in fact helpful in understanding our modern world. Our current culture - indeed any culture ever - hasn’t arisen spontaneously ex nihilo. Rather, every culture has built on what came before, and will serve as the foundation of what comes after. Human society evolves. 

 

Understanding current Chinese culture requires some knowledge of the ancient texts which still influence that culture. 

 

For all of us living in the West, we will fail to understand our culture without understanding the ideas that lie at the heart of the history of that culture. 

 

Those of us raised Christian will sometimes (although not as often as you might think) have a good knowledge of the Bible. More rarely, we might have some knowledge of the writings of the Church Fathers such as Augustine. 

 

But shockingly, few seem to understand the Greek roots of most of the ideas in the Christian Scriptures (aka the New Testament), and this means that far too many misunderstand the writings of Paul, the teachings of Christ, and even the use of Greek ideas like the underworld. 

 

Because the writers of the Bible were in conversation with the ancient ideas that predated them by hundreds of years, the context and meaning of many passages require an understanding of what that conversation was about. 

 

One of the big epiphanies in my deconstruction from Evangelical/Fundamentalist doctrine was reading Politics by Aristotle decades ago. 

 

To understand Paul’s use of the “domestic codes” throughout his letters, you have to go back to the OG, where Aristotle lays out his views of the idea organization of society. Specifically, the belief that free Greek men should rule over women, children, and slaves, who were by definition subhuman and unable to govern themselves. 

 

Paul’s ideas, when seen in that context, are clearly a repudiation of Aristotle’s belief. And yet modern interpreters have taken him as confirming the hierarchies that Aristotle claimed. It is a bizarre inversion of meaning. 

 

So, I believe that understanding Aristotle, Plato, and other philosophers is helpful in understanding our own time. 

 

That’s a really long introduction to get to Poetics, which is more accurately about drama, not poetry as we think of it. It does touch on lyric poetry and epic poetry (particularly Homer), but the bulk of the book is about the various forms of drama, with a focus in the part we still have on tragedy. 

 

I am not going to summarize the ideas in this book. Many are ones that any of us who have spent any time studying literary theory or even drama generally are already familiar with. 

 

The Classical Unities; hubris, nemesis, catharsis; the distinction between the noble-born characters of tragedy and the common-born characters of comedy; the basic structure of a three or five act play; and so on. 

 

And perhaps the most influential ideas in Western literature: the narrative arc and character-driven plot. 

 

The book is a fascinating read, although it definitely feels dated in many areas. Which, well, to steal from Yoda, when 2500 years you reach, look this good you will not. 

 

The very fact that reading this book I could see the roots of so much that literary theory is still talking about is a testament to Aristotle’s clarity of thought, and close observation of human nature and its relation to the art we produce. 

 

There are a few passages which I thought particularly interesting. 

 

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with every kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of dramatic action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purification of these emotions. 

 

Aristotle thought that tragedy needed specific elements in order to be effective.

 

Every tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality - namely, plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, song.

 

For a time in the 20th century, except for opera, tragedy didn’t come with that much song - songs were for comedies. However, it is good to see the idea of the musical tragedy making a comeback. It is perhaps no accident that one of the best modern musicals I have seen is based on a Greek myth. 

 

Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist of having a single man as the hero…As therefore, in the other imitative arts, 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 such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference is not an organic part of the whole. 

 

There is a certain satisfaction in a story of this sort, one where everything necessary is present, and nothing present that is not. Not that there isn’t another kind of pleasure in a rambling story, say, by one of the Victorians. But a tight plot with that unity is amazing when it is done right. 

 

Aristotle also talks about why certain kinds of “tragedy” are unsatisfying. There is nothing particularly interesting about a good man who finds success, or a bad man who sufferers consequences. Likewise, there is no real point to a good man who suffers blind misfortune. There is no connection to reality in any of those cases in a way that resonates universally. 

 

A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. 

 

Thus, the proper subject for a tragedy is a basically decent, good man, who is brought low by a tragic flaw, a single - and all too human - failing that brings him down. 

 

One can, for example, see ourselves in Hamlet, too paralyzed by fear and indecision to act, even to protect himself. Or Macbeth, seduced by ambition and goaded on by a woman questioning our manhood. Or Lear, disappointed that his offer of an inheritance inspires a rather cold response from his child. Or Othello, who allows the seed of doubt about his spouse - and indeed his own impotence - to ruin everything. 

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one quote that betrays Aristotle’s chauvinism. I do this in part because it is such a great example of how Paul’s pushback against Aristotle is clear in context.

 

With regard to the characters there are four things to be aimed at. First, and most important, they must be good. Now any speech or action that manifests some kind of moral purpose will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is good. The goodness is possible in every class of persons. Even a woman may be good, and also a slave, though the one is liable to be an inferior being, and the other quite worthless. 

 

Contrast this with Galatians: 

 

There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

 

Stick that in your pipe, Aristotle. That this is a clear rebuke is evident when you know the cultural context. Women are not inferior. The enslaved are not inferior. Other ethnicities are not inferior. We are all equal. 

 

Aristotle, like any good writer and thinker, had many good things to say. And also some glaring blind spots. 

 

The key in reading is to understand. To use discernment. To understand how ideas are interconnected, and influence all that comes after. To understand ideas as a conversation rather than dictation, and to draw from the conflict the ideas that most support human thriving is the goal. 

 

I am disappointed, however, that the second half of this book has been lost, because I would be very curious to know what Aristotle thought was humorous. (And believe me, the old Greek comedies can be hilarious.) What might have been.