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G.R.F. FERRARI
ABSTRACT
Against the consensus that Aristotle in the Poetics sets out to give tragedy a role
in exercising or improving the mature citizens moral sensibilities, I argue that
his aim is rather to analyse what makes a work of literature successful in its own
terms, and in particular how a tragic drama can achieve the effect of suspense.
The proper pleasure of tragedy is produced by the plotting and eventual dispelling
of the plays suspense. Aristotle claims that poetry says what is universal not
in order to suggest that poetry achieves anything of the effect of philosophy, but
to explain how in creating his plots the poet takes into consideration what, in
general, could be expected to happen. Chapter 4 of the Poetics is not a theory
of mimesis but an analysis of the lowest common denominator of the pleasure
we take in ctions. The inevitability or likelihood by which events in the tragic
plot are to be connected has an aesthetic rather than a moral function. Doing
away with the irrationality of chance and increasing the human intelligibility of
the action is not its point; the point is to furnish the plot with the second half of
the formula for successful suspense: that events in the plot should happen against
expectation because of one another. The rst half of the formula is examined
under the rubric of peripety or reversal. The formula as a whole describes the
pivotal moment when the pieces of the plot suddenly t with a con guration that
only in retrospect can we see to have been falling into place all along. Pity and
fear are the emotions on which Aristotle focusses because they are the emotions
engaged by the tightening-towards-release of literary suspense. And the pleasure
of catharsis is the pleasure of that release.
University on May 2, 1997, and to thank all the participants in the workshop for their
critique and, not least, their encouragement. The nal version has had the bene t of
helpful advice from the editors of Phronesis.
2
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1986), esp. pp. 378-394; Stephen Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Elizabeth S. Bel ore, Tragic Pleasures:
Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). The
majority of contributions to Am lie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotles Poetics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), when they are not neutral on the issue,
also take this approach. (The volume includes more recent pieces by Nussbaum and
by Halliwell.) The consensus is interestingly congruent with a work that comes at
Aristotle from a Straussian standpoint and argues that he assigns poetry an important
role in the civic education of adults: Carnes Lord, Education and Culture in the
Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). An exception
to the general trend is Malcolm Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987), who questions whether either Aristotle or the pre-
Platonic tradition were didactic. Resistance to the consensus now seems to be build-
ing in connection with the topic of catharsis: see Jonathan Lear, Katharsis, Phronesis
33.3 (1988) 297-326 (reprinted in the Rorty volume); Andrew Ford, Katharsis: the
ancient problem, 109-132 in A. Parker and E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Per-
formativity and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995); Velvet Yates, A sexual
model of catharsis, Apeiron 31.1 (1998) 35-58. Of these, Ford and Yates are the more
wholehearted resisters; Lear in the second, positive part of his article still hankers to
nd an edifying view of tragedy in Aristotle. My own focus in this essay will be
Aristotles theory of the tragic plot rather than catharsis, to which I will turn only
brie y at the end.
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 183
3
The talk is printed in Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions (London: Gollancz,
1946), 178-190.
184 G.R.F. FERRARI
4
Aristotles judgment of history may seem less benighted if the word mllon is
taken to qualify both limbs of the famous pronouncement if the correct translation
is poetry says rather what is universal, history rather what is particular. This would
leave room for a Thucydides.
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 185
5
In Rorty, Essays, p. 243, 253.
6
This is Halliwells explanation in Rorty, Essays, p. 254.
