Ep. 243: Aristotle’s “Poetics” on Art and Tragedy (Part Two)

0:00 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah, let's get more of this apparatus of what tragedy is and what makes for good tragedy out before we bring it back to analyzing contemporary stuff and things like that. I think that's just going to be confusing at this point.

0:10 Seth: He makes some distinctions early on that we've kind of glossed when he was talking about comedy versus tragedy and whatever he talks about lampooning and a few other modalities. And that we should be clear that tragedy has a very narrow swim lane based on the plot, the characters, and then the setting and so forth. I mean, we don't have to go into his whole taxonomy, but it would pay to, I think, go through a little bit of detail there.

0:34 Mark Linsenmayer: Do you have something you want to pull out in particular?

0:36 Seth: Have we clarified the objects or the actors, the objects of imitation, who it is that they have to be of a certain level, not too low, not too high. Do we feel like that's clear?

0:47 Mark Linsenmayer: I was interpreting that they had to be high, not that there's a happy medium.

0:52 Wes: Right. Low is for comedy. High is for tragedy. The alternative, which is more of what we might think of as realism or naturalism, is just not addressed.

1:02 Dylan: The closest thing would be history.

1:03 Wes: Right.

1:04 Seth: I apologize. I misspoke in saying that it's not that their station isn't high, but that from the perspective of their actions, they can't be perfect. Right. They can't be perfect paragons of virtue. Their station has to be high.

1:18 Wes: So he ends up saying in this. In chapter six, that plot is the soul of tragedy and character takes second place. And one of the reasons for that is that the most powerful elements when it comes to tragic experience are reversal, fortune and recognition, which we won't really get into more detail into until chapter 11. He talks a little bit about thought and diction. We can leave aside diction, but I don't know if we. Before leaving chapter six, we want to say anything about thought.

1:48 Mark Linsenmayer: This was another place where the translation issues seemed relevant. That character is ethos, which is the same as moral virtue in his Nicomachean ethics, and thought is dianoia, which is intellectual virtue in his ethics. It's not just what the characters happen to say, but it's them displaying intellectual virtues. Something like that.

2:12 Wes: Which translation is that?

2:14 Mark Linsenmayer: This is. I've been saying it wrong. It's not Bernadetti, it's Benardete.

2:20 Seth: I would rather not go on like a side tangent about reasoning, diction. And I think the key is plot is more important than character. There are these other elements, but the next part where he gets into 50B and 51A and talks about plot and the essential elements of plot, I think are much more important.

2:38 Mark Linsenmayer: Read your translation.

2:39 Seth: Given these definitions, let us discuss next what qualities the structure of events should have, since this is the first and most important part of tragedy. Structure of events. We have laid down the tragedy as an imitation of a complete, that is whole action possessing a certain magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end. Side note, very famous sentence. A beginning is that which itself does not follow necessarily from anything else, but some second thing naturally exists or occurs after it. Conversely, an end is that which does itself naturally follow from something else, either necessarily or in general, but there is nothing else after it. A middle is that which itself comes after something else and some other thing comes after it. Well constructed plots should therefore not begin or end at any arbitrary point, but should employ the stated forms.

3:27 Mark Linsenmayer: This seems to me just to be wrong. I feel like there's plenty of ways that you can choose what's going to be the first.

3:34 Wes: Well, I don't really think it means that you can begin in media rays. Like that's not what it means, because you always are beginning in media rays. There's no. There's lots of stuff that happens outside of the actual plot, the background stuff, because drama is so compressed and.

3:49 Dylan: And he's also saying that I guess we would have. The question of this is applied to tragedy. It may be that there are other forms of literature that are, he would say, not as high, that don't have that structure.

4:02 Wes: It's meaningless to say beginning means start at the beginning in some literal sense, because there is no literal sense. It means there's a logical beginning, There's a way the story unfolds. And I think he's right. You know, things have to unfold rationally. So beginning could even be like there's an arc for characters, for instance, there's an emotional through line. And you just want to see a logical progression from the beginning to the end of that or some other logical progression in the action that makes sense. And what's important is that nothing be essentially a miracle, right?

It's not just that things randomly happen because the poet wants them to happen and makes them happen, as if the poet were God and just says, okay, I hereby make this happen now. And once you've set up a context that dictates what has to happen, the poet isn't entirely free anymore. And if they're a good poet, a lot of things just flow out of the background of the story and character. If characters are going to be alive, they have to be doing what they would do, not what you, the poet, necessarily want to make them do.

