Aristotles Literary Aesthetics

G.R.F. FERRARI

ABSTRACT
Against the consensus that Aristotle in the Poetics sets out to give tragedy a role
in exercising or improving the mature citizens moral sensibilities, I argue that
his aim is rather to analyse what makes a work of literature successful in its own
terms, and in particular how a tragic drama can achieve the effect of suspense.
The proper pleasure of tragedy is produced by the plotting and eventual dispelling
of the plays suspense. Aristotle claims that poetry says what is universal not
in order to suggest that poetry achieves anything of the effect of philosophy, but
to explain how in creating his plots the poet takes into consideration what, in
general, could be expected to happen. Chapter 4 of the Poetics is not a theory
of mimesis but an analysis of the lowest common denominator of the pleasure
we take in ctions. The inevitability or likelihood by which events in the tragic
plot are to be connected has an aesthetic rather than a moral function. Doing
away with the irrationality of chance and increasing the human intelligibility of
the action is not its point; the point is to furnish the plot with the second half of
the formula for successful suspense: that events in the plot should happen against
expectation because of one another. The rst half of the formula is examined
under the rubric of peripety or reversal. The formula as a whole describes the
pivotal moment when the pieces of the plot suddenly t with a con guration that
only in retrospect can we see to have been falling into place all along. Pity and
fear are the emotions on which Aristotle focusses because they are the emotions
engaged by the tightening-towards-release of literary suspense. And the pleasure
of catharsis is the pleasure of that release.

When taken as a description of the Poetics, my title is more controversial

than it might seem.1 It implies that the primary aim of Aristotles inquiry
in that work was after all to distinguish the qualities of what we would
now call literature and to investigate what makes a literary work of art
successful in its own special terms with tragic drama, the consummate
literary form, selected for particular attention. I say after all because in
recent years an in uential consensus has arisen according to which Aris-
totles inquiry in the Poetics is part and parcel of his larger interest in the
moral education of the citizen. Typically imagined as responding to Pla-
tos exclusion of tragedians from the ideal city described in the Republic,

Accepted November 1998

1
I would like to thank Julius Moravcsik for giving me the opportunity to present
the ideas contained in this essay at a workshop on Aristotles Poetics held at Stanford

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Phronesis XLIV/3

182 G.R.F. FERRARI

Aristotle sets out in the eyes of this consensus to vindicate poetry by

giving the tragedian a role in the ongoing moral education of the mature
individual the exercise or enlargement of his sensibilities, his humanity.
It is a task that the tragedian shares, or would share in the best social
arrangement, with the orator and the politician. A requirement of this
interpretation of the Poetics, then, is to stitch the work as seamlessly as
possible into the larger context formed by Aristotles writings on ethics,
politics, and rhetoric. Perhaps the names of Nussbaum, Halliwell, and
Bel ore will suf ce to represent the consensus that I have in mind.2
It is hard not to nd some aspects of this approach to the Poetics
appealing. To seek a larger context for the work is nothing but good philo-
logical method; and to relax boundaries between these particular Aris-
totelian elds of inquiry permits entry into important doubts about the
autonomy of literature, and into currently dominant questions about the
relation of the literary to the political. Nevertheless, the enterprise not only
mistakes Aristotles general purpose in writing the Poetics but has led to
serious distortions of the particular concepts of analysis that he brings to

University on May 2, 1997, and to thank all the participants in the workshop for their
critique and, not least, their encouragement. The nal version has had the bene t of
helpful advice from the editors of Phronesis.
2
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1986), esp. pp. 378-394; Stephen Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Elizabeth S. Bel ore, Tragic Pleasures:
Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). The
majority of contributions to Am lie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotles Poetics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), when they are not neutral on the issue,
also take this approach. (The volume includes more recent pieces by Nussbaum and
by Halliwell.) The consensus is interestingly congruent with a work that comes at
Aristotle from a Straussian standpoint and argues that he assigns poetry an important
role in the civic education of adults: Carnes Lord, Education and Culture in the
Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). An exception
to the general trend is Malcolm Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987), who questions whether either Aristotle or the pre-
Platonic tradition were didactic. Resistance to the consensus now seems to be build-
ing in connection with the topic of catharsis: see Jonathan Lear, Katharsis, Phronesis
33.3 (1988) 297-326 (reprinted in the Rorty volume); Andrew Ford, Katharsis: the
ancient problem, 109-132 in A. Parker and E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Per-
formativity and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995); Velvet Yates, A sexual
model of catharsis, Apeiron 31.1 (1998) 35-58. Of these, Ford and Yates are the more
wholehearted resisters; Lear in the second, positive part of his article still hankers to
nd an edifying view of tragedy in Aristotle. My own focus in this essay will be
Aristotles theory of the tragic plot rather than catharsis, to which I will turn only
brie y at the end.
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 183

