A Return to Aristotle and Why
The Poetics, Mimesis, and the Justification for Genre Fiction
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All literary theory we currently have today originates at some point with Aristotle’s Poetics. From the time of its rediscovery in Europe after the Crusades to the mid-19th century, Aristotle’s mimetic theory held sway in the literary world as the golden standard for evaluating, analyzing, and appreciating literature.
What makes Poetics the golden standard has largely to do with the fact that it’s one of the few pieces of literary theory that survives from Ancient Greece. Other contemporary philosophers, like Plato, did address the idea of literature in their dialogues, but it was always in relation to something else.
Another reason it’s the golden standard is because of what works he mentions: we still have most of them and this is crucial information in not only how these works influenced society, but also how they influenced philosophy. Aristotle mentions Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and he names Homer which means that by this time at least, both works were in the form in which we currently know them. He also mentioned plays by Sophocles and Euripides such as Oedipus Rex, The Oresteia, and Medea—all of which we have.
But what Aristotle is perhaps best known for is mimesis—the word from which we get mimic. This is the heart of mimetic theory which is best described, as M. H. Abrams puts it in The Mirror and the Lamp, as “the explanation of art as essentially an imitation of aspects of the universe” (8). This means that what you see in art whether that’s in a poem, a novel, a painting, a sculpture, etc, is basically mimicking something in real life.
Incidentally, “art imitates life” and its inverse have their roots in Aristotle’s mimesis. But it’s not Aristotle who thinks of the inverse, it’s Plato.
Plato vs Aristotle: The Literary Round
Most students of the arts will have come across the Plato vs Aristotle debate at one point or another. It’s, in fact, the subject of a very famous fresco in the Vatican called The School of Athens by Raphael. You may recognize it.
Here, Plato and Aristotle are the primary focus, with Plato imperiously pointing upward to signify his Theory of Forms and Aristotle with his hand outstretched, palm downwards signifying observable reality. For those of you who are not familiar with the dispute, this can be even more succinctly framed by saying that Plato was the philosopher of universal, metaphysical truths while Aristotle was the philosopher of categories. This is why you’ll find his work full of frameworks and classifications while Plato’s ideas are almost entirely metaphysical.
Both have a part to play, and both have their own ideas about mimesis. But to dismiss one in favor of the other is a mistake because Aristotle builds on Plato.
To return to Abrams, Plato’s mimesis is primarily concerned with “the perfecting of the social state and the state of man, so that the questions of art can never be separated from the questions of truth, justice, and virtue” (9). Indeed, Plato even initially wanted to expel poets (aka writers/authors) from his perfect state because, to him poets didn’t tell the exact truth because they didn’t exactly copy ideas which, by extension, made them liars. What kind of virtue could liars inspire in a population?
If you’ve been paying close attention to cultural discourse from the past 50+ years, Plato’s objections rhyme with the same objections that get books “banned” in schools to this day and which led to Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the 2011 case in the Supreme Court regarding violent video games: people are afraid of life imitating art but the real danger is assuming that the power of art is uniform across every single individual when it very clearly isn’t.
This comes partially from how Plato sets up his mimetic theory which is based on eternal, unchanging ideas; the world we can sense whether that’s natural or artificial; and that shadows, mirror reflections, and the fine arts are all essentially the same and based on the quality of the original idea being reflected.
Now, we can pick these apart fairly easily with the benefit of psychology and with lived experience. For instance, we know that perception and reality are often two very different things: two observers can sense the same thing but have two completely different interpretations or even memories of the same event. We can also postulate that ideas that don’t change are not exactly possible with a species that constantly changes and is subject to mortality.
This is where Aristotle makes some improvements. He doesn’t dismiss his teacher’s ideas—on the contrary—we see them come up again in Poetics, although only covertly. Aristotle clearly builds on this framework because he dives straight into more detailed categories without establishing Plato’s groundwork.
Aristotle bases quality on the object or idea imitated, the medium of the imitation, and then how the imitation is executed. In other words, if you have a bad idea, Plato will throw out the whole thing as worthless automatically. Aristotle, however, would look not just at the idea, but how the artist tried to communicate the idea. His implication is that some mediums are more conducive to communicating some ideas than others. He routinely dismisses scenarios as suitable for tragedy, for instance, because they do not accomplish the goals of the tragic form.
