Aristotle’s Poetics: Six Parts of Tragedy

Aristotle’s Poetics: Six Parts of Tragedy

Aristotle provides a definition of tragedy that we can break up into seven parts: (1) it involves mimesis; (2) it is serious; (3) the action is complete and with magnitude; (4) it is made up of language with the "aesthetic ornaments" of rhythm and harmony; (5) these "aesthetic ornaments" are not used uniformly throughout, but are introduced in separate parts of the work, so that, for instance, some bits are spoken in verse and other bits are sung; (6) it is performed rather than narrated; and (7) it arouses the emotions of pity and fear and accomplishes a catharsis (purification or purgation or tempering/moderation or satisfaction) of these emotions.

Next, Aristotle asserts that any tragedy can be divided into six component parts, and that every tragedy is made up of these six parts with nothing else besides. There is (a) the spectacle (opsis), which is the overall visual appearance of the stage and the actors. The means of imitation (language, rhythm, and harmony) can be divided into (b) melody/songs (melos), and (c) diction, (lexis) which has to do with the composition of the verses/versification of dialogues. The agents (medium) of the action can be understood in terms of (d) character(ethos) and (e) thought. Thought (dianoia) seems to denote the intellectual qualities of an agent while character seems to denote the moral qualities (ethics) of an agent. Finally, there is (f) the plot(Fable), or mythos, which is the harmonious combination/arrangements of incidents and actions in the story.

Aristotle argues that, among these six, the plot is the most important. To the question whether plot makes a tragedy or character, Aristotle argues that without action there cannot be tragedy at the same time character/s are required to do action. The characters serve to advance the action of the story, not vice versa. The ends we pursue in life, our happiness and our misery, all take the form of action. Tragedy is written not eerily to imitate man but to imitate man in action. That is, according to Aristotle, happiness consists in a certain kind of activity rather than in a certain quality of character.

* It (Plot) is in the words of David Daiches: ‘the way in which the action works itself out, the whole casual chain which leads to the final outcome.’

Diction and thought are also less significant than plot: a series of well-written speeches have nothing like the force of a well-structured tragedy. Aristotle notes that forming a solid plot is far more difficult than creating good characters or diction.

Having asserted that the plot is the most important of the six parts of tragedy, he ranks the remainder as follows, from most important to least: character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle.

 Character reveals the individual motivations of the characters in the play, what they want or don't want, and how they react to certain situations, and this is more important to Aristotle than thought, which deals on a more universal level with reasoning and general truths. Melody/songs and spectacle are simply pleasurable accessories, but melody is more important to the tragedy than spectacle: a pretty spectacle can be arranged without a play, and usually matters of set and costume aren't the occupation of the poet anyway.

Plot is the “first principle,” the most important feature of tragedy – the soul of tragedy:

Aristotle defines plot as “the harmonious arrangement of the incidents”: i.e., not the story itself but the way the incidents are presented to the audience, the structure of the play. According to Aristotle, tragedies where the outcome depends on a tightly constructed cause-and-effect chain of actions are superior to those that depend primarily on the character and personality of the protagonist.

* Thus, Prof. Else* rightly observes “For plot is the structure of the play, and around which the material parts are laid, just as the soul is the structure of a man.”(*A.G. George: Critics and Criticism)

* David Daiches: “Tragedy is an imitation not of human beings but of action and life, of happiness and misery. Happiness and misery are realized in action; the goal of life is an action, not a quality. Men owe their qualities to their characters; but it is in their action that they are happy or the reverse. And so the stage figures do not act in order to represent their character; they include their character for the sake of their action.”

Plots that meet this criterion will have the following qualities (context):

1.     The plot must be “a whole,” with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning, called by modern critics the incentive moment, must start the cause-and-effect chain but not be dependent on anything outside the compass of the play (i.e., its causes are downplayed but its effects are stressed). The middle, or climax, must be caused by earlier incidents and itself cause the incidents that follow it (i.e., its causes and effects are stressed). The end, or resolution, must be caused by the preceding events but not lead to other incidents outside the compass of the play (i.e., its causes are stressed but its effects downplayed); the end should therefore solve or resolve the problem created during the incentive moment (context). Aristotle calls the cause-and-effect chain leading from the incentive moment to the climax the “tying up” (desis), in modern terminology the complication. He therefore terms the more rapid cause-and-effect chain from the climax to the resolution the “unraveling” (lusis), in modern terminology the dénouement (context).