186 G.R.F. FERRARI
tragedy the pleasure derived from the pity and fear. Rather, his claim is
that we nd such images pleasurable despite the disgust we would feel if
confronted with the reality; it is an extreme case to show that the basic
pleasure of mimesis comes from the act of imagination rather than
depending on the nature of the object imagined. Figuring out that this
[the image] is that [the object represented] (1448b16-17) is Aristotles
way of describing what happens when the audience accepts the ction-
makers invitation to imagine a state of affairs. This is appreciation of
ction at the most rudimentary level; and the learning involved is not
such as the moralists require for their interpretation. The appreciation of
tragic drama in all its particularity is a more complex pleasure. Unlike
with the example of pictured corpses, this pleasure depends very much on
the nature of the object imagined, for it is a consequence not simply of
admiration for the playwrights skilful use of his materials but also of such
things as amazement at the intricacies of the plot, and the winding-up and
subsequent release of suspense that is, our fear for the hero. These are
the topics with which Aristotle proceeds to ll his treatise, and nothing
further is said about learning as a component of this complex pleasure,
whose actual components do not nd their grounding in what he says
about mimesis in chapter four, but in what he subsequently says about the
tragic plot.
One of the most important things he has to say about the tragic plot or
myow is that it must be uni ed, and that it will be so if the incidents com-
prising its single action (prjiw) are linked by inevitability or likelihood
(kat t ekw t nagkaon) (e.g. 1450b23-30, 51a12-17, 59a18-21). This
prescription is an obstacle for anyone pursuing a close t between the
action of tragic drama in the Poetics and the analysis of human action to
be found in the ethical and rhetorical works. For one thing, those works
attach no importance to the criterion of unity in the case of prjiw, of
human action; and more decisively, they regard necessity or inevitability
(t nagkaon) as incompatible with that key component of moral action,
deliberation for we do not deliberate about what we hold to be inevit-
able (Nicomachean Ethics 3.3; Rhetoric 1.10.7). The problem cannot be
avoided by playing up the other partner, t ekw, in the pairing of
inevitability with likelihood. If anything, it is inevitability that dominates
the partnership; at any rate, when the paired notion rst appears in the
work, in chapter seven, ekw is absent from the phrase and is represented
by a substitute, w p t pol, for the most part (1450b30).
I propose to embrace rather than be embarrassed by the concept of t
nagkaon in literature, but to do so by treating it as an aesthetic rather
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 187
7
Chapter seven also contains an implicit comparison of dramatic action to a zon,
at 1450b34.
188 G.R.F. FERRARI
8
Thus although Halliwell begins, as I do, by noting that lives rarely have the degree
of cohesion found in the structure of a successful plot (It is precisely . . . the lack of
patterns of coherence in the events of much ordinary life . . . which makes them inad-
equate material for the demands of a poetic plot-structure, Aristotles Poetics, p. 106),
he goes on to give this distinction a didactic twist: Poetry should in some sense rise
above mundane life . . . and elevate human action to a higher level of intelligibility,
so that it acquires something which even the philosopher might recognise as sig-
ni cant (ibid.). On my interpretation of what Aristotle means by the inevitable or
likely connection of events in a plot, a philosophers judgment of what is signi cant
in human action has nothing to do with it.
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 189
nothing random or senseless about either Odysseus hunt for the boar
or his ruse of madness; both were deliberately chosen and purpose-
ful acts, quite intelligible in human terms. (Even if his getting wounded
by the boar was an accident, it was a risk he knew he was taking.)
Aristotle praises Homer for excluding them not because they are events
that, considered singly, just happened to Odysseus, but because they
are events that, taken together, just happen to be connected connec-
ted by virtue of belonging to a single persons life. Nor does Aristotle
say that it is because such a connection would fail to teach the audience
anything universal that it should be avoided, but because it would fail to
constitute the single action of the uni ed tragic plot.9 And the reason why
that in turn matters is that the play would then fail to produce fear and
pity and with them the proper pleasure of tragedy.10
All in all, there has been too much fuss over the modal niceties of
Aristotles appeal to the inevitable or necessary and the likely, the nagkaon
and the ekw. Aristotles main purpose is simply to distinguish events
that happen as a result of or because of each other and never mind
exactly how from events that just happen to be connected. That is why
he proposes alternatives that de ne a broad range inevitability or like-
lihood. The connection must at least not be un-likely, or the audience may
not accept one event as the result of the other. It is the implication also
of the closing sentence of chapter ten, in which, having insisted that what
happens in a tragic plot must follow with inevitability or likelihood from
the foregoing events, Aristotle adds: For it makes a great difference whether
things happen because of one another, or after one another (dia-frei gr
pol t ggnesyai tde di tde met tde, 1452a20-1). Inevit-able or
likely connection of events in effect goes to make up one half of
Aristotles magical though apparently oxymoronic formula for a success-
ful tragic plot: namely, that in it things happen par tn djan di llhla,
against expectation because of one another (1452a4). I have been speak-
ing only of the di llhla portion of this formula; but it is time now to
consider how events in a tragic plot defeat expectation, occur par tn
djan which brings me to the topic of peripety or reversal.