5:04 Mark Linsenmayer: I thought of a modern example to just make this vivid of somebody who I think tried to do this, that I think everybody's going to be familiar with. This example is the Star wars prequels. This is supposed to be somebody who's high and who has this fall. And so you could look at that from the point of view of this. Where does that story actually start? Does it start with trade disputes or whatever the hell it's at the very beginning of Episode one? Does it even start with the pod racing that goes on forever? No, neither of those things. Somewhere later, that's the start. If there is a logical coherence that could be made out of that story,

5:42 Dylan: it could just be terrible.

5:44 Seth: So I think there's another place where he's talking about this concept of completeness, where he says something to the effect of, if you look at all the parts, is it the magnitude or the

5:54 Wes: unity that's the next chapter is plot unity. But here he's going to talk about magnitude. And it has to be an orderly arrangement of parts, but it has to be the right size.

6:05 Seth: He says something to the effect of, if you can take anything out and the whole thing falls apart, then it's essential if you can take it out and it doesn't fall apart, then you don't need it.

6:16 Wes: Well, it's his way of defining an organic whole.

6:18 Seth: Yes, but to use that concept applied to literature or poetry or art. I think is interesting because it suggests. Think of it in terms of a structure of logical necessity. Then there's entailment and things like that. If you think of it in terms of completeness. Parts of the whole. There's almost like a plot structure. Will have a perfect structure where all the pieces tie together and there's nothing extraneous and nothing missing. Of course, in his very rigorous language of there's only these things and not no other things. Him saying that makes sense, but it's a really interesting concept.

Because it absolutely rules out dream sequences and flights of fancy and things like that. Where anything that doesn't directly contribute to furthering the plot and the action. For the purposes of this reversal and recognition is extraneous. And that's a point. Rest. When we talk about Shakespeare, maybe we can debate whether Shakespeare is 100% adherent to that.

7:15 Wes: We skipped a little ahead to 8, but in 7, the part that we just skipped over is just that part I think we've already mentioned. Which is that it has to be the right magnitude. So that it's not so big. It has to be of a size that we can. In time and space. That we can actually comprehend it as a whole. Or the plot length, for instance, has to be something that we can keep in memory. It can't be. By the time we've gotten to the end of the play, we've forgotten what was happening at the beginning. So it's not just that the piece has to have a beginning, middle and the end. We have to be able to keep that altogether in our imaginations. So that a reversal will seem like a reversal. Right. If we can't hold those things together like that, a reversal is no longer a reversal. It's just another. Another thing that happened that's unrelated to what comes before.

8:01 Mark Linsenmayer: Did anybody else think of Descartes? Rules for the direction of mind here. You got to take it in one glance, your understanding. Anyway, I feel like he's getting at the same underlying observation.

8:12 Wes: It seems related to what Seth was getting at from chapter eight, which is that what's being imitated is one action, he says, which is really interesting and unexpected to me. One action and that a whole. The structural union of the parts being such that if any of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjoined. And disturbed. And that's what makes it something like an organic whole or something like a living thing, which is, you know, each of our organs, right, Our body parts has its function in the. Has an essential part in our functioning as a whole organism. And if you remove my leg. Yeah, it's actually going to be missed. And a plot should be like that. A plot shouldn't just be, oh, it was optional, I can remove that. And nothing is. No, if you remove it, it's like maiming someone.

9:02 Dylan: I mean, the argument is, I think, goes towards the notion of intensity. Right. Part of what happens with tragedy is that that plot, in the witnessing of it, is fanning a kind of intensity. And part of that working properly is that as a story, it forms a completely efficient whole. That there's nothing extraneous and there's nothing missing. And that sort of exquisite balance fans the flames of intensity that go towards making it as effective as possible.

9:37 Wes: So the contrast here that he uses is to something that's simply episodic, where the unifying feature is just the hero, just the character, just the protagonist. So if you took Odysseus and you made a story about out of everything that ever happened to him in his life, his character is not the basis of a sufficient unity for that. So when he's talking about, you're really focusing on one action. And he's going to claim that the Odyssey centers on one action, even though it's a big sprawling thing with lots of stuff going on. But the action is essentially, I think, him trying to get home. Right.

10:13 Mark Linsenmayer: He's floating around, the God is watching him. He gets tied up a few times.

10:17 Wes: One action, mark one.

10:19 Mark Linsenmayer: I'm paraphrasing what he actually says. That action is.

10:23 Seth: Yeah. No, that piece where he talks about the Odyssey and what it is is fascinating. That brings us into the purview of the epic. And I'm not sure that we want to go there, but he does think that epics have a single structure. And he talks about this later on. Where you can do this for both epics and tragedy is that you outline the story and it's an outline in its universals. So it's boy meets girl, boy loses girl, Right? Boy, boy gets girl back or whatever. Whatever that cliched thing is. And then you fill in the details with, like, the names and the specifics and whatever.