bear. I propose a return to an earlier approach, for which, it seems, fresh

arguments have become necessary: an approach that found its pithiest if
not its earliest expression in a talk delivered by the whodunnit writer Dorothy
L. Sayers at Oxford in 1935. I leave those who are not already familiar
with its contents to infer them from its title, which is Aristotle on detec-
tive ction.3 In a similar spirit, I shall defend an interpretation of the
Poetics according to which Aristotle, so far from claiming that the trage-
dian either is or should be bent on deepening our understanding of the
human condition, imagines instead that the tragic art can be adequately
analysed as the art of suspense, whose proper pleasure derives not from
increased moral understanding but from the emplotment and eventual dis-
pelling of the plays suspense. Tragedy is plot for plots sake.
Those who nd this construal unequal to the dignity of tragic drama
and wish to exonerate Aristotle from responsibility for it might turn rst
to the famous pronouncement of chapter nine, that poetry is more philo-
sophic and more serious than history (filosofteron ka spoudaiteron
pohsiw storaw stn) because poetry says what is universal (t kaylou
lgei), history what is particular. I would insist, however, that it is not the
universality of poetrys content that Aristotle has in view here; rather, he
is describing the poets creative activity and explaining its connection to
universal judgment. His gloss on the famous pronouncement runs:
By universal I mean what sort of thing it is likely or inevitable that a given
sort of person should turn out to say or do. This is what poetry aims at; the
names of the characters are attachments. By the particular I mean what
Alcibiades did or had happen to him. (1451b8-11)

That Aristotle is here describing a process, the process of plot-creation, is

put beyond doubt by his next remark, to the effect that the point he has
just made about tragedy becomes unequivocally clear in the case of com-
edy (p mn on tw kvmdaw dh toto dlon ggonen), whose poets rst
construct a plausible plot and only then give their characters names,
whatever names occur to them. The process he has in mind, then, is the
one he elaborates in chapter seventeen when advising the tragedian to
lay out his plot universally (ktyesyai kaylou) before lling in the
details (1455a34-55b13). Thus the plot of Iphigenia at Tauris is set out
not as the familiar myth of Iphigenia and Orestes but as a bare-bones
story in which a girl is abducted to another land to which her brother is

3
The talk is printed in Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular Opinions (London: Gollancz,
1946), 178-190.
184 G.R.F. FERRARI

subsequently brought as a captive, and so on. Aristotles point in chapter

nine is that despite using known names from the past as does the historian,
the tragedian is in fact no less a creator of plots than the comic drama-
tist who invents his characters as well as his plots. And the universality
at which poetry aims is not its ultimate goal but something it must look
to if its plots are to be properly constructed. The dramatist must bear in
mind, say, what a priestess will infer from the lament for a long-lost sis-
ter uttered by the man she is about to sacri ce, and how she will react if
that long-lost sister is herself. Poetry says what is universal not by virtue
of making universal statements but by ful lling the task that Aristotle
assigned to the poet at the beginning of the ninth chapter, that of saying
what could be expected to happen (oa n gnoito) as opposed to the
historians task of saying what actually happened (1451a36-51b5). The
syntax of saying what could be expected to happen should not be under-
stood as if it were the answer to a question but as consisting of a verb of
saying followed by a relative clause that is its direct object. It should not
be understood by analogy with the syntax of he is saying what would
interest us where this means he is telling us what it is that we would
nd interesting, but instead with that of he is saying what would inter-
est us where it means what he is saying is the sort of thing we would
nd interesting. In other words, the dramatist who constructs and pre-
sents a plausible plot is neither describing nor explaining what could be
expected to happen; rather, the phrase what could be expected to hap-
pen is a description that must be true of the events of his plot if that plot
is to be a success. The exemplary quality of a tragic plot is not, then, its
point but a consequence of how it has been made; nor is Aristotle claim-
ing that history speaks of particulars while poetry speaks of universals,
but simply that poetry makes plots while history recounts actual sequences
of events. Since the poet, unlike the historian, cannot escape consideration
of the universal in the course of composing his works (for the poet must
hypothesize), his task is more serious and more philosophical than that
of the historian at least of the historian who is a mere chronicler. That
the task is more philosophical, however, does not mean that its product
is any kind of philosophy, or aims at any kind of teaching.4
A full-strength didactic interpretation of chapter nine of the Poetics is

4
Aristotles judgment of history may seem less benighted if the word mllon is
taken to qualify both limbs of the famous pronouncement if the correct translation
is poetry says rather what is universal, history rather what is particular. This would
leave room for a Thucydides.
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 185

