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A Broadway View of Aristotle's "Poetics"Author(s): Forest HansenSource: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 3, No. 1, Special Issue: The Performing Arts inAesthetic Education (Jan., 1969), pp. 85-91Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331465Accessed: 08/10/2010 14:26

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A Broadway View of Aristotle's Poetics

FOREST HANSEN

Increasingly college freshmen arrive on campus with a backgroundin the humanities that extends beyond studies of English and Americanliterature. From my experience I judge that about half of them, forinstance, have studied Oedipus Rex. Thanks to broadened curriculaand the diligence of high school English teachers, the need for a

required general education humanities course for college freshmen isno longer patent. But sometimes the college teacher is faced with the

job of undoing some of that earlier education. This is especially aproblem with respect to understanding Greek tragedy.

From his high school teachers, from outline manuals, or simplyby a kind of cultural osmosis, the college freshman typically has

acquired generalizations about Greek tragedy derived ultimately fromAristotle's Poetics: that its hero is someone of high estate who fallslow, that he falls because of a "fatal flaw," that tragedy gives us acatharsis of pity and fear, and so forth. When accepted uncritically,such generalizations pose difficulties in reading and discussing partic-

ular tragedies. In his excellent book Greek Tragedy (DoubledayAnchor), H. D. F. Kitto has argued persuasively that Aristotle's theorysimply does not apply to many plays. What is called for, I think, isa better understanding of the Poetics in order to forestall misapplicationof its concepts. I propose to initiate such understanding by suggestinghow Aristotle derived those concepts.

One common misconception about the Poetics held by those whohave read or heard references to it but have never examined the workitself is that in it Aristotle laid down certain a priori rules about drama

FOREST HANSEN is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Lake ForestCollege. He formerly directed a required freshman humanities course at LakeForest and his article "Langer's Expressive Form: An Interpretation" appearedin a recent issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His primaryinterests are the aesthetics of literature and music.

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(or art in general), rules that dictate in a rather arbitrary fashion theform and content, the purpose, the setting, the characters, the time

sequence, the plotting of a dramatic tragedy. Lincoln Diamant, theeditor of one widely used text, perpetuates that misinterpretation whenhe says, "This is a book mainly on how to write plays." It is definitelynot that, but such an interpretation was placed on the Poetics centuries

ago and has stuck like solder. We ought to peel it off, and we canbest do so by looking at the opening lines of Aristotle's lecture:

My design is to treat of Poetry n general, and of its several species; o in-quire what is the proper effect of each-what construction f a fable, orplan, is essential o a good poem of what, and how many, parts each speciesconsists; with whatever else belongs to the same subject.The aim in this passage is obviously analysis and understanding, notcreation. Aristotle is going to examine poetry, note the different kinds,and try to determine the underlying principles of those kinds or

species. After listing them and noting in what way they differ (andin what way they are the same), and after theorizing about the causesfor the origin of poetry, Aristotle says quite clearly that he is not con-

cerned with any revival of the theatre, with any improvement of con-temporary tragediac writing, with a do-it-yourself drama kit. At theend of Chapter VI he says,Whether ragedy has now, with respect to its constituent parts, received heutmost improvement of which it is capable, considered both in itself andrelatively o the theatre, s a question that belongs not to this place.The question that does belong, by implication and by dint of what hehas said and goes on to say, is, "What are the principles of the tragedyas we know it?" --or, put another way, "What reasonably valid

generalizations can we make about this and other art forms?"In order to understand the problem Aristotle poses for himself and

his students, we might update it for ourselves in this manner: what arethe different species of musical drama, and what are the principlesof the species most popular in our time, the Broadway musical? Herewe might distinguish between opera, comic opera, operetta, Broadwaymusical, and the Hollywood musical. When we zero our study in on theBroadway musical, as Aristotle did on tragedy, we might spend somebrief time on its history as an outgrowth of the operetta and earlymusical drama, but like him we would spend most of our time not onhistory but on an analysis of this artistic form and on developing somegeneralizations on the basis of particular musicals. Now, just howmight we do this?

In the first place, in order to do such analysis, we obviously would

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have to be familiar with musicals. This does not mean that we must beacquainted with all musicals ever created. One can talk sensibly aboutthe epic form on the basis of a study of the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, andParadise Lost, although hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other epicshave been written. Aristotle, in fact, made his generalizations on thebasis of only two epics. But certainly one would have to know a fair

percentage (you see how vague this is) of works.We have only thirty-two Greek tragedies, all of them written by