And so if you can't build an outline that's that straightforward. And his outline of Odysseus is something like, you know, guy goes to war and gets lost, like is tortured by Poseidon. In the meantime, people are at home stealing his stuff and tearing down his house. He comes back, he fights him, he wins, you know, and all's well. Like, that's the story of the Odyssey, and the rest of it is episodic dramatization. So I think there's this notion of a single. Maybe this would be. If we were being scholarly about it, we'd go back to the word mythos and try to figure out story versus plot here.

But I think what he's saying is that you should be able to tell the story concisely and completely in a way that captures all the essential elements. And then the play itself or the dramatization itself is just a colorization of that complete and concise story.

11:49 Wes: You should have an elevator pitch just in case you meet a producer and you can say, hey, I've had this really great poem called the Odyssey.

11:59 Mark Linsenmayer: Did you know about some of these things that he uses as the bad examples? Like the little Iliad is referred to several times as if this is something that's not the Iliad by Homer, but by somebody else. The little Iliad, you know, like 20 plays are made out of that because it's so disjointed. It's so not one story in the way that the great Odyssey is.

12:18 Seth: I don't know what you're talking about.

12:21 Wes: I mean, I've heard of it, but it's not something I know anything about. I'm sure it doesn't exist, right?

12:28 Mark Linsenmayer: Probably, yes.

12:29 Dylan: On the point of epics versus tragedy, he says that epics have everything that tragedy has in them, but that tragedies have more. So in all the features of tragedy, they're sort of a superset of the features in epics. So you can basically just understand tragedies and you understand epics, which seems a

12:50 Mark Linsenmayer: stretch, but that's okay.

12:52 Wes: Now we're at nine.

12:53 Seth: Yep.

12:54 Dylan: Which is poetry in fact and history.

12:57 Wes: So this is basically. He says poetry is more philosophical than history, and it tends to express the universal. And it does this by saying what is possible. You know, he has this thing that comes up a lot, this phrasing that comes a lot, which is that it expresses what is possible according to probability or necessity. So, for instance, these concepts of universality and probability and necessity are all related. So he'll say, we want to think about how a person of a given character will on occasion, speak or act according to the law of probability or necessity.

So you're not a historian. You're not saying, yes, this particular person existed and did X, Y and Z. You are more in a hypothetical where you're saying suppose so and so a person of such and such a type existed. What would follow from that typology? How would that person speak and behave? And then that's how you work that through. As a poet, you're not trying to be a reporter on facts that happened. You're engaged in this game of kind of like inference from thinking about universal types.

14:01 Mark Linsenmayer: I like the Benardete translation that it's of what is possible according to the likely or necessary. So it's not just saying probability that leaves open low probability, but in terms of probably, what would probably happen. In other words, you get these characters in this situation, what would they definitely or probably say?

14:21 Wes: Yeah, the Greek word is eikos. I think it's just the likely or that's the likely and then the forget what likelihood would be. Exactly.

14:29 Mark Linsenmayer: But yeah, it says the possible is persuasive. It could be historical. Because of course, if something did happen, then it possibly happened to bring back our goofy modal logic.

14:41 Wes: And that's the whole point though, is that the only reason we use history as poets, we would only use reality for the sake of probability, for the sake of making things seem likely, more likely than not. So it's not because we are faithful to the facts and we want to be reporters, but only because we want our story to have an internal plausibility

15:00 Dylan: to it at this point. This is in contrast to comedy. Right? Comedy doesn't necessarily use real names, but maybe random names or made up names. I mean, I take it, because it's not worried about. I mean, the aim of comedy isn't to be realistic in the way and persuasive in the way that tragedy is.

15:19 Wes: Well, in a comedy actually you have a probable plot.

15:22 Mark Linsenmayer: He doesn't really talk about comedy at any length here. So we don't really know exactly what we can just, you know, by knowing Aristophanes, like what kind of thing he probably had in mind. In other words, not a wacky Monty Python, anything could happen. Comedy, it's like a dinner theater, basically like a tragedy, except things turn out okay, is the way I've heard Shakespeare's comedies described.

15:44 Wes: In a comedy, the poet first constructs a plot line on the lines of probability and then assumes any names he pleases. Tragedians start with the real names to enhance the credibility, but then they're really doing the same thing, which is working out what's possible. They're not trying to be historians, they're just trying to figure out what plausibly might have happened. You just make up people with comedy. In tragedy, you're starting out with well known personages.

