Here we are taking a look at the next 5 sections of Aristotle’s poetics. As I stated last time, I’m working through Aristotle’s Poetics in an attempt to figure out why, even today, he is pointed to by script-writers as a guiding light in the production of drama. He is wordy, and often difficult to work out but, little by little, I’m beginning to see what his fans appreciate about him. Today we look at the elements of drama, in particular, plot, and what makes a good plot (at least according to Aristotle).
POETICS BOOK V
On Comedy and the Epic
In book V Aristotle treats briefly of comedy and the epic.Comedy concerns itself with the ridiculous (but not harmful). That is, in a comedy people behave in dysfunctional or inappropriate ways (such that they appear ridiculous and elicit laughter) but without suffering harm or eliciting sympathy. This was important to Aristotle, because, as already stated, plays in Greek society served an overtly moral purpose and so, he felt the need to establish the moral credentials of comedy. For Aristotle, the comedy was morally useful in rendering inappropriate social behavior ridiculous and thereby furnishing the audience with examples to avoid.
The Epic differs from Tragedy in that it is wider in scope and narrative in form. In today’s parlance, the epic is a book, while the tragedy is a play. A book is narrated, while a play is enacted, primarily, before the eyes (as an audio-play is enacted, primarily, before the ears). Everything you might find in a book can be found in a play, but not everything in a play is found in a book.
If we think of the comedies of Shakespeare, we see this principle at work. The plays might deal with serious matter (duels, love, suicide, etc.), but it is all done in good fun and no-one is ever really hurt (humiliated, maybe, but never hurt). The duels are avoided, the suicides are revealed to have been faked etc. Even where the antagonist gets their come-upance, their final fate is dealt with “off-stage”.
We also see that characters rarely grow or change in comedies designed after the Aristotellian model. The character we meet at the beginning of a comedy is just the same as at the end (though their circumstances may have changed). Is the bachelor egotistical and vapid at the beginning of the story? He will be so at the end (even if by that time he is married). Is the character selfish and stupid? They will remain so.We could do worse than follow such a model. For Aristotle, growth or character change undermined the ridiculous nature of the character and, instead, inspire empathy. This, Aristotle felt, removed what made comedy, comedy.Today, we are much more inclined to want to include character depth in comedy writing, but the principle remains true that the more we have a character grow and change, the less ridiculous they become. Fixed and unchanging characters are a feature of comedy that find little place in tragedy (except, perhaps, as comic relief).
POETICS BOOK VI
Tragedy
Now, back to tragedy (or the play).One of Aristotle’s more difficult, and famous, definitions reads “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
“We’ve dealt elsewhere with the notion that plays, “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions”, are required to be morally useful. This may be a laudable opinion (sort of), but it is not a constraint we feel the need to strictly apply today. Even as recently as the Golden Age of Radio, radio-shows, such as the Shadow, felt constrained (and were in fact constrained by law) to include deliberate moral lessons – “the weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows”, etc. Today, we feel far less constrained and can produce a work of art or play simply to be entertaining. That said, it would be foolish to consider art morally neutral. Entertainment is a high calling, providing people with a way to cope with the stresses of life, a temporary release from suffering, a means of sharing joy with others, etc. It can also be deliberately corruptive. Sometimes this is a feature of the design of the work. Sometimes this is a function of the use to which the work is put. Personally, I feel horrendously under-qualified to be giving writers any moral advice beyond ” be aware of the consequences of your choices, be responsible, own your decisions, and, where possible, try to avoid doing harm”.
Much of the remainder of Aristotle’s definition is common sense. According to Aristotle, a play presents a recognizable and plausible imitation of reality (even where that reality is made fantastic by the presence of gods and monsters). More on this later.Tragedy, in distinction to comedy, is serious. Dealing, as it should, with important themes and actions and consequences, etc. If it is not serious, then it is, in fact, comedy.