generally served up with a massively spiced version of chapter four, which

becomes nothing short of a general theory of mimesis. Aristotle states
there that the pleasure we take in artistic images is one of learning or
understanding the pleasure of guring out what each image is an image
of. On the assumption that this statement refers not only to the basic plea-
sure we take in the recognition of images but to the most sophisticated
pleasures of moral understanding, it would imply that our powers of infer-
ence, applied to each mimetic element, bring us to cognition of the works
signi cance to the world a process that would be no mere reinforce-
ment of our existing comprehension of the world but would provide us
with imaginative opportunities to test, re ne, extend and perhaps even
question the ideas and values on which such comprehension rests. The
phrases are Halliwells.5 But all that Aristotle is in fact doing in this pas-
sage is to analyse the lowest common denominator of the pleasure we take
in ctions. This after all is what one might gather from the simplicity of
his example from the graphic arts, when he points out that we take plea-
sure in examining well-made images the sight of which would disgust us
were they real, such as those of corpses or vermin. Those who would insist
that chapter four describes the single genus of which the pleasure we take
in pictures is a simple species and the pleasure we take in tragic drama
a more complex one owe us an account of why in that case Aristotle later
claims that if a situation is disgusting or repulsive (the word is miarn),
as for example the fall of a decent man from good to bad fortune, its
representation on the tragic stage cannot give the appropriate pleasure
(1452b31-36, 53b39, 54a3). Yet with pictures disgust at the object por-
trayed is no block to delight in the portrayal. The explanation of the dis-
crepancy cannot be that the greater complexity of the pleasure afforded
by tragic drama consists precisely in the fact that the painful element in
this case is not something so simple as a repulsive external appearance
but rather the deep emotions of pity and fear that Aristotles descrip-
tion of the proper pleasure of tragedy as deriving, by means of mimesis,
from the painful emotions of pity and fear (1453b11) is but a more sophis-
ticated exempli cation of the claim in chapter four that pictorial art can
transform what would make for painful viewing into a visual delight.6 For
if this explanation were right, then Aristotle in chapter four would be mak-
ing the plainly false claim that the pleasure we take in the painted image
of something disgusting derives from the disgust as in the case of

5
In Rorty, Essays, p. 243, 253.
6
This is Halliwells explanation in Rorty, Essays, p. 254.
186 G.R.F. FERRARI

tragedy the pleasure derived from the pity and fear. Rather, his claim is
that we nd such images pleasurable despite the disgust we would feel if
confronted with the reality; it is an extreme case to show that the basic
pleasure of mimesis comes from the act of imagination rather than
depending on the nature of the object imagined. Figuring out that this
[the image] is that [the object represented] (1448b16-17) is Aristotles
way of describing what happens when the audience accepts the ction-
makers invitation to imagine a state of affairs. This is appreciation of
ction at the most rudimentary level; and the learning involved is not
such as the moralists require for their interpretation. The appreciation of
tragic drama in all its particularity is a more complex pleasure. Unlike
with the example of pictured corpses, this pleasure depends very much on
the nature of the object imagined, for it is a consequence not simply of
admiration for the playwrights skilful use of his materials but also of such
things as amazement at the intricacies of the plot, and the winding-up and
subsequent release of suspense that is, our fear for the hero. These are
the topics with which Aristotle proceeds to ll his treatise, and nothing
further is said about learning as a component of this complex pleasure,
whose actual components do not nd their grounding in what he says
about mimesis in chapter four, but in what he subsequently says about the
tragic plot.
One of the most important things he has to say about the tragic plot or
myow is that it must be uni ed, and that it will be so if the incidents com-
prising its single action (prjiw) are linked by inevitability or likelihood
(kat t ekw t nagkaon) (e.g. 1450b23-30, 51a12-17, 59a18-21). This
prescription is an obstacle for anyone pursuing a close t between the
action of tragic drama in the Poetics and the analysis of human action to
be found in the ethical and rhetorical works. For one thing, those works
attach no importance to the criterion of unity in the case of prjiw, of
human action; and more decisively, they regard necessity or inevitability
(t nagkaon) as incompatible with that key component of moral action,
deliberation for we do not deliberate about what we hold to be inevit-
able (Nicomachean Ethics 3.3; Rhetoric 1.10.7). The problem cannot be
avoided by playing up the other partner, t ekw, in the pairing of
inevitability with likelihood. If anything, it is inevitability that dominates
the partnership; at any rate, when the paired notion rst appears in the
work, in chapter seven, ekw is absent from the phrase and is represented
by a substitute, w p t pol, for the most part (1450b30).
I propose to embrace rather than be embarrassed by the concept of t
nagkaon in literature, but to do so by treating it as an aesthetic rather
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 187

than a moral term. It is directly comparable to what in Platos Phaedrus

(264bc) is called ngkh logografik. This is the element that Socrates
nds missing from the speech of Lysias under critique at that point in the
dialogue, the element of writerly inevitability. Lysias speech is delivered
in character, the character of a ctional suitor for the favours of a young
boy, as if it were a speech in a play. The writerly inevitability absent from
this disjointed effort is therefore the inevitability that fails to grace the
sequence in which the ctional character addresses his topics; that
sequence of delivery is in effect the sequence of ctional action depicted
by Lysias. For lack of it, the speech is declared to have no organic unity;
it is not like a living creature, a zon, with torso and extremities in their
proper place, but lacks a sense of beginning middle and end (264c). Precisely
this combination of ideas recurs in Aristotle. The unity and completeness
desirable in the action of the tragic plot, its having a de nite beginning
middle and end, make it comparable to a living creature, a zon (this we
read at the beginning of chapter twenty-three, 1459a19-21). Beginning
middle and end the reader has in turn seen de ned in chapter seven by the
criterion of inevitable or likely connection: a beginning has no inevit-
able connection to anything preceding, an end is connected with inevit-
ability or likelihood to what precedes but to nothing that would follow, a
middle has this connection both to what precedes and to what follows
(1450b27-31). 7
As introduced in the Phaedrus, the idea of writerly inevitability is broad
enough to apply to non- ction as well as to ction to any form of writ-
ing, not just to speeches delivered in character as is the speech of Lysias.
But ction the composition of ctional plots is the only context that
Aristotle has in view when he takes up Platos notion for the Poetics and
makes it his own. The inevitability or likelihood in question is explained
not as attaching to a single event but instead to the succession of events
that constitute the plot (1450b30, 51a12-13, 51a27-8, 51a38, 51b8, 52a20,
52a24). The important thing is not the statistical normality or certainty of
any of the events but the overall coherence and unity of the action
(prjiw) made up of these events action which may be and often is quite
abnormal and bizarre. Very different is the use of arguments from likelihood,
t ekw, in rhetoric. Here the probability of single events is indeed at least
as important a consideration as coherence of narrative: a forensic orator
will argue that the deed could not have been done because it is simply