16:09 Mark Linsenmayer: Doesn't he say somewhere like, if the thing that actually happened historically seems really implausible, then you should not include that in several places.

16:17 Wes: He says, we prefer probable fictions to improbable facts, probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.

16:30 Dylan: Yeah. So right here it says so one ought not to seek to cling completely to the stories that have been handed down concerning those whom tragedies are about. For to seek this would also be laughable, since even things known are known to few, but nevertheless they delight all. He says the poet must be a maker of stories rather than of meters. He's referring there to historians who write in meter, pointing out that just because you write in meter doesn't mean you've written a tragedy.

16:57 Wes: The last part of chapter nine, the last point he's going to make is that even though there's this really interesting concentration on causal sequences and probability and necessity, the tragic effect depends upon something unexpected happening. It's in particular this combination of something seeming inevitable, something flowing out of all prior. Once you've had your moment of recognition, whether as the audience or the character in the play, it's clear how everything comes out of prior causes. And yet it's completely unexpected. And it's the combination of that which is what's important to the tragic effect and also what helps lead us to the feeling of wonder, which is. I think this chapter is the first place he will mention that in the

17:45 Dylan: work Psalmiston, the imitation is not only of a complete action, but of fearful and pitiable things. And these come to be both, especially or more, whenever on account of one another, they come to be contrary to expectation. They're surprising. For if this is the case, it will be more wondrous than if they come to be spontaneously or by chance. Since even among chance things, those seem most wondrous, which appear to have come to be as if for a purpose.

18:14 Wes: And then he gives the example of someone who was killed by the statue of someone. So you murder someone, the statue is made out of them, and then their statue ends up falling on you at some point. I think that's the killing you. It's ironic, right? Because it's both contrary to expectation. It's an accident, but it's a weird accident where something apt happens, almost as if it were designed to happen that way.

18:41 Mark Linsenmayer: Sorry, are we at 11 yet?

18:43 Wes: I think we can jump to 11.

18:44 Mark Linsenmayer: What's the good quote on reversal?

18:46 Wes: At the beginning of 11, he'll say it's. And these are species of surprise. So there are two surprises. One is reversal, one is recognition. But he calls the reversal of fortune is the change by which a train of action produces the opposite of the effect intended. And that according to our rule of probability or necessity. So, for instance, Oedipus's messenger shows up. Oedipus is worried. He's kind of cottoning on to the truth of things. And the messenger thinks he's going to alleviate his worries by saying that I forget exactly what he tells him. But it's something that he thinks is going to make Oedipus feel better, but all it does is make Oedipus realize, okay, yeah, he did kill his father and sleep with his mother.

19:34 Mark Linsenmayer: You couldn't have been the son of. What's the. Jocasta's husband?

19:37 Wes: Laius. Yeah. Because the other guy was your father. Yeah.

19:41 Mark Linsenmayer: The son of Laius was taken away to this far off. And they're like, wait, that's my house that you're describing. Oh, something along the lines of that.

19:48 Wes: Yeah.

19:49 Dylan: Mentioning the way the Greek works in this section on recognition in the second paragraph. Recognition, on the other hand, just as the name 2 signifies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge. So to understand the name, signification is recognition is made up of two words, the word for ignorance and the word for knowledge. So agnoia and gnosis. So recognition is ignorance to knowledge.

20:15 Wes: Benardete will point out in his introduction that you could think of it almost as like a privation of ignorance that's

20:21 Mark Linsenmayer: happening, which does make things seem more philosophically important than just saying. It's a reversal. It's the twist. The whole thing is about knowledge. And here's the prime place where we, the audience, identifying with the characters, get that injected in us.

20:37 Wes: Well, we should keep these separate. He thinks they should be the same, but they're not always. So the reversal of fortune and the recognition, they happen to be the same for that moment in Oedipus, which is ideal.

20:48 Dylan: Yeah, it's most beautiful then.

20:50 Wes: Yeah. So the recognition would be the change from ignorance to knowledge. And the reversal of fortune is just the fact that a train of action is going to produce the opposite effect than the one you might think it would have produced.

21:01 Dylan: The notion of recognition, as the removing of ignorance reminds me that truth is the removing of forgetting. Right. Aletheia is the word for truth.

21:14 Wes: The unforgetting Seth is a Heidegger person,

21:17 Seth: the remembering all over that Heidegger makes

21:20 Wes: a lot of Alethea.

21:22 Seth: That's why I was just kind of shocked we're not talking about Heidegger.

21:28 Wes: The other part is that we might tend to forget that something bad actually has to happen too. It's not just recognition and reversal, but something destructive and painful. Especially death. Death is always good. But other things, torture, blindness, that's fine.

