A Broadway View of Aristotle's "Poetics"

Author(s): Forest Hansen

Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 3, No. 1, Special Issue: The Performing Arts in
Aesthetic Education (Jan., 1969), pp. 85-91
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331465
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A BroadwayView of Aristotle'sPoetics

FOREST HANSEN

Increasingly college freshmen arrive on campus with a background

in the humanities that extends beyond studies of English and American
literature. From my experience I judge that about half of them, for
instance, have studied Oedipus Rex. Thanks to broadened curricula
and the diligence of high school English teachers, the need for a
required general education humanities course for college freshmen is
no longer patent. But sometimes the college teacher is faced with the
job of undoing some of that earlier education. This is especially a
problem with respect to understandingGreek tragedy.
From his high school teachers, from outline manuals, or simply
by a kind of cultural osmosis, the college freshman typically has
acquired generalizations about Greek tragedy derived ultimately from
Aristotle's Poetics: that its hero is someone of high estate who falls
low, that he falls because of a "fatal flaw," that tragedy gives us a
catharsis of pity and fear, and so forth. When accepted uncritically,
such generalizations pose difficulties in reading and discussing partic-
ular tragedies. In his excellent book Greek Tragedy (Doubleday
Anchor), H. D. F. Kitto has argued persuasively that Aristotle's theory
simply does not apply to many plays. What is called for, I think, is
a better understanding of the Poetics in order to forestall misapplication
of its concepts. I propose to initiate such understanding by suggesting
how Aristotle derived those concepts.
One common misconception about the Poetics held by those who
have read or heard references to it but have never examined the work
itself is that in it Aristotle laid down certain a priori rules about drama
FOREST HANSEN is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Lake Forest
College. He formerly directed a required freshman humanities course at Lake
Forest and his article "Langer's Expressive Form: An Interpretation" appeared
in a recent issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His primary
interests are the aesthetics of literature and music.
86 HANSEN
FOREST

(or art in general), rules that dictate in a rather arbitrary fashion the
form and content, the purpose, the setting, the characters, the time
sequence, the plotting of a dramatic tragedy. Lincoln Diamant, the
editor of one widely used text, perpetuates that misinterpretation when
he says, "This is a book mainly on how to write plays." It is definitely
not that, but such an interpretation was placed on the Poetics centuries
ago and has stuck like solder. We ought to peel it off, and we can
best do so by looking at the opening lines of Aristotle's lecture:
My design is to treat of Poetryin general,and of its severalspecies;to in-
quire what is the proper effect of each-what constructionof a fable, or
plan, is essentialto a goodpoem- of what,and how many,partseach species
consists;with whateverelse belongs to the same subject.
The aim in this passage is obviously analysis and understanding, not
creation. Aristotle is going to examine poetry, note the different kinds,
and try to determine the underlying principles of those kinds or
species. After listing them and noting in what way they differ (and
in what way they are the same), and after theorizing about the causes
for the origin of poetry, Aristotle says quite clearly that he is not con-
cerned with any revival of the theatre, with any improvement of con-
temporary tragediac writing, with a do-it-yourself drama kit. At the
end of Chapter VI he says,
Whethertragedyhas now, with respectto its constituentparts,receivedthe
utmost improvementof which it is capable, consideredboth in itself and
relativelyto the theatre,is a questionthat belongsnot to this place.
The question that does belong, by implication and by dint of what he
has said and goes on to say, is, "What are the principles of the tragedy
as we know it?" --or, put another way, "What reasonably valid
generalizationscan we make about this and other art forms?"
In order to understand the problem Aristotle poses for himself and
his students, we might update it for ourselves in this manner: what are
the different species of musical drama, and what are the principles
of the species most popular in our time, the Broadway musical? Here
we might distinguish between opera, comic opera, operetta, Broadway
musical, and the Hollywood musical. When we zero our study in on the
Broadway musical, as Aristotle did on tragedy, we might spend some
brief time on its history as an outgrowth of the operetta and early
musical drama, but like him we would spend most of our time not on
history but on an analysis of this artistic form and on developing some
generalizations on the basis of particular musicals. Now, just how
might we do this?
In the first place, in order to do such analysis, we obviously would
 POETICS
VIEWOF ARISTOTLE'S
A BROADWAY 87

