There is, then, another reason why our age has been fascinated by the theory of plot. The fact is that we have convinced ourselves that the model of the pair fabula/narrative discourse, pragma and mythos, serves not only to explain the literary genre that in English is called fiction. Every discourse has a deep structure that is narrative or can be developed in narrative terms. I could cite Greimas’s analysis of Dumézil’s introduction to his Naissance d’archanges,* where the scientific text manifests a polemical structure that emerges in the shape of academic coups-descène, struggles against opponents, victories and defeats. In The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) I tried to show how one can find a story even beneath the (apparently plotless) text that opens Spinoza’s Ethics: “Per causam sui intelligo id cujus essentia involvit existentiam; sive id cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens” (By cause of itself, I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing).
There are at least two inset fabulae here. One concerns a grammatically implicit agent (ego) who carries out the action of understanding or signifying and by so doing moves from confusion to a clearer knowledge of God. Let’s remember that if “intelligo” interpreted as “I understand” or “I recognize,” then God remains an object that is not modified by the action, but if one translates that verb as “I want to signify” or “I want to say,” then the agent sets up, through the act of selfdefinition, his object of discourse (he makes it exist as cultural object).
However, this object, with its own attributes, is the subject of another story.
It is a subject that performs an action through which, through the fact of being, it exists. It seems that nothing happens in this adventure about the nature of God, since there is no temporal interval between the actualization of his being and the actualization of his existence (in fact, neither of these ever moves from some preceding potential to the act, because they have always been there), nor does his existence, when it comes, change his essence. Certainly this is an extreme case, where both action and the passing of time are at zero degrees (which equals infinity), and God acts always in his self-manifestation, uninterruptedly and forever producing the fact that he exists through the simple fact that he is. It is not much for an adventure story, but it is enough for the essential conditions of a fabula to emerge. There is no coup-de-scène, perhaps, but this depends on the reader’s sensitivity. The Model Reader of a story like this is a mystic or a metaphysics expert, a textual cooperator who is able to feel the most intense emotions at this nonstory whose exceptional nature never ceases to strike him like a thunderbolt. Even the Amor Dei Intellectualis is a burning passion, and one feels a stupefied and continual sense of surprise in recognizing the presence of Necessity.
If, then, our age discovers that every philosophical or scientific discourse can also be read as a narrative, this may be happening now because, more than in any other epoch, science and philosophy (perhaps even to deal with the crisis of the novel) present themselves (it has been said) as grand narratives. This does not mean—as happens for some people—that by being narratives they do not have to be judged in terms of their truth. They simply want to express some truth by using a structure that is attractive in a narrative sense. And if then the great philosophical narratives do not seem sufficient, we have seen that instead of going to look for truth in the philosophers of the past, much contemporary philosophy has gone to look for it in Proust or Kafka, Joyce or Mann. Thus it is not so much that philosophers have given up pursuing the truth as that art and literature have also taken on that function. But these are marginal observations, and Aristotle does not come into them.
The Poetics has many faces. One cannot have a fertile book without it also producing contradictory results. Among my first discoveries of the modernity of Aristotle, I remember a book by Mortimer Adler, who had worked out an aesthetics of film based on Aristotelian principles. In his Art and Prudence he gave the following definition: “A film is a representation of a completed action, of a certain length, using a combination of images, sound effects, music and other things.”* Perhaps this definition was a bit scholastic (Adler was a Thomist who also inspired Marshall McLuhan), but the idea that although the Poetics was not capable of defining “high” literature, it was still of use as a perfect theory of popular literature and art was upheld by other authors as well.†”
I do not accept the idea that the Poetics cannot define “high” art, but it is certainly the case that, with its insistence on the laws of plot, it is particularly suited to describing the strategies of the mass media. The Poetics is certainly the theory of, among others things, the John Ford-style Western—and not because Aristotle was a prophet but because whoever wants to put on stage or screen an action using plot (which is what a Western does without any clutter) cannot do other than follow what Aristotle had perceived. If telling stories is a biological function, Aristotle had already understood all that was needed from this biology of narrativity.
The mass media are not alien to our biological tendencies; on the contrary, the media could be accused of being human, all too human. The problem, if it exists, lies in the question whether the pity and terror they provoke genuinely lead to a catharsis; but if one understands catharsis in its homeopathically minimalist sense (have a good cry and you’ll feel better), they are, in this minimalist state, applied Poetics.
One could even say that if we stick to Aristotelian ideas for the construction of a mythos that will produce an effective ergon, we can only fall into mass-media syndrome. Coming back to Poe, if we read only the pages that he devotes to the production of emotions which he saw as his aim, we would think we were dealing with a screenwriter for Dallas. Since he wanted to write a poem that would produce an impression of melancholy (“since Melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones”) in a little over one hundred lines, he wondered which was the most depressing of all melancholic subjects, and concluded that it was death, and that the most melancholy death was that of a beautiful woman, “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”
If Poe had stuck only to these principles, he would have written Love Story. Luckily he knew that if plot is the dominant element in every story, it must however be tempered with other elements. He avoided the mass-media trap (albeit an antelitteram one) because he had other formal principles. Hence his calculation of the number of lines, his analysis of the musicality of the word “Nevermore,” and the deliberate visual contrast between Pallas’s white breast and the blackness of the raven, and everything that makes “The Raven” a poetic composition and not a horror film.
But we are still dealing with Aristotle. Poe calculated an appropriate and organic mixture of lexis, opsis, dianoia, ethos, melos. That is how he put flesh on the bare bones of a mythos. The mass media can make us cry, and offer us consolation, but they usually do not allow us to purify ourselves while enjoying a “great creation” that has been well structured. When they do do this, and for me the Ford of Stagecoach certainly does do this, then they really do achieve the ideals of the Poetics.
We come to the last ambiguity. The Poetics is the first work to develop a theory of metaphor. Ricoeur (quoting Derrida on this topic, who says that in Aristotle the defined is implicated in the person who defines) observes that, in order to explain metaphor, Aristotle created a metaphor, borrowing it from the order of movement.* In fact, the Aristotelian theory confronts us with the fundamental problem of all philosophies of language, namely, whether metaphor is a departure from an underlying literalness or the birthplace of every degree zero of writing.
Although it is true that I remain faithful to a theory of interpretation that, when dealing with written texts, must presuppose a literal degree zero from which metaphor is the departure that must be interpreted, it is also true that if we look at things from the glottogonic point of view (whether at the origins of language, as Vico wanted, or at the origins of every text that comes into being), we must take account of the moment when creativity can emerge, for it does so only at the cost of a metaphorical vagueness that names an object that is as yet unknown or unnamed.
The cognitive power of metaphor on which Aristotle insisted—though