It is complete, in that it has a beginning, middle, and end that are intrinsic to the story. A good play begins with the first meaningful action of the story, relates only those events necessary to moving the story forward, and concludes as soon as the story is resolved. All irrelevant material is rejected. Completeness, therefore involves not only including everything necessary for the telling of the tale, but also an economic approach, excluding everything that would distract from it.
To say that a play is of a certain magnitude is to say that it is limited in duration, but also that it functions within certain fixed limits. A stage play has a limited amount of time to tell its story, true. But it also has only so much real-estate with which to work (the stage), the patience of the audience with the story (an audience will only sit still so long) as well as budgetary constraints on the degree and quality of the set, costumes, props, orchestra, etc. that accompany it.
It is often said that Radio is free of constraint. We can, in much the way that a book might, place the setting of our play anywhere in this universe or another. We can as easily visit the belly of a whale or the farthest star.
This freedom is not without limits, however. The radio audience must be engaged quickly. Distraction is only a channel-change away. The soundscape and dialog must be readily decodable. The number of voices must not be so many as to make recognition of the characters difficult without visual aid, etc.
A key feature of drama (and especially of audio drama) is that it is delivered in dialog. Yes, exceptions exist – the BBC’s famous sound-only story, The Revenge, by Andrew Sachs, has no dialog and stands out as a case in point. But generally, dialog is the medium of storytelling in audio-drama. Aristotle places language “embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play” front and center.It is safe to say that that audio-dramatist must be able to do the same, harnessing dialog as a means of story-telling, if they wish to produce scripts for this medium.
The famous maxim “show don’t tell” finds its origin in Aristotle’s insistence that, as far as plays are concerned, drama is “found in action, not narrative”.
But what of non-visual media, like radio, that rely on dialog? The maxim still holds. Characters should not tell us that they are, for example, angry. We should intuit the anger via subtext. We show the anger through the characters words and interactions (with supporting sounds), but we should never tell the audience the character’s emotional state, outright.
COMPARE…
BOB: I’m so angry, I feel like slamming the door today. The yellow party won the election.
WITH…
BOB: Get the hell out of my way! And take that damned yellow hat off. I don’t care who won the election. I’m not having one of those hats in this office.
SOUND: OFFICE DOOR SLAMS
According to Aristotle, tragedy is made up of six parts, organized under three categories;
Category 1: Objects of Action (comprising of Plot, Character, and Thought)
Category 2: Means or Manner of Action (comprising of Language – diction – and Melody)
Category 3: Mode or Medium of Action (comprising of Spectacle (costume, special effects, and scenery).
Aristotle makes plot the primary element of storytelling. For this he has been roundly criticized on many occasions. Those who enjoy character-based drama have often found his opinion obnoxious, feeling, with some justification, that writers who focus primarily on plot produce weak stories. There would be some justification to this viewpoint if Aristotle was only interested in plot (to the exclusion of all else), but he is not. His interest in plot is fundamentally an interest in action and reaction.
Character is revealed in the actions and reactions that the dramatis personae have to the events around them. Character is internal, but, internal character is not accessible to the eye. Because people are capable of deception and lies, it is not accessible to the ear, either. As human beings we can choose to believe or disbelieve what a person says, but we rarely discount what we see them do.
As a result, Aristotle argues that a person’s true character is not revealed by their statements but by their actions. The coward may talk of his bravery, but his true character is revealed when it is tested by events and results in action (standing-fast or running away). Because Aristotle emphasizes the revelation of character through the actions and reactions of characters (rather than through narrative explanation), he argues that events/plot are primary. In no way does he exclude the importance of character. He merely demands that character be revealed in action.
Of the elements of a plot, he singles out the reversal and recognition (discussed later) as the most significant.
Aristotle places character second in his list. Character is where we learn of the moral qualities of the individual (remember his idea that characters are either better, worse, or the same as us). It’s worth stating again that extremes of character are to be avoided (except, perhaps, in comedy). The perfectly good and perfectly evil character do not feel real to us. We know ourselves to be flawed and we empathize with the flaws we observe in others (even as we like or dislike the character overall). The catalyst for the revelation of character are the events of the plot.
