Subject: BHA: RE: Re: Aristotle the joker
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 20:44:59 -0500


Tobin,

To be fair to old Aristotle, I think Greek drama allowed for far less
artistic license than contemporary theater.

P.S. After all these years, now you tell me that one actually has to
*Ulysses* to get it. All these years, I thought Cliffs Notes had done it for
me! Do you think I also need to go back and read the original Shakespeare,
or are the Cliffs Notes better Bill's work than they are for Jim's?


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> [mailto:owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU]On Behalf Of Tobin
> Nellhaus
> Sent: Monday, January 26, 1998 5:19 PM
> To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject: BHA: Re: Aristotle the joker
>
>
> 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 ---
>



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