In this sense Poetics does not interpret individual works, to which it turns only as a repertoire of examples. But in pursuing this aim Poetics becomes entangled in a paradox; in trying to capture the essence of poetry it misses its most essential feature, namely, its uniqueness and the variability of its manifestations.
Doležel thus observes that Aristotle’s Poetics is at one and the same time the founding text both of literary theory and of literary criticism in the West, and this comes about precisely because of its inherent contradiction. It establishes a metalanguage of criticism, and allows judgments founded on the knowledge this metalanguage supplies. But this result is achieved at a certain price. Every Poetics that proposes ideal structures, and chooses to ignore the particularities specific to individual works, is always in the end a theory of the works that the theorist judges to be best. Thus even Aristotle’s Poetics has (allow me to paraphrase Popper) its own “influencing aesthetics,” and Aristotle betrays his own critical preferences every time he chooses an example.
According to Gerald Frank Else, only a tenth of all Greek tragedies meet the structures posited by Aristotle.* In a vicious circle, an intuitive critical judgment has preceded and determined the choice of the corpus it will use to work out the general principles that justify the judgment in critical terms. Doležel points out that Else’s statement is also based on a critical prejudice, but his argument holds in any case, since it highlights the presence of the vicious circle that has flawed the entire history of poetics and criticism.
We thus find ourselves facing not an opposition (as was long thought) between a normative poetics and an aesthetics that operates on such a level of generality as never to be compromised by the reality of particular works (Aquinas’s “Beauty is the splendor of the Transcendentals brought together” is an aesthetic definition that allows us to justify both Oedipus Rex and a good adventure story) but, rather, the oscillation between a descriptive theory and a critical practice that presuppose each other in turn.
Aristotle speaks to us not only of abstract criteria such as order and measure, verisimilitude or necessity, or organic balance (Poetics 1450b 21 ff.) but also of that criterion which will negate every purely formalistic reading of the Poetics. The fundamental element in tragedy is plot, and plot is the imitation of an action whose aim, the telos, is the effect that it produces, the ergon. And this ergon is catharsis. A tragedy will be beautiful—or will work well—if it is able to effect purification from passions. Thus the cathartic effect is a kind of coronation of a tragic work, and this resides in the tragedy not as a written or acted discourse but as a discourse that is received.
The Poetics represents the first appearance of an aesthetics of reception, but it presents some unresolved problems of every reader-oriented theory.
We know that catharsis can be interpreted in two ways, and both interpretations are upheld by that enigmatic expression appearing at 1449b 27–28: tragedy accomplishes ” ten ton toiouton pathematon catharsin” (the catharsis of such passions).
The first interpretation is that Aristotle is thinking of a purification that releases us through the intense experience of our own passions—as would seem to be suggested by the Politics (which, however, unfortunately refers to the Poetics for an explanation that is never given in either of the two works), and therefore the purification must be understood in traditional medical terms, as a homeopathic action, a liberation of the spectator through the identification with the characters’ passions—and it is imposed on us as an experience we cannot avoid. Tragedy is, in this view, a corybantic, psychagogic machine (if some detachment were possible, this would be produced solely by comedy, but we know too little about what Aristotle meant by comedy).
The second interpretation understands catharsis in an allopathic sense, as a purification undergone by the passions themselves, inasmuch as they are “beautifully” represented and seen from afar as the passions of others, through the cold gaze of a spectator who becomes a pure, disembodied eye—and who enjoys not the passions he experiences but the text that puts them onstage.
Radicalizing this conflict of interpretations, we might say that in one interpretation it leads to a Dionysiac aesthetic, in the other to an Apollonian aesthetic. And, in more banal terms, on one side we have an aesthetics of the discotheque and pulp fiction (and I will talk later about how to read the Poetics as a theory of mass-media emotions), and on the other an aesthetics seen as a moment of serene and detached contemplation, where art shows us the splendor of truth.
This ambiguity is due to the very sources Aristotle was drawing on. The Pythagoreans “had appropriate chants for the passions of the soul, some for weaknesses and others for angers, through which, by exciting and raising the passions in just measure, they would be returned to a courageous virtue” (Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras). And Pythagoras used poetic texts such as Homer, dithyrambs, threnodies, and laments for cathartic purposes. It is reasonable to assume that Aristotle meant a purification that comes about through an act of free vision of the miraculous organization of the great phenomenon that is tragedy, and at the same time he was fascinated by the psychagogic powers his own culture spoke about.
There are other fertile ambiguities in the Poetics. Aristotle is an Alexandrian who has partly lost the religious spirit that characterized the fifth century B.C. He works a little bit like a contemporary Western ethnologist trying to track down universal constants in the tales of savages, which fascinate him but which he does not understand except from the outside. So then we come up with another, very modern reading of Aristotle, one that Aristotle himself encourages, pretending to talk about tragedy whereas in reality he is providing us with a semiotics of narrativity. The tragic spectacle includes story, characters, diction, thought, spectacle, and music, but “the most important of these elements is the composition of the actions … For the end of tragedy is the story and the facts” (1450a 15–23).
I agree with Ricoeur when he says that in the Poetics narration founded on plot, this ability to compose a story, he ton pragmaton systasis, becomes a kind of common genus of which the epic is a species.* The genre that the Poetics discusses is the representation of an action (pragma) through a plot (mythos), and epic diegesis and dramatic mimesis are only species of this genre. Now the theory of plot is what has perhaps most profoundly influenced our century. The first theory of narrativity emerges with the Russian formalists, who propose on the one hand the distinction between fabula and sjuǽet, and on the other hand the deconstruction of the fabula into a series of narrative motifs and functions. It is hard to find direct references to Aristotle in the works of Šklovsky, Veselovskij or Propp, but in the first study of the Russian formalists, by Victor Erlich (Russian Formalism, 1954)† the debt of the Formalists to the Aristotelian tradition was clearly shown—even though Erlich pointed out correctly that the Formalist notions of fabula and sjuǽet are not strictly coterminous with those of pragma and mythos. Similarly, one could say that Aristotle’s narrative functions are less numerous than those of Propp. But the principle is the same, without a doubt, and this was noticed by the first structuralist critics at the beginning of the 1960s (but it would be unfair not to mention the “Dramatic Situations” of Polti and Souriau, vague descendants of Gozzi—and therefore of an eighteenth-century Italian who had not forgotten Aristotle).
“The narratives of the world are numberless,” wrote Roland Barthes in his “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits.”* “It is thus legitimate that, far from abandoning any idea of dealing with narrative on the grounds of its universality, there should have been (from Aristotle on) a periodic interest in narrative form and it is normal that the newly developing structuralism should make this form one of its first concerns.” In the same issue of Communications in which Barthes’s essay was first published (vol. 8, 1966), Genette’s contribution, “Frontières du récit,” was based on a reading of Aristotle, as was the first articulation of Bremond’s semiology of the story, which could be seen as a meticulous systematization of the formal structures suggested by Aristotle. (Curiously, Todorov, who would show in his other works that he knew Aristotle very well, would base his Grammaire du Dé- cameron on a purely grammatical basis.)
I am not saying that a theory of plot and narrativity emerges only in our century.†” But it is curious that contemporary culture returned to this “strong” aspect of the Poetics at the very time when, as many see it, the form of the novel was entering a period of crisis.
However, to tell and listen to stories is a biological function. One cannot easily escape the fascination of plots in their raw state. If Joyce avoids the rules
