西方文论——亚里士多德

As the greatest thinker and the most knowledgeable scholar of the ancient Greece, Aristotle is no doubt a vital figure in almost everywhere in Greek history. Although his writings cover many subjects , including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government , Aristotle is among the most excellent philosophers all the time, and he also did incomparable contributions to ancient Greek literary theories. The most outstanding writing of him on literary theories collects in his Poetics. Aristotle's Poetics, which is particularly concerned with drama, is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. Aristotle's original work was divided in two, but only the first part, which focuses on tragedy, survives. The lost second part addressed comedy. In the Poetics his basic standpoint is that imitation is the foundation of pleasure, which comes from all forms of art, not only poetry but also music, dancing, painting, and sculpture. Imitation is the most emphasized. It is the artists who usually help the others to understand the pleasure better in the way they find out similarities. According to Modern Library's Basic Works of Aristotle (2001), there are five basic parts within the table of contents page of the Poetics: (1) Elementary discourse on tragedy, epic poetry, and comedy, as the chief forms of imitative poetry. 2.1 Definition of a tragedy, and the rules for its construction. 2.2 Different analysis on tragedy 3. Rules for the construction of an epic: To arouse catharsis through pity and fear in the audience. The characters must be four things: good, appropriate, realistic, and consistent. Discovery must occur within the plot. It is important for the poet to visualize all of the scenes when creating the plot. The poet should incorporate Complication and Denouement within the story, as well as combine all of the elements of Tragedy. The poet must express Thought through the characters' words and actions, while paying close attention to Diction and how a character's spoken words express a specific idea. Aristotle believed that all of these different elements had to be present in order for the poetry to be well-done.4. Possible criticisms of an epic or tragedy, and the answers to them 5. Tragedy is artistically superior to epic poetry: Tragedy has everything that the Epic has, including epic meter. The reality of presentation is felt in the play as read, as well as in the play as acted. The tragic imitation requires less space for the attainment of its end. If it has more concentrated effect, it is more pleasurable than one with a large admixture of time to dilute it. There is less unity in the imitation of the epic poets and this is proved by any work of their supplies matter for several tragedies. In all these, he considers tragedy a higher form of art.First of all, imitation is the common principle of the Poetics. Aristotle divides poetry according to whether it imitates people above or below the average state of humanity. The nature of art is just imitation, which is the base of telling apart art from crafts as well. He defines poetry as the mimetic or imitative use of language, rhythm and harmony separately or in combination. By saying poetry is mimetic, it means that it allows people to think about its subject matter as real while admitting that it is in fact imaginary. Poetry is mimetic because it creates an expression of things in the world, unlike philosophy, for example, which presents ideas. Imitation is human’s instincts, so poetry has a strong pull on us. We can not only fulfill our desire to learn about the world, but also gain aesthetic satisfaction. Owing to this, he holds that art origins from human’s instincts. All in all, the theory of Imitation, according to Aristotle, include following aspects:1) When artists are imitating the reality, they can perform it either as it is or more beautiful or more ugly. 2) There are three kinds of objects of imitation: a) things that happened or happens b) things in the legend or people believe in c) things that should happen. It is a special function ofartistic imitation that artists can present objects following these three sorts of rules 3) To art, the imitation should be general as well typical. On the one hand, imitation should concern about figures and events that have general significance, on the other hand, it should represent some specific matter. In this way, compared with history, poetry writing is more philosophical and is much closer to the truth. 4) In order to stress the nature and striking features of imitated objects , artists are allowed to use methods of idealization and typification. And sometimes, poets can even describe those that are impossible to happen or something unusual, as long as they can make it believable.In my point of view, the highlight of Poetics is his imitation theory on tragedy. Aristotle identifies tragedy as the most refined version of poetry dealing with lofty matters and comedy as the most refined version of poetry dealing with humble matters. As Aristotle said in this book, “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious complete, and of a certain magnitude…”, tragedies where the outcome depends on a tightly constructed cause-and –effect chain of actions are superior to those that depend primarily on the character and personality of the protagonist.He defines tragedy according to seven characteristics: (1) it is mimetic, (2) it is serious, (3) it tells a full story of an appropriate length, (4) it contains rhythm and harmony, (5) rhythm and harmony occur in different combinations in different parts of the tragedy, (6) it is performed rather than narrated, and (7) it arouses feelings of pity and fear and then purges these feelings through catharsis. A tragedy consists of six component parts, from most important to least important: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle.Plot is the “first principle,” the most important feature of tragedy. Aristotle defines plot as “the arrangement of the incidents”, not the story itself, but the way incidents are presented to the audience, the structure of the play. The plot must be “a whole”, with a beginning, middle and end. As for the plot, a well-formed plot must have a beginning, which is not a necessary consequence of any previous action; a middle, which follows logically from the beginning; and an end, which follows logically from the middle and from which no further action necessarily follows. The plot must be “complete”, having “unity of action.” It should be unified, meaning that every element of the plot should have close connection with the rest of the plot, leaving no loose ends. This kind of unity allows tragedy to express universal themes powerfully, which makes it superior to history, which can only talk about particular events. Episodic plots are bad because there is no necessity to the sequence of events. Also the plot must be “of a certain magnitude,” and may either simple, although complex is better. The best kind of plot contains surprises, but surprises that, in retrospect, fit logically into the sequence of events. The best kinds of surprises are brought about by reversal of fortune, and or discovery. A good plot progresses like a knot that is tied up with increasingly greater complexity until the moment of reversal of fortune, at which point the knot is gradually untied until it reaches a completely unknotted conclusion. Character has the second place in importance. In a perfect tragedy, character will support plot, personal motivations will be intricately connected parts of the cause-and-effect chain of actions producing pit and fear in the audience. The protagonist should be renowned and prosperous, so his change of fortune can be from good to bad. This change “should come about as the result, not of vice, but of some great error or frailty in a character.” Such a plot is most likely to arouse pity and fear in the audience, for “pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.” The character involved in the change must have specific characteristics to arouse the tragic emotions of pity and fear. Therefore, Aristotle said that there are three forms ofplot that should be avoided: 1. A totally good man must not pass from happiness to misery. This will make the audience angry that bad things happened to him. They won’t pity him so much as be angry for him. 2. A bad man must not pass from misery to happiness. This won’t appeal to the audience at all because they won’t want to see evil rewarded. 3. A bad man must not pass from happiness to misery. The audience won’t feel sorry for him because they will believe he got what he deserved. This changed the view of fate. The root of tragedy is not the fate but lies in the personality of a character, hence here comes to the heated debate of “tragic flaw”, which is the most common translation of “hamartia” in Greek, but we need to be careful with this term and understand what the Greeks meant by "flaw" and how it relates to a broadly defined sense of "fate": Through tragic flaw, the tragic hero visits his own fate upon him or herself. In this way, "fate" is transformed from some metaphysical concept -- "the will of the gods," "the divine order of the cosmos" etc. -- to one in which we see our fates as tied to inherent elements of our selves, of our psyches, that ordain our destinies. To put it in an easy way, tragic flaw is a personal error in a protagonist’s personality that brings about his tragic downfall in a tragedy. Tragic flaw imparts the sense of pity and fear in the audience of the readers. The audience or the readers identify with the tragic hero as, like them, his character is a mixture of good and bad qualities. They feel pity for the reversal of fortune that he undergoes. This arouses a feeling of pity in them. Similarly, by witnessing a tragic hero suffer due to his own flaw, the audience or the readers may fear the same fate may befall them if they indulge in similar kinds of action. Therefore, tragic flaw may be employed for a moral purpose to encourage people to improve their characters by removing the flaws that can cause a tragedy in their lives.For a tragedy to arouse pity and fear, we must observe a hero who is relatively noble going from happiness to misery as a result of error on the part of the hero. Our pity and fear is aroused most when it is family members who harm one another rather than enemies or strangers. In the best kind of plot, one character narrowly avoids killing a family member unwittingly thanks to an discovery that reveals the family connection. The hero must have good qualities appropriate to his or her station and should be portrayed realistically and consistently. Since both the character of the hero and the plot must have logical consistency, Aristotle concludes that the untying of the plot must follow as a necessary consequence of the plot and not from stage artifice.Since thought, diction, melody, and spectacle are not so important to further interpret, we just come to the function of tragedy here. According to Wikipedia, in drama field, Katharsis means A release of emotional tension after an overwhelming vicarious experience, resulting in the purging or purification of the emotions, as through watching a dramatic production (especially a tragedy). According to Aristotle, the function of tragedy is Katharsis or Catharsis. To him, tragedy has reversion and discovery, then arouses pity and fear, through which person’s emotion is Katharsized. From the perspective of tragic narrative, katharsis is a basic measurement to formulate and achieve the goal of balance and harmony between pity and fear. From the perspective of comic narrative, katharsis is an important criterion to judge both laughable subject and manner in comic narrative. In light of its important function in both tragic narrative and comic narrative, it can be concluded that the katharsis in Aristotle's Poetics is a narrative-ethical principle of criticism involving balance and harmony. It reflects ancient Greeks' dialectical understanding of the relations between literature and society, between aesthetics and utility and between literary creation and criticism. It also renders a new understanding and interpretation ofGreek narrative art.Aristotle discusses thought and diction and then moves on to address epic poetry. Epic poetry must have as many kinds as tragedy: it must be simple, or complex, or ‘ethical’ or ‘pathetic’. Epic poetry differs from tragedy in the scale on which it is constructed, and in its meter. Whereas tragedy consists of actions presented in a dramatic form, epic poetry consists of verse presented in a narrative form. Tragedy and epic poetry have many common qualities, most notably the unity of plot and similar subject matter. However, epic poetry has a great and special capacity for enlarging its dimensions. It can be longer than tragedy, and because it is not performed, it can deal with more fantastic action with a much wider scope. By contrast, tragedy can be more focused and takes advantage of the devices of music and spectacle. Epic poetry and tragedy are also written in different meters. After defending poetry against charges that it deals with improbable or impossible events, Aristotle concludes by weighing tragedy against epic poetry and determining that tragedy is on the whole superior. And superior it is, because it has all the epic elements, which may even use the epic meter, with the music and spectacular effects as important accessories; and these produce the most vivid of pleasures.It can’t be denied that Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, as Marvin Carlson explains, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions”, while at meantime no one can afford to neglect the crucial historical role of it and its significance all over the world.。