Plot of a tragedy may be simple or complex. The simple plot is without peripeteia or discovery and the complex is with peripeteia or discovery. Aristotle prefers complex plot like the plot of Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles to simple plot. Of all plots, the episodic are worst. The second constituent of tragedy is character. According to Aristotle, there are four things to be aimed at in a character.
Unlike Ighigeneia. Character also, like the plot, should be governed by the law of probability or necessity. The third constituents is diction which includes several parts such as letter, syllable, connecting words, noun, verb etc.
The perfection of style demands clearness without manners. The greatest thing in style is to show a command of metaphor. The use of metaphors is the mark of genius, because to make good metaphors demands an eye for resemblances.
Another important element of tragedy is thought- the ability to say what is appropriate in any given circumstances. It has to be communicated to the audience through the speeches of the characters. Of the remaining parts, song holds the chief place among the embellishments. Then comes spectacle, which surely has an emotional attraction of its own but least artistic.
The power of tragedy can be felt even apart from spectacle. In the case of oratory, this is the function of the political art and of the art of rhetoric: and so indeed the older poets make their characters speak the language of civic life; the poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians. Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids.
Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character. Thought, on the other hand, is found where something is proved to be or not to be, or a general maxim is enunciated. Fourth among the elements enumerated comes Diction; by which I mean, as has been already said, the expression of the meaning in words; and its essence is the same both in verse and prose.
The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.
These principles being established, let us now discuss the proper structure of the Plot, since this is the first and most important thing in Tragedy. Now, according to our definition Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude.
A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.
A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles. Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order.
Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long.
As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms a certain magnitude is necessary, and a magnitude which may be easily embraced in one view; so in the plot, a certain length is necessary, and a length which can be easily embraced by the memory. The limit of length in relation to dramatic competition and sensuous presentment is no part of artistic theory.
For had it been the rule for a hundred tragedies to compete together, the performance would have been regulated by the water-clock—as indeed we are told was formerly done.
But the limit as fixed by the nature of the drama itself is this: the greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous. And to define the matter roughly, we may say that the proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.
Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. Hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind.
They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity. But Homer, as in all else he is of surpassing merit, here too—whether from art or natural genius—seems to have happily discerned the truth.
In composing the Odyssey he did not include all the adventures of Odysseus—such as his wound on Parnassus, or his feigned madness at the mustering of the host—incidents between which there was no necessary or probable connection: but he made the Odyssey, and likewise the Iliad, to center round an action that in our sense of the word is one.
As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.
For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole. It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it.
The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.
By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. The particular is—for example—what Alcibiades did or suffered. In Comedy this is already apparent: for here the poet first constructs the plot on the lines of probability, and then inserts characteristic names—unlike the lampooners who write about particular individuals.
But wonder is itself a feeling, the one to which Miranda is always giving voice, the powerful sense that what is before one is both strange and good. Wonder does not numb the other feelings; what it does is dislodge them from their habitual moorings.
The experience of wonder is the disclosure of a sight or thought or image that fits no habitual context of feeling or understanding, but grabs and holds us by a power borrowed from nothing apart from itself. The two things that Plotinus says characterize beauty, that the soul recognizes it at first glance and spontaneously gives welcome to it, equally describe the experience of wonder.
The beautiful always produces wonder, if it is seen as beautiful, and the sense of wonder always sees beauty. But are there really no wonders that are ugly? The monstrosities that used to be exhibited in circus side-shows are wonders too, are they not?
In the Tempest , three characters think first of all of such spectacles when they lay eyes on Caliban II, ii, ; V, i, , but they are incapable of wonder, since they think they know everything that matters already. A fourth character in the same batch, who is drunk but not insensible, gives way at the end of Act II to the sense that this is not just someone strange and deformed, nor just a useful servant, but a brave monster.
But Stephano is not like the holiday fools who pay to see monstrosities like two-headed calves or exotic sights like wild men of Borneo. I recall an aquarium somewhere in Europe that had on display an astoundingly ugly catfish. People came casually up to its tank, were startled, made noises of disgust, and turned away.
Even to be arrested before such a sight feels in some way perverse and has some conflict in the feeling it arouses, as when we stare at the victims of a car wreck. The sight of the ugly or disgusting, when it is felt as such, does not have the settled repose or willing surrender that are characteristic of wonder.
We are in the power of another for awhile, the sight of an illusion works real and durable changes in us, we merge into something rich and strange, and what we find by being absorbed in the image of another is ourselves. As Alonso is shown a mirror of his soul by Prospero, we are shown a mirror of ourselves in Alonso, but in that mirror we see ourselves as we are not in witnessing the Tempest , but in witnessing.
The Tempest is a beautiful play, suffused with wonder as well as with reflections on wonder, but it holds the intensity of the tragic experience at a distance. Achilles and Priam cry together, each for his own grief, as each has cried so often before, but this time a miracle happens. Achilles had been pitying Patroclus, but mainly himself, but the feeling to which Priam has directed him now is exactly the same as tragic pity. Achilles is looking at a human being who has chosen to go to the limits of what is humanly possible to search for something that matters to him.