21:43 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah.

21:43 Dylan: But pity and fear together. So that's going to help to have something bad happen. That you can have pity for the character undergoing that and then also fear for that event happening, maybe even happening to you.

21:57 Wes: And this is where we get more. So chapter 13. I think we can skip chapter 12, where he just gives you the parts of tragedy. And some people wonder if that's a legitimate part of the treatise. But the way pity and fear is excited in us, as we've discussed, this is where he gets a little bit into the change of fortune. Cannot be of a good man brought low or a bad man made prosperous. And nor can it be like the downfall of a villain. But really it's quote, pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves just backing up to those other things to which he contrasts them.

You know, we're very familiar with the downfall of the villain scenario. That's action films. So where bad things do happen and then someone gets their revenge. And often it's moralized. So. Right. It feels justified. And we can get a kick out of the violence in. But also it seems like we're standing on a kind of moral high ground. And then likewise, the type of entertainment we're not going to usually see is bad people getting away with things and being made prosperous. That would be really unsatisfying.

23:00 Dylan: They're flops, right?

23:02 Wes: Yeah. And then the same thing with good people who are just a lot of terrible things happen to them. We can talk about how that contrasts with tragedy. The weird thing is going to end up being that the tragic hero is somewhere in between this good person and this bad, bad person. They can't be totally good, but they can't be totally bad. And I think this is what Seth was trying to get at earlier.

23:23 Seth: There's nothing tragic about a bad person getting their just desserts or a good person being brought low. It's that idea that there's a balance between fear and pity and not just one or the other.

23:36 Dylan: Exactly.

23:37 Wes: So this thing that neither totally good nor totally bad protagonist has, he'll call it in my translation it's error or frailty. So it's not vice or depravity, but you could call it error or frailty. And this is someone trying to translate the Greek word hamartia, which often has been translated as the tragic flaw. Right. That we're all so familiar with. And it's became a source of scholarly debate for centuries about whether we're supposed to think of it that way. But the idea is that there's something that the person isn't just completely vicious, that there's something in them that we can identify with and think of as noble, and yet they also make significant enough errors that lead to terrible things happening to them.

24:24 Mark Linsenmayer: So what is Oedipus significant error? Is it killing somebody on the road, or is it being too diligent in trying to find out the truth?

24:34 Dylan: When you pick those two questions, Mark, I think you're making the error be somehow he's culpable in a moral sense for it.

24:42 Wes: If you are talking about a character flaw. Right. And this is the controversy, whether a character flaw in particular is what we're thinking about generally, I think you'll find that it falls in the category of a kind of narcissism or hubris. Right. This is another point of contention, but a kind of arrogance of someone who pretends to have a kind of knowledge they don't really have. And so in Oedipus cases, part of his arrogant quality is to be willing to kill someone over road rage, right? That's part of it. And then another part is that he's in enormous denial. Even though he has Tiresias trying to tell him what's going on, he's capable of holding onto his deluded view of the world because he has a kind of certainty he can't be told by others.

25:28 Dylan: I think the process of him not recognizing and us watching him not recognizing what his situation is until he finally does, that's part of what's the effect of what's going on. One of the ways in which it doesn't matter that we already know what the end is.

25:45 Mark Linsenmayer: So would Odysseus and Polyphemus the cyclops, would this have a similar thing that you know, it's. You admire Odysseus because he's so crafty and has all these heroic qualities, but he can't, as they're stealing from the Cyclops, he can't help but yell out his name and mock the Cyclops for what he's doing. That's his arrogance. That's Wes, your description of it. The Arrogance made me think of immediately. Of course, it's not ultimately tragic for him, but that episode, there's a little. Some of his. A lot of his friends get eaten, and he gets.

26:15 Seth: He.

26:16 Dylan: He stays. He stays wandering for even much longer as a result. Right.

26:20 Wes: Well, Aristotle will say, you know, the events are tragic, so there's a lot in common between epic poetry and tragedy. So the analyses work.

26:28 Mark Linsenmayer: But would it have been a better story if he goes home and he's just. Ultimately, he was undone and was not able to solve the problems and live a happy end of his life?

26:40 Wes: I don't know how to analyze that because I haven't thought about the fact that the Odyssey does kind of have a happy ending. It kills everyone, but it's more straightforward. Reading the Iliad as tragedy is much more straightforward. So we did 13 and 14 now is more about fear and pity. And Seth actually already read a little bit from this, but he's going to tell us that it's better for fear and pity to be generated by the plot and by the inner structure of the way it's arranged than from spectacle or scenery or something extraneous that the poet is putting into it, trying to tell us you should feel horror and pity at this moment. It should actually come out of the plot itself.