7
Chapter seven also contains an implicit comparison of dramatic action to a zon,
at 1450b34.
188 G.R.F. FERRARI

too unlikely. It is a mistake to think that the shared terminology testi es

to a resemblance between the tasks of ction and of rhetoric in Aristotles
mind. Likewise, the fact that inevitability stymies deliberation according
to the rhetorical and ethical works is not a problem for the Poetics. The
inevitability with which events in a dramatic plot succeed each other is
not a matter for deliberation by the characters of the drama but a ctional
creation of the dramatists. Deliberation by the characters about what is
to be done is in fact one of the most important tools employed by the
dramatist in constructing the sort of plot in which deed seems to follow
deed with the relentlessness of the inevitable. It is in this sense an
inevitability of the writing, ngkh logografik.
Nevertheless, since the dramatist is a mimetic artist, and imitation, to
be imitation, must be of something found rather than made, the inevitable
or likely connections that constitute the one action of the plot are indeed
those found in life. The connections, but not the unity. Lives rarely have
the unity of a good story, as Aristotle explains in chapter eight when prais-
ing Homer for not mistaking the unity of the person Odysseus for the unity
of his Odyssey (1451a22-30). One does not make an Odyssey, he points
out, by telling everything that happened to Odysseus his being wounded
in the youthful boar-hunt, his feigned madness to escape being drafted
into the Trojan expedition, and the rest of it. There is no inevitable or
likely connection between these events. Rather, Homer composed the
Odyssey around a single action, which from the summary that Aristotle
provides later, at the end of chapter seventeen (1455b16-23), might best be
described as Odysseus delayed return to Ithaca and restoration to power.
Didactic interpretations here sniff out an eagerness in Aristotle to ban-
ish the irrationality of chance from the action of tragedy, and to furnish
it instead with intelligibility in human terms; for the audience will not
learn anything of universal importance from what is merely a matter of
chance.8 But these interpretations are barking up the wrong trail. There is

8
Thus although Halliwell begins, as I do, by noting that lives rarely have the degree
of cohesion found in the structure of a successful plot (It is precisely . . . the lack of
patterns of coherence in the events of much ordinary life . . . which makes them inad-
equate material for the demands of a poetic plot-structure, Aristotles Poetics, p. 106),
he goes on to give this distinction a didactic twist: Poetry should in some sense rise
above mundane life . . . and elevate human action to a higher level of intelligibility,
so that it acquires something which even the philosopher might recognise as sig-
ni cant (ibid.). On my interpretation of what Aristotle means by the inevitable or
likely connection of events in a plot, a philosophers judgment of what is signi cant
in human action has nothing to do with it.
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 189

nothing random or senseless about either Odysseus hunt for the boar
or his ruse of madness; both were deliberately chosen and purpose-
ful acts, quite intelligible in human terms. (Even if his getting wounded
by the boar was an accident, it was a risk he knew he was taking.)
Aristotle praises Homer for excluding them not because they are events
that, considered singly, just happened to Odysseus, but because they
are events that, taken together, just happen to be connected connec-
ted by virtue of belonging to a single persons life. Nor does Aristotle
say that it is because such a connection would fail to teach the audience
anything universal that it should be avoided, but because it would fail to
constitute the single action of the uni ed tragic plot.9 And the reason why
that in turn matters is that the play would then fail to produce fear and
pity and with them the proper pleasure of tragedy.10
All in all, there has been too much fuss over the modal niceties of
Aristotles appeal to the inevitable or necessary and the likely, the nagkaon
and the ekw. Aristotles main purpose is simply to distinguish events
that happen as a result of or because of each other and never mind
exactly how from events that just happen to be connected. That is why
he proposes alternatives that de ne a broad range inevitability or like-
lihood. The connection must at least not be un-likely, or the audience may
not accept one event as the result of the other. It is the implication also
of the closing sentence of chapter ten, in which, having insisted that what
happens in a tragic plot must follow with inevitability or likelihood from
the foregoing events, Aristotle adds: For it makes a great difference whether
things happen because of one another, or after one another (dia-frei gr
pol t ggnesyai tde di tde met tde, 1452a20-1). Inevit-able or
likely connection of events in effect goes to make up one half of
Aristotles magical though apparently oxymoronic formula for a success-
ful tragic plot: namely, that in it things happen par tn djan di llhla,
against expectation because of one another (1452a4). I have been speak-
ing only of the di llhla portion of this formula; but it is time now to
consider how events in a tragic plot defeat expectation, occur par tn
djan which brings me to the topic of peripety or reversal.
Here again the didactic interpretation nds Aristotle wrestling with the

