Life Sentences (35 page)

In Plato’s day, art was becoming more mimetic by the minute. And that meant: more faithful to appearances. Figures were now individualized, not so hieratic, symbolic, and formal; casts were being taken from the bodies of athletes to the scandal of the connoisseurs; decoration was looser and less geometrical; paintings which deceived the eye were marveled at (Plato was not pleased that painters were proud when birds pecked at their painted grapes); drama was undergoing the same slow transformation: had not Agathon—the writer whose victory in the theatrical competitions the
Symposium
celebrates—had he not introduced, for the first time, nonmythological elements? And what was one to say about Euripides’ sensationalism, and his vulgar pandering to the passions of the populace? Aristophanes had made fun of the saintly Socrates before the Athenians murdered him. Artists were in cahoots with the priests who looked after the numerous sanctuaries that had sprung up as if piles of rock had been watered into bloom, and votive objects and other offerings to the gods had collected in the precincts of the shrines like leaves in a windless corner. The politicians, moreover, had led the people into
an ill favored, unfortunate, and lengthy war. Plato’s attitude would become a familiar one. Mass culture has been eating away at high culture’s cookie for as long as baking has been a business. Sculptors were manufacturing huge heavily bedizened statues for the public to marvel at, and countless pretty boys in marble toes or ladies dressed in plump breasts and long thighs that Roman pillagers would later resell to the Latin bourgeois, received the ardent admiration of the masses—not just then, but, in the guise of Roman copies, since.

What a pleasure it was to produce reasons that copying was so detrimental to the rational spirit, and put painters in their place, because the people and scenes they painted were already artifacts, already appearances, already removed from reality by at least one degree. Falsehoods follow falsehoods like pilgrims to their shrine. The world loves the flattery that all likeness intends.

However, that very character of mimesis is essential to the educational process, much of which must take place before the age of reason, and therefore very often by means of imitation. The youth must be provided with proper role models—to employ one of our popular euphemisms. Plato has still another use for his proportional metaphor of the divisions of the soul and state, because when we are infants, we are also as vegetables; we eat and excrete, cry and kick, and our parents are expected to supply the moderation that would otherwise be lacking. As youths we are controlled by our passions, and we must be taught to bleed for peace instead of drill for oil, to direct our feelings to their appropriate objects, to love the good and hate the ill informed. When adults, we rule ourselves. This is an ideal, of course, because when the state is badly managed, its citizens remain children; they fire their guns into the sky; they die for the wrong causes; they allow their passions to be stirred by raucous music; they read only one book.

Alas, for consistency, if we tell only nice things about Zeus and his fellow loungers on Mount Olympus, so that the youth will have something to be devout about, we shall have to tell lies, for the gods are as wicked as you and I, and don’t rule the way guardians are
supposed to. Lying is not a seemly exercise; nevertheless Plato recommends a shield of lies to protect the innocence of the people and enable them to be more easily managed.

Yet one more proportion can be lined up alongside Plato’s controlling metaphor, namely parallel levels of knowledge. When the appetitive portion dominates, the soul lives in a state of ignorance, is psychologically a child, and should be allowed only a workman’s productive role in the ideal republic. He or she depends upon successful
praxis
to make do, and learns a trade by imitating those who already have it. Skills, like casting bronze, are passed down from master to his sons like recipes for stews, and may include good, bad, or irrelevant advice, often a surprising mingling of superstition and good sense. Administrators are allowed
doxa
—opinions—beliefs that, whether right or wrong, are not supported by satisfactory reasons. Only guardians possess the
Logos
, theoretical knowledge, the justification that makes some opinions sound.

These three levels of “knowledge and education”—
praxis, doxa, Logos
—match up with the parts of the soul, and those with the stages of human growth and psychological types, and those with the classification of citizens along with their appropriate virtues, to form the soul of the state; and in every case the connection is established through mimesis—mimesis as either impersonation, participation, or copy—and one in which Form is made manifest through the order it lends to illusion.

If Plato is prepared to put every meaning of mimesis to use, and make it a modest philosophical jack-of-all-trades, Aristotle appears inclined to confine it to more purely aesthetic contexts. Either because of the fragmentary character of the
Poetics
, its sketchy lecture-note quality, or its immense concision, there seem to be more flagrant misrepresentations of its contents than most early tracts have had to suffer. As Stephen Halliwell points out, “the philosopher’s concept of mimesis has played a vital role in the long story of Western attitudes to artistic representation, [but] that role has often been mediated through the reworking and misinterpretation
of his ideas, especially those found in the
Poetics
.” I would suggest that the philosopher’s concept has not played a vital role, after all, but only misconstruals of it have, much in the same way that the Bible has suffered from its readers, so that what it has been taken to mean, not what it means, matters. Falsehood and error have played a far larger role in history than truth and correctness, for falsehoods always find a way to be convenient and of use.

Even if Aristotle had said, “Art is an imitation of nature,” the words he would have used—
techné, mimesis physis
—would have given the game away; for each of these terms has considerable philosophical significance in Aristotle’s work and, understood in that context, make the formula one I, at least, might love, instead of this infamous sentence’s historic meanings, all of which are vulgar and abhorrent. Aristotle says he is going to investigate one of the productive arts—the craft of making poems—and that investigation will involve distinguishing poetry’s genres and their particular effects, defining the elements that comprise the craft, especially how to turn traditional plots into decent drama, as well as whatever else proves to be pertinent during the course of his study. And he will begin, as he customarily does, with first principles.

