http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax
©2006 by Z. Tomaszewski.
Besides laying out six formal components of tragic narrative, Aristotle explores the requirements for each component. In examining the action, which he calls Plot, Aristotle states that it should be whole, complete, and of a certain magnitude. More specifically:
plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference is not an organic part of the whole (Aristotle 1961, Chapter VIII).
Aristotle continually stresses this unity of the action. The events comprising the action must be connected to one another by necessary or probable cause to make a single whole. By the nature of these causal connections, a story has a beginning, middle, and end:
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it (Aristotle 1961, Chapter VII).
A story is complete when it includes all these necessary events; it does not start or end haphazardly.
Aristotle also held that a plot should be of a certain magnitude. It should be at least long enough to admit a change in fortune (Chapter VII). Generally, he considered larger, longer plots to be more beautiful, but only so long as they did not exceed the audience's memory. Once a plot becomes too long or complex to hold all in mind at once, the audience will lose any sense of its unity (Chapter VII).
A tragic plot can be divided into two parts. The events before the change in fortune are the Complication; those after are the Unraveling (or Denouement) (Chapter XVIII).
Aristotle held that the worst plots are episodic, where episodes succeed each other without necessary or probable causes. He stressed that the unity of a single protagonist throughout does not guarantee a unity of action (Chapter VIII). This low opinion of episodic narratives seems to have survived to today, as we generally consider TV shows and serial fiction to be of lower quality or less "literary" than movies and novels. However, even these episodic narratives tend to exhibit Aristotle's unity within an episode.
Aristotle describes additional requirements for a good plot, but most of them are specific to tragedy: the Recognition, the Reversal of Situation, and the Scene of Suffering, as well as the structural parts in relation to the choric song.
Yet despite Aristotle's focus on tragedy, he does leave us with some rules applicable to any well-formed story. It should concern itself with a single, unified action. It should be long enough to admit some change in state. It should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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Argax Project : Dissertation :
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Last Edited: 27 Dec 2007 ©2006 by Z. Tomaszewski. |