9
Homer is praised for composing the Odyssey as one action, of the kind I mean
(man prjin oan lgomen tn Odsseian sunsthsen), 1451a28-9.
10
The connection between the unity of tragic action and the proper pleasure of
tragedy is made at 59a19-21; at 52a1-4 this action is speci ed as consisting of pitiable
and fearful events; and at 53b11-13 the poet is said to produce the proper pleasure of
tragedy from pity and fear, through imitation.
190 G.R.F. FERRARI

spectre of chance and of its in uence on human lives; only this time not
attempting to exclude it altogether from the action for the reversal that
distinguishes the complex from the simple plot must arrive in some sense
unexpectedly, par tn djan, as when the messenger from Corinth whose
news is to relieve Oedipus of anxiety turns out on the contrary to con rm
his worst fears. Rather than exclude chance altogether Aristotle would be
coming to artistic terms with it. With his call for events that defeat expec-
tation but nevertheless can be seen to occur because of each other, par
tn djan di llhla, Aristotle would be going as far as he can to rec-
oncile tragedys requirement for intelligibility of human action in its plot-
structure with its recognition of an instability a tragic instability in
human existence; for poetry is more like philosophy than history, and
being philosophical cannot rest easy with the ux of human affairs that
makes for drama, but must nd in it a pattern and an order.11 If there is
a tension between the two limbs of Aristotles formula between events
that defeat expectation and events that result from one another it would
accurately re ect the tragic tension to which all human affairs are subject.
But this account puts more moral and existential weight on the girders
of Aristotles structure than they were designed to bear. Aristotle is not
pitting the intelligibility of human action against those random pressures
that might be thought to render life meaningless, but the intelligibility of
a dramatic plot against those faults of composition that render it merely
episodic. Among these faults is that of connecting events by chance; but
a plot that avoids this error, instead connecting events against expecta-
tion because of one another as prescribed, is not thereby confronting the
responsibility of pitting intelligibility the di llhla against tragic
instability the par djan. That prescription does not in fact pit any-
thing against anything. It is too seldom noticed that the phrase par tn
djan di llhla, despite such translations as Halliwells contrary to
expectation yet still on account of one another,12 or Goldens unexpect-
edly, yet because of one another,13 or Elses contrary to ones expecta-
tion yet logically, one following from the other,14 contains no adversative.

11
Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics, pp. 210-11.
12
Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 42.
13
Leon Golden, trans., O.B. Hardison Jr., comm., Aristotles Poetics: A Translation
and Commentary for Students of Literature (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida,
1981), p. 18.
14
Gerald F. Else, Aristotle: Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1970), pp. 34-5.
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 191

Aristotles is a single phrase: against expectation because of one another.

He is not saying that events in the best kind of plot defeat expectation
despite resulting from one another; he is saying that they defeat expect-
ation by virtue of resulting from one another. In other words, the best
kind of plot is one in which, at a certain point the point of reversal or
peripety the pieces unexpectedly t together.
So far is chance from being that with which tragedy must struggle that
one variety of chance is in fact quite capable of connecting events in the
manner of the best kind of tragic plot. I quote from the end of chapter
nine (1452a4-11):
The events [of the drama] will amaze more if they come about against expecta-
tion because of one another than if they come about spontaneously or by chance.
After all, even among things that happen by chance, those that seem most amaz-
ing are the ones that look as if they had come about on purpose (sa sper
pthdew fanetai gegonnai), as for example when the statue of Mitys in Argos
fell on the person responsible for Mitys death, killing him while he was look-
ing at it. Events such as these do not have the appearance of randomness. So
plots of this sort must be superior.

Critics have often aimed the reference of tow toiotouw myouw, plots of
this sort, in the direction of the category events that come about against
expectation because of one another, then launched it on a mighty back-
ward parabola that can safely vault the example of Mitys and leave no
suggestion that his story, being a matter of chance, could make for a supe-
rior plot. They recognize the strain in this leap, but are unsure how to
avoid it. The best way to avoid it, however, is simply to accept that
Mitys story does indeed have the shape of a superior plot, and to be the
less troubled by this after recognizing that the dramatic plot which Aris-
totle subsequently uses to exemplify peripety, and a superior plot by any
standard that of the Oedipus Tyrannus pivots on just this sort of
coincidence.
First we must understand what makes the case of Mitys special among
chance concatenations of events, and for this it is essential to take at full
strength the phrase describing what causes it to amaze, namely that it
sper pthdew fanetai gegonnai. This I translated as looks as if it had
come about on purpose. The phrase cannot simply be classifying the case
of Mitys among events that do not after all have the purpose they might
appear to have, because that classi cation would for Aristotle include the
whole gamut of chance or spontaneous events. To use his standard exam-
ples from the second book of the Physics, the man did not in fact go to
the market-place to meet his debtor and get re-paid but for some other
192 G.R.F. FERRARI

