Life Sentences (36 page)

The formal cause is what will be later called the object’s essence, and like the material cause is a combination of what the thing actually is and what it can become because of what it actually is; however, the formal cause is its definition, and determines what a thing is destined to become or do if allowed to express its nature. In the case of a work of art, the formal cause, as I’ve said, lies outside the thing itself and resides in the artist. Nothing grows into a marble fawn on its own, though flesh and blood fawns do. Those principles of change that reside within an object or event are said to be its entelechy—its direction of self-realization. The final cause is, of course, the end at which a course of action aims, the fully realized deer, or statue, or polished skill.

All this is elementary Aristotle. What scholars seem less inclined to do is to apply Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics (even his ethics and his logic) to the principles of the
Poetics
. If we do that, many obscurities become immediately clear and the concision of the text understandable. For instance, a tragedy, Aristotle says, is the imitation of a morally serious action—clearly one that has taken place, or might take place, in the ordinary life of extraordinary people—in such a way as to show how its consequences follow inevitably from its nature. These consequences invariably involve the loss of eudaemonia, well-being, or self-fulfillment, not merely for the individual but for the society. So often catastrophe is the result of excess: of success, as if a vine choked the tree it twined upon; or certainty, as if you bet your life on your ability to guess right; or duty, pursuing what you think proper against every advice; or of innocence, or loyalty, or honesty itself, so often not the best policy because virtue is the way to ruin.

Aristotle advises the plot maker to concentrate upon a single unified action, and therefore one that is definable and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. His advice is not as simpleminded as it sounds. It has to do, as he says later, with raveling and unraveling, tying the knot, and untying it.

The beginning of a play is complete when the dramatist has established a situation that implicitly contains the conclusion. It is the planted seed. Henry James used to feel that his beginnings always needed more material put in them to support the story, consequently that they grew too large, so he studied various methods of foreshortening. For Aristotle the play’s course—the object of its mimesis—must resemble an entelechy. The play’s middle occurs at that point in the arc of an arrow’s flight when its rise weakens and the course of its return becomes inevitable. This is often seen as a reversal of fortune, since the action was initially regarded as a good and wise one, and prospers in that guise, before showing its true self, and reversing its direction. The conclusion is the completed actualization of what was there to be realized from the beginning. When there are many subordinate plotlines the trick is to find one fulfillment that will satisfy them all.

The infamous unities of one place/one day are suggested only because such a confinement makes far easier the disclosure of consequences. A tragedy should move like a syllogism from premises to conclusion. The fewer premises the better. The ordinary world rarely offers us such a sight, because there are too many competing courses of action. The seed of a tree must not only cope with the earth it finds itself in and employ the moisture and nutrients that are there, but it must compete with other plants for its light and food, avoid being munched into oblivion by a deer, stand up eventually against the elements, and dodge disease, the sawmill, and the forest’s fires. History is an account of accidents, collisions of causes, and its results are always maimed. Thousands are throwing their basketballs at the same basket. History hears only the din of disappointed ends. There is no song that isn’t interrupted almost the moment it’s begun. History is wreckage. Whereas the tragic action grows like a plant in a nursery or a bacterium in a laboratory. No one is permitted to knock it from its stand; no diseases darken its leaves; no worms chew its blooms. We can therefore see what it will be; what it is in its inner self—a complete action as rounded as a racecourse. Who better than Kant to warn us against actions with unintended
consequences, advice that, given early, nevertheless comes to our politicians too late? Tragedy drops one small smooth pebble into a calm pure pond and then measures, whereas history tosses a handful of gravel into a raging sea on a foggy day. That is why poetry is more philosophical than history. History’s universals are all dead or dismembered.

