A
clear distinction between tragedy and comedy dominated the stage of the
ancient world. The biblical adaptations of the medieval times,
represented during the holidays in front of the churches, combined
tragedy and comedy, giving birth to modern dramaturgy:
The
mixture of tragedy with comedy…
Will
make an earnest part, another funny;
A
variety that everybody likes quite [1].
The
technical descriptions 'Poetics'―originally conceived as an
analysis of tragedy, suited the new dramatic sensitivity. D. W. Lucas
writes on this issue: «poietikhs... as the subject of a book it would
recall the tecne retorike, the Handbook of Rhetoric; the purpose of
this books, which had been in existence for a century or more..., was
to teach the art of speaking, but [Poetics' object] is mainly to define
the nature and function of poetry, though instructions for the poet are
included[2].» Aristotle realized that the main manifestation of poetry
was the art of plot making, rather than versification: «It clearly
follows that the poet or 'maker' should be the maker of plots rather
than of verses (Poet., 9)[3]». Based on his experience as spectator of
Greek poetry―epic and drama, Aristotle deduced a series of narrative
principles, widely spread in the academic circles of Athens, Rome,
Constantinople, Cordoba, Istanbul, Paris and Beverly Hills. The
reputation of Poetics can be attributed to its sharp description of the
elements of drama, but also to its apparent lack of interest on ethics
of narration. Although Aristotle distinguishes the dialectics of the
older poets from the rhetoric of the contemporary (Poet., 6,) he
abstains from any further analysis on the subject and refers the reader
to his treatise on Rhetoric[4], in which he defines rhetoric as a
half-dialectic, half-deceiving reasoning referred to ethics and
politics (Rhet., 1,
2)[5].
Contrary to Plato, Aristotle did not write about the effects of poetry
on children's education. Poetics mainly describes the internal
mechanisms of dramaturgy, giving special attention to the emotions
aroused by the spectacle. As a result Aristotelian aesthetics, divested
from ethics, deteriorated the social role of creativity during the
centuries to come. When at the beginning of the 19th-century Benjamin
Constant advocated an art for art's sake―L'art pour l'art, he was
merely formalizing the ideology of Poetics[6]. Cinema, a sub-product of
the industrial revolution, evolved as an art for the mass, but only
exceptionally as an art about the mass. Without interest to debate the
effects of mechanized art upon society, the early producers and
directors of commercial cinema quickly embraced the formal precepts of
Poetics.
Television is not only distinguished from other media by its global
coverage, but also by its visual continuity: a legacy of the Hollywood
studio production system. News-reports, soap operas, TV commercials,
travel documentaries touting
cheap
airline tickets and music video-clips are all visual stories with a
beginning, middle and end. In spite of his manifest animadversion
towards spectacle[7], Aristotle refers to frenetic music and special
effects as means able to arouse―through pity and fear, the catharsis
(Poet., 14), that is, the main purpose of tragedy.
Aristotle's analysis on tragedy is deductive; his observations are
still valid for the playwrights and spectators of today. Any spectacle
encourages creativity―as long as it works as entertainment. Contrary to
Plato, Aristotle pays little attention to poetic inspiration. His
pretended vindication of poetry is rather a satire against Plato―as the
scholastics rightly understood. Plato didn't intend to exclude the
poets from the Republic, but rather to establish a rigorous censorship
on poetry in conformity with a warlike educational policy. Aristotle
becomes more rigid than his tutor does when he reduces the function of
the poet and the historian to the making of plots. Susan Sontag grasps
the ideology of Poetics when she writes: «When Aristotle said that
poetry was more philosophical than history, he was justified insofar as
he wanted to rescue poetry, that is, the arts, from being conceived as
a type of factual, particular, descriptive statement. But what he said
was misleading insofar as it suggests that art supplies something like
what philosophy gives us: an argument[8]». I may add that by calling
poetry philosophical[9], and by stating that it bends towards the
universal, Aristotle achieves what Plato was unable to achieve through
his arguments: to establish the superiority of philosophy over
poetry. The poet is thus condemned to the arena of divertimento.
The arduous debates in the universities of Italy, Spain, England and
France about the unity of tragedy, its duration and its purpose, were a
direct aftermath of the Aristotelian subordination of drama to
dialectics. Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century Novalis was
able to reestablish the harmony between philosophy and poetry.