Here again the didactic interpretation nds Aristotle wrestling with the
9
Homer is praised for composing the Odyssey as one action, of the kind I mean
(man prjin oan lgomen tn Odsseian sunsthsen), 1451a28-9.
10
The connection between the unity of tragic action and the proper pleasure of
tragedy is made at 59a19-21; at 52a1-4 this action is speci ed as consisting of pitiable
and fearful events; and at 53b11-13 the poet is said to produce the proper pleasure of
tragedy from pity and fear, through imitation.
190 G.R.F. FERRARI
spectre of chance and of its in uence on human lives; only this time not
attempting to exclude it altogether from the action for the reversal that
distinguishes the complex from the simple plot must arrive in some sense
unexpectedly, par tn djan, as when the messenger from Corinth whose
news is to relieve Oedipus of anxiety turns out on the contrary to con rm
his worst fears. Rather than exclude chance altogether Aristotle would be
coming to artistic terms with it. With his call for events that defeat expec-
tation but nevertheless can be seen to occur because of each other, par
tn djan di llhla, Aristotle would be going as far as he can to rec-
oncile tragedys requirement for intelligibility of human action in its plot-
structure with its recognition of an instability a tragic instability in
human existence; for poetry is more like philosophy than history, and
being philosophical cannot rest easy with the ux of human affairs that
makes for drama, but must nd in it a pattern and an order.11 If there is
a tension between the two limbs of Aristotles formula between events
that defeat expectation and events that result from one another it would
accurately re ect the tragic tension to which all human affairs are subject.
But this account puts more moral and existential weight on the girders
of Aristotles structure than they were designed to bear. Aristotle is not
pitting the intelligibility of human action against those random pressures
that might be thought to render life meaningless, but the intelligibility of
a dramatic plot against those faults of composition that render it merely
episodic. Among these faults is that of connecting events by chance; but
a plot that avoids this error, instead connecting events against expecta-
tion because of one another as prescribed, is not thereby confronting the
responsibility of pitting intelligibility the di llhla against tragic
instability the par djan. That prescription does not in fact pit any-
thing against anything. It is too seldom noticed that the phrase par tn
djan di llhla, despite such translations as Halliwells contrary to
expectation yet still on account of one another,12 or Goldens unexpect-
edly, yet because of one another,13 or Elses contrary to ones expecta-
tion yet logically, one following from the other,14 contains no adversative.
11
Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics, pp. 210-11.
12
Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 42.
13
Leon Golden, trans., O.B. Hardison Jr., comm., Aristotles Poetics: A Translation
and Commentary for Students of Literature (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida,
1981), p. 18.
14
Gerald F. Else, Aristotle: Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1970), pp. 34-5.
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 191
Critics have often aimed the reference of tow toiotouw myouw, plots of
this sort, in the direction of the category events that come about against
expectation because of one another, then launched it on a mighty back-
ward parabola that can safely vault the example of Mitys and leave no
suggestion that his story, being a matter of chance, could make for a supe-
rior plot. They recognize the strain in this leap, but are unsure how to
avoid it. The best way to avoid it, however, is simply to accept that
Mitys story does indeed have the shape of a superior plot, and to be the
less troubled by this after recognizing that the dramatic plot which Aris-
totle subsequently uses to exemplify peripety, and a superior plot by any
standard that of the Oedipus Tyrannus pivots on just this sort of
coincidence.