have to be familiar with musicals. This does not mean that we must be
acquainted with all musicals ever created. One can talk sensibly about
the epic form on the basis of a study of the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and
Paradise Lost, although hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other epics
have been written. Aristotle, in fact, made his generalizations on the
basis of only two epics. But certainly one would have to know a fair
percentage (you see how vague this is) of works.
We have only thirty-two Greek tragedies, all of them written by
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We know that these playwrights
created around three hundred tragedies, and that there were a good
many other Greek writers producing in competition with them. Quite
possibly from the earliest play of Aeschylus to the time of Aristotle's
lecture (probably around 330 B.C.), two thousand Greek tragedies
had been publicly performed in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens.
Aristotle mentions forty-two plays. One could safely assume that he did
not cite every play he was familiar with, but even if we credit him with
a knowledge of two or three times as many plays, this gives him only a
small percentage of the total productions. But he is obviously familiar
with Greek tragedies.
In the second place, one could write about musicals -as about
tragedies - without having witnessed them on the stage. One ought
to have seen a few musicals, I suppose, in order to stimulate one's
imagination into picturing possible costumes, stage setting, etc. - what
Aristotle calls "spectacle" or "decoration." But one can fairly be said
to "know" a musical on the basis of listening to records, just as Aristotle
says (II, 14) that one can get the full impact of Oedipus from hearing
it read. At the time of Aristotle's lecture, the great age of Greek drama
was seventy-five years past, Sophocles and Euripides having died in
405 and 406 B.C. His acquaintance with their great works and with
those of Aeschylus may have come through productions of the old
"classics"in his day or through only a reading of those plays. Certainly
he argues that a reading would be sufficient for any good plays - i.e.,
plays that do not depend for their effect largely on "decoration"
(what we call "stage effects," with the same slightly derogatory
connotation).
In the third place, essential to any such analysis would be a
familiarity with the best that had been written and produced. In our
study of the musical, one could conceivably disregard The Pajama
Game, Wonderful Town, Top Banana, and perhaps even Fiddler on the
Roof, The Music Man, Fiorello, and Camelot at no great peril. But
88 HANSEN
FOREST

certainly if no reference were made to Oklahoma, Brigadoon, South

Pacific, The King and I, or My Fair Lady, and if the principles derived
were inapplicable to any of these works, we would think the study
misdirected in some important way. By the same token, the playwrights
cited most often by Aristotle are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides,
and the main plays cited are generally their best ones. In brief, the
method for analyzing the form of the musical would be analogous to
Aristotle's implied method for studying the form of the tragedy:
examine the best instances and discover their artistic principles.
This method usually brings students up short, whether they encounter
it in Aristotle himself, in neo-classicists like Matthew Arnold who tell
us to read the "classics" and use them as standards in developing our
poetic taste and judgment, or in the arguments of classroom teachers
endeavoring to instruct and refine poetic sensibility. The rebuttal
usually is, "But how do we know that the classics are good?" - with all
the insinuations of the popularized, extreme, and inconsistent relativism
that seems so early to infect young people today. In terms of our
analogy, how does one answer such a question: "What are the best
musicals?"
One answer is, "Inspect them and you'll see." To anyone who
attends to the performances of Pajama Game and Brigadoon, say, it
should be obvious that Brigadoon is the better musical. This is not
because the critics have said so (if any have) or because Brigadoon
had a longer run (if it did) or because it sold more records (if that is
the case). One simply perceives that it is better, if not in the same way
that we perceive that someone is taller than someone else, then in
something like the way we perceive that Lyndon Johnson was a better
President than--to be on the safe side--Harding, or that a well-
constructed house of brick is better than one of straw. This is a
respectable answer, I think, or could be made into one, although
students might not be satisfied by it. But it is not Aristotle's answer.
His is more complete and perhaps more satisfying. Continuing our
analogy of the musical, we might construct in its terms an answer
like his.
Musicals are generally built around the theme of romantic love. This
might be presented as a man pursuing a woman, a woman pursuing a
man, or without pursuit a couple gradually falling in love with each
other, perhaps even contrary to their conscious wishes. In the end they
are happily joined, usually after an argument, a temporary break-up, or
a threat to the position or even life of one of the characters. A
 POETICS
VIEWOF ARISTOTLE'S
A BROADWAY 89

secondary romantic situation provides a contrast to the love of the

principal characters. While the theme of romantic love permeates the
show, however, there is a superficial problem presented as the main
plot, at the beginning at least, so that the audience sees love emerge
out of the soil of the surface situation and finally come to full bloom.
So much can be said about virtually all musicals. From this, and from
the experiencing of this art form, it is apparent that what it aims at is
an arousal of the feelings associated with romantic love: first the
feeling of infatuation, then the feeling of frustration, and finally the
feeling of wholesome fulfillment. To paraphrase (or perhaps parody)
Aristotle, it aims at the arousal of the feeling of pity for the longing
lover, fear that he will not reach his goal, and then catharsis when he
does and all's right with the world. From this it would follow that the
best musicals are those which best succeed in arousing those emotions
and their catharsis, giving us at the end a delightful feeling that people
and the world are pretty fine and that true, pure, untroubled, idyllic
romantic love is possible- even for us. Then, in turn, we could ex-
amine those musicals which give us that feeling most strongly, and con-
clude that since in them, say, the man usually pursues the woman, the
threat is not to body but to peace of mind, the secondary love plot ends
in sadness,and the superficialplot resolves in a trite moral like "material
selfishness is a bad thing" - then, if we found these particular com-
plications in all or most of those musicals, we could call them principles
or rules of the musical.
This, I suggest, is the method Aristotle implicitly sets forth and
supposes himself to employ in the Poetics. Using it, he concludes that
the aim of tragedy is to arouse pity and fear and to effect a catharsis
of those emotions. On the basis of what plays best accomplish this
aim he rounds out his definition or description of tragedy as "an
imitation of some action that is important, entire, and of a proper
magnitude," an imitation that involves unexpected actions which occur
not by chance but as a consequence of other actions, that depicts the
change of fortune from prosperity to adversity of a person neither
eminently virtuous nor villainous but someone whose character is
better than most, who has fame and success, and who falls from his
high position through an "error of human frailty." To these main
features of a good tragedy, Aristotle adds numerous secondary ones. He
acknowledges that no play has all of them, nor is it vital that a good
play have even most of them. But the best plays generally exhibit most
of these characteristics.
90 FOREST
HANSEN

