Did you know that Hollywood execs assess screenplays using 'exactly' the same criteria found in Aristotle? Or that Rocky can be analysed following the 'story structure' of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which the Daddy of Lit.Crit examined to demonstrate 'timeless universal truths' about drama?
And did you know that Aristotle talked about 'the three unities of dramatic action: time, place, and action'?
Neither did I!
Poor Aristotle, and poor us! Crumpling under this veritable barrage of howlingly wrong interpretations of an ancient fragment of literary criticism by a terrific guy who was writing a work-in-progress, always looking out for new ideas, testing out his theories and modifying them as he went along.
To treat his Poetics as a completed and revised treatise of the art and craft of drama is an insult. He wasn't interested in setting the Ten Commandments on How To Write a Play in stone. And, my God, he'd be furious if he could see how perversely his work has been mangled and torn and chewed over (and spat out on poor aspiring screenwriters' scripts).
Let's for once give this man the courtesy and respect of reading what he actually wrote, and put a stop, once and for all, to putting words into his mouth.
The Big One:
'A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessaity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.
A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.'
Let's look at the definition of 'middle'. It seems like tautology, but the context shows that the word 'follows' here marks a causal sequence, not a mere temporal sequence. So the 'middle' unlike the 'beginning' stands in casual relation to what goes before, and unlike the 'end' is causally linked to what follows.
THERE IS NO ATTEMPT TO MARK AT WHICH POINT THE 'MIDDLE' IS TO BE PLACED
What's absolutely crucial about Aristotle's ideas about the unity of tragic action is that it is an organic unity, an inward principle which reveals itself in the form of an outward whole. And what he's stressing is that the incidents of the play must be connected together by an inward and causal bond. Also, he makes a point of not laying down any precise rules about the length of a play.
Related to this is a brilliant parenthesis in his Simple and Complex Plot section which has been hijacked, uncredited, by many unoriginal minds as if they're thought it up all by themselves!
'(There is a crucial difference between one thing happening merely after something else, and the same thing happening because of it)'
There's a whole lot more I could add, but haven't got time now. But for now I'll just go back to those quotes I gave at the start.
1. I don't know how any criteria of assessment can be 'exactly' the same as those used by Aristotle on Greek Tragedies when there are quite a few times when his remarks are at complete variance to what the plays are actually like. And anyway, which criteria are these guys using? Much of Aristotle's work has been so profoundly misinterpreted by others, most people go by 'interpretations' (usually wrong ones) written later.
This is a whole new topic - maybe I'll get back to this one.
2. No, Aristotle never talked about 'Unity of Place'. Like so many Renaissance scholars and writers, the Italian theorist Lodovico Castelvetro wildly misunderstood the ancient philosopher's words, and made up 'The Three Unities' (of time, place and action). Unfortunately, everyone assumed this was a prescriptive from Aristotle himself.
I 'm definitely coming back to Hollywood and Aristotle in another blog.
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Hi Pauline,
I have thought some similar things about the way people portray Aristotle's work in Poetics. Often there is a heavy emphasis on rehashing popular themes from secondary commentary about Poetics, when the initial basis for someone using that theme was a misinterpretation.
I commented on a blog post (http://thestorydepartment.com/reviewed-poetics-by-aristotle) a few weeks ago about this:
You’re right that many people misread Aristotle’s Poetics.
Sometimes this is due to reading a particular translation and placing great emphasis on the specific wording. Although, since english versions are translated, this clinging to specific wording is often unhelpful. There are also some very major differences between translations. Some are minor word choice issues but some convey entirely different meanings of key features of the book.
Often, people will also pay more attention to secondary commentary (often based on a translation) than to the original and perpetuate popular misreadings or exaggerations.
I think Poetics is a good book, but many people could also benefit from thinking about how Aristotle came to write it (I’ve also seen a lecture from Yale in which a professor claimed that Aristotle's students wrote it based on their lecture notes but I don’t know if that claim is based on convincing evidence): he watched a lot of plays and arrived at decisions on what he considered to work or not work and wrote about it. This is something that anyone can do now, without worrying about what other people say about how storytelling is or should be done. Abstract theory is only useful to the extent that it is an accurate description of what actually happens in practice, and a description can only ever be partial. Real understanding of stories is gained from having experience of real stories.
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