Oedipus sees his own tragedy unfold and is the best spectator for his own blinding. He learns that what he never intended to happen, fate has seen to. The play that so fascinated the Philosopher does not imitate our world. Nor do Galileo’s mechanics. When has a kid slid down a slide the way a kid would if the kid were an imaginary kid computing the rate of his passage along geometry’s inclined plane? Utopias, like Plato’s
Republic
, attempt to control causes and consequences, generally with ludicrous results. Better a plausible impossibility, Aristotle remarks, to the consternation of countless commentators, than an implausible possibility; because history is nothing but the implausible, the unpredictable, the incredible concatenation. A good play’s movement is inexorable. It is, in that sense, the equal of any argument. In real life, people recover from incurable cancers—occasionally. And nearly always in bad movies. We complain of such conclusions. We blame them on Hollywood.

Aristotle wants his action to be performed by a powerful person so that the consequences will escape their agent and implicate the state. All of Thebes is suffering, the chorus is quick to tell us. Tragedy is a massive loss of opportunity. Right or wrong, Aristotle always makes sense.

The artist brings things into being the way nature brings things into being. Art adds realities to the world that were missing from it, and that well might belong here. That is Aristotle’s sense of mimesis: it does not make copies of things. It does not end with a likeness. It is, instead, an investigation, an argument, a realization.

Meta-
means “between,”
meta-
means “with,” or
meta-
means “after.”
Metempsychosis
means “to travel to another life.”
Metamorphosis
means “to alter shape or form such as the transformation of cartilage into bone, worm into butterfly.”
Metaphysics
means “to go beyond material things the way the book that comes after the
Physics
in the collected works of Aristotle treats of first principles.”
Metalanguage
means “to look down on the language of Use from the language of Mention.” It is the tongue for speaking of tongues.
Metanoia
means “to repent, to change one’s mind.”
Metalepsis
means “the exchange of one figure of speech for another.”
Metaphor
means “to move to a strange place, to be a word that wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, a substitute for an injured player, another eye in another sky.”
Phrein
, the back half of metaphor, means “to bear on one’s body as the scars or wounds of argument and war are borne.” It means “a likeness, a trace, a spore.” It means, in general, “to carry, wear with honor, or hold dear as one cherishes a grudge.” So
metaphor
means “to carry between, to bear with, or to look after.” What it does not mean is a simpleminded transfer of a word from one place to another like a rider who changes buses; it does not mean a word out of order; it does not mean a word with an unfamiliar function.

The section of the
Poetics
in which some of Aristotle’s observations
about metaphor are contained is often treated by even the most dedicated commentators as an abberation. Gerald Else, who lavishes 670 pages of exegesis on this little book, is blunt enough: “The three and one-half chapters [which deal with grammar and metaphor] are omitted from this study for three reasons: (1) they are technical to a very high degree … and bristle with special problems …; (2) to a degree unequaled by any other part of the work they have to be treated in a special context, that of the development of ‘grammatical’ study in Greece; and (3) they have very little—astonishingly little—connection with any other part of Aristotle’s theory of poetry.” Else goes on to wonder whether these paragraphs are even genuine. A few more pages are devoted to metaphor in the
Rhetoric
, where, we are told, Aristotle provides over twenty examples; however, some of them are so obscure, because they are cited out of context, as to defy analysis, and G. M. A. Grube advises the casual reader to skip to the next chapter.

It does not help that Aristotle uses
metaphor
, as Plato does
mimesis
, in the widest possible sense, taking on its meanings as one embattled takes on all comers, or that he appears to reduce the figure to a word, a noun. He classifies nouns with his customary relentless analytical intelligence into “current, strange, metaphorical, ornamental, newly coined, lengthened, abbreviated, or otherwise altered,” a strangely disorderly list. Then he says: “A metaphor is a word with some other meaning which is transferred from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from one species to another, or used by analogy.” This is called by contemporary commentators the substitution theory. They do not like it, and no wonder.

It is important to remember what Aristotle says metaphors are not: they are not strange, that is, foreign, unless we were to say, regarding the president’s stated reasons for invading Iraq, “his soufflé fell”; and they are not ornamental; that is, they are more than merely decorative, for instance, if “the employee’s flattery left lipstick on both of his bosses’ cheeks,” then whether the image were merely decorative might depend on where the cheeks were.

