Hi, my name's Tom. Welcome back to my channel and to another episode of What
the Theory?, my series in which I aim to provide some sometimes fun but always
accessible introductions to key theories in cultural studies and the wider
humanities. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at Aristotle's The Poetics, a treatise
composed by everyone's favourite Greek philosopher sometime between 335
and 350 BC (depending on who you ask). Within it, he looks at the social role of
storytelling as well as setting out to understand exactly how Greek Tragedy was
able to make its audiences feel such extreme emotion. As always, if you have
any thoughts or questions as we go along then please do feel free to drop those
down in the comments. And, if this video seems like your kind of thing and you'd
like to see more, please do consider subscribing and hitting that little
notifications button. With that out of the way however, let's crack on with it!
It's hard to overstate the influence of The Poetics. The treatise as we read it
today is likely either a set of notes prepared in preparation for delivering a
lecture by Aristotle himself or taken by a student while listening to Aristotle
speak within the Academy. And what survives is only a fragment of a
slightly longer piece of work. As we'll see, the surviving portion of The Poetics
sets out to understand how Greek Tragedy (or, for our purposes, storytelling
slightly more generally) works. However, Aristotle references within it a
companion piece on Comedy which, unfortunately, has been lost to time.
Nonetheless, as the earliest surviving piece of cultural criticism that we have
(alongside the Natyashastra which is a treatise on Sanskrit theatre written
around the same time), The Poetics holds something of a special status amongst
creators and critics of theatre, film, television, novel-writing and all other
kind of narrative forms. And The Poetics is often introduced as a kind of
rulebook; a guide to plotting out the perfect narrative. This was certainly the
view of the French neoclassicists in the 16th and 17th century who very much
used The Poetics as the foundations for their formula for creating the perfect
theatrical play. And, even more recently, Robert McKee—a screenwriting tutor whose
1997 book Story is considered by many to be the definitive book on screenwriting—
has built a small fortune on Aristotelian foundations. Nonetheless, we don't
know for sure whether Aristotle's intentions in writing The Poetics was
really to create this kind of prescriptive model for narrative
structure. While, within it, he certainly separates out some work which he
considers to be good from that which he considers to be bad, we don't know
whether he was suggesting that this is the way that all tragedy should work or
whether he was simply commenting on what had worked and what hadn't amongst the
plays that he had seen. What is clear, however, is that Aristotle believed in
the power and importance of storytelling. He thought that it had a pivotal
role to play in society and, before we go through understanding Aristotle's
conceptualisation of narrative structure, I think its first important to
understand this slightly broader argument in The Poetics; in which
Aristotle attempts to theorise why we tell stories in the first place. And, in
order to do so, we need to begin with Plato, Aristotle's teacher to whom The
Poetics is essentially a response. In The Republic, Plato's book in which he aims
to set out his vision for an ideal society, Plato had suggested a strict
censorship of poetry and drama. In one passage he suggests that we must "delete
lamentations and pitiful speeches on the part of famous men. We surely assert that
the good man does not think death to be a dreadful thing to another good man his
friend". Plato in fact saw little value in the mimetic arts (those which seek to
reflect or represent real life) at all. But, here, his main concern is that seeing
a heroic figure in a moment of despair or distress would make the citizens of
his Republic feel sad or angry or distressed. And this just wouldn't do.
Why would a society want its citizens to feel such negative emotions? Plato was
concerned that, if I were to use my afternoon off to go to the amphitheatre
and, while there, watch Electra and Orestes avenge their father by
murdering Clytemnestra, I might come away from the amphitheatre so spiked up on
the spirit of revenge that I might go about killing anyone who's ever done me
wrong too. Aristotle, however, had a different view. While he agreed that
poetry and drama could certainly stir up these extreme emotions in us, he
suggested that we don't simply carry these emotions back with us into our
daily lives. Instead, Aristotle argues that experiencing such emotions
within the amphitheatre (or indeed in the cinema, in front of the TV or whilst
reading a book) enables "through pity and fear the proper purgation [or catharsis]
of these emotions". In short, Aristotle argues that fiction
and storytelling create a space for us where we can explore and experience
these extreme emotions in order to get them out of our system. My watching
Orestes murder Clytemnestra, then, allows me to experience that feeling and
burn off some of that pent-up rage that I might be feeling precisely in order
that I don't go about avenging people in real life.