Thirdly, Aristotle discusses thought, more properly understood as motivation. A character’s action must never be random. Something must motivate it and that motivation must be plausible. If a character expresses fear, there must be something in the environment or in the mind/thoughts of the character that elicits that fear. If a character begins to run, there must be an accompanying motivation (a desire to exercise, or the fear of an axe-wielding maniac).
While the motivation may be hidden for a time (in order to increase curiosity) it cannot stay so. The motivation of the action must be clear, revealed in sound and dialog, to be satisfying.At a more basic level, motivation relates to desire. Characters never initiate action without wanting… something. Even when coerced there is desire (to get out from under the coercion).
The characters desire/motivation is revealed in what they choose to do or avoid and in their decisions.
When characters face choices, anticipate, consider, weigh up, and explore the potential consequences of those choices, and then settle upon an action, thought is further revealed.
Fourth comes diction– the way voices are differentiated and the idiosyncratic ways that characters speak. Does the character speak slowly and thoughtfully, using big words? Does the character drop the “h”? Does the character mispronounce words, or utilize an accent? Is there a rhythm to the words, or are the words abrasive and jarring?
Aristotle also discusses, fifthly, song. The lyrics, rhythms, and melody of Gilbert and Sullivan spring readily to mind (although the art of the musical is somewhat foreign to a non-musician like myself). Song is something that Aristotle sees as an embellishment of the dialog.
With that understanding we turn to our final element; spectacle. On the stage this consists of costuming, props, and set. In film this is expanded to include CGI and special effects. But in audio-drama, the “spectacle” is created by sound effects and music. The sound effects support and illustrate the action of the story, creating the pictures in our minds that help to sell the reality of the story world to us, while music underscores and emphasizes the emotion and tone of the story. But both, in combination with the dialog, can bring the world of the play to life.
Aristotle makes the spectacle least important in his list on the grounds that, were it left out, a good play could still be enjoyed on the basis of the dialog alone. While sound is essential to a sound-only production such as the BBC’s “Revenge”, it is certainly the exception rather than the rule. As a life-long reader of plays (both for entertainment and as a means of self-education regarding the art of play-writing) generally speaking a play doesn’t “need” the embellishments (except at points and to achieve certain effects). However, the embellishments of sound and music can and do significantly increase the immersion generated by the story and, in many cases, could not be removed without doing violence to the whole.
POETICS BOOK VII
The PlotThere are times when reading Aristotle’s Poetics that I find myself wanting to scream. He often goes into frustrating detail about more obvious matters, while providing very little detail on the more complex topics that I find harder to understand. In book vii, he labors over the seemingly obvious, but there is value here nonetheless.He reminds us of his definition (again) that drama is “an imitation that is complete and whole and of a certain magnitude” before going on to define what that completeness is.
A drama has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning starts at the last possible initial and essential moment (a moment that nothing essential can come before). The ending occurs at the last possible final and essential moment (a moment that nothing essential can follow after). And the middle is made up of those essential moments that come between the beginning and end.
Obvious, right?
But it is the essential nature of the parts that are significant to Aristotle. A story doesn’t begin just anywhere. It begins with an event that initiates the action and leads irrevocably through a chain of events to a conclusion. These events are selected by the writer and NONE of them can be purposeless, random, or unnecessary if the writing is to be successful.
Artistotle goes on to point out that a dramatic work of art must be comprehensible (that it must make sense). If it is too short, a beginning only, it will not satisfy. If it is too long (so that, either because of its complexity or duration, its parts and their working together cannot be discovered by the viewer/listener) it also fails to satisfy.
Here he is concerned with both duration and completeness. A play may be long or short, but it must be complete and, in being complete, it must not be stuffed with anything un-necessary.
Finally, he makes the point that a plot must be concerned with change. He takes as his primary examples a change from “good fortune to bad” or “bad fortune to good”.
For Aristotle, a story cannot be good where the status quo does not alter.In terms of how this applies to audio-drama, the following can be stated;
An audio drama (of whatever length) whether an episode in a series or a feature length story must describe a change in the circumstances of a character (or characters) from its beginning to its end in as economical, yet essentially complete, a manner as possible.