What this distinction really means is that Aristotle is giving a framework for greater distinction between genres, literary styles, plot types, and types of art than Plato is. The bulk of Poetics is about what is suitable for tragedy—not because there is a moral value assigned to tragedy over any other art form, but because tragedy has a very specific purpose—we would call it a genre expectation today.
I’ll get into this more in The Eftsoons Romantic, Issue #1. This is a big part of a larger argument I’m making that details how the romantic literary tradition was deliberately side-lined, feeding into the increased ire that it draws in its genre form.
Why You Should Care About Aristotle as a Writer
Aristotle’s Poetics basically paves the way for genre fiction. In fact, today’s genre market would appeal to Aristotle’s sense of order. It’s a small point to make, but if you are in a highly contested genre like romance, or fantasy, then this is a minor point that nearly all the literary snobs overlook usually in favor of a hardline about universal truths and morality.
But most writers who have an actual grasp on reality and the struggles of real people don’t care about the big universals for their own sake. They care about the universals as they affect specific lives, specific emotions, specific people. It’s people that the big universals are supposed to serve, not the other way around. Truth, justice, and virtue are all well and good, but they don’t necessarily keep a roof over your head or put groceries on the table.
And that, I suspect is why the “universals” argument of Plato almost always goes through a phase where it’s really popular—usually with purists with the luxury of making broad sweeping statements—and then there’s a collapse because it’s an unsustainable belief when your follower count plummets, your brand deals dry up, you lose the next election, or your crypto investments fail. At some point, you have to bring the universe down to the level of an individual human being with the understanding that no two human beings are going to be the same and that no two situations are exactly the same.
Part of Shakespeare’s everlasting appeal is in his universals, it’s true, but the situations in which he places his characters are almost painfully specific: Prince Hal’s worry about not living up to his father and disappointing not only him but the entire nation, Beatrice’s cry of “Oh God that I were a man” is the cry of every woman at every point in history who has been denied justice or a voice, Hamlet’s musings about existence and being caught in times that force him between being the man he needs to be and the man he wants to be. It’s not the universals, I would argue that make us love Shakespeare as we do, but his specifics—because those specifics are themselves universal.
Specificity is what makes us cry—because we recognize the emotion either because we empathize with the character, or we have lived that emotion at some point in our lives. It’s not because we recognize some nebulous universal truth—it’s because we’ve recognized a very specific personal truth that is common to lived experience.
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1977.
News
Well, this issue was supposed to go out next week, but the writing of it came more easily this week, so I did a last-minute schedule change. You have to write what you know you can deliver sometimes.
Word to the wise, don't put dates on your upcoming topics!
The Eftsoons Romantic, Issue #1 is coming together!
Next week's Eftsoons Letter will actually give you a sneak peak of what the first four issues are going to cover. If you enjoyed today's essay on Aristotle, then you definitely will want Issue #1 because I'm going to deep-dive into the Poetics and give you the receipts for what Aristotle actually says. I plan on releasing the first issue during the last week of July, and I'm still on track to do that.
Swan-Maid's Song Research
Have you heard about Doggerland? This was apparently a landmass—not just a land bridge--that connected what is today the British Isles with mainland Europe. Even more intriguingly, it's where the Seine, Rhine, and Thames met before flowing out to the sea.
The made-up world of my swan-maid and paramour is proving to be quite an adventure, and I've learned more about glaciers, climate change, and braided rivers than I ever thought I needed to know.
Plato may have gotten his literary theory slightly wrong, but he apparently was correct about Atlantis!
Coming Up
- "How the Romantic Tradition was Deliberately Sidelined in Education." This is the introduction to The Eftsoons Romantic and the first few issues. It's proven to be a much more involved topic than even I anticipated, and I ended up going all the way back to Aristotle.
- "What Is a Moral Framework?" I talk about moral frameworks a lot in High Romance, and here I show you want I mean by them, and what they entail.
- "Romance, Fated Mates, and Free Will" This is a short examination and explanation of Romance in contrast to the two movements that defined the 20th century: Naturalism and Symbolism. This will feed into the next month's issues of both the Letter and the Romantic.
- Bonus: I have my own review of the much-lauded Yesteryear in the works!
