Dignus Digno Vindice Nodus

Aristotle's Poetics by Stephen Halliwell

Review by: B. R. Rees
The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1987), pp. 201-203
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
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 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 201

DIGNUS DIGNO VINDICE NOD US

STEPHEN HALLIWELL: Aristotle's Poetics. Pp. xi+369. London:

Duckworth, 1986. ?29.50.
When your reviewer was prevailed upon to give his first course of lectures on the
Poetics some thirty years ago, the only tools of his new trade which came to hand
were the (then) Oxford text, the editions of Bywater, Butcher, Gudeman, Hardy and
Rostagni, F. L. Lucas' book and House's lectures, mercifully rescued from oblivion
and edited by Colin Hardie in that very year. Since then we have had a spate of
publications concerned with Aristotle's treatise - texts, editions and commentaries,
translations, articles and parts of, chapters in or appendices to books on ancient
literary criticism and Greek tragedy in several languages, including Welsh; but from
the beginning of the century there has been an almost complete dearth of general
studies. It is this yawning gap that Halliwell has set himself to fill with 'a patient,
critical reassessment of the major doctrines of the Poetics... within the perspective of
Aristotle's wider system of thought'. The result is a work which must become essential
reading not only for all serious students of the Poetics, including those who, like your
reviewer, have dabbled in it from time to time, but also for those- the great
majority - who have prudently fought shy of it altogether.
H. begins by examining the historical setting and background of the treatise,
especially its complex relationship to Plato's teaching on poetry, and then devotes
three chapters to Aristotle's aesthetics and, in particular, his theory of mimesis. The
philosopher's main aim, as H. sees it, was not to provide a manual of instruction as
such nor simply to defend the moral and intellectual status of poetry against Plato
but to offer a theoretical framework which would enable a better understanding of
it. Mimesis is at the very heart of such an understanding, combining the tools of techne
and poiesis and 'representing the axis between the artistic product and reality'; with
its roots deeply embedded in human nature it produces an experience of pleasure which
is fundamentally cognitive and derived from the contemplation of patterns of human
action. Unlike the mimesis of Plato's Republic,it does not merely reproduce common
reality: though accepting the importance of the traditional idea of mimesis as
image-making, Aristotle enlarges this to include his own preferredsense of enactment,
thus creating an element of tension which can be resolved only if we understand
dramatic mimesis as one possible mode of poetry, not necessarily applicable to poetry
in general. An additional complication is that, by stressing poetry's concern not with
particulars but with universals, he leaves us with two different views of poetic mimesis.
By this hint of a concession to Plato's more philosophical form of mimesis his reluctant
pupil tries to restore to the poet something of the traditional status denied to him by
Plato.
From the theory of mimesis H. moves on naturally to the way in which it works
out in practice and so to confront Plot and Character, those two 'capital-letter fixtures
of commentary', as Jones once described them. Our post-Romantic belief in the
centrality of psychological characterization to drama and the novel has obscured
Aristotle's view of the relative status of action and character, making it difficult for
the modern reader to appreciate the true meaning of the notorious statement in
50a23-5. Action is 'a pattern which supervenes on the arrangement of material and
arises out of a combination of purposive individual actions' but can be properly
understood as such only by taking into account the 'explanatory quality of character'

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202 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