Aristotle underrates the poets who value versification over
plot-making, praise those who attempt to emulate the philosophers and
ends up calling all of them gifted or insane. His praise or
satire alludes to the ability of the poet of writing discourses
incompatible with each other within a single play, that is, of severing
truth in a random number of certainties. Reluctant to analyze a
discourse that rejects universal laws, Aristotle centers his analysis
in the emotions: «Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action… through
pity and fear effecting the proper purgation (kaqarsois), of these
emotions» (Poet.,6.) Based on passage of Politics, in which Aristotle
mentions kaqarsois once again, the interpreters of the renaissance
understood drama either as a therapeutic process or as an ethical
action, which―as music, would strengthened the citizen's disposition
towards terror and compassion[10]. Prior to these interpretations,
kaqarsois refers to the climax, that is, to the resolution of the
tragedy's main conflict. Aristotle describes drama as a pleasant
experience, far more intense than reading and declamation: «And
superior it [tragedy] is, because it has an the epic elements- it may
even use the epic meter- with the music and spectacular effects as
important accessories; and these produce the most vivid of pleasures
(poet., 26)». The hedonic aspect of drama, misunderstood and suppressed
by the medieval monks[11], has been recently vindicated by Bertold
Brecht: «Thus, what the ancients, following Aristotle, demanded of
tragedy is nothing higher or lower than that it should entertain
people... [catharsis] is performed not only in a pleasurable way, but
precisely for the purpose of pleasure[12].»
The
assumption that kaqarsois―or the cleansing of the passions, happens
during the climax of the drama, contrasts with the ubiquitous
definition of kaqarsois included in the 'Tractatus Coisliniamus'―a text
arguable attributed to Aristotle, in which kaqarsois occurs with each
laughter: «Comedy… [accomplishes] by means of pleasure and
laughter the catharsis of such emotions[13].»
'Poetics' constitutes a
reformulation of poetry. Aristotle insists in the etymology of the word
(poihsis ―from poiew: to make to fabricate,) in order to define poets
as makers of plots. Once he has established the ideal length of a
play, Aristotle places Homer―the official poet of Athens, in a rank
inferior to Aeschylus and Sophocles. The art (tecne) of composing
verses―still present in the definition of tragedy, is excluded from the
list of constitutive elements of drama: «Tragedy, then, is an imitation
of an action that is serious… in language embellished… [which] must
have six parts… Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song»
(Poet., 6.) Poetic inspiration should be surveyed according to the
plot-making inventiveness of the poet. Weavers of incidents and
conflicts, the poets will gradually sacrifice versification in order to
become playwrights. Centuries before the establishment of naturalistic
cinema, Aristotle hinted that the elaborated verses of Greek drama
would be replaced by colloquial speech: «Aeschylus first introduced a
second actor… Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the
appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most
colloquial we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into
iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse» (Poet.,
4.) The unflavored dialogues of commercial cinema are the most recent
manifestation of poetic drama. The survival of versified poetry had
been already at the stake during Aristotle's lifetime: «Ariphrades
ridiculed the tragedians for using phrases which no one would employ in
ordinary speech» (Poet., 22.)
Due
to its formalist analysis, 'Poetics' has been traditionally interpreted
as an apolitical treatise. But the dramatic preferences of Aristotle
reveal his own ideology. 'Poetics' omits the most controversial Greek
tragedies, e.g., Prometheus Bound, Antigone and Women of Troy, in order
to elaborate its discourse on an illustrative play of the Status Quo:
Oedipus King. Sophocles' masterpiece represents the life of a ruler
willing to sacrifice his life for his vassals.
Aristotle admires Oedipus King on account of its structure―in which
sentences and sub-conflicts are directly related to the main conflict
of the play: «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, in
the manner not of Euripides but of Sophocles» (Poet., 18.) He also
questions the use of the chorus as a singer of interludes―that is, of
prayers or laments dissociated from the main action of the play: «their
choral songs pertain as little to the subject of the piece as to that
of any other tragedy» (Poet., 18.)
Aristotle does not question the originality of these songs, but rather
their flimsy articulation to the main conflict of the play. Thematic
repetition is encouraged, as well as the representation of the fate of
a small number of ruling families: «the best tragedies are founded on
the story of a few houses- on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus,
Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus» (Poet., 13.)
Aristotle recommends the representation of active rather than passive
conflicts, for the former are more prompt to evoke fear and compassion.
He―as most of the commercial producers of our time, rejects episodic or
disjunctive tragedies. Several dramas lost or destroyed during the
decline of the Greco-Roman civilization had been already condemned by
'Poetics': «Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call
a plot 'episodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another
without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces
by their own fault, good poets, to please the players» (Poet., 9.) His
statement applies to summer blockbusters such as Jurassic Park, in
which all the scenes are chronologically edited one after each other.
The scene in which two reptiles of supernatural appetite are about to
swallow the heroes of the film, must be placed―according to the Deus ex
Machina convention, towards the end of the film. This narrative
structure is repeated in Saving Private Ryan, in which a troupe of
ferocious German soldiers is about to slaughter the heroes of the film.
In both cases the antagonists are timely annihilated by a celestial
mechanism.
The
reduction of art to entertainment drove Bertold Brecht to formulate an
Epic Dramaturgy―in opposition to an Aristotelian Dramaturgy. As a
playwright, Brecht distinguished art from science[14] in order to
recover for art the space it had lost before philosophy and science:
«It is customary to see a rather unnatural knowledge in exceptional
poets. They perceive with clear divine assertiveness what most men can
only achieve through great industry and effort. It is clearly
unpleasant ―let's confess it, to realize that we hardly listen to the
inspiration of the poets[15]».