2. Plot must be a complete whole. According to Aristotle, the worst kinds of plots are “‘episodic,’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence”; the only thing that ties together the events in such a plot is the fact that they happen to the same person. Playwrights should exclude coincidences from their plots; if some coincidence is required, it should “have an air of design,” i.e., seems to have a fated connection to the events of the play (context). Similarly, the poet should exclude the irrational or at least keep it “outside the scope of the tragedy,” i.e., reported rather than dramatized (context). While the poet cannot change the myths that are the basis of his plots, he “ought to show invention of his own and skillfully handle the traditional materials” to create unity of action in his plot (context). Application to Oedipus the King.
3. The plot must be “of a certain magnitude,” both quantitatively (length, complexity) and qualitatively (“seriousness” and universal significance). Aristotle argues that plots should not be too brief; the more incidents and themes that the playwright can bring together in an organic unity, the greater the artistic value and richness of the play. Also, the more universal and significant the meaning of the play, the more the playwright can catch and hold the emotions of the audience, the better the play will be (context).
4. The plot may be either simple or complex (pg. 19, Butcher), although complex is better. Simple plots have only a “change of fortune” (catastrophe). Complex plots have both “reversal of intention (situation)” (peripeteia) and “recognition” (anagnorisis) connected with the catastrophe. (pg. 20 Aristotle’s Poetics by S.H. Butcher) Both peripeteia and anagnorisis turn upon surprise. Aristotle explains that a peripeteia occurs when a character produces an effect opposite to that which he intended to produce or reversal of fortune, while an anagnorisis “is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined for good or bad fortune.” He argues that the best plots combine these two as part of their cause-and-effect chain (i.e., the peripeteia leads directly to the anagnorisis); this in turns creates the catastrophe, leading to the final “scene of suffering” (context).
5. Aristotle goes to the extent of saying that ‘without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character’. (Tragedy is possible without acharacter but not without action). He explains it by saying that there can be tragedies which ‘fail in the rendering of character’. Furthermore, ‘if you string together a set speeches expressive of character and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however, deficient in these respect yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.’ (examplessited by Aristotle of modern poets(?) and from paintings of Polygnotus, who includes character and action and Zeuxis, who omits character.
6. Aristotle argues that if you put together group of speeches (soliloquies form Shakespeare) will not make a tragedy though the reading and performing may be entertaining.

• He further argues that Peripety (Reversal) and anognorisis (Discovery) – most powerful means for tragic effect is part of plot, not of character.Sophocles’sOedipus the King is regarded by Aristotle as an instance of ideal plot for it involves both Peripety and Discovery.

7. Greek plays – man doomed before his birth – character is not destiny
8. Play without good plot is a play without action – nothing happens – there would be no drama at all.

Modern critics do not agree with Aristotle – logically speaking, character is prior to action and there can be no action without character. The events have no meaning if they do not arise from a human will. But one should not forget that Aristotle has written it in accordance with the ancient Greek plays. In these plays, characters were figures known to the audience and the outline of these personalities were fixed, so that the dramatist was not at liberty to modify or elaborate their conventional configurations. Under such circumstance the whole interest lay in the arrangement of incidents.

Theory of Catharsis & Function of tragedy.

Theory of Catharsis:

Explain the concept of Catharsis.

Discuss the function of tragedy.

As to the exact meaning and concept of Catharsis, there has been a lot of controversy among scholars and critics down the centuries. Therefore, it deserved separate treatment. Let us consider it in detail:

The critics on catharsis by prolonged debated has succeeded only in creating confusion, not in clarifying the concept.

John Morley has rightly said: “The immense controversy, carried on in books, pamphlets, sheets, and flying articles, mostly German, as to what it was that Aristotle really meant by the famous words in the sixth chapter of the poetics, about tragedy accomplishing the purification of our moods of pity and sympathetic fear, is one of the disgraces of the human intelligence, a grotesque monument of sterility.”

Yet since Aristotle is vague in the usage of this word, critics have to interpret it on his behalf. Certain broad understanding of the term is necessary, though the attempts at deriving the doctrines regarding the functions of the tragedy from this are absurd and ridiculous.

