Aristotle was Plato's student, but his thinking differed so much from his teacher's that he did not succeed Plato as head of the Athenian Academy, but rather struck out on his own, eventually serving as the tutor to the son and heir of Philip of Macedon, a boy later known as Alexander the Great. Aristotelian philosophy teaches that knowing material reality can be achieved by properly identifying the essential traits of things and distinguishing things from other things by forming classification schemes based on those traits. The theory's great power is that it can produce useful, independently verifiable categories of analysis--if we all can agree on the epic's essential traits, then we can conduct reasonable scholarly discussions about epics. Since Aristotle also was interested (like his teacher, Plato) in the proper organization of human communities, from the one-family "oikos" (whence "economy") to the city-state of the "polis," he also tried to describe the social functions of literature. This continues to be an important line of study in modern literary theory. One of the method's weakness arises from disagreements about what, if anything, can be called essential from the start ("a priori"), outside some kind of social, political, historical processes that made it. A second weakness, shared by some practitioners of Structuralism (q.v.), is Aristotle's fondness for definition and categorization by "binary oppositions": states which are supposed to be mutually exclusive, such as "live or dead," "on or off," in that you can't be both, but must be one or the other. Many of the oppositions by which he constructed his literary analysis are suspect or simply wrong, at least in our own era (e.g., "comedy or tragedy" has become confused with tragi-comedy and satire). Post-Aristotelian thinking tends to avoid relying upon unexamined binary oppositions and to look backwards, in order to situate literature's traits in the processes which created them, but otherwise we owe a great methodological debt to "The Philosopher," as he was known to medieval readers. To read the complete "Poetics," click here.
After Aristotle: Neo-Aristotelian critics in the Renaissance, like Julius Caesar Scaliger and Lodovico Castelvetro, codified Aristotle's general observations about the need for some kind of unity in a work to create the (needless) aesthetic rule that all great plays must obey the "four unities" of form, time, action, and place. The authority of this early Neo-Aristotelian criticism soon was exploded by the emergence of mixed genres like "tragi-comedy," successful leaps of time between acts of plays or chapters of novels, audience enjoyment of sub-plots and complex plots, and great popularity of travel narratives. Twentieth-Century Neo-Aristotelianism is generally associated with the University of Chicago school of critics, including Elder Olsen, R. S. Crane, and Richard McKeon. Wayne Booth and E. D. Hirsch developed important New Criticism methods based on Aristotelian ways of thinking.
Some Aristotelian principles--
1) Genre and generic attributes
Aristotle sought to anchor his definitions of
literary genres in exemplary works and authors. Of tragedians, he considered
Sophocles the best, and his Oedipus Tyrannus ("Oedipus the King") the
finest example. That's immediately debatable because great works by two other major
tragedians survived (Aeschylus and Euripides). In the case of epics, his task was
easier because only one author's works were widely known to him, those of Homer.
According to Aristotle, the lost Homeric mock battle narrative, Margites, is to
comic drama as the Iliad and the Odyssey are to tragedy. Note
that this suggests genres originate in pairs, each balancing qualities the other
excels
in with qualities it lacks and its partner has in abundance. When distinguishing
between epic and tragedy, he said epic has a multiplicity of plots, each of which is
fully developed in the epic's larger scope, but the tragedy is a compressed
development of a single plot. Aristotle says epics have a major advantage over
tragedy because of their multiplicity of incident, the capacity to enlarge its
action to incorporate several series of events which may have happened
simultaneously [representing them in narrative series by means of flashbacks, etc.].
2) Mimesis / Imitation
For Aristotle, all literature is an art of
imitation (Gk. mimesis, whence "mime"). As artists imitated life to
produce their literature, audiences would be inspired to imitate, in some fashion, what
they read, heard or saw on the stage. The social function of epic as an
exemplar of good behavior was easier for Aristotle to assume in Classical Greece.
Recently, the hero-aesthetic has been dethroned as a necessary and great model of human
aspiration, at least as it motivates citizens to become warriors. Comedy produced an
immediate problem for Aristotle, however, since comedies tend to be about bad behavior and
people doing ugly, immoral, or ridiculous things. He accepted that the primary
object of comedy is imitation: imitation of low characters--not morally bad, but
ludicrous, ugly but not painful or destructive. He defended comedies' mimetic
representation of ludicrous behavior because it would incite audiences to avoid its
imitation.
3) Proper proportion
A tragedy imitates action that is serious,
complete, and of an appropriate magnitude (neither trivial nor too vast).
4) Literature's function
The tragedy evokes two kinds of emotions, pity
and fear, in order to cleanse the mind of dangerous but natural human tendencies,
especially overgrown pride in our accomplishments.
This emotional purging (katharsis),
when shared by the whole population, restored the city to health.
5) Character construction
Tragic characters all have two qualities by
which we judge them: thought and character. In order of importance,
proper characters should have the following qualities: goodness in a moral sense,
appropriateness to social mores, truth to life (probability in small details), and
consistency (i.e., not disturbingly divided in nature).