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We know that these playwrightscreated around three hundred tragedies, and that there were a goodmany other Greek writers producing in competition with them. Quitepossibly from the earliest play of Aeschylus to the time of Aristotle'slecture (probably around 330 B.C.), two thousand Greek tragedieshad been publicly performed in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens.Aristotle mentions forty-two plays. One could safely assume that he didnot cite every play he was familiar with, but even if we credit him witha knowledge of two or three times as many plays, this gives him only asmall percentage of the total productions. But he is obviously familiar

with Greek tragedies.In the second place, one could write about musicals -as about

tragedies - without having witnessed them on the stage. One oughtto have seen a few musicals, I suppose, in order to stimulate one'simagination into picturing possible costumes, stage setting, etc. - whatAristotle calls "spectacle" or "decoration." But one can fairly be saidto "know" a musical on the basis of listening to records, just as Aristotle

says (II, 14) that one can get the full impact of Oedipus from hearingit read. At the time of Aristotle's lecture, the great age of Greek dramawas seventy-five years past, Sophocles and Euripides having died in405 and 406 B.C. His acquaintance with their great works and withthose of Aeschylus may have come through productions of the old"classics" n his day or through only a reading of those plays. Certainlyhe argues that a reading would be sufficient for any good plays - i.e.,plays that do not depend for their effect largely on "decoration"

(what we call "stage effects," with the same slightly derogatoryconnotation).

In the third place, essential to any such analysis would be a

familiarity with the best that had been written and produced. In ourstudy of the musical, one could conceivably disregard The PajamaGame, Wonderful Town, Top Banana, and perhaps even Fiddler on the

Roof, The Music Man, Fiorello, and Camelot at no great peril. But

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certainly if no reference were made to Oklahoma, Brigadoon, SouthPacific, The King and I, or My Fair Lady, and if the principles derivedwere inapplicable to any of these works, we would think the studymisdirected in some important way. By the same token, the playwrightscited most often by Aristotle are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides,and the main plays cited are generally their best ones. In brief, themethod for analyzing the form of the musical would be analogous toAristotle's implied method for studying the form of the tragedy:examine the best instances and discover their artistic principles.

This method usually brings students up short, whether they encounterit in Aristotle himself, in neo-classicists like Matthew Arnold who tellus to read the "classics" and use them as standards in developing our

poetic taste and judgment, or in the arguments of classroom teachers

endeavoring to instruct and refine poetic sensibility. The rebuttal

usually is, "But how do we know that the classics are good?" - with allthe insinuations of the popularized, extreme, and inconsistent relativismthat seems so early to infect young people today. In terms of our

analogy, how does one answer such a question: "What are the best

musicals?"One answer is, "Inspect them and you'll see." To anyone who

attends to the performances of Pajama Game and Brigadoon, say, itshould be obvious that Brigadoon is the better musical. This is notbecause the critics have said so (if any have) or because Brigadoonhad a longer run (if it did) or because it sold more records (if that isthe case). One simply perceives that it is better, if not in the same waythat we perceive that someone is taller than someone else, then in

something like the way we perceive that Lyndon Johnson was a better

President than--to be on the safe side--Harding, or that a well-constructed house of brick is better than one of straw. This is a

respectable answer, I think, or could be made into one, althoughstudents might not be satisfied by it. But it is not Aristotle's answer.His is more complete and perhaps more satisfying. Continuing our

analogy of the musical, we might construct in its terms an answerlike his.

Musicals are generally built around the theme of romantic love. This

might be presented as a man pursuing a woman, a woman pursuing aman, or without pursuit a couple gradually falling in love with eachother, perhaps even contrary to their conscious wishes. In the end theyare happily joined, usually after an argument, a temporary break-up, ora threat to the position or even life of one of the characters. A

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secondary romantic situation provides a contrast to the love of theprincipal characters. While the theme of romantic love permeates theshow, however, there is a superficial problem presented as the main

plot, at the beginning at least, so that the audience sees love emergeout of the soil of the surface situation and finally come to full bloom.So much can be said about virtually all musicals. From this, and fromthe experiencing of this art form, it is apparent that what it aims at isan arousal of the feelings associated with romantic love: first the

feeling of infatuation, then the feeling of frustration, and finally the

feeling of wholesome fulfillment. To paraphrase (or perhaps parody)Aristotle, it aims at the arousal of the feeling of pity for the longinglover, fear that he will not reach his goal, and then catharsis when hedoes and all's right with the world. From this it would follow that thebest musicals are those which best succeed in arousing those emotionsand their catharsis, giving us at the end a delightful feeling that peopleand the world are pretty fine and that true, pure, untroubled, idyllicromantic love is possible- even for us. Then, in turn, we could ex-amine those musicals which give us that feeling most strongly, and con-

clude that since in them, say, the man usually pursues the woman, thethreat is not to body but to peace of mind, the secondary love plot endsin sadness, and the superficial plot resolves in a trite moral like "materialselfishness is a bad thing" - then, if we found these particular com-

plications in all or most of those musicals, we could call them principlesor rules of the musical.