F.L.Lucas in his Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics asks three pertinent questions, and answers very illuminatingly. The questions are:

      (i) What was really Aristotle’s view?

      (ii) How far is it true?

      (iii) What led him to adopt it?

Let us consider the answers one by one.

1.      The meaning of Catharsis:  Let us quote F.L. Lucas at length on the meaning of catharsis: “First, there has been age-long controversy about Aristotle’s meaning, though it has almost always been accepted that whatever he meant was profoundly right. Many, for example, have translated Catharsis as ‘purification’, ‘Correction or refinement’, ‘Reinigung’, or the like. It has been suggested that our pity and fear are ‘purified’ in the theatre by becoming disinterested (impartial or without bias). It is bad to be selfishly sentimental, timid, and querulous; but it is good to pity Othello or to fear for Hamlet. Our selfish emotion has been sublimated. All this is most edifying; but it does not appear to be what Aristotle intended.”

There is strong evidence that Catharsis means, not ‘Purification’, but ‘Purgation’. A medical metaphor. (Aristotle was the son of a Physician.) Yet, owing to changes in medical thought, ‘Purgation’ has become radically misleading to modern minds. Inevitably, we think of purgatives and complete evacuations of water products; and then outraged critics ask why our emotions should be so ill-treated. (Eg.Ayurved-panchkarma).

“But Catharsis means ‘Purgation’, not in the modern, but in the older, wider English sense which includes the partial removal of excess ‘humours’. The theory is as old as the school of Hippocrates that on a due balance … of these humours depend the health of body and mind alike.” F.L.Lucas.

To translate Catharsis as purgation today is misleading owing to the change of meaning which the word has undergone. The theory of humours is outdated in the medical science. ‘Purgation’ has assumed different meaning. It is no longer, what Aristotle had in mind. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to translate Catharsis as ‘moderating’ or ‘tempering’ of the passions. But such translation, as F.L.Lucas suggests, ‘keeps the sense, but loses the metaphor’. Anyway, when it is not possible to keep up both, the meaning and the metaphor it is better to maintain the meaning and sacrifice the metaphor in translating Catharsis as ‘moderating’ or ‘tempering’.

The passions to be moderated are these of pity and fear. The pity and fear to be moderated are, again, of specific kind. There can never be an excess in the pity that results into a useful action. However, there can be too much of pity as an intense and helpless feeling, and there can be too much of self-pity, which is not a praise-worthy virtue. The Catharsis or moderation of such pity ought to be achieved in the theatre or otherwise when possible, for such moderation keeps the mind in a healthy state of balance.

Similarly, only specific kinds of fear are to be moderated. Aristotle does not seem to have in mind the fear of horrors on the stage, which as Lucas suggests are “supposed to have made women miscarry with terror in the theatre”, Aristotle specifically mentions ‘sympathetic fear for the characters’. “And by allowing free vent to this in the theatre, men are to lessen, in facing life thereafter, their own fear of … the general dread of destiny.” (F.L.Lucas)

There are besides fear and pity the allied impulses which also are to be moderated. “Grief, weakness, contempt, blame – these I take to be the sort of thing that Aristotle meant by ‘feeling of that sort’.” (Lucas).

2.      Then we are faced with the second question: How far is Aristotle’s view of Catharsis true? We may feel after witnessing a tragedy that certain tension in course of the hours’ traffic upon the stage are built up and relaxed. We may feel released / relaxed when certain emotions are worked up in the mind and are rinsed out as it were at the end which is more or less positive by implication, for death or calamity is explained and accounted for as arising from certain avoidable weakness or miscalculations of the hero. This sort of relaxation or release after a prolonged tension that is built up and maintained during the drama, though a welcome feeling, is not a purgation or moderation but fulfillment or satisfaction with the conclusion which is not only logical but also reasonable, which is not outrageously pessimistic but sadly positive and corrective of tragic errors to the spectators. They did not get rid of anything as in purgation they should; they gain something – a sort of artistic delight which tragedy gives. In fact, tragic delight is what they want and expect from tragedy, not moderation or proper balance of humours or purgation which has only ethical significance. Certain moral ends of Catharsis might be incidentally achieved. But it is not the chief end of tragedy. F.L.Lucas observes:

“One could, of course, argue that these good folks were instinctively craving a catharsis. But I should have thought they were suffering in their daily lives, not from excess of emotion, but from deficiency; that they wanted, not to be ‘purge’, but to be fed – that they were hungry and thirsty for emotions that the dull round of their days denied.”

