Aristotle is Full of Shit

So we had assigned reading for my crit studies last night - Aristotle's Poetics, which I'm sure I read in college and neglected. We articulates the first "literary theory," and talks about genres - the epic, the comedy, and the tragedy. His conclusion - there is a hierarchy of genre, and that tragedy, as defined by something that makes you feel pity and fear, at the end, is the highest form. He argues comedy is a less serious form, that it makes men worse than they are in real life and that tradegy and the epic make men better than they are in real life. The difference between the epic and tragedy, for him, is that a tragedy is an epic, but an epic isn't always a tragedy. Hence, the tragedy is superior. "All the elements of an epic poem are found in tragedy, but the elements of a tragedy are anot all found in the epic poem."

He talks about length - which I thought was pertinent. He uses the example of a painting. If it is too small, it cannot be great, because it does not contain enough information. If it is too big, one cannot process all the information in a single viewing. Therefore, there are paramenters that need to be set, in terms of size and scope of a work of literature. We can apply the same to film, I suppose.

He talks about how character is subserviant to plot for the sake of the piece, that audiences respond to action.

Poetry, he writes, comes from an instict to imitate. Humans imitate for pleasure and poetry is an extension of that. (Is that why my girlfriend wanted to watch the porn film and copy their positions? Just kidding - I don't have a girlfriend.) Anyhow, just checking to see if anyone is really reading about this Aristotle entry...I guess I'm writing it because writing helps me remember what I read. Plus, I can go back and see my own summary when I need to write a paper.

Other things - poetry tries to express the universal, whereas history tries to express the particular...a reason, for Aristotle, that poetry is a higher calling. He thinks the plot should be single in it's issue, rather than double...(i wonder what he would say about Pulp Fiction?). The change of fortune should be from good to bad, not because of choices or default of character, but because of circumstance or human weakness. Duh. It's tragedy. But I guess he's the first one to articulate it, so we'll let him be trite...

Anyhow, the rest of the writing, I found boring, he started talking about masculine and feminine words and letter and what vowels are and stuff. I never got into metaphysics and all the minute details of things.

Aristotle was limited because all he had to operate with were the Greek poets. How different would his world-view be if had watched Seinfeld, the Sopranos, Alex Payne, Charlie Chaplin, or read some James Jones, John Steinbeck, Larry McMurtry?

Comedy, as Eugene says, when done well, becomes tragedy. Again, there is some sort of implicit ordering of genres in such a statement - as if it is higher to be a tragedy...but it's true. The end of the little tramp is truly funny, but also deeply sad. Sideways - same thing - deeply funny, but also deeply sad. The music of Bessie Smith, blues, something about it is so sad, yet funny, also. Tragic-comic sensibility, as Cornel West says.

Whatever, Aristotle. I appreciate his scholarly work done way back in the day and for being one of the intellectual bases of Western civilization and all that, but for my money, he's a bore and too damn simple.