27:23 Mark Linsenmayer: Not just that the music is telling you something sad is happening. There's sad music playing, feel sad.

27:30 Wes: So those extraneous aides, he say, you know, those can make things monstrous, but not so much terrible or fearful. And we get a pleasure out of them. But it's not tragic pleasure in particular. The parallel for us today is special effects. I think we might think that massive special effects are a way of getting at some of these deeper emotions. And this I think Aristotle is absolutely right about. But actually, we don't really need them. And in a way, they can actually interfere at getting us into a deeper level of fear and pity. What they tend to produce is they might produce shock or some sense of something being monstrous, but they bring us away from our identifications, our specific identifications with the characters on stage. In a way, they sort of overshadow characters and character.

28:20 Mark Linsenmayer: I think he's probably gonna have to say something like, you know, if you talk about what in film, good cinematography and lush soundtrack and special effects and all these things like that, they can enhance something that's already there. But if there's nothing there in the characters, in the plot that is grabbing you in the first place, then it's not going to work. There's nothing to enhance It'll just be a hollow shell of a spectacle.

28:49 Wes: I think we can start loosening up here as far as the text goes, because as things go on now, it gets more even though, Mark, I know I made you read the rest. We can draw from it as needed. I'm wondering if we've really gotten at pity and fear and what that means and why we get pleasure out of tragedy. If we do and wonder how that all fits together with wonder.

29:13 Mark Linsenmayer: I just feel like he doesn't actually explain it very well in here. He just says the best kinds are like, here's some characteristics. What would bring more pity if the. This is in chapter 14. If the sufferings come out of people who are enemies or they don't have any particular relationship to each other, or if they're friends. Clearly, if it's friends betraying each other, friends killing each other, father and son, brother and brother, son and mother, those are going to be more poignant. Those are going to bring more pity and fear. So he gives a lot of examples like that of things that he thinks heighten it.

But I think you'd. If you want to come up within the principle of like, well, why do these things bring the kind of catharsis that is more poignant than other things? It's kind of left to your own. Is this just a phenomenological thing, like, reflect on this? Don't you agree with my judgments? That seems very untheoretical compared to what one would expect out of Aristotle.

30:07 Dylan: Well, it feels incomplete in that way. Right. He more has the conditions for thinking this through rather than the explanation in the text about why pity and fear are co. Required for tragedies to work at their highest level.

30:24 Wes: Yeah. And this is something I think you have to do. You have to get into. So my biases are going to show up now because I think you have to get deeper into the psychology of it to really explain it. It's something that we have to supply ourselves.

30:37 Dylan: Sachs does a good explanation, and I guess part of it's in the text too. And we gave the examples of the different kinds of lower examples of a tragedy regarding the evil character who gets his comeuppance and the good character who's brought low, how that isn't sufficient for a tragedy. There's something similar going on with pity and fear in the way that Sachs reads it that you get, as Mark referred to it, you get a tearjerker, you get a horror story, but it's only when you get them together that you get a tragedy.

31:10 Wes: If there's pity but no fear. You get the tearjerker and fear but no pity. The horror movie, where there's, you know, kind of build up of apprehension and then you get the shock of violence. Then you could do a more milder form of the horror movie, which is more like an action movie, I think, where you're getting vengeance or justice there. The satisfaction is again by identifying with the infliction of pain and death. But you're given the cover of being on the side of justice. So all that stuff, I mean, that's really important because one of the things to think about is that you really can't achieve a tragic effect if you are inducing people with feelings of self righteousness, for instance, or vengeful feelings are completely incompatible.

Tragedy is more like a feeling of mourning. But the way. Is it all right to quote from Sachs, or are we so. You know, he discusses Antigone a little bit. There's a point where Antigone tells us that human beings are what passes beyond all boundaries. And he mentions King Lear talking about human beings as poor, bare, forked animals. The way he puts it, tragedy seems always to involve testing or finding the limits of what is human. There's no mere orgy of strong feeling, but a highly focused way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of what is human.

As such, I suggest that Aristotle was right in saying that the powers which first of all bring this human image to sight for us are pity and fear.

32:33 Mark Linsenmayer: Yeah. What do we think about that? As that there's something morally superior, there's something that makes this high culture. Whereas the variations that Dylan was describing. Right. If you just have pity, a tear jerker, if you just have fear, then it's a horror movie. That those are, as Sachs describes them, like the revenge fantasy are base emotions. It's kind of just going into the holodeck, going into the fantasy world and experiencing something that you couldn't normally experience, but you're not necessarily coming out with anything.