reason, nor did the stool fall on its feet in order to be sat upon; these use-
ful outcomes are incidental (196a33-6, 197b16-18). What Aristotle means,
then, by the claim that those chance events amaze most which look as if
they had come about on purpose, must be that in such cases one is led to
wonder whether the event was in fact chance at all, so providential is the
outcome. By contrast, such mundane strokes of luck as meeting your
debtor at the market, or the stool falling on its feet, are not put down to
providence by anyone, and fail to amaze. But what happened to Mitys
killer seems, as we would say, too good to be true; seems, as we might
also say, just like a story. Exactly: for it meets the criterion of a good
plot, whose events unfold for the audience against expectation because of
one another. The encounter between statue and killer seems to have been
planned all along, although no one was expecting it. It is not the unex-
pectedness alone that makes for amazement, but the emergence of the
unexpected from its causal nexus the fact that the pieces unexpectedly
come together. We who hear the story are not given a surprise out of
nowhere; that is rather what Mitys killer got.
If the encounter between statue and killer only seems to have been planned
all along, the encounter between Oedipus and the messenger from Corinth
who turns out to reveal to the king his awful identity really was planned
all along planned by Sophocles. Nevertheless, it is as striking a coinci-
dence as was the denouement of the Mitys story, both for the characters
in the drama and for those members of the audience who either do not
know that the messenger happens to be the very man who presented the
infant Oedipus to his adoptive father or, if they do, are suf ciently engaged
by the ction to continue to feel its excitement using that capacity we
all have to nd a novel thrilling even on second, third, fourth readings. It
strikes both characters and audience as that particular sort of coincidence
that seems too providential to have been coincidence at all and of course
in the Oedipus story divine retribution is indeed at work. It is not a ques-
tion, though, of deciding whether the reversal of the Oedipus Tyrannus
does or does not t Aristotles de nition of chance. What matters for
Aristotle is that both the Mitys and the Oedipus stories t the criterion of
events unfolding against expectation because of one another. Reversal,
runs the beginning of chapter eleven, occurs when the action shifts in the
opposite direction, as already stated this I take as a reference back to
the defeat of expectation that marks complex tragedy, the fact that rever-
sal emerges par tn djan and this shift [Aristotle continues] comes
about with likelihood or inevitability, as we further (mn . . . d) say; as for
example in the Oedipus . . . (1452a22-25) and this time the backward
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 193

reference is to the second element in a proper reversal, the fact that it

emerges not simply against expectation but also di llhla, from a causal
nexus of events. So in the Oedipus the horrible coincidence of the mes-
sengers being who he is plays itself out by means of a sequence of per-
fectly typical and normal reactions: Oedipus, believing himself the son of
Polybus and Merope of Corinth, naturally assumes that the messengers
news of Polybus death has released him from one part at least of the
oracles threat, and is, naturally, exultant, although he remains of course
fearful still of returning to where his mother lives; which fear the mes-
senger attempts to dispell how would he not? he is after all both a
unkey with hopes of reward and, as it happens, a man who nds him-
self now in a position to offer Oedipus a second item of news that he will
welcome by announcing that Polybus and Merope were not in fact
Oedipus real parents, and that he should know, being the one who
brought the infant to Polybus all those years ago. And the reversal crashes
in; the pieces t not as they had seemed to be, but with a new and unex-
pected con guration, one that only in retrospect can we see had been
falling into place all along.
The structure of dramatic reversal, then, neither constitutes of itself a
meditation on the lability of the human condition nor did such meditation
give it its place in Aristotles theory of drama. What lends the plot of the
Oedipus Tyrannus its particular weight and fascination is that it effects a
match between the machinations of the gods and those of the human
mechanic who makes the whole thing run the playwright. Both Soph-
ocles and Sophocles gods make victims of the human characters in the
play, setting up the situation so as to lead their expectations to inevit-
able defeat. But this is a special case. While gods appear often enough
as characters in Greek tragedy, it is unusual for them to feature as script-
writers. But for every Greek drama for every drama and literary ction
tout court the human dramatist plays god in the little world he has
created. This is no less true of the I.T. than it is of the O.T. but no one
attempts to claim for the Iphigenia at Tauris the existential weight of the
Oedipus. Aristotle, however, gives the complex plot-structure of the Iphigenia
his highest accolade (1454a4-7), because the reversals that make for com-
plex tragedy are not for him an existential matter. Let us by all means
connect Aristotelian peripety with dramatic irony or what is sometimes
called irony of Fate in which the playwright is the all-powerful ironist
and his characters the victims of the irony but let us be careful to write
fate with a small f.
Aristotles own view about the effect of chance on human happiness is
194 G.R.F. FERRARI

made clear enough in the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he accepts that

