Some Aristotelian principles--
1) Genre and generic attributes
Aristotle sought to anchor his definitions of literary genres in
exemplary works and authors. Of tragedians, he considered Sophocles the best,
and his Oedipus Tyrannus ("Oedipus the King") the finest example. That's
immediately debatable because great works by two other major tragedians survived
(Aeschylus and Euripides). In the case of epics, his task was easier because
only one author's work were widely known to him, those of Homer. According to
Aristotle, the lost Homeric mock battle narrative, Margites, is to comic
drama as the Iliad and the Odyssey are to tragedy. Note that this
suggests genres originate in pairs, each balancing qualities the other excells
in with qualities it lacks and its partner has in abundance. When
distinguishing between epic and tragedy, he said epic has a multiplicity of
plots, each of which is fully developed in the epic's larger scope, but the
tragedy is a compressed development of a single plot. Aristotle says epics
have a major advantage over tragedy because of their multiplicity of incident,
the capacity to enlarge its action to incorporate several series of events
which may have happened simultaneously [representing them in narrative series
by means of flashbacks, etc.].
2) Mimesis / Imitation
For Aristotle, all literature is an art of imitation (Gk. mimesis,
whence "mime"). As artists imitated life to produce their literature,
audiences would be inspired to imitate, in some fashion, what they read, heard
or saw on the stage. The social function of epic as an exemplar of good
behavior was easier for Aristotle to assume in Classical Greece. Recently, the
hero-aesthetic has been dethroned as a necessary and great model of human
aspiration, at least as it motivates citizens to become warriors. Comedy
produced an immediate problem for Aristotle, however, since comedies tend to be
about bad behavior and people doing ugly, immoral, or ridiculous things. He
accepted that the primary object of comedy as imitation: imitation of low
characters--not morally bad, but ludicrous, ugly but not painful or
destructive. He defended comedies mimetic representation of ludicrous behavior
because it would incite audiences to avoid its imitation.
3) Proper proportion
A tragedy imitates action that is serious, complete, and of an
appropriate magnitude (neither trivial nor too vast).
4) Literature's function
The tragedy evokes two kinds of emotions, pity and fear, in order to
cleanse the mind of dangerous but natural human tendencies, especially
overgrown pride in our accomplishments. This emotional purging (katharsis),
when shared by the whole population, restored the city to health.
5) Character construction
Tragic characters all have two qualities by which we judge them:
thought and character. In order of importance, proper characters should have
the following qualities: goodness in a moral sense, appropriateness to social
mores, truth to life (probability in small details), and consistency (i.e.,
not disturbingly divided in nature).
6) Sub-components of dramatic theater
Tragedies have these six parts: plot, character, diction, thought,
spectacle (today, "special effects"), and song.
7) Literature and human nature
According to Aristotle, our qualities are determined by our characters,
those basic combinations of traits we were born with or develop as we grow, but
we are made happy or wretched by our actions. Therefore, the great literature
concentrates on showing us those actions at crucial moments and the "first
principle" of any drama is its plot (i.e., the action). A perfect
tragedy should imitate complex actions (see #12) that excite pity and fear (#4)
while leading a man who is extraordinarily good and just to misfortune by some
error of judgment or frailty of character. That "frailty of character" is the
famous "tragic flaw" or hamartia, actually something closer to a "tragic
imbalance"
8) Completeness of a work of literature ("unities of
form and time")
The key qualities in the construction of a tragedy's plot are: it has a
beginning, middle, and end (i.e., is complete); and it is of appropriate size
to be "easily embraced in one view" or "easily embraced by the memory" [long
enough to move a character "from calamity to good fortune, or from good fortune
to calamity." For this reason, Aristotle says good plays resemble living
organisms. (This idea has a rebirth in Romanticism's "organic form" theory.)
An "episodic" plot is: one that moves from incident to incident without
necessary or probable cause. You can still find modern literary reviews that
condemn a work's plot as "episodic," though since Modernism, fiction has tended
to test that boundary and many of the rest Aristotle tried to establish.
9) "Unity of action"
In addition to unity of form and time, Aristotle also said a plot should
be unified. However, definitions of this tend to be circular: the plot centers
around an action that is unified.
10) Poetry vs. history--the "truth" problem
The ancients and medieval theorists were troubled that poetic works of
all kinds (narrative fiction, drama, lyrics) are technically lies. isn't
lying a bad thing, something to be punished. Aristotle saw the poet and
historian as his opposing binary opposites to solve this problem. The poet's
job differs from the historian's in that: the historian must relate what
happened, but the poet may relate what may (or may have) happened. (Also see
Sidney, "Defense of Poesy.")
11) Simple vs. complex plots
While Aristotle tended to favor literary traits that unified, he was not
against complexity, itself. For him, a complex plot is distinguished from a
simple one because it has one or both of these special features which produce
important effects in the audience: reversal of expectations ("peripeteia")
and/or recognition (usually of someone's identity, often of one's own true
identity ["anagnorisis"]). Both of these events occur nearly simultaneously
near the end of Oedipus Tyrannus. Aristotelian analysis divides the
play's action into two parts complication and unraveling, the latter of which
might begin with the reversal of expectations and end with the self-discovery or
recognition scene.
12) Literature and the "agon"
Like most Classical Greeks, Aristotle saw most of the universe as a
pattern of struggle, or "agon," in which opposed forces battled for
supremacy. Tragedy and epic, alike, according to Aristotle, might develop a
kind of collision between opposing character types in which one must subdue the
other. He said tragedy should have a "double thread," which can be identified
by: its concern for two groups of actors whose ends are opposite because of
their opposite natures (e.g., in epic, Odysseus' triumphant return vs. the
suitors' destruction; in tragedy, Antigone's unwavering insistence on the old
burial customs' vs. Creon's equally stubborn demand that she obey the city's law
as he has articulated it).
13) Spectacle / Special Effects vs. Tragic or Comic
effects
Aristotle distinguished clearly between works which operated upon the
audience's minds by manipulating the emotions via thoughtful processes from
those which sought their impact by shocking the audience with scenes which were
taboo in ordinary social life (e.g., murders, open sexuality, violent
accidents). The movies, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street,
and all their many imitators, are examples of tragedies that use spectacle to
move the audience's emotions. An alternative means of moving the audience's
emotions is having painful circumstances strike those who are either friends or
related to each other (esp. blood relations).
14) Tradition and the Individual Talent
T.S. Eliot's essay by that name (collected in The Sacred Wood,
816 E421Ks), describes the process by which great art derives from the teachings
and examples of previous eras' greatest works. However, this raises the
question of how much change can be made in plots or characters or situations
borrowed from previous works. For the Greeks, the problem was religious, since
the mythic stories of the gods and heroes which were adapted by the playwrights
were still part of functioning Greek religion in the Classical era. Aristotle
says there is one restriction on the poet's adaptation of legends: "he may not
destroy the framework of the received legends." Obviously, this raises the
same "essentialist" question we see in other Aristotelian principles of
interpretation and creation. Who can say what the "framework" is and what is
non-essential? Did Helen go to Troy, or did the Trojans and Greeks fight over a
phantom sent by the gods to destroy them? Can that kind of question be raised
by a work of literature, or does that somehow violate the "rules"?
15) Poetry, Inspiration and Madness
Unlike Plato, whose "Ion" attempts to prove poets are out of their minds
when they compose, Aristotle allowed more room for the poet's witting craft to
produce literature. However, Aristotle believes really great poets must be
either specially gifted (able to imitate any kind of human character) or mad
(unable to maintain their own characters).