The wonder of this sight takes Achilles out of his self-pity, but back into himself as a son and as a sharer of human misery itself. All his old longings for glory and revenge fall away, since they have no place in the sight in which he is now absorbed. The feeling in this moment out of time is fragile, and Achilles feels it threatened by tragic fear. Finally, after they share a meal, they just look at each other. In the grip of wonder they do not see enemies.
They see truly. They see the beauty in two men who have lost almost everything. They see a son a father should be proud of and a father a son should revere. The passion of the Iliad moves from anger through pity and fear to wonder. When Priam first appears in his hut, Homer compares the amazement this produces to that with which people look at a murderer who has fled from his homeland This is a strange comparison, and it recalls the even stranger fact disclosed one book earlier that Patroclus, whom everyone speaks of as gentle and kind-hearted esp.
When Achilles remembers his father, he is remembering the man whose kindness brought Patroclus into his life, so that his tears, now for his father, now again for Patroclus XXIV, , merge into a single grief. Achilles cannot be brought to such a reflection by reasoning, nor do the feelings in which he has been embroiled take him in that direction. Hector, who must go up against those hands, is mesmerized by them; they are like a fire, he says, and repeats it.
His murderous, manslaughtering hands are stilled by a grief that finally has no enemy to take itself out on. But at the end of the poem, Achilles has lost interest in glory. He is no longer eaten up by the desire to be lifted above Hector and Priam, but comes to rest in just looking at them for what they are. Homer does surround Achilles in armor that takes the sting from his misery and from his approaching death, by working that misery and death into the wholeness of the Iliad.
But the Iliad is, as Aristotle says, the prototype of tragedy; it is not a poem that aims at conferring glory but a poem that bestows the gift of wonder. Like Alonso in the Tempest, Achilles ultimately finds himself.
Of the two, Achilles is the closer model of the spectator of a tragedy, because Alonso plunges deep into remorse before he is brought back into the shared world. Achilles is lifted directly out of himself, into the shared world, in the act of wonder, and sees his own image in the sorrowing father in front of him. This is exactly what a tragedy does to us, and exactly what we experience in looking at Achilles. In his loss, we pity him.
In his capacity to be moved by the wonder of a suffering fellow human, we wonder at him. At the end of the Iliad, as at the end of every tragedy, we are washed in the beauty of the human image, which our pity and our fear have brought to sight.
But a beginning is something which, in itself, does not need to be after anything else, while something else naturally is the case or comes about after it; and an end is its contrary, something which in itself is of such a nature as to be after something else, either necessarily or for the most part, but to have nothing else after it-It is therefore needful that wellput-together stories not begin from just anywhere at random, nor end just anywhere at random …And beauty resides in size and order …the oneness and wholeness of the beautiful thing being present all at once in contemplation …in stories, just as in human organizations and in living things.
A revelation, as the word indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, that produces either friendship or hatred in people marked out for good or bad fortune. The most beautiful of revelations occurs when reversals of condition come about at the same time, as is the case in the Oedipus. Joe Sachs Email: joe. Poetry as Imitation The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial marking out of dramatic poetry as a form of imitation.
The Character of Tragedy A work is a tragedy, Aristotle tells us, only if it arouses pity and fear. Tragic Catharsis First of all, the tragic catharsis might be a purgation. Tragic Pity First, let us consider what tragic pity consists in. Tragic Fear and the Image of Humanity Since every boundary has two sides, the human image is delineated also from the outside, the side of the things that threaten it.
The Iliad , the Tempest , and Tragic Wonder In both the Iliad and the Tempest there are characters with arts that in some ways resemble that of the poet.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Joe Sachs trans. Aristotle, On the Soul , Joe Sachs trans. A good plot has Peripety or Discovery—sometimes both. Peripety is the change from one state of things at the beginning of the play to the exact opposite state by the end of the play. This could be something like the change from being rich to being poor, or from being powerful to being powerless, or from being a ruler to being a beggar.
The change that takes place in a tragedy should take the main character and possibly other characters from a state of happiness to a state of misery. Discovery is a change from ignorance to knowledge. Change by itself is not enough. The character involved in the change must have specific characteristics to arouse the tragic emotions of pity and fear. Therefore, Aristotle said that there are three forms of plot that should be avoided. A totally good man must not pass from happiness to misery.
This will make the audience angry that bad things happened to him. A bad man must not pass from misery to happiness. A bad man cannot pass from happiness to misery. The true tragic hero cannot be too good or too bad, but he must end up in misery. Aristotle concluded that the best tragedy centers on a basically good man who changes from happiness to misery because of some great error. For example, he might have a good quality, like pride, that gets out of hand.
The plot of a tragedy also involves some horrible or evil deed.
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