Subject: BHA: Re: Aristotle the joker
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 00:18:51 +0200


Hi Michael--

Actually I'm not specially a fan of music and spectacle--though they can be
great.  The primacy of plot over everything else isn't the issue (although I
should note that this may be true for Western drama, but it certainly isn't
for classical Sanskrit drama, which focuses on "mood" [rasa], an issue that
Aristotle ignores).  But one doesn't have to be a Broadway fanatic to reject
Aristotle's claim that reading a play can give the *same* experience as
attending a performance.  First, the actors' rendition of the characters'
action and speech is not likely to be precisely what you imagined, nor for
that matter is the set or anything else--in fact, it's not likely to be
exactly what the *director* imagined (and can even be better, due to actors'
and designers' own contributions).  This is no small matter: consider the
difference between, say, Hamlet giving his "To be or not to be" speech alone
on stage, vs giving it while Polonius and Claudius are spying on him from
behind while egging Ophelia to approach him.  The difference is clearly one
of social context and social meaning, which leads me to my second point: the
experience of attending a performance is a social occasion distinct from any
form of reading or recitation.  Having an actor stand an armslength away and
slowly name the dead at Agincourt straight to your face will almost
certainly take your attention and constitute you as a witness in a way that
reading *Henry V* probably won't.  Attending *King Lear*, which is at least
partly about the horrors of sundering a kingdom, in an audience that
included the newly enthroned James I, who began reunifying one (check the
date!), is not the same as watching it on PBS with William F. Buckley
mouthing pieties about universal truths.  *Nothing* in the *Poetics*
addresses the social dynamics of performance (unless one wants to count the
catharsis business, which is pretty dodgy textually, but in any case is more
psychological than social).  This latter point returns me to my earlier
criticism, that Aristotle's four causes don't handle social relations very
well; and I would say that in the *Poetics*, he doesn't think socially at
all.  (I think this was one of Brecht's underlying contentions with
Aristotle, though not exactly expressed as such; and certainly Brecht's
arguments for estrangement, distanciated acting and so forth concern
performative issues not considered by the Stagarite.  Given the constant
emphasis Brecht placed on these concerns, I can't agree that he viewed
presentation as secondary.)  In short, as I see it, the claim that reading
and seeing a play can give the same experience involves the elimination of
the social aspects of the performance event and its reduction to the stage
presentation, and the reduction of the stage presentation to the words.
It's like saying, "Oh, just read the Cliff Notes--you can get Joyce's
*Ulysses* from the plot synopsis."

My copies of the *Poetics* are in the U.S. (local translations are probably
all into Finnish or Swedish), so I have to depend on memory, but Nietzsche
didn't invent dithyrambs out of thin air: whatever the nuances or
obscurities, the *Poetics* definitely talks about tragedy emerging from
dithyrambs.  Actually, as I recall Aristotle offers *two* origins of
tragedy--the other was, I think, from the mimes.  I remember extensive
(critical) discussions of both notions in Gerald Else's commentaries.
Neither idea makes much sense.

I'm not trashing Aristotle wholesale.  And I didn't mean to hammer on and
on.  Still, while Aristotle is good on some things, some of his statements
about literature and drama amaze me.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net *or* tobin.nellhaus-AT-helsinki.fi
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce





     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---