Revised version of a lecture given in Forli, Italy, in February 1999.
THE POETICS AND US
Allow me, as an Italian, to approach the question of Aristotle’s Poetics in the form of a confession by a child of this century. Italian culture produced the great Renaissance commentators on Aristotle, and in the baroque period it was Emanuele Tesauro who, with his Cannocchiale aristotelico, represented to the world of post-Galilean physics Aristotle’s poetic theories as the sole key to approaching the human sciences. But at the very beginning of the following century this same Italian culture was enriched by Vico’s New Science, the work that questioned every Aristotelian precept in order to posit a language and poetry that develop outside any rules. By doing so, Vico unwittingly opened the door—while in France, from Boileau to Batteux, from Le Bossu to Dubos, and right down to the Encyclopédie, writers were still looking to set down the rules of tragedy with the rules of taste—to a philosophy, a linguistics, and an aesthetics of the unpredictable freedom of the Spirit.
This is not the genteel, classical French Esprit but romantic, Hegelian Geist, which emerges through history only to become history itself. Thus, from nineteenth-century Idealism to Croce, Italian culture was dominated over the course of a hundred years by the rejection of all rhetoric and all poetics. Under an Idealist aesthetics that read all language as founded from the outset on aesthetic creativity, the phenomenon of poetry could be described no longer as the deviation from a preexisting norm but rather as a new dawn. The few pages devoted by Croce to Aristotle show irredeemable prejudices, which resulted in a formally impeccable syllogism: aesthetics began with Baumgarten’s idea of a ” scientia cognitionis sensitivae, gnoseologia inferior” (a science of sensory cognition, a lower gnoseology); Aristotle was unable to read Baumgarten, and thus Aristotle had nothing to say on aesthetics.
I remember the shivers I experienced as a young man, feeling as marginalized as a young homosexual in Victorian society, when I discovered that the Anglo-Saxon tradition had continued to take Aristotle’s poetics seriously, and without interruption.
I was not amazed to find traces of Aristotle in Dryden or Hobbes, in Reynolds or Dr. Johnson, not to mention the references to the Poetics, however vague and even at times polemical, that I found in Wordsworth or Coleridge; but I was struck by the readings of poets and critics who were contemporaries of Croce but who gave me the outline of a culture for which Aristotle was still a model, a point of reference.
One of the classics of American critical theory, Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) opens with a reference to Aristotle; if Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1942) managed to blend the principles of Anglo-Saxon criticism with the work of the Russian formalists and of the structuralists in Prague, it was because they referred to Aristotle in almost every chapter. In the 1940s the masters of the New Criticism measured themselves against Aristotle. I discovered the Chicago school, which defined itself unreservedly as neo-Aristotelian, a critic of contemporary theater like Francis Fergusson (The Idea of a Theater, 1949), who used the notions of plot and action and interpreted Macbeth as an imitation of an action, and Northrop Frye, who played with the Aristotelian notion of mythos in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957).
But we need only cite the influence of the Poetics on a writer like Joyce. He not only speaks about it in the 1903 Paris Notebook, written during his visits to the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, but in 1904 writes a short ironic poem on catharsis. He tells Stuart Gilbert that the Aeolus episode in Ulysses is based on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus of 9 March 1903, he criticizes Synge for not being Aristotelian enough for his tastes. In a letter to Pound of 9 April 1917, he says of Ulysses: “I am doing it, as Aristotle would say—by different means in different parts.”
Lastly, the theory of literary genres in the Portrait is of clear Aristotelian origin. In that work Stephen Dedalus works out a definition of pity and terror, deploring the fact that Aristotle had not provided one in the Poetics and ignoring the fact that he had, however, done so in the Rhetoric. Through a kind of miraculous elective affinity, the definitions Joyce invents are very similar to those in the Rhetoric—but he studied with the Jesuits, and along with a secondhand version of Saint Thomas he must also have come across a thirdhand account of Aristotle. To say nothing of the English-speaking cultural environment in which he lived, about whose Aristotelian interests we have already spoken.
I believe, however, that I underwent my most decisive Aristotelian experience reading Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Composition, where he analyzes, word by word, structure by structure, the birth, technique, and raison d’être of his poem “The Raven.” In this text Aristotle is never named, but his model is ever present, even in the use of some key terms.
Poe’s project consisted in showing how the effect of “an intense and pure elevation of soul” (Beauty) is achieved by careful organization of structures, and in showing how “the work proceeded step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem,” while still keeping track of a unity of impression (which is in physical terms the unit of time that corresponds to one reading of the text), and of place, and of emotional tone.
The extraordinary thing about this text is that its author explains the rule whereby he managed to convey the impression of spontaneity, and this message, which goes against any aesthetics of ineffability, is the same as that transmitted by the Poetics. This Aristotelian lesson is also found later in Pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime, which is usually seen as a celebration of the aesthetic “je ne sais quoi.” On the Sublime certainly wants to tell us about a poetic effect that is based not on rational or moral persuasion but, rather, on a feeling of wonder that is produced as a kind of ecstasy and coup de foudre. But right from the first page of the treatise, the anonymous author tells us he does not want just to define the object of his discourse but also to tell us the strokes of artifice by which it can be produced. Hence, in the second part of the work, we find a minute analysis of the rhetorical strategies to be adopted in order to achieve, through definable procedures, this indefinable effect.
Poe proceeds in the same way, except that The Philosophy of Composition is a fascinating and ambiguous text: is it a set of rules for other poets, or is it an implicit theory of the art in general, extrapolated from a personal experience of writing, by a writer who positions himself as a critical reader of his own work?
The fertile ambiguity of this text was noticed by Kenneth Burke, who approached Poe’s text in explicitly Aristotelian terms. If there is a discipline called Poetics, it will have nothing to do with a criticism seen as commercial advice to the reader, or a distribution of approval or disapproval. It will have to deal with one of the dimensions of language, and in that sense it will be the proper object of the critic, just as poetry is the object of the poet. “An approach to the poem in terms of Poetics is an approach in terms of the poems nature as a kind (a literary species or mode).” * In this sense Burkes definition comes close to that given by the Prague school, for whom poetics is the discipline that explains the “literariness” of literature, which is to say that it explains why a literary work can be defined as such.
Burke is well aware that defining literary processes and the rules of genre can lead, as has happened, to the transformation of a descriptive into a normative science. Nevertheless, poetics cannot escape its duty to formulate rules that are implicit in the poets practice, even if the artist is not conscious of them.
Poe, on the other hand, was conscious of them and consequently worked as a “philosophus additus artifici” (philosopher as well as an artist). Perhaps he did so “après-coup,”and while he wrote he may have been unaware of what he was doing, but as a reader of his own work he later understood why “The Raven” produces the effect it does and why we say it is a good poem. The analysis carried out by Poe the author could have been done by a reader like Jakobson. Thus, while trying to define a compositional practice of which his poem was an example, Poe identified strategies characterizing artistic procedure in general.
Poe’s essay is Aristotelian in