Thus, in Aristotle's view, Tragedy (or storytelling more generally) allows us to
purge ourselves of these extreme emotions and thus plays a positive
societal role in allowing us to live more happily alongside one another.
Aristotle, however, was not content with simply arguing that storytelling
provides a positive social function. As well as suggesting that it is able to
bring about this catharsis or purgation, he also wanted to explore exactly how it
is able to do so. How is it that me sitting in an amphitheatre watching
a troupe of actors pretending to hate each other or be in love enables me to
feel those emotions too? In The Poetics, then, Aristotle sets out to analyse
numerous pieces of Greek theatre in order to consider why some of these were
able to stir up such emotion in their audience and why others weren't so much.
And Aristotle's specific focus is on Greek Tragedy which he very much saw as
the highest form of storytelling. And so his first task is to define exactly what
he means by Tragedy. For Aristotle, then, tragedy was defined in opposition to two
things primarily. The first being comedy. And, always looking for a more eloquent way
of expressing himself other than "one is funny, the other often sad", he writes that
"the distinction which marks of tragedy from comedy is that comedy aims at
representing people as worse, tragedy as better than in actual life". While, as I've
mentioned, Aristotle's specific treatise on Comedy is unfortunately lost to time,
what's clear from this statement is that Aristotle considers
comedy to focus on characters who are irrevocably flawed, they are never going
to become better people. Whereas the mark of tragedy is that it focuses on heroic
figures who give eloquent speeches and enact acts of great significance. He
mentions a number of times throughout The Poetics that Greek Tragedy tended to
focus on a select few families from Greek legend. And he saw this as very
much right and proper. The second thing that Aristotle is keen to define tragedy
against is Epic Poetry: works such as Homer's The Iliad or The Odyssey. And the
first distinction he draws between these is fairly uncontroversial: that of form.
For, while the Epic poet, Aristotle states, "imitates by narrative", the tragedian
"presents all his characters as living and moving before us". As we might expect,
one relies on dictation and narration while the other relies on performers
acting out events in front of us. So far, so uncontroversial. However Aristotle
also draws another distinction between Epic Poetry and Tragedy which has proven
slightly more contested in the centuries since. And these further distinctions
relate not to form—recited or acted out—but to the way in which the narrative of
the two is structured. Firstly, Aristotle argues that Tragedy "endeavours as far as
possible to confine itself to a single revolution of the Sun or but slightly to
exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time". Secondly, he
suggests that an Epic Poem has a "multiplicity of plot" whereas a Tragedy
has a "unity of plot". Or, to put it in other words, an Epic Poem tended to have
numerous narrative elements all interweaving whereas a tragedy focused
on a single, focused chain of events. And it is from these very short observations
that we get the notion of the Three Classical Unities of Action, Place
and Time. This notion, that a play should take place within a day, be set in a
single location and have a very focused dramatic action, was very popular during
the 16th and 17th centuries and even has a significant influence on some more
recent playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller. However, while it
remains a popular point of reference, we should probably take this notion of the
three unities with a pinch of salt. For Aristotle never once
mentions a unity of place and only mentions this unity of time once. And,
furthermore, again, we don't know whether Aristotle is simply commenting on the
plays he has seen rather than trying to set out this formulaic way of setting
out a narrative structure. So, we should probably take the notion of the Three
Classical Unities as more an invention of the French neoclassicists'
interpretation of The Poetics rather than an idea inherent in Aristotle's
own writing. Having defined what he means by Tragedy, then, Aristotle finally
comes to exploring what it is that made certain Greek Tragedy so evocative for
their audiences. And, in doing so, he introduces a number of terms for
analyzing narrative structure which remain incredibly significant and
influential today. As you may have gathered from the way I've been talking
so far, Aristotle's focuses very much on plot
over character. While he does acknowledge that creating complex, interesting
characters is important in writing a decent play, he suggests that "character
determines people's qualities but it is by their actions that they are happy or
the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with the view to the representation
of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Plot, then, is
the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: character holds the