6) Sub-components of dramatic theater
Tragedies have these six parts: plot,
character, diction, thought, spectacle (today, "special effects"), and
song.
7) Literature and human nature
According to Aristotle, our qualities are
determined by our characters, those basic combinations of traits we were born with or
develop as we grow, but we are made happy or wretched by our actions. Therefore, the
great literature concentrates on showing us those actions at crucial moments and the
"first principle" of any drama is its plot (i.e., the action). A
perfect tragedy should imitate complex actions (see #12) that excite pity and fear
(#4) while leading a man who is extraordinarily good and just to misfortune by some
error of judgment or frailty of character. That "frailty of
character" is the famous "tragic flaw" or hamartia, actually
something closer to a "tragic imbalance"
8) Completeness of a work of literature ("unities of
form and time")
The key qualities in the construction of a
tragedy's plot are: it has a beginning, middle, and end (i.e., is complete); and
it is of appropriate size to be "easily embraced in one view" or
"easily embraced by the memory" [long enough to move a character
"from calamity to good fortune, or from good fortune to calamity"]. For
this reason, Aristotle says good plays resemble living organisms. (This idea has a
rebirth in Romanticism's "organic form" theory.) An "episodic"
plot is: one that moves from incident to incident without necessary or probable
cause. You can still find modern literary reviews that condemn a work's plot as
"episodic," though since Modernism, fiction has tended to test that boundary and
many of the rest Aristotle tried to establish.
9) "Unity of action"
In addition to unity of form and time,
Aristotle also said a plot should be unified. However, definitions of this tend to
be circular: the plot centers around an action that is unified.
10) Poetry vs. history--the "truth" problem
The ancients and medieval theorists were
troubled that poetic works of all kinds (narrative fiction, drama, lyrics) are technically
lies. Isn't lying a bad thing, something to be punished? Aristotle saw
the poet and historian as his opposing binary opposites to solve this problem. The
poet's job differs from the historian's in that: the historian must relate what
happened, but the poet may relate what may (or may have) happened. (Also see
Sidney, "Defense of Poesy.")
11) Simple vs. complex plots
While Aristotle tended to favor literary traits
that unified, he was not against complexity, itself. For him, a complex plot is
distinguished from a simple one because it has one or both of these special features
which produce important effects in the audience:
reversal of expectations
("peripeteia") and/or recognition (usually of someone's identity, often of
one's own true identity ["anagnorisis"]). Both of these events occur
nearly simultaneously near the end of Oedipus Tyrannus. Aristotelian analysis
divides the play's action into two parts complication and unraveling, the latter of
which might begin with the reversal of expectations and end with the self-discovery or
recognition scene.
12) Literature and the "agon"
Like most Classical Greeks, Aristotle saw most
of the universe as a pattern of struggle, or "agon," in which opposed
forces battled for supremacy. Tragedy and epic, alike, according to Aristotle, might
develop a kind of collision between opposing character types in which one must subdue the
other. He said tragedy should have a "double thread," which can be
identified by: its concern for two groups of actors whose ends are opposite
because of their opposite natures (e.g., in epic, Odysseus' triumphant return vs.
the suitors' destruction; in tragedy, Antigone's unwavering insistence on the old
burial customs' vs. Creon's equally stubborn demand that she obey the city's law as he has
articulated it).
13) Spectacle / Special Effects vs. Tragic or Comic effects
Aristotle distinguished clearly between works
which operated upon the audience's minds by manipulating the emotions via thoughtful
processes from those which sought their impact by shocking the audience with scenes which
were taboo in ordinary social life (e.g., murders, open sexuality, violent
accidents). The movies, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, and all
their many imitators, are examples of tragedies that use spectacle to move the
audience's emotions. An alternative means of moving the audience's emotions is
having painful circumstances strike those who are either friends or related to each
other (esp. blood relations).
14) Tradition and the Individual Talent
T.S. Eliot's essay by that name (in The
Sacred Wood, 816 E421Ks) describes the process by which great art derives from the
teachings and examples of previous eras' greatest works. However, this raises the
question of how much change can be made in plots or characters or situations borrowed from
previous works. For the Greeks, the problem was religious, since the mythic stories
of the gods and heroes which were adapted by the playwrights were still part of
functioning Greek religion in the Classical era. Aristotle says there is one
restriction on the poet's adaptation of legends: "he may not destroy the
framework of the received legends." Obviously, this raises the same
"essentialist" question we see in other Aristotelian principles of
interpretation and creation. Who can say what the "framework" is and what
is non-essential? Did Helen go to Troy, or did the Trojans and Greeks fight over a
phantom sent by the gods to destroy them? Can that kind of question be raised by a
work of literature, or does that somehow violate the "rules"?
15) Poetry, Inspiration and Madness
Unlike Plato, whose "Ion" attempts to
prove poets are out of their minds when they compose, Aristotle allowed more room for the
poet's witting craft to produce literature. However, Aristotle believes really great
poets must be either specially gifted (able to imitate any kind of human character)
or mad (unable to maintain their own characters).