Aristotle’s own examples are problematic. He says that the expression, “There stands my ship,” shifts from an implicit genus, which he claims is that of lying at anchor, to one of its species or kinds, namely “to stand.” However (in English, at any rate), one’s posture while lying at anchor would be quite different from that assumed when standing. Both are species of being moored, but to stand at anchor means to be at the ready, to show mostly your masts, whereas if you lie at anchor you are hull down, and most of the crew will be ashore. The proper genus for lying and standing should be simply at anchor. We can leave G. M. A. Grube’s version for S. H. Butcher’s translation, but it is not only awkward and tautological but laughable as well: “ ‘There lies my ship,’ for lying at anchor is a species of lying.” Philip Wheelwright, to take our chances there, gives us, “ ‘Here stays my ship’; for being at anchor is a species of staying.” However, it isn’t clear whether
being at anchor
isn’t the genus and
staying
the species.

Aristotle’s instance of species to species is “with the bronze drawing out his life,” or “cutting with the stubborn bronze.” To refer to a sword by the matter of its blade is already a doubled case of part to whole—
bronze
for
blade
and
blade
for
sword. To draw out
in English means to entice an exit or disclosure, as a character in Henry James might “draw out” one friend to speak about another, or a lady’s wink in the hall draw Cedric from the dining room, or, more strongly, the phrase may mean to siphon or extract. “Cutting with the stubborn bronze” sounds like the same synecdoche
—bronze
for
blade
—with animation added like oil for an engine, but in this instance Aristotle is referring to a bronze bowl and the ritual of sacrifice. The English word
stubborn
will possibly take us still farther afield.

Only by leaving the language in the Greek can we be sure we have the right image. When the word that makes the metaphor moves into place it brings a fresh context of meanings the way a new owner fills an old house with his furniture. The former occupants, and all their stuff, fade into the background and lurk there like ghosts. The literal never likes to lose its place. Telemachus complains that Penelope won’t bring to an end the constant solicitation of her hand, while
the suitors “continue to bleed my household white.” The metaphor is built of a triple ratio: blood stands to body as money stands to household; bleeding is to body as expenditure is to wealth; and white is a sign of sickness or weakness the way one’s bank balance, by adding an 1, becomes blank. Moreover, as Homer later informs us, this expenditure of wealth is partly the result of the thirsty princes “draining the broached vats dry of vintage wine.”

Although the simplest imagery is not simple, we use it easily and all the time. Actually, “all the time” is a hyperbole like Aristotle’s example of a transfer from species to genus: “Odysseus did a thousand noble deeds.” The genus that
thousand
stands under here is the idea of
many
, Aristotle claims. We are certainly familiar with this sort of exaggeration. “I have a million things to do this morning.” “I innocently asked her to dinner, but she ate enough for forty men.” The crucial thing about any hyperbole is: How far do we blow up the balloon? When do we think we have exceeded every norm sufficiently? One only has to sense the different effect the image has as you go from what may be only a likely enlargement to one surpassing the imagination. “I have sixteen things to do this morning.” “You don’t say! Well, I have thirty things to do this morning.” “Yeah? but I have a million things to do this morning.” Set that acceleration against: “I have thirty-eight things to do this morning” “Tough luck, kiddo. I only have the square root of forty-nine things to do this morning,” or, “I have a god-awful lot of things to get half-done by noonish.”

The literal version of this bit of unhappiness would be, “I have impossibly many things to do this morning.” The impossible is philosophically suspect. Is it possible to have degrees of impossibility or is it like being dead—never a matter of more or less? Telemachus is probably exaggerating, too, when he insists that the bleeding of his household has reached the paleness of white, but we would have to have some knowledge of his finances to be sure. If the Ulysses Trading Company’s stock went up, he might be in the black again. This complex metaphor (complex because it is made of many interlocking images: his household has a human body; the suitors are wounding
it; the wound is financial; the wound is deadly) demonstrates that hyperbole can lose or gain such a status, depending upon external circumstances. Robert Fagles’s modern translation suggests that the suitors are leeches, and the word
bleeding
tempts us to consider the leeches’ use as a medical procedure, an encouragement that is probably inappropriate.