33:03 Dylan: They're like drinking.

33:04 Mark Linsenmayer: I'll admit that. I. Yeah, I think that what Aristotle's done here is he's described a flavor of possible experience very vividly, but I don't see it as morally superior than any of the other flavors. I feel like there's a kind of catharsis. Right. There's a reason you might not want to call it catharsis, but there's a reason like that. People like horror movies. It's not just because they're being titillated. It's to have fear discharged in A way that, you know, using the word catharsis is not bad. And the same thing with tearjerkers, the same thing with romantic comedies. There's all these ways that we want to feel that there's something missing in our lives or something, that having this experience that takes us beyond what is happening to us, and yet we get to do it from the safety of our living room or movie theater or reading a book or whatever.

33:50 Wes: I am willing to defend the cultural hierarchy.

33:54 Mark Linsenmayer: Go, go.

33:55 Wes: Why?

33:55 Mark Linsenmayer: Why? This is a superior type of experience than merely mere escapism.

34:00 Wes: All right. Can you indulge me one psychoanalytic digression here, please? Okay. I have to name, drop to and refer to a paper. But it's something that I think listeners would enjoy reading because it's the best explanation of the experience of tragedy that I've come across. And it's by Hanna Segal. She's a psychoanalyst, and she wrote a paper called A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics. The idea is that part of what happens this is both from the standpoint of someone who's involved in a creative act or a poetic act and for an audience, is that it recapitulates a moment of maturation which involves a transition from a state of mania, let's say, to a depressive position, where the depressive position is the superior thing.

And why is it the superior thing? Because the way we become more integrated psychologically, the way we develop ourselves on the inside, is to experience is losing things on the outside. So the paradigmatic case of that is the relationship to the parents. After a certain point, we're no longer taken care of in the same way. We no longer have the same sorts of relationships with our parents. But if we're lucky in the maturational process, we internalize those functions. We internalize the ability to become a mother and father to ourselves. What's lost on the outside represents an integration on the inside.

35:25 Dylan: And.

35:25 Wes: And tragedy is arguably a recapitulation of that experience. There's a reason why, in other words, we are attracted to that feeling of total loss and total devastation. Because total loss and total devastation on one level have the significance of something that's profoundly joyous. Even. I think, on another level, part of what's so deeply pleasurable about the experience of tragedy is that incredible integrating effect. I mean, I think when Sachs is talking about the way it focuses us on what it means to be human, for instance, I think there's a crossover to the point of view that I'm expressing and to the feeling of Wonder.

When Sachs talks about catharsis, he'll talk about, do we think about it as purgation? Are we just flushing out poisonous fears, or are we indulging the thrill that comes with fear? Is this medicinal? Is it an addictive drug? When I think about football, are we just sort of living by getting a good feeling out of violence as a way of purging or buried resentments? So those kinds of catharsis aren't a good explanation of tragic experience which has to be related to something beautiful. I think the way we get beyond that is this sense of wonder.

He'll go on to talk about it as this feeling of being washed or cleansed by the unexpected appearance of something beautiful in something terrible. Anyway, sorry if that just grinds things

36:56 Mark Linsenmayer: to a halt, but it certainly takes it to an area that I have no idea how to evaluate without completely

37:04 Dylan: engaging the psychoanalytic part about it. I guess I would say that there's something that rings true about it in that I think, by and large, more complicated experiences are more revealing about who we are and revealing about the world. It's not to say that the other kinds of experience, simpler experiences, don't have their place, just that some experiences are more powerful and more revealing. And that that's where I would put the kind of story and narrative that he's talking about in Tragedy. That compared to a Rom com and my own experience of it. Is that part of the reason why at some level, I'd often rather watch the Rom com than watch King Lear? Because it's just so much more work to engage with something that's more complicated and revealing. And it's just easier to have a beer.

37:55 Wes: Well, another way that Sachs gets at this. And maybe this will be more appealing and easier to kind of evaluate, especially in light. You know, he uses examples from King Lear, which we just discussed. But the thesis is that having pity for these protagonists on stage to whom terrible, terrible things happens, is a way of showing us what we are. And by way of showing us what is really precious about humanity. And to really grasp that preciousness, we have to grasp its violation. And so that's part of what we're getting at. So when Gloucester's eyes are taken out, for instance, part of what we're meant to understand, according to Sachs, is the.

To pity is the violation of Gloucester's decency. Because what gets his eyes taken out is his loyalty to Lear. That human life depends on respect for that decency. That is the substance of what it means to be human. And we cease to be human without it. So in a way, it sort of delimits the boundary of what is human by showing what threatens it from the outside. It's only by coming to terms with that sort of total destruction that you see in tragedies that you come to appreciate what's usually invisible in the foreground.