First we must understand what makes the case of Mitys special among
chance concatenations of events, and for this it is essential to take at full
strength the phrase describing what causes it to amaze, namely that it
sper pthdew fanetai gegonnai. This I translated as looks as if it had
come about on purpose. The phrase cannot simply be classifying the case
of Mitys among events that do not after all have the purpose they might
appear to have, because that classi cation would for Aristotle include the
whole gamut of chance or spontaneous events. To use his standard exam-
ples from the second book of the Physics, the man did not in fact go to
the market-place to meet his debtor and get re-paid but for some other
192 G.R.F. FERRARI
reason, nor did the stool fall on its feet in order to be sat upon; these use-
ful outcomes are incidental (196a33-6, 197b16-18). What Aristotle means,
then, by the claim that those chance events amaze most which look as if
they had come about on purpose, must be that in such cases one is led to
wonder whether the event was in fact chance at all, so providential is the
outcome. By contrast, such mundane strokes of luck as meeting your
debtor at the market, or the stool falling on its feet, are not put down to
providence by anyone, and fail to amaze. But what happened to Mitys
killer seems, as we would say, too good to be true; seems, as we might
also say, just like a story. Exactly: for it meets the criterion of a good
plot, whose events unfold for the audience against expectation because of
one another. The encounter between statue and killer seems to have been
planned all along, although no one was expecting it. It is not the unex-
pectedness alone that makes for amazement, but the emergence of the
unexpected from its causal nexus the fact that the pieces unexpectedly
come together. We who hear the story are not given a surprise out of
nowhere; that is rather what Mitys killer got.
If the encounter between statue and killer only seems to have been planned
all along, the encounter between Oedipus and the messenger from Corinth
who turns out to reveal to the king his awful identity really was planned
all along planned by Sophocles. Nevertheless, it is as striking a coinci-
dence as was the denouement of the Mitys story, both for the characters
in the drama and for those members of the audience who either do not
know that the messenger happens to be the very man who presented the
infant Oedipus to his adoptive father or, if they do, are suf ciently engaged
by the ction to continue to feel its excitement using that capacity we
all have to nd a novel thrilling even on second, third, fourth readings. It
strikes both characters and audience as that particular sort of coincidence
that seems too providential to have been coincidence at all and of course
in the Oedipus story divine retribution is indeed at work. It is not a ques-
tion, though, of deciding whether the reversal of the Oedipus Tyrannus
does or does not t Aristotles de nition of chance. What matters for
Aristotle is that both the Mitys and the Oedipus stories t the criterion of
events unfolding against expectation because of one another. Reversal,
runs the beginning of chapter eleven, occurs when the action shifts in the
opposite direction, as already stated this I take as a reference back to
the defeat of expectation that marks complex tragedy, the fact that rever-
sal emerges par tn djan and this shift [Aristotle continues] comes
about with likelihood or inevitability, as we further (mn . . . d) say; as for
example in the Oedipus . . . (1452a22-25) and this time the backward
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 193
15
Bel ore, Tragic Pleasures, p. 231.
16
Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics, pp. 176-77.
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 195
for the context from which the unexpected situation emerged, that
Aristotle believes will serve the orators purpose an edifying and admon-
itory purpose, since fear, as Aristotle puts it in the same passage, prompts
men to deliberate. But if this in Aristotles view were also the dramatists
goal, his plots, like the orators examples, could as freely have offered the
unexpected shorn of its causal nexus, have presented events that come
par tn djan, but with no attention to their coming also dillhla. At
the other extreme, it is not clear why a plot need include anything unex-
pected at all if its aim is to induce fear for oneself based on sympathetic
pity. A play in which the events unfold exactly as planned, such as the
Medea, or in which the consequences of a deed already committed work
themselves out, such as the Ajax, ought to induce just as much fear at
ones own vulnerability; for we are at least as vulnerable to the suffer-
ing depicted in those plays as we are to that depicted in the Oedipus
perhaps more.