And again, he observes:

“He (Aristotle) stands in the position of a person arguing with a fanatical Puritan about wine or dancing. The advocate of moderate indulgence is naturally driven to plead that wine is good medicinally and dancing as exercise; but, in fact, man do not usually drink wine as medicine, and only Socrates dances alone in his house for exercise.”

But there are critics who find the theory of Catharsis profoundly meaningful.  They do no deny that tragedy has as its chief end only tragic delight to serve. But in the anatomy of that delight they find the truth of psychology as elucidated by Aristotle in his theory of Catharsis. Aristotle, they say, makes us critically aware of complex psychological processes that contribute to the art-experience of tragedy; while enjoying this experience we are not aware of these processes. Mr. W. Macneile Dixon, for example writes in his Tragedy( London, 1938) in defense of Aristotle’s theory:

“A theory , we may unreservedly admit, as pretty as it is popular, and of interest to us since something of modern psychology, which dwells upon the dangers of repressed desires, is here anticipated. Repression, it appears, leads to neurosis. The idea associated with emotional states may, some physicians tell us, if denied their natural outlet issues in instability and hysteria. Relief of the unconscious mind, whether of the community or the individual from physical tension is at times a necessity… The milder ailment cures severer, the external excitement draws off the internal, the fear without disperses the fear within, the cup of the sour brims over and tranquility is restored.  … And if you care to add refinement you may think of this release as an escape from personal pre-occupations and anxieties into the larger life of sympathy with the whole human clan, the universal world, which embraces that great society of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.” (Pg. 118).

3.      The third question is: What led Aristotle to adopt this theory? It should be remembered that Plato, his master, has attacked poetry in general including tragedy from moral and philosophical point of view. So Aristotle had to defend poetry against his master’s attack on the moral and philosophical ground. He has to refute Plato’s charges. To quote F.L.Lucas:

“Poetry, said Plato, makes men cowardly by its picture of the afterworld. No, replies Aristotle, it can purge men’s fears. Poetry, said Plato, encourages men to be hysterical and uncontrolled. On the contrary, answers his pupil, it makes them less, not more, emotional by giving a periodic healthy outlet to their feelings. In short, Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is half a defense.”(Pg. 57)

But it is only half a defense. That is to say that the other half of the theory is possibly the result of a serious, analytical inquiry of Aristotle’s into the nature of tragic delight and its psychological effects. His Catharsis forms the most important part of his concept of tragedy as a positive, not pessimistic, drama which leaves wholesome effect, not mere disturbance, in the minds of the spectators.

Since, Aristotle in Europe, tragedy has never been a drama of despair, causeless death or chance disaster. The drama that only paints horrors and leaves souls shattered and mind unreconciled with the world may be described as a gruesome, ghastly play, but not a healthy tragedy, for tragedy is a play in which disaster or downfall has causes which could carefully be avoided and sorrow in it does not upset the balance  in favour of pessimism. That is why, in spite of seriousness, even heart-rending scenes of sorrow, tragedy embodies the vision of beauty. It stirs noble thoughts and serves tragic delight but does not condemn us to despair. If the healthy notion of tragedy is maintained throughout the literary history of Europe, the ultimate credit, perhaps, goes to Aristotle who propounded it in his theory of Catharsis.

Catharsis established tragedy as a drama of balance. Sorrow alone would be ugly and repulsive. Beauty pure would be imaginative and mystical. These together constitute what may be called tragic beauty.  Pity alone would be sentimentality. Fear alone would make us cowards. But pity and fear, sympathy and terror together constitute the tragic feeling which is most delightful though it is tearfully delightful. Such tragic beauty and tragic feeling which it evokes constitute the aesthetics of balance as propounded for the first time by Aristotle in his theory of Catharsis. Therefore, we feel, reverence which Aristotle has enjoyed through ages has not gone to him undeserved. His insight has rightly earned it.