no human agents happiness can be entirely independent of luck. His pre-
scriptions for the plot of tragedy are motivated not by this belief but by
a concern for what sorts of event best stimulate fear and pity in the audi-
ence. But the moment has come to ask why the exclusive emotional focus
of Aristotles analysis in the Poetics should be just this pair, fear and pity.
It might well be thought that tragedy has a wider emotional range, arous-
ing anger, perhaps, and shame. My short answer is that fear and pity are
Aristotles focus because they are the emotions engaged by tragic sus-
pense by its tightening towards release. What they are not what
Aristotle does not have in mind are the emotions felt by an audience
being braced with a sense of its own tragic vulnerability. Aristotle does
not take an edifying view of the tragic emotions. Those who nd him to
do so argue that in the Rhetoric fear is construed as felt for oneself, and
pity as felt for those like oneself; therefore the fear that Aristotle imputes
to the audience of a tragedy is the fear that they too could suffer as they
have just witnessed one similar to themselves suffering the tragic hero
who arouses their pity.15 A version of this argument allows that the audi-
ence also feels fear for the hero, but conditioned on a sympathy that
amounts to an imaginative fear for themselves.16
Looming once again as an obstacle to this approach comes Aristotles
prescription for the best tragic plot, the plot in which events occur against
expectation because of one another. This kind of plot, he explains, does
the best job of making the events imitated fearful and pitiable (1452a2-4).
But why should this be so, if the fear that Aristotle had in mind were a
fear for oneself based on sympathetic pity for the hero? Why should the
unexpectedness have to emerge from a causal nexus in order to maximise
a fear of this sort? Wouldnt a bolt from the blue, of the sort found, say,
in the Madness of Heracles, in fact do a much better job of it? If disas-
ter can strike a hero for no reason, thinks the member of that audience,
then no one is safe; we all must tremble. Or consider the strategy that
Aristotle commends in the second book of the Rhetoric to the orator who
needs to get his audience good and scared about their situation: you must
make them feel vulnerable, he says, by showing them that men greater
than they have succumbed, to say nothing of their equals, and in circum-
stances that these men had not anticipated and were not expecting (2.5.15,
1383a8-12). Here it is the unexpectedness alone, with no special regard

15
Bel ore, Tragic Pleasures, p. 231.
16
Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics, pp. 176-77.
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 195

for the context from which the unexpected situation emerged, that
Aristotle believes will serve the orators purpose an edifying and admon-
itory purpose, since fear, as Aristotle puts it in the same passage, prompts
men to deliberate. But if this in Aristotles view were also the dramatists
goal, his plots, like the orators examples, could as freely have offered the
unexpected shorn of its causal nexus, have presented events that come
par tn djan, but with no attention to their coming also dillhla. At
the other extreme, it is not clear why a plot need include anything unex-
pected at all if its aim is to induce fear for oneself based on sympathetic
pity. A play in which the events unfold exactly as planned, such as the
Medea, or in which the consequences of a deed already committed work
themselves out, such as the Ajax, ought to induce just as much fear at
ones own vulnerability; for we are at least as vulnerable to the suffer-
ing depicted in those plays as we are to that depicted in the Oedipus
perhaps more.
No; the only kind of fear and pity that is maximised by a plot in which
events are connected against expectation because of one another is fear
for the person whose impending fate engages our pity fear for the hero
or heroes of the play. The audience at a tragedy knows, by generic con-
vention if by nothing more de nite, that terrible things are going to hap-
pen, or be only narrowly averted. The onward march of the plot, the di
llhla especially if things seem to be going well, as they often will in
the complex plot builds our fear for the person we care about, the hero,
and with it our pity, to the extent that we do not nd the heros actions
deserving of the noose that tightens about his neck.17 Meanwhile, the
means by which the dramatist will bring about peripety remain hidden
from us. We are constantly expecting the worst; but the good playwright
knows how to make it arrive, despite our expectations, unexpectedly
par tn djan. Disaster strikes, or is narrowly averted, not out of no-
where, but after the suspense has built to the maximum the maximum,
that is, of fear and pity.
The fear, Aristotle explains at one point, is in relation to one like us,
per tn moion (1453a5-6). The thought is absent from the Rhetoric, in
which it is pity that is felt in relation to those like us, while fear is felt
for oneself (2.8.13, 1386a24-28). This is as it should be after all, the
orators task is to move his audience to action, and to that end he must
make them fear for themselves. The dramatists task is rather to engage

17
That Aristotle could speak of feeling pity over an event in the near future is
shown by Rhetoric 2.8.15, 1386b1.
196 G.R.F. FERRARI

his audience in the ction, to bind them with its spell. The principal means
by which he achieves this effect is to make them care enough about the
hero to fear for him, that is to say fear on his behalf. Aristotle offers the
statement that fear comes about in relation to one like us as an explana-
tion of why a plot in which a very bad person moves from good to bad
fortune does not arouse fear. In other words, the audience will not fear on
behalf of a very bad person because a very bad person will not arouse
their sympathetic concern. This way of understanding the audiences fear
also makes sense of why Aristotle declares unfearful a plot in which bad
characters move from ill to good fortune. If a tragedy were meant to
arouse an audiences fear for themselves the fear that bad things could
happen to them why would a plot such as this not do an excellent job
of it? In a world where villains can nd success, let the decent citizen
quake in his bed! Although it is certainly possible for the playwright to
make the audience feel vulnerable by the different expedient of bringing
or threatening disaster on a character whom they think of as themselves,
why would Aristotle consider this expedient the playwrights only option,
as he does, if he also thought that inducing vulnerability in the audience
should be the playwrights goal? Rather, this sort of plot is unfearful sim-
ply because bad things do not happen to its protagonist the bad (but not
very bad) character who ends with good fortune and therefore there is
nothing for the audience to fear on his behalf, even if they could sympa-
thize with him.
The reader will doubtless be wondering how the concept of catharsis
ts with the general interpretation of the Poetics that I have presented
here. It ts very directly. The pleasure of catharsis is the pleasure that the
audience feels when the suspense that has been tightening throughout
the play is suddenly released. It is the pleasure of relief. The relief is not
therapeutic, however, nor does the audience come to the performance in
a pre-existing pathological condition. Rather, their emotional condition is
produced by the performance, and only the performance, brought to a cri-
sis, and so relieved. That emotional condition is sympathetic fear for the
hero and his impending fate. The procedure is homeopathic, but not in the
sense that a pre-existing emotion is healed by applying to it that very same
emotion, rather in the sense that the emotion is relieved by being stimu-
lated and so brought to a crisis. It is in this that tragedy resembles a purg-
ing drug.
To give the full argument for this view of catharsis would be to unbal-
ance this essay. Instead I shall mention the three factors on which it most
crucially depends: rst, accepting the relevance of what is said about
catharsis in the eighth book of the Politics, in which Aristotle gives the
 ARISTOTLES LITERARY AESTHETICS 197

