The Price of the Plot in Aristotle'sPoetics

Abstract

Plato's critique of imitative tribe Book X of Republic calls for a defense of poetry, and Aristotle initiates that effort Poetics. Taking his cue from Plato, he makes imitation the key concept and thus associates poetry with other kinds of representation, perhaps the single most influential move the history of Western aesthetic theory, for this set of practices corresponds, roughly speaking, to our fine arts.' The second step this defense is the identification of the art of poetry a heterogeneous group of imitative discourses that includes dramas, mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues, as well as elegiac and epic poets (47b10). What poets do, Aristotle claims, is imitate action rather than assert propositions, which means that neither scientific treatises verse nor imitations of men talking philosophy, but also fact doing it, are poems. This brusquely rejects the received idea that verse makes the poet: if someone brings out a work of medicine or natural science verse, they normally call him a poet; but there is nothing common between Homer and Empedocles except the verse-form (47b16-18). Poetry had been, as it still often is common speech, identified with verse, but a few sentences Aristotle set the course for Western poetic theory by making fictional representation the defining characteristic of poetry. The process of definition did not stop here, however, and that is where problems arise. Having identified the art of poetry, Aristotle then focused on what was highest it and thus claimed to reveal its essence, that is, its purpose: drama was superior to narrative, tragedy to comedy, and incidents, i.e. the plot, are the end of tragedy, and the end is most important of (50a23). Aristotle demotes narrative and lyric poetry and makes the other five elements of drama that he had picked out-characters, diction, reasoning, spectacle and song (50a9)-mere means. Although this may be justified the case of the last two, to make character principle unnecessary and reasoning and style (the term I shall substitute for Richard Janko's diction) the province of other arts, and thus not grounds for assessing poets, seems odd indeed. The main bad consequence of Aristotle's view is to minimize what one might call the expressive aspect of poetry (what we infer about a speaker's state of mind from his or her words). Ironically, he had silently rejected the germ of just such a theory early Poetics. In this article I want to: (1) explain why Aristotle gave such primacy to the plot, the bare story, (2) elaborate on the bad consequences of that effort, and (3) suggest how one might improve the resulting theory on the basis of his own first proposal about the nature of poetry. There is considerable agreement, even among modern Aristotelians, that there is something amiss with Aristotle's theory of poetry. Gerald Else, the author of the most distinguished modern English commentary on Poetics, says that [w]hen all is said and done, Aristotle's real conviction about words and word-magic was that they were a necessary evil, 'all imagination and there for the sake of the listener,' i.e., not for the general truths that imitations of action could provide.2 In a similar vein, Wayne Booth, speaking as Aristotle redivivus, says that in our energetic pursuit of how to discern (or