In
the same vein, the aesthetics of disjunctive or reiterative films such
as Un Chien Andalou, L’Année Dernière à Marienbad o Citizen Kane
prompted professor Jean Mitry to formulate a cinematography without
grammar or syntax.
'Poetics' defines plot as the soul of drama, a statement that suits the
commercial demands of mainstream filmmaking today. Drama could exist
with plot alone―characters, songs and music can be excluded. Aristotle
understands plot as a complete action (praxis): «for 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 » (Poet.,
6.) The poet is a contriver of actions, in conformity with
Aristotle's theories on physics (197b4), politics (1325a32), and ethics
(1098a16, b21.) Happiness and unhappiness happened in actions regulated
by opposed forces: true and secrecy, life and death, revenge or
forgiveness. Gilles Deleuze echoes Aristotle while describing American
Cinema: «Action is by itself a strife of forces, a series of strives:
strife against the system (milieu), against the others, against itself…
[The movement action (l'image-action) stretches out before the
system and shrinks in before the action[16].» Mainstream cinema
represents characters that can only live and feel through violent
actions, e.g. in The Godfather, the main character achieves power by
slaying his opponents, in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, a cow-boy
expresses his friendship by shooting a trouble-maker on his back.
Actions become physical actions. Violence, rarely represented during
the decline of the Greek tragedy, becomes the norm of commercial
cinema. Models and actors perform acrobatic chases and escapes in order
to satisfy their psychological needs. The morbidity of film producers,
rather than the aesthetic demands of the spectators, regulates
filmmaking today.
'Poetics'
describes the dramatic elements of ancient drama and
contemporary cinema. In his last chapters, Aristotle analyses the role
of sub-plots, changes of fortune, music, make-up and special
effects. But by emphasizing entertainment, Aristotle sanctioned
poetry in conformity with the economic and political imperatives of his
age.
[1] Lo trágico y lo cómico mezclado (…)
harán grave una parte, otra ridícula,
que aquesta variedad deleita mucho. Vega, Lope de, El Nuevo Arte de
Hacer Comedias, 174 - 178.
[2] D.W Lucas, appendix to Aristotle's Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1968), p. 53.
[3] Aristotle, Poetics, tran. S. H. Butcher, at
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html (Jan. 2003). All
citations from this edition.
[4] «Concerning Thought, we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to
which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs (Poet., 19).»
[5] Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, at
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/Rhetoric/ (Jan. 2003).
Aristotle defines rhetoric as «partly like dialectic, partly like
sophistical reasoning (Rhet., 1,4).» All cites from this edition.
[6] Oscar Wilde popularized this expression in 'The Critic as Artist',
in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Blits Editions, 1990)
pp. 948-998.
[7] « The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own,
but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least
with the art of poetry (…)Besides, the production of spectacular
effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of
the poet (Poet., 6)».
[8] Sontag, Susan, 'On Style', in Against Interpretation (New York:
Picador, 1965), p. 15.
[9] “Dio kai filosofwteron kai spoudaioteron poiesis istorias estin”
(Poet., 9).
[10] Torquato Tasso, nonetheless, judges the originality of a poem by
its main conflict and resolution: «La novità del poema (…) consiste ne
la novità del nodo e de lo scioglimento de la favola,» Tasso, Torquato,
Discorsi dell'arte poetica ed in particolare sopra il poema eroico, I.
[11]«Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the
monks…», Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of The
Roman Empire, 4, 37.
[12] Bertold Brecht, Journal Notes, in Brecht on Theatre: the
development of an aesthetic, ed. & trans. John Willet (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 157.
[13] Tractatus Coislinianus, trans. by Richard Janko (Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 45.
[14] «Kunst und Wissenschaft wirken in sehr verschiedener Weise,
abgemacht» 'Das epische Theater', in Schriften zum Theater 3: über eine
nicht-aristotelische Dramatik (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1963), p.
58. And later on, towards the end of his life: «Die
materialistisch-dialektische Betrachtungsweise mub, da wir uns im
Bereich der Kunst aufhalten, zu Bewubtsein gebracht und zu einem
Vergnügen gemacht werden» Brecht, Bertold, 'Eigenarten des Berliner
Ensembles', in Brechts Theaterarbeit: seine Inszenierung des
'Kaukasischen Kreidekreises' (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1954), p. 15.
[15] «Sie sind es gewohnt, in Dichtern einzigartige, ziemlich
unnatürlich Wesen zu sehen, die mit wahrhaft göttlicher Sicherheit
Dinge erkennen, welche andere nur mit großer Mühe und viel Fleiß
erkennen können. Es ist natürlich unangenehm, zugeben zu müssen, daß
man nicht zu diesen Begnadeten gehört» Brecht, Op. cit., 1963, p. 58.
[16] Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema I. L’Image-Mouvement (Paris: Les
éditions de Minuit, 1983), p. 197.
