Aristotle, pt 1

Poetics


Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. I. Bywater. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. 6th printing with corrections, 1995. 2:2316–40.

I would have called it Aesthetics, though Poetics works too. Aristotle identifies threads in poetry especially in tragedy, and he does so in order it would seem to describe what makes good art.

I don’t want to review here the specific facets of poetry which Aristotle elaborates—means, objects, manner, rhythm, language, harmony, plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle, beginning, middle, end, prologue, episode, exode, parode, stasimon, reversal, discovery, suffering, harmatia, mimesis. I’d rather note the bits that surprised me.

First, Aristotle provides a slab or two of archaic literary history. He describes the origin of poetry, its division into high and low forms, and its development through improvization into the contemporary genres. He also alludes to some correctives, that Dorians should be credited with the invention of tragedy and comedy, not the Athenians. (Bet that one rankled a few citizens.)

I’m intrigued that Aristotle keeps his investigations limited to Hellenic traditions. I mean, I know Greeks knew they were the gods gift to humanity, but were their scholars also so convinced? As I read more into Athenian writings, I want to be sensitive to this issue. Most critics today study literature outside their own traditions, and the best critics always do. Maybe Aristotle considered the Dorians and others different enough to make his point at home?

That’s the space problem I see, but what about the time problem? Aristotle certainly has access to more Greek texts than we do today, but Homer remains something of a bedrock. There is mention of pre-Homeric poets, though Aristotle admits to much ignorance concerning them. In short, how does Aristotle know what he knows; how much of Aristotle’s study is inductive versus deductive?

Second, mimesis. I don’t have much to say about this for now, but I’m curious why Aristotle doesn’t question the idea. The general populace today is almost paranoid about the extent to which life imitates art. The populace today takes much for granted that Aristotle didn’t know, but he specialized in literary theory and the populace doesn’t. I wonder when theorists started questioning the notion.

Lastly, he caught me off guard when he said tragedy was “grander and of more esteem” than epic. I’ve always assumed that epic was the highest form of art, that being so was its aim, but this ancient critic didn’t think so. Along these lines, I was surprised to find Aristotle’s chief purpose being to define what makes the purest and the strongest manifestations of poetry. It’s almost as if he’s writing a manual to help poets who aren’t already familiar with these ideas. Maybe I don’t give critics enough credit, but who are they to tell artists how to create their work? It’s one thing to interpret texts and lends them significance—poets can’t do everything themselves. It’s also one thing to criticize work, evaluating it for any number of ends. But if poets want mentorship, it seems fitting that they would seek poet mentors. Again, maybe I’m not giving critics enough credit, but I don’t look to poets specifically to teach me how to do my job; I find it odd that they would like to me or others to teach them how to do theirs.

That’s it for now. I’ll list several questions I have in case someone has any ideas. References are to page, paragraph, and line numbers in the edition listed at the top of this post.

  • 2316.1.4–5: I wonder what he means by “the natural order” and “first principles.”
  • 2317.2.2f: When did we decide to throw out Aristotle’s premise here about the fundamental division between good and evil?
  • 2317.2.16ff: I assume tragedy has better men and comedy has worse, but am I understanding Aristotle correctly?
  • 2317.5: Why does Aristotle refer strictly to Greek works? Maybe in his mind the works from the different ethnai represent sufficiently different languages and cultures? Why is his sense of literary history so brief relative to our own?
  • 2318.4: If these claims are not deductive, did Aristotle actually have access to what he considered “the general origin of poetry”?
  • 2319.1.1–2: I wonder why Aristotle considers tragedy grander and of more esteem than epic.
  • 2319.3.6: How is it that the “natural form” of tragedy was a late development?
  • 2320.1: Why does Aristotle enumerate what is unique to epic only to then claim “all the parts of an epic are included in tragedy; but those of tragedy are not all of them to be found in the epic”? What is meant by “constituents”?
  • 2320.2.1: Is “hexameter poetry” synonymous with epic?
  • 2320.3: Aristotle says that of the six parts of tragedy, two arise from means, one from manner, and three from object. Have I got them labelled correctly above?
  • 2324.2.17: The “happy” ending of a tragedy? I suppose Aristotle hasn’t described tragedy as something that goes from up to down; the reversal can occur in either direction, such as in the example of Lynceus.
  • 2325.1.1: A stasimon has only iambs and dactyls then?
  • 2325.3.19: How could a reversal from good to bad fortune produce a happy ending? See 2324.2.17.
  • 2325.3.22ff: Why does Aristotle here state that the best tragedies center around some few houses if in chapter 9 he encourages departure from “the traditional stories”?