However clarifying my assertions may be up to this point, they will

hardly shock the student or teacher versed in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.
Since for high school students this is usually the first and most intensely
studied Greek play (sometimes the only one in the high school syllabus),
Aristotle's concepts of the tragic hero, the tragic flaw, pity and fear,
and catharsis are often quickly and then tenaciously accepted. Oedipus
Rex clearly exemplifies and endorses them. But these concepts simply
interfere with a proper reading of many other Greek plays. Antigone,
Medea, and Agamemnon are, I suspect, the most widely studied
tragedies after Oedipus Rex. Of these, only the first can usefully be
examined in accordance with Aristotelian principles.
Pity and fear are simply not aroused, for instance, by Agamemnon.
This is not because Aeschylus failed in achieving that end but because
he aimed at something else. If one wants to put it into psychological
or emotional terms, he aimed at arousing our awe and our sense of just
punishment for evil-doers. We pity Oedipus because he is, on the whole,
a good man, and it is sad that this fundamentally admirable person is
brought down, even if ultimately through his own fault. His faults are
forgivable; they are far outweighed by his merits. As Aristotle puts it,
he is an image of a man better than us, of man as he ought to be, not
as he is. We fear, says Aristotle rightly, because we recognize that the
same thing (in a general way) could happen to us. This is partly
because of our identification with Oedipus in reading or seeing the
play, partly because we simply recognize it as exemplifying the fact that
one can never be sure life will deal out rewards and punishments with
any fairness; thus we or people close to us--our friends or parents
or children - might also suffer no matter how careful and good we are.
What about Agamemnon? Who pities him? From the beginning
Aeschylus makes us realize that he is a bad man, and this portrayal of
him is slowly and irrevocably intensified until it reaches a pitch in
Cassandra's long speech. As Kitto suggests, we simply wait for the ax
to fall, and by the time it does - in spite of our lack of sympathy for
Clytaemnestra- we say to ourselves, "At last! That nasty man is done
away with!" We know, further, that the same thing is going to happen
to that nasty woman, and we can hardly wait for it to happen. So we
rush to the second play of the trilogy and read greedily until we
watch her get hers too. We do not identify with Agamemnon, or
Clytaemnestra, or Cassandra,or any of the characters. We stand apart
from them, knowing that what happens to them is not going to happen
to us, because we do not murder and otherwise ill treat people the way
 VIEWOF ARISTOTLE'S
A BROADWAY POETICS 91

they do. Contrasts with The Eumenides, the third play in Aeschylus's
trilogy, are even more marked. That play ends, in fact, on an essen-
tially happy note!
Where and why did Aristotle go wrong? The answer to the first
question is relatively simple: he did not in fact follow the method he
proposed. Though Aristotle evinces great respect for Aeschylus and
Euripides, he constructs his theory almost wholly on the principles
implicit in Sophocles's tragedies, especially Oedipus Rex. (It is no
wonder then that the stated principles can be used in analyzing that
play.) This is similar to someone purporting to do a Poetics on
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama but actually restricting himself to a
consideration of Shakespeare'splays; or, to use my analogy, someone
claiming to make a study of light musical drama and discussing this
wholly in terms of the musical a la Lerner and Lowe or Rodgers and
Hammerstein, without acknowledging that he is neglecting to treat -
though he might mention incidentally - the somewhat different form
of operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.
The answer to the second question is more complicated and can only
be suggested here. A play like Oedipus Rex, which depends for its
effect on plot - which has for its essence, one might say, plot action -
is much more comparable to a biological entity: it progresses,it grows, it
develops toward an end in both senses of the word. A play of character
or mood - like those of Aeschylus and Euripides - does not do this
so apparently. Aristotle's whole metaphysics, with its emphasis on
organicism and teleology, makes him predisposed to admire Sophocles.
Oedipus Rex fits in nicely with his larger philosophical position.
Aristotle's Poetics, then, ought not to be taken as the last word on
Greek tragedy. By no means should this be construed as total dis-
paragement of Aristotle or of the use of his concepts in teaching
students to analyze drama. They are relevant to Sophoclean tragedy
and to much later drama as well. Particularly in the Renaissance and
the early eighteenth century, dramatic creation as well as criticism took
its cue from (an often uncritically accepted) Aristotelian literary theory.
In addition, part of the force of a play such as Death of a Salesman
derives from a conscious opposition to those principles. The Poetics
remains one of the hallmarksnot only of literary theory but of the larger
field of aesthetics. But like many great works, it can easily become
part of an unexamined way of thinking. Its shortcomingsshould also be
appreciated.