This, I suggest, is the method Aristotle implicitly sets forth andsupposes himself to employ in the Poetics. Using it, he concludes thatthe aim of tragedy is to arouse pity and fear and to effect a catharsisof those emotions. On the basis of what plays best accomplish thisaim he rounds out his definition or description of tragedy as "animitation of some action that is important, entire, and of a propermagnitude," an imitation that involves unexpected actions which occurnot by chance but as a consequence of other actions, that depicts the

change of fortune from prosperity to adversity of a person neither

eminently virtuous nor villainous but someone whose character isbetter than most, who has fame and success, and who falls from hishigh position through an "error of human frailty." To these mainfeatures of a good tragedy, Aristotle adds numerous secondary ones. Heacknowledges that no play has all of them, nor is it vital that a goodplay have even most of them. But the best plays generally exhibit mostof these characteristics.

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However clarifying my assertions may be up to this point, they willhardly shock the student or teacher versed in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.Since for high school students this is usually the first and most intenselystudied Greek play (sometimes the only one in the high school syllabus),Aristotle's concepts of the tragic hero, the tragic flaw, pity and fear,and catharsis are often quickly and then tenaciously accepted. OedipusRex clearly exemplifies and endorses them. But these concepts simplyinterfere with a proper reading of many other Greek plays. Antigone,Medea, and Agamemnon are, I suspect, the most widely studied

tragedies after Oedipus Rex. Of these, only the first can usefully beexamined in accordance with Aristotelian principles.

Pity and fear are simply not aroused, for instance, by Agamemnon.This is not because Aeschylus failed in achieving that end but becausehe aimed at something else. If one wants to put it into psychologicalor emotional terms, he aimed at arousing our awe and our sense of justpunishment for evil-doers. We pity Oedipus because he is, on the whole,a good man, and it is sad that this fundamentally admirable person isbrought down, even if ultimately through his own fault. His faults are

forgivable; they are far outweighed by his merits. As Aristotle puts it,he is an image of a man better than us, of man as he ought to be, notas he is. We fear, says Aristotle rightly, because we recognize that thesame thing (in a general way) could happen to us. This is partlybecause of our identification with Oedipus in reading or seeing the

play, partly because we simply recognize it as exemplifying the fact thatone can never be sure life will deal out rewards and punishments with

any fairness; thus we or people close to us--our friends or parentsor children - might also suffer no matter how careful and good we are.What about Agamemnon? Who pities him? From the beginningAeschylus makes us realize that he is a bad man, and this portrayal ofhim is slowly and irrevocably intensified until it reaches a pitch inCassandra's long speech. As Kitto suggests, we simply wait for the axto fall, and by the time it does - in spite of our lack of sympathy for

Clytaemnestra we say to ourselves, "At last! That nasty man is doneaway with!" We know, further, that the same thing is going to happento that nasty woman, and we can hardly wait for it to happen. So werush to the second play of the trilogy and read greedily until wewatch her get hers too. We do not identify with Agamemnon, orClytaemnestra, or Cassandra, or any of the characters. We stand apartfrom them, knowing that what happens to them is not going to happento us, because we do not murder and otherwise ill treat people the way

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A BROADWAY IEW OF ARISTOTLE'S OETICS 91

they do. Contrasts with The Eumenides, the third play in Aeschylus'strilogy, are even more marked. That play ends, in fact, on an essen-

tially happy note!Where and why did Aristotle go wrong? The answer to the first

question is relatively simple: he did not in fact follow the method he

proposed. Though Aristotle evinces great respect for Aeschylus and

Euripides, he constructs his theory almost wholly on the principlesimplicit in Sophocles's tragedies, especially Oedipus Rex. (It is nowonder then that the stated principles can be used in analyzing that

play.) This is similar to someone purporting to do a Poetics onElizabethan and Jacobean drama but actually restricting himself to aconsideration of Shakespeare's plays; or, to use my analogy, someone

claiming to make a study of light musical drama and discussing this

wholly in terms of the musical a la Lerner and Lowe or Rodgers and

Hammerstein, without acknowledging that he is neglecting to treat -

though he might mention incidentally - the somewhat different formof operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The answer to the second question is more complicated and can onlybe suggested here. A play like Oedipus Rex, which depends for itseffect on plot - which has for its essence, one might say, plot action -is much more comparable to a biological entity: it progresses, t grows, itdevelops toward an end in both senses of the word. A play of characteror mood - like those of Aeschylus and Euripides - does not do thisso apparently. Aristotle's whole metaphysics, with its emphasis on

organicism and teleology, makes him predisposed to admire Sophocles.Oedipus Rex fits in nicely with his larger philosophical position.

Aristotle's Poetics, then, ought not to be taken as the last word onGreek tragedy. By no means should this be construed as total dis-paragement of Aristotle or of the use of his concepts in teachingstudents to analyze drama. They are relevant to Sophoclean tragedyand to much later drama as well. Particularly in the Renaissance andthe early eighteenth century, dramatic creation as well as criticism tookits cue from (an often uncritically accepted) Aristotelian literary theory.In addition, part of the force of a play such as Death of a Salesmanderives from a conscious opposition to those principles. The Poeticsremains one of the hallmarks not only of literary theory but of the largerfield of aesthetics. But like many great works, it can easily becomepart of an unexamined way of thinking. Its shortcomings should also beappreciated.