Aristotle

Theory of Literature Exercise

Aristotle, considered to be one of the first literary critics, embraced the theory of literature in two main masterpieces that influenced the Western thinking during many centuries: “Rhetoric” and “Poetics”. During his time, writers argued that inspiration was believed to come from the Gods. But a problematic arose within this thought: if poets are inspired by the Gods, then they only write what the Gods tell them, so when poets claim that their work is no good, it is a sin to say that the Gods said no interesting things. Aristotle goes around this traditional thinking and treats literature as a noble and teachable art (‘art-teckne’). By this he also claims a matter of inspiration, but as human skills that can be improved and expanded.
Aristotle was one of Plato’s disciples and they both lived in a country with a rich literary culture, in which literature had a big role in the public life of the Polis(Greek political and social order). Poetry in ancient Greece was central to education. Homer’s poetry, for example, was central to common things from everyday life – how to behave, how to receive guests at your home, etc. Although both Aristotle and Plato agreed about the didactic function of literature, Aristotle comes in conflict with his master’s beliefs. Plato was opposed to poets: his idea of an ideal society/republic would be without poets. However, poetry was a major issue to education. He condemns poetry because the muses possess the poet. Poetry is a way of surrounding our minds to other forces. He compares the function of poetry to a ‘relationship’. Sometimes we love people who are not good to us and the only solution is to let them go. In Plato’s sense the same happens to poetry: it is not good for our minds, so we have to get rid of it. For Plato poetry is an art of imitation about things of life, though simple things just live, for example, chairs and tables, which are on their turn, only imitation of the ideal objects that are at other levels. In this way, poetry simply deals with imitations of imitations. Plato doesn’t make any distinction between imitation and real, whereas Aristotle says that imitation and the object imitated are separated. Aristotle defends, as well, that poetry is an imitative art, and that poets speak in the voices of others. He argues about the pleasure of the imitation itself within poetry, through such he points out to the representation. According to him, representation is something we have since childhood. Everyone enjoys it, that’s why we delight in looking at pictures. All the earliest forms of arts, like ancient paintings and drawings on rocks, seem to confirm the theory of imitation of Aristotle. These pictures represented successful real life facts meaning it was something they desired. This desire made such factual reality more likely possible. We delight ourselves looking at pictures because we can learn something with that representation and we prefer the picture to real things.
Imitation is seen by people as real representations of the real world. They are, in detail, accurate things from our lives. With this perspective Aristotle involves literature with an aesthetic dimension of representation: art can be naturally enjoyed. Aristotle’s “Poetics” revealed two forms of poetry: tragedy and comedy. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; while tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. It is important to point out that only the portion of the book that focuses on tragedy has survived. Aristotle redefines three principles: mimesis (the representation), plot (the arrangement of poetry) and genre (literary kind), and centred on these three principles he gives us a definition of tragedy. According to him, tragedy is an imitation/representation using medium, object and manner, where pity and terror (the true catharsis) are the proper strong emotions natural of a tragedy. Aristotle presents six parts of a tragedy: plot, characters, diction, reasoning, spectacle, and song. Out of all six parts the plot is the most important and essential because without the plot there is no tragedy. The plot must be unit and complete in itself conceiving the construction of incidents and passage of time (beginning, middle, end). Therefore, the plot is not separable from the mimesis, the representation of a scene. The plot for Aristotle introduces ‘causation’, which is when one thing happens due to a cause and so on (cause-effect relationship). This way the unity of the plot depends on events that happen because of earlier causes. Poetry’s function is not to relate things that have happened but things that may happen, in function with probability or possibility. It has to do with causation. For Aristotle the presentation of the world as it is does not correspond to a detailed characterization of its surface. He claims that the ones who focus on the world are not realistic, but idealistic because the world is an illusion. The poet gives access to reality. History only gives access to the surface of the world. This means history only represents all the things that have happened through time. Historians deal with what happened in particular times. Poets don’t, they deal with single actions that give a direct access to universal truths believed by Aristotle to be the ‘good and the beautiful’. The poetic plot for Aristotle is the narrative form of the conception model of the universe. A poet is a composer of a plot, rather than verses. Through a variety of techniques, the plot needs to be imagined, and even more important constructed, imitating directly the ideals of the world.