Poetics

I took Aristotle's Poetics to work today, another relic from my time as an undergraduate that I didn't recall very well, and I ended up hitting upon several interesting passages. Poetics is of course a deconstruction of epic and tragedy in classical literature and has exerted a powerful influence over western dramatic criticism that cannot be overstated; I could hardly not read it.

What I found most interesting is Aristotle's assertion that tragedy reflects the lives of people better than those around us. To simplify his argument, the tragic model depends on disaster befalling good people. He goes on to write:

Since tragedy is an imitation of people better than we are, one should imitate good portrait-painters. In rendering the individual form, they paint people as they are, but make them better-looking. In the same way the poet who is imitating people who are irascible or lazy or who have other traits of character of that sort should portray them as having these characteristics, but also as decent people. (Poetics, 8.1, trans. Malcolm Heath, Penguin 1996, p.25)

It occurred to me that this description of the ideal tragedy was in fact what irked critics of both epic and tragedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aristotle's proposal that the tragic subject should be innately better than real people in spite of any flaws they possess cannot be reconciled with the principals of Commonwealth and post-Restoration societies, which were partly acting in response to Christian idealism. For many critics, Milton and Dryden among them, a perfect (or even superior) hero could not be synonymous with a flawed hero; the flaws provided an insurmountable obstacle to achieving perfection or superiority. Why should an irascible, lazy character be superior to those surrounding him?

I think to most modern readers this sounds a reasonable complaint so perhaps it is surprising how relatively recently it arose. This objection had seen some light in earlier centuries - Odysseus appears in Dante's purgatory undergoing punishment for crimes of fraudulence during the Trojan war - but it was during the seventeenth century that it first appeared with frequency. Reaction then was variously Miltonian, as I began to discuss in my previous entry, or comic (Behn, Dryden, and later Fielding). Note also that it was here that the lines between epic and tragic began to blur.

I couldn't comment conclusively on how the dilemma was resolved in nineteenth-century literature but it seems to me that the later twentieth century saw a revival of the classical model of the hero who is flawed yet still superior to his fellow men. For example, the action-men heroes of the late 1970s through to the early 1990s (Rocky Balboa, Max Rockatansky, John McClane, Costner's Robin Hood, Martin Riggs) are don't respect authority, are anti-intellectual, lack conventional manners, and perhaps use a native slyness to win the day; nevertheless they are invariably innately better than the characters who surround them and it is they that the audience cheers for. There are of course variants (Indiana Jones is an obvious example of the intellectual action hero) but the formula is generally the same. Like Aristotle's description of the tragic subject, these epic heroes are painted as they are, as everymen, but made better-looking - given, in short, a kind of intrinsic nobility that real everymen don't possess.

But I'm getting side-tracked. I don't believe that Aristotle addresses the conflict between superior and flawed heroes later on in his Poetics - I'd be very surprised if he does, in fact - but I'm interested to see what else he has to say. So far it has been an enlightening read.