39:10 Mark Linsenmayer: It's just. There should be, then, modern analogues of this. I think what makes it so much effort to engage with something like King Lear is not merely the complexity, but it's fundamental foreignness. And it's the same with Oedipus or any of the stuff that he's talking about is because there are ideological things, like we already talked about earlier. How this idea that, are the characters going to be better than we are? Are they going to be worse than we are? Like, I think that we have now entered an age, at least in the west here, at least among the intellectual class.

Where we don't really have the notion of there being these superior beings. We think that everybody's approximately equal. Maybe we still have the notion of a fool. There's people, definitely people that are worse than the average. So just even taking that one element out that, no, we want to be able to identify with the characters. We don't want to cast them as greater than human. As something, you know, among the semi divine. That right in there means that it's going to be a different experience. And what you're describing, like, I think about the Walking Dead or something.

At its best, of course, it's a TV show. Lots of cheesy things happen. There are different. But at its best, you know, that's talking about the complete degradation, right? The loss of human dignity. Life has become worth essentially nothing. Or maybe it's worth everything because it's so rare. And the sort of struggles that then people reduce to a Lord of the Flies kind of existence have to figure out in, you know, how to. Then when society is not there giving meaning, giving value to life, how do you then inject it yourself? Or is that even possible?

Like, that seems a modern analog. But that has no resemblance to tragedy as it's been described here. There's no reversals. There's no recognition in a strong way. Like it's just a related species, I think.

41:00 Wes: I mean, I want to say that in defense of Shakespeare, for instance, there's a reason where. Why, hundreds of years later, his plays are still very popular. And for me in particular, there's nothing jarring or foreign about it. It's just. It's like heroin immediately, like the whole experience from start to finish is enormously pleasurable for me. And I know there are other people like that as well. So I think it just. Even though it's not going to have a mass audience these days, I think that's explained by something other than the fact that there's a noble personage required.

Nobility we might define more broadly. And in any case, there's lots of ways in which contemporary entertainment is preoccupied with the super right in superheroes. But in badasses and action films, even in ordinary dramas, there's often an emphasis on the particular powers of the protagonist and their relative superiority to other people. So I actually don't think it's that part that is that foreign. Strangely enough. I think what's done with that in tragedy is much different than is what it's done in a regular say in an action film. It's just.

Or a superhero film. Those powers are exploited, right? And you get to identify with them and identify with someone kicking ass, using them and bringing justice to the world. Tragedy is not about justice, it's anti justice. And so whatever powerful personage is involved or whatever powers the characters have, those things are going to be totally destroyed in the end. They're going to be totally given up and they're going to ask you to give up the thrill of identification with such things. And the reason why we prefer most of the entertainments that we do, I think is because it exercises feelings that are much more immediately gratifying.

And I think there's a place for them. I mean, I like action films too. You know, there's a place for wanting to enjoy like violence on screen, you know, in the name of justice.

42:55 Mark Linsenmayer: The people who actually cite tragedy as an influence. So like Mad Men, which. This epic or Sopranos, it's. You know, one of. The guy who did Mad Men was one of the writers on Sopranos first. The whole image of Mad Men is like somebody falling, falling out of a building. That it's this somebody who is super talented and has this nobility, but has obvious, right from the beginning, flaws that are sort of key. It's a more existential take, you know, that it's hard to drum up meaning in this world. And so the long term experience of one of those shows like that is to try to find some peace with it. The whole situation is a tragedy.

43:32 Wes: If the fall takes nine seasons, you know, that violates the magnitude clause for Aristotle. Right. You can't achieve the effect that way. Was it five seasons? I forget how many seasons it is. It's serious Binge watching anybody else have

43:48 Mark Linsenmayer: any sort of things that in pop culture or that you've watched, you know, whether are considered high or low, that you are trying to evaluate this in terms of. Or is it really. I want this to be about something more than ancient tragedy, which then Shakespeare managed to reproduce and nobody cares to today? Like, no, if this is really such a blueprint for what makes us tick, then I would expect just like somebody points out the hero's journey. We talked about this in one of the pretty much pop episodes. And then you can see that, you know, variations of it all over the place. Like, if this is such a blueprint for the human mind, I would expect to see it can't just be a lost art for over educated types.

44:28 Seth: I have no interest in trying to either validate or disprove that thesis. This is apparently a work that's read widely and read by people who write dramas. I think there's a lot in there that he does about the analysis of plot and structure, character, which people take to heart. And maybe they gloss the stuff that we're