example of how exciting music dispels excitement by inducing it (8.7.5,

1342a7-11); second, giving the word peranousa in the de nition of
tragedy in Poetics chapter six (1449b24-28) its proper force;18 and third,
construing the genitive tn toiotvn payhmtvn in the catharsis-clause of
the de nition as subjective rather than objective.19 This yields the follow-
ing translation of that clause: By means of pity and fear carrying through
the purge that such emotions bring.20 And this I take to be an accurate
description of the workings of tragic suspense.21

Department of Classics, University of California, Berkeley

18
That is, recognizing that in this context it does not simply mean effecting.
(Notice that in chapter nineteen, 1456a37-b4, when Aristotle speaks of bringing about
or effecting emotions, including those of pity and fear, the verb he uses is paraskeu-
zein.) Rather peranousa here means bringing to an end, bringing to completion.
Tragic catharsis is the completion of what the arousal of pity and fear has begun. Pier
Luigi Donini, in La tragedia, senza la catarsi, Phronesis 43.1 (1998) 26-41, builds
his quite different account of catharsis around a similar understanding of the force of
peranousa. But my construal of tn toiotvn payhmtvn as a subjective genitive
allows me to locate both the process and its completion within each tragedy, whereas
Donini takes tragedy to crown with the clarity of reason a catharsis begun and in large
measure accomplished by the wild, ecstatic music described in the passage of Politics
8. He thus seems to place his reinterpretation within the camp of the didactic inter-
preters. But it is not my intention in this essay to justify my own interpretation of
catharsis against its innumerable competitors. I need only show that it is possible to
understand catharsis in such a way that it ts my overall interpretation of Aristotles
purposes in the Poetics.
19
This was suggested in 1955 in a brief note by Robert Lane The catharsis of
pity and fear, Classical Journal 50.7 (1955) 309-10. But the view of catharsis that
he develops from this insight is quite different from mine.
20
Translating in this way explains why Aristotle refers back to pity and fear as
such emotions rather than these emotions. He is identifying the kind of purge he
means; it is the kind to which such emotions as pity and fear, but also excitement
(nyousiasmw), as in the Politics, do indeed lend themselves. There is a syntactic par-
allel for this, in combination with the subjective genitive, at Eudemian Ethics 1230b18.
Contrasting the self-indulgent person with one who is insensible to pleasure, Aristotle
mentions how rarely we meet with cases of insensibility, and how much more com-
monly with tn tn toiotvn dvn ttan ka asyhsin, the defeat and the sensibil-
ity that such pleasures bring. Here dvn must be construed subjectively with ttan ,
even though not with asyhsin , for the self-indulgent person does not defeat plea-
sures, he is defeated by them, because he is sensible of them. And toiotvn not only
refers back to something in the context but delimits the kind of defeat in question. I
note also the use of the subjective genitive in the phrase met tn to farmkou kyarsin,
after the purging that the drug (hellebore) has effected, in Hippocrates, Internal Affec-
tions 51.46 (although it is not the unanimous reading of the manuscripts).
21
Is catharsis therefore an effect that only complex plots can attain, despite its
inclusion in the general de nition of tragedy? I can imagine two directions which an
198 G.R.F. FERRARI

Aristotelian reply might take. One would be to treat the de nition as normative. Only
well-composed tragedies perform the proper function of tragedy (1452b28-30), and it
is this function that the de nition describes. After all, the plots of many existing
tragedies should not arouse pity and fear by Aristotles criteria (e.g. 1452b34-6), but
pity and fear belong to the de nition of the genre no less than catharsis. A second
direction would be to treat suspense as something that, although best realized by the
complex plot, need not be entirely absent from the simple. We can fear for Medea
and sympathize with her in her plight, wishing that she might yet pull back from the
terrible deed to which she feels driven; and this sympathetic fear is dispelled when
she proceeds to action. Will she really do it? is a question we can ask quite as much
while watching Medea prepare to kill her children as while watching Iphigenia pre-
pare to kill her brother; but the tension is dispelled in a less satisfying way this
would be Aristotles thought if our fears merely play themselves out as we had antic-
ipated they would.