second place". Aristotle believes that it is not through well drawn-out characters
giving wordy speeches that this process of catharsis or purgation is
brought about but through the successful "arrangement of the incidents". And what
always strikes me when returning to The Poetics is how little has changed in how
we discuss the arranging of events to make for a decent plot since Aristotle
laid out this work. Even the most casual filmgoer will have heard of the notion
that most mainstream films tend to be composed around a three-act narrative
structure. And, while the notion that a story should be split into a sequence of
acts is more correctly attributed to the Roman poet Horace (who advocated for five),
many of the more specific moments that proponents of a three-act structure
theory suggest should be there within that structure very much come from
Aristotle's Poetics. So, Aristotle observes that "every Tragedy falls into
two parts: complication and unraveling". The first half of a Tragedy, he suggests,
usually contains a number of events where a protagonist progresses towards a
certain goal with their path towards achieving that goal becoming more and
more complicated as time wears on. Once a plot has begun to unfold, however,
Aristotle suggests that there will be a moment referred to in Ancient Greek as
"peripeteia" or reversal: a change of circumstance which fundamentally shifts
the world of this play and causes the hero's journey to go in a very different
direction. In Oedipus Rex, for example, the complication consists of
Oedipus trying to track down the murderer of Laius, the former king of
Thebes. All of this changes in Episode Four, however, when Oedipus discovers
that it was in actual fact he who killed Laius, that Laius was his father and,
therefore, Jocasta, his wife, is his biological mother. In Oedipus Rex,
this moment of peripeteia or reversal is conjoined with a moment of what's
referred to as "anagnorisis" or recognition in which Oedipus finally discovers the
true nature of his situation. It is these moments of peripeteia and anagnorisis
(reversal and recognition) through which Aristotle suggests that the play goes
from complication to unraveling, and it's very much in the
process of unraveling that Aristotle suggests that catharsis comes about. But
there are two more moments which are vital according to Aristotle in
bringing about this catharsis. And the first is a scene of "pathos" or suffering,
during which the protagonist and other characters wrestle with the consequences
of that great reversal. This scene, he suggests, "is a destructive or painful
action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds and the like". In
Oedipus Rex, we get a bit of both when Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus,
disgusted at himself for sleeping with his own mother, stabs out his own
eyes with the pin of her brooch. And, finally, these moments of reversal,
recognition and suffering lead to the moment of catharsis itself. In
Oedipus Rex, this takes place when Oedipus, so disgusted at himself, asks to be
exiled from Thebes. So, complication reversal, recognition, suffering and
catharsis. These, to Aristotle, are the moments which we must include in a plot
in order to bring about that catharsis or purgation amongst an audience. It is
the proper arrangement of these incidents which allow storytelling to
have that power of making us feel emotions through simply watching or
reading something. And these terms (or at least the notion of them) very much carry
currency in the present day. If we look at the narrative structures offered up
by contemporary screenwriting tutors such as Robert McKee or, slightly less
subtly, Blake Snyder for example, we'll see moments such as a "midpoint" which
very much has reflections of the moment of reversal or, in Blake Snyder, the "Dark
Night of the Soul" which very much seems to echo that notion of pathos or
suffering. Aristotle's thoughts within this very earliest work of cultural
criticism, then, very much underline how we talk about and analise narrative
structure in the present-day. So, to conclude. In The
Poetics, Aristotle sets out to argue that storytelling has a vital social role to
play in allowing us to purge ourselves of the extreme emotions that we might
otherwise feel in real life. And, further to this, he seeks to analyse exactly how
Greek Tragedy is able to perform this function. And, while The Poetics itself
very much confines itself to Greek Tragedy, the terms which are discussed
within it have very much become applicable in the present day to all
kinds of narrative storytelling whether that be theatre or film or television or
novels. The Poetics, in its present-day form then, may be a short and somewhat
understated book. However the ideas which Aristotle offers us within it have
certainly stood the test of time. Thank you very much for watching this video, I
hope you've found it useful and of some insight. If that is the case then I'd
really appreciate a thumbs up down below and, again, if you'd like to see more like
this then please do consider subscribing. Thank you very much for watching once
again and have a great week!