based on choice, an echo of the moral philosophy of the Ethics. On the other hand,
character can be realized only in action and plot - the terms are almost synonymous
in the Poetics - and so Aristotle's tragedy is not character-based but 'agent-centred'
and excludes any other source of causation, even divine agency. At the same time,
character's role in determining human action and thus contributing to the unity of
a play rules out some of the traditional features of the hero's status and concentrates
attention on his appeal to the tragic emotions of pity and fear.
Aristotle's theory of the emotional effect of tragedy on audience or reader
complements his view of action and character and is consistent with his philosophical
beliefs as set out in other works. Pity and fear are to be seen not as 'uncontrollable
instincts or forces' but as 'part of an integrated response to the structured material
of poetic drama' through 'cognitive understanding of the mimetic representation of
human action and character'. The analysis of pity and fear in the Rhetoric demon-
strates their interlocking nature; while pity is primarily altruistic, it too, like fear, has
a self-regardingelement, being aroused by the innocent sufferingof tragic agents 'like
ourselves', since we too are exposed to human vulnerability and are just as liable to
a fall from happiness and prosperity. In tragedy, even when that fall is averted, there
may be a fear of what was in prospect, perhaps accompanied by a proleptic pity for
the sufferer,and this explains how Aristotle is able to reconcile his theory of the tragic
emotions with the possibility of a 'happy ending', which he accepts and even, in
chapter 14, prefers. It is the poet's mimetic art that enables him to arouse these
emotions by creating dramatic situations to which his audience can react as it would
to similar events in everyday life. H. rightly rejects attempts to translate katharsis in
the Poetics as either 'purgation' or 'purification' or to allow it a simple identity with
the katharsis of Politics 8: it does, however, produce a result comparable to medical
therapy and is closely linked to the pleasure derived from tragedy, since both depend
on a proper understanding of the 'plot-structure', as he prefers to render muthos. This
thorough review of katharsis is supported by an appendix appraising the main
interpretations, both past and present, of the notorious clause in Aristotle's definition
of tragedy: H.'s personal preferenceis for one form of the view which posits' a process
(or effect) of psychological attunement or balance', related to the doctrine of the mean
and the concept of habituation.
Just as the relation between action and character and the nature of pity and fear
reflect aspects of Aristotle's moral and psychological teaching, so his identification
of prosperity and adversity as 'the poles between which the action of tragedy moves'
echoes his view that eutuchia and dustuchia result from the possession or lack of
'external goods' and not from the operations of chance, which the requirements of
unity of plot exclude from influencing,let alone controlling, tragic action. Indispensable
to Aristotle's theory of the tragic plot is the metabasis (change of fortune) or lusis
(denouement) resulting from recognition and reversal,which provide the turning-point
of a tragedy, and hamartia,which is the third component of the complex plot, though
not explicitly or implicitly a necessary feature of all tragedy: it is by means of hamartia
that Aristotle is able to steer his theory of tragedy between the Scylla of Platonic
moralism and the Charybdis of arbitrary and undeserved misfortune. H.'s discussion
of this all too often misapprehended topic, accomplished without recourse to what
he calls 'hamartia hunting', has a freshness about it which his readers cannot fail to
appreciate and is the most lucid and convincing that your reviewer has yet seen. The
same may fairly be said of H.'s final chapter on the Nachleben of the Poetics.
So far so good - even if a bare summary does scant justice to the breadth and depth
of H.'s argument or to his felicity in expressing it, which defies paraphrase. Possibly

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 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 203
he over-indulges his fondness for repeating in entirely different words statements
already adequately expressed in the previous sentence, and on occasions his dismissal
of others' views may seem to be a touch too summary; but these are triflingcomplaints.
Clearly he has read and digested pretty well everything relevant to his subject, has
teased out of this most difficult of texts conclusions consistent with its author's
teaching elsewhere, and has grappled adroitly and honestly with the formidable cache
of paradoxes unearthed by his enquiry. It is not until he reaches the greyest areas of
the Poetics in his later chapters and is faced with his last and most intractable bunch
of paradoxes that our respect for his thoroughness becomes tinged with a feeling of
pity-and-fear for' one like ourselves'. At this point the rigour of his critique reawakens
our old suspicion that 'the master of those who know' sufferedfrom warts which resist
treatment by even the most skilled and determined of physicians. If Aristotle's
exclusion of divine agency from his scheme of things is a discrepancy which is
'ineliminable', if' the fundamental premises of Aristotle's theory of poetry and tragedy
virtually dictate the devaluation and neglect of choral lyric', and if there is no place
in it for genres which fail to conform to Aristotle's requirements for tragedy, then the
'coherent pattern' which H. has set himself to trace begins, through no fault of his,
to look rather frayed at the edges.
And so your reviewer is left in the end with a paradox of his own: why was Aristotle
so naive as to attempt a task for which he was manifestly so unfitted? The chance
survival of this treatise, warts and all, and its resurrection at the very moment when
it was likely to exert the greatest influence on readers have blinded them to the plain
truth that he was just not the man to write it. It is to H.'s credit that he has not tried
to conceal this final 'paradox', even if he has not indicated his recognition of it in
so many words. His meticulous re-examination of all the available evidence has served
only to confirm a conclusion which some of us have already reached by more subjective
processes, namely, that Aristotle was too cold a fish to appreciate, let alone to write
about, poetry and tragedy, and his Poetics may be worth more than the papyrus it
was written on but, despite its impressive Nachleben, it does not rate more than an
alpha gamma after all. Whether or not this represents in some degree a reversal of
H.'s original intention in writing this most illuminating study is a question that only
he can answer.
University College, Cardiff B. R. REES

FROM ARISTOTLE TO SIDNEY

KATHY EDEN: Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition.

Pp. ix+200. Princeton University Press, 1986. ?18.70.
This book is a contribution not only to the study of Aristotelian poetics, but to that
of earlier Greek ideas (Gorgias and Plato) and to the later theoretical traditions seen
in St Augustine and finally in Sidney's Apology. Its basic idea is to work out the
resemblance between poetic and legal discourse, as these were perceived (though not
necessarily made explicit) by the writers under examination. There are four main
sections. The first deals with a fairly obvious point of contact between drama and the
legal sphere: the techniques of recognition defined by Aristotle involve evidence of
various kinds in much the same way as the procedures of the law courts. The second
chapter - 'Poetry and Equity' - discusses Aristotle's defence of poetry as a method

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