He could have said he was going to study the skill of a pilot of ships, whose aim is a safe arrival in harbor, or that of a physician, whose purpose is healing; but neither is a part of poiesis—the productive arts. He could have made his subject the sandal maker’s art: what kinds of sandals there were; what end each was designed to serve, and how you went about making them: the tools you would need, the materials you might choose, and so forth. But, you might say, in that case where does mimesis come in? Some animals have padded paws; some have hooves; some skins are as leathery as gloves. But we have no such protection from the sharp stones of the road, so the cobbler remedies that lack, not by imitating hooves but by following the hints thrown out by nature, and bringing shoes into being mechanically without any thought of resemblance, only one of function. The principle of change lies in the cobbler, and is clearly
external to its object, unlike the fabled acorn that follows genetic instructions. When the artisan goes to work, he makes things by
following the pattern of nature
(that is the right rendering of
mimesis
here):
it
makes lava,
he
manufactures plastics;
it
grows talons,
he
invents corkscrews;
it
encourages eagles,
he
runs after rats with baited traps.

There are some things in nature that need to be fixed, and there are others that aren’t there at all, but ought to be. The physician mends; the cobbler adds. Potions that physicians might need, our chemists sometimes supply. It will be like that with the craft of poetry. Tragedy, it will turn out, is a purgative, and good for the body politic—an analogy that has its origins in Plato, but one that Aristotle is happy to continue. He was the son of a physician, after all.

There is another consequence of Aristotle’s treatment of poetry as a craft. As Gerald Else remarks, “There is not a word anywhere in the
Poetics
about the persons Homer and Sophocles. The artist does not produce
qua
man, person, individual, but
qua
artist; or as Aristotle says, with his special brand of vividness, ‘it is accidental to the sculptor that he is Polyclitus.’ ” Another example, updated from Plato: the art of medicine is a body of knowledge which the physician internalizes. Then when Dr. Weisenheimer cures my gout, it is the art of medicine that does it. When he botches the job, he does so as old Joe Weisenheimer of Louisa Alcott Lane. When the Romantic poets fly their kites, it is the wind that keeps them airborne. They just think it is their own hot air.

So poetry is placed among the productive arts. In the most businesslike fashion possible. I don’t think one can stress this placement too strongly. As Gerald Else concludes, “His treatise is not a discussion of ‘poetry’ in either, or any, sense of the English term; it is, in all sadness and sobriety, an analysis of the nature and functioning of the
art
of poetry and of its species.” It is not
about
Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
. And those species: what are they? They are the epic (which is recited), tragedy and comedy (which are performed), and dithyrambic poetry (which is sung by a chorus). Flute and lyre music
are also deemed imitations. Aristotle goes on to say that some arts use color and shape, but all the others employ the voice, or are at least audible.

Aristotle resides in an oral culture still. Moreover, he knows that the written word can resemble only other written words. “The cat sat on the mat” in no way imitates its situation. When Creon enters in a snit, however, his words enable the actor to impersonate his character, mimic his tone of voice, and say what he might say under the circumstances. We also know that he won’t talk American, though he does in this translation.

The stage directions, “Creon enters,” do not imitate an action; they order it. The words Creon speaks do not imitate his state of mind; they express it. However, Creon’s speaking them—his tone of voice, his choice of the Americanism “cannot take that from him”—do help the actor impersonate Creon’s character and consequently could be said to be an imitation.

In the case of music, both Plato and Aristotle seem to find it especially infectious—that martial music makes one martial, that lullabies lull, and so on—that is, they encourage participation, but it is the dynamics of music, more than anything else, that is transferable, and it is music, too, that achieves its harmony through the formal relations of its sounds and the manner of their production, since the Pythagoreans had presumably discovered a connection between tones and the length of a lyre string. Its harmonies and disharmonies affect the morally important emotions; indeed, as Stephen Halliwell puts it, they are “
enacted
by the qualities of the artwork. That these qualities are ‘in’ the (musically organized) sounds themselves is inferred from music’s capacity to convey emotional-cum-ethical feelings to the audience.”

In a previous lecture I observed how Plato had argued for a division between the realm of Being and the world of Becoming that could be crossed only on a bridge of mimesis. The Demiurge uses sensory qualities to imitate the Forms: the things of this world impersonate their real counterparts, and gain their secondary and only reality by participating in them. Aristotle, with so much common sense it seems daring, does not have a gulf he must cross, because his forms exist in every instance of their kinds. They are sunk in their particulars like posts. If all the members of a species are there, in that species, because they have “the same form,” then might it not be possible to imagine a situation in which a form customarily found in one place was found in another as well? A musical score possesses a note structure that the performer follows and reproduces in the piece he plays; moreover, the auditory waves that microphones capture and transfer to digital tapes can boast that structure too, as a disc’s grooves do. It might be only a metaphor, but music’s moods and the emotional coloration of our consciousness could share similar dynamic relationships without in the least having the same content.

Ultimately, Aristotle interprets the form/content connection first as a structure/function relation, and finally as one of potency and act. To understand this we have to remind ourselves of Aristotle’s classification of causes into four kinds, because they apply to the sources of action in a tragedy, and to the course of mimesis there, as surely as they do to nature and life generally. Every event has a material cause. It is made of something, sometimes several different kinds of thing, and this matter must be considered, when confined to artistry, as canvas and pigment, words in a language, sounds from a flute, stone from a quarry. Every material will have its own actuality (the idea of something that is pure potentiality—prime matter—is entirely conceptual); that is, marble will have that stone’s qualities and forms. These, however, will be the basis for the many things it might do or become. The efficient cause is simply the work done in order to realize those potentialities; it is energy enabled by tools and
directed by skills, in the sculptor’s case, so that out of the marble a marble fawn emerges.