No; the only kind of fear and pity that is maximised by a plot in which
events are connected against expectation because of one another is fear
for the person whose impending fate engages our pity fear for the hero
or heroes of the play. The audience at a tragedy knows, by generic con-
vention if by nothing more de nite, that terrible things are going to hap-
pen, or be only narrowly averted. The onward march of the plot, the di
llhla especially if things seem to be going well, as they often will in
the complex plot builds our fear for the person we care about, the hero,
and with it our pity, to the extent that we do not nd the heros actions
deserving of the noose that tightens about his neck.17 Meanwhile, the
means by which the dramatist will bring about peripety remain hidden
from us. We are constantly expecting the worst; but the good playwright
knows how to make it arrive, despite our expectations, unexpectedly
par tn djan. Disaster strikes, or is narrowly averted, not out of no-
where, but after the suspense has built to the maximum the maximum,
that is, of fear and pity.
The fear, Aristotle explains at one point, is in relation to one like us,
per tn moion (1453a5-6). The thought is absent from the Rhetoric, in
which it is pity that is felt in relation to those like us, while fear is felt
for oneself (2.8.13, 1386a24-28). This is as it should be after all, the
orators task is to move his audience to action, and to that end he must
make them fear for themselves. The dramatists task is rather to engage
17
That Aristotle could speak of feeling pity over an event in the near future is
shown by Rhetoric 2.8.15, 1386b1.
196 G.R.F. FERRARI
his audience in the ction, to bind them with its spell. The principal means
by which he achieves this effect is to make them care enough about the
hero to fear for him, that is to say fear on his behalf. Aristotle offers the
statement that fear comes about in relation to one like us as an explana-
tion of why a plot in which a very bad person moves from good to bad
fortune does not arouse fear. In other words, the audience will not fear on
behalf of a very bad person because a very bad person will not arouse
their sympathetic concern. This way of understanding the audiences fear
also makes sense of why Aristotle declares unfearful a plot in which bad
characters move from ill to good fortune. If a tragedy were meant to
arouse an audiences fear for themselves the fear that bad things could
happen to them why would a plot such as this not do an excellent job
of it? In a world where villains can nd success, let the decent citizen
quake in his bed! Although it is certainly possible for the playwright to
make the audience feel vulnerable by the different expedient of bringing
or threatening disaster on a character whom they think of as themselves,
why would Aristotle consider this expedient the playwrights only option,
as he does, if he also thought that inducing vulnerability in the audience
should be the playwrights goal? Rather, this sort of plot is unfearful sim-
ply because bad things do not happen to its protagonist the bad (but not
very bad) character who ends with good fortune and therefore there is
nothing for the audience to fear on his behalf, even if they could sympa-
thize with him.
The reader will doubtless be wondering how the concept of catharsis
ts with the general interpretation of the Poetics that I have presented
here. It ts very directly. The pleasure of catharsis is the pleasure that the
audience feels when the suspense that has been tightening throughout
the play is suddenly released. It is the pleasure of relief. The relief is not
therapeutic, however, nor does the audience come to the performance in
a pre-existing pathological condition. Rather, their emotional condition is
produced by the performance, and only the performance, brought to a cri-
sis, and so relieved. That emotional condition is sympathetic fear for the
hero and his impending fate. The procedure is homeopathic, but not in the
sense that a pre-existing emotion is healed by applying to it that very same
emotion, rather in the sense that the emotion is relieved by being stimu-
lated and so brought to a crisis. It is in this that tragedy resembles a purg-
ing drug.