POETICS BOOK VIII
The Unity of the Plot
Unity is an essential feature of a story. Sometimes a writer makes the mistake of thinking that a story is unified because it deals with a single subject or character, but, as Aristotle points out, a life is not a plot. The fact that I was born, lived in a home with my parents, went to school, worked in a series of jobs, married, and had a family does not make these events a unified plot simply because they are about me.
A plot is formed by the selection of events around a particular character goal/desire and restricts itself to only those events relevant to the complete telling of that tale. The Odyssey by Homer, for example, carefully selects from the life of Odysseus only those events relevant to his home-coming.
A successful plot is dependent on the skill of the writer at selecting those events that contribute to the whole in an essential way. Recounting what the protagonist ate for breakfast is not essential to a story where the protagonist’s goal is to rescue his kidnapped son, for example.
The test of the unity of a story consists of ensuring that no element of a story can be removed or added without significantly changing or distorting the whole. A whole must be understood in relation to its parts and its parts in relation to the whole. Anything that cannot contribute to the unity of the story must be excluded.
POETICS BOOK IX
Plot vs. History
Just as a life is not a story, neither is history, in and of itself. Recording events as they happened, in sequence does not result in a plot. Stories involve invention. They are about what might be, or what might have been, more than they are about what actually was. And, unlike history, which concerns itself (at least according to Aristotle), with producing a comprehensive record of events, drama aims, more philosophically, at communicating ideas. In this, I suspect Aristotle is groping towards the notion of “theme”.
Rather than being a mere chronological sequencing of events, a story is about something. And in Artistotle’s Greece, where drama primarily served a civic function (teaching and promoting civic duty) it is not hard to see why Aristotle felt this way.
But as a general principle, beyond the culture of Greece, this has a lot of merit. Stories aren’t merely collections of events from a life or history. They are, in fact about something; about coping with change, about love, or revenge, or grief, or achievement, etc. They are, to paraphrase Aristotle, about universal experiences that we all can relate to (or they are if they are any good).The value of history, as a source of story, lies in its plausibility. The story based on history is believable because its events have in fact happened in the real world. However, Aristotle is at pains to point out that we are not restricted to “historical” stories. All stories, even the historical ones, must be fictionalized to a degree (through selection and invention) so that they can express their message. History lends a sense of reality to stories, but wild flights of fiction can be plausible so long as each event is linked to each by a clear chain of cause and effect.
That which Aristotle calls the episodic story is to be avoided. A story that is merely a series of events in sequence. The “and then” story – “I got up and then I went outside and then I caught a rabbit and then I ate it and then I looked at the sky and then I noticed a storm gathering” – is ultimately unsatisfying.
For Aristotle, the satisfaction and believability of a story is tied up with it being motivated effectively. Eg. “Cold and hungry, I left the cave and caught a rabbit for breakfast. The wind was picking up, so I scanned the sky and noted the gathering clouds. Storms in the mountains could be dangerous, so I would need to seek shelter.”
The inclusion of motivational links takes the “episodes” related earlier and makes them plausible and part of a unified whole. This story is one of survival against the elements. It is about something.
Here, Aristotle makes an aside that speaks directly to our present. Good writers will, from time to time, include unmotivated episodic material at the behest of (and to placate) their actors, or studio, or investors. Bad writers do it because they can’t do otherwise.
But what of surprises and twists? According to Aristotle, an action does not have to be predictable to be motivated. In fact, the best actions are surprising when they occur – however, when we look back at them they must appear to have been inevitable (that is, we must be able to see the antecedent causes and motivations that led inevitably to them).
It may be a shocking surprise that the mild mannered wife takes an axe to her husband in the second act, but given his dismissive and insulting behavior, when we look back over their interactions, it should appear thoroughly motivated and plausible.
Next time, we’ll examine Aristotle’s break-down of the key elements of a plot.
Copyright Philip Craig Robotham © 2021 .
