Okay, I Need To Re-Read Aristotle's Poetics - Tragedies

Not like I have had time to finish the books I have started, but I did read The Poetics once upon a time. Also, another book that has gone missing. (I did re-read his Rhetoric; which had practical uses once upon a time.)

Martha Bayles's The Character of Tragedy; Plot is the key to character is why I am bringing up Aristotle.

If the Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on the subject of tragedy, is rarely studied today, it is largely because the French Neoclassicists of the seventeenth century turned Aristotle’s descriptions of Greek tragedy into prescriptions. Finessed by Corneille and Racine, ignored by Molière, challenged by the Romantics, and rejected by the Modernists, the Poetics was all but forgotten by 1953. But each in his own way, Beckett and Clarke heeded the deeper insights it contains.

The most important of these insights is that plot is the key to character. Aristotle did not reach this conclusion because he thought character unimportant. Rather, it was because, as he argued in the Ethics, the only way for one human being to discern the true character of another is to observe the other’s actions over a long period, preferably a lifetime. In the theater, where such lengthy observation is not possible, tragedy forces the issue by taking “a man like ourselves,” who despite his good intentions stands “between the two extremes” of “eminently good and just” and “vice and depravity,” and subjecting him to at least one wrenching, agonizing “reversal of fortune.”

Thus, Aristotle defines tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude,” in which the “plot…is the first and most important thing.” He further states that a “well-constructed plot” needs a beginning, middle, and end—and that the best plots are “complex” in the sense of including various heart-stopping twists. These include “Reversal” (peripeteia), in which a key event turns out to mean the opposite of what is expected; “Recognition” (anagnorsis), in which a new discovery changes everything; and “Scene of Suffering” (pathos), in which a character experiences emotional distress, physical agony, or violent death (or all three).

Yet, plot is supposed to be passe - all interior stuff showing character. Maybe I did learn something from Aristotle, the idea that action, the plot, is how to develop character does not seem so strange.

Back to the original essay.

As a postwar Modernist in good standing, Beckett did his best to reject these prescriptions. And he succeeded to the point that one admiring critic called Waiting for Godot “a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats.” It is not quite true, however, that Beckett’s masterpiece lacks a plot.

The following makes sense, if the original idea of tragedy was to impart an idea:

 To explore these matters further, I invoke the spirit of American philosopher Walter Kaufmann, whose 1968 book Tragedy and Philosophy debunks several clichés encrusting the modern understanding of Greek tragedy. One such commonplace, endlessly recycled through SparkNotes and course syllabi, is that the “tragic hero” is brought down by a “tragic flaw” (hamartia), usually an excess of “pride” (hybris). Kaufmann dispatches this formula by pointing out that neither Aristotle nor the great tragedians dwell on heroes, focus on tragic flaws, or share the monotheistic belief that pride is an offense against God.

Another cliché is that all tragedies end badly. When William Dean Howells, the elder statesman of nineteenth-century letters, quipped, “What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending,” the novelist Edith Wharton interpreted that as a dig at the sentimental optimism of American readers. But Aristotle made a similar observation about Athenian theatergoers—noting, first, that they preferred tragedies that end well (as did he), and, second, that a tragedy need not end with a terrible reversal of fortune, as long as it includes one along the way.

It seems to me, the reversal of fortune is a moral lesson - not necessarily a sermon, but a lesson acted out. Such as being careful who you kill and who you marry and sticking one's nose in where it ought not go. Eh, Oedipus?

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