To give the full argument for this view of catharsis would be to unbal-
ance this essay. Instead I shall mention the three factors on which it most
crucially depends: rst, accepting the relevance of what is said about
catharsis in the eighth book of the Politics, in which Aristotle gives the
ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 197
18
That is, recognizing that in this context it does not simply mean effecting.
(Notice that in chapter nineteen, 1456a37-b4, when Aristotle speaks of bringing about
or effecting emotions, including those of pity and fear, the verb he uses is paraskeu-
zein.) Rather peranousa here means bringing to an end, bringing to completion.
Tragic catharsis is the completion of what the arousal of pity and fear has begun. Pier
Luigi Donini, in La tragedia, senza la catarsi, Phronesis 43.1 (1998) 26-41, builds
his quite different account of catharsis around a similar understanding of the force of
peranousa. But my construal of tn toiotvn payhmtvn as a subjective genitive
allows me to locate both the process and its completion within each tragedy, whereas
Donini takes tragedy to crown with the clarity of reason a catharsis begun and in large
measure accomplished by the wild, ecstatic music described in the passage of Politics
8. He thus seems to place his reinterpretation within the camp of the didactic inter-
preters. But it is not my intention in this essay to justify my own interpretation of
catharsis against its innumerable competitors. I need only show that it is possible to
understand catharsis in such a way that it ts my overall interpretation of Aristotles
purposes in the Poetics.
19
This was suggested in 1955 in a brief note by Robert Lane The catharsis of
pity and fear, Classical Journal 50.7 (1955) 309-10. But the view of catharsis that
he develops from this insight is quite different from mine.
20
Translating in this way explains why Aristotle refers back to pity and fear as
such emotions rather than these emotions. He is identifying the kind of purge he
means; it is the kind to which such emotions as pity and fear, but also excitement
(nyousiasmw), as in the Politics, do indeed lend themselves. There is a syntactic par-
allel for this, in combination with the subjective genitive, at Eudemian Ethics 1230b18.
Contrasting the self-indulgent person with one who is insensible to pleasure, Aristotle
mentions how rarely we meet with cases of insensibility, and how much more com-
monly with tn tn toiotvn dvn ttan ka asyhsin, the defeat and the sensibil-
ity that such pleasures bring. Here dvn must be construed subjectively with ttan ,
even though not with asyhsin , for the self-indulgent person does not defeat plea-
sures, he is defeated by them, because he is sensible of them. And toiotvn not only
refers back to something in the context but delimits the kind of defeat in question. I
note also the use of the subjective genitive in the phrase met tn to farmkou kyarsin,
after the purging that the drug (hellebore) has effected, in Hippocrates, Internal Affec-
tions 51.46 (although it is not the unanimous reading of the manuscripts).
21
Is catharsis therefore an effect that only complex plots can attain, despite its
inclusion in the general de nition of tragedy? I can imagine two directions which an
198 G.R.F. FERRARI
Aristotelian reply might take. One would be to treat the de nition as normative. Only
well-composed tragedies perform the proper function of tragedy (1452b28-30), and it
is this function that the de nition describes. After all, the plots of many existing
tragedies should not arouse pity and fear by Aristotles criteria (e.g. 1452b34-6), but
pity and fear belong to the de nition of the genre no less than catharsis. A second
direction would be to treat suspense as something that, although best realized by the
complex plot, need not be entirely absent from the simple. We can fear for Medea
and sympathize with her in her plight, wishing that she might yet pull back from the
terrible deed to which she feels driven; and this sympathetic fear is dispelled when
she proceeds to action. Will she really do it? is a question we can ask quite as much
while watching Medea prepare to kill her children as while watching Iphigenia pre-
pare to kill her brother; but the tension is dispelled in a less satisfying way this
would be Aristotles thought if our fears merely play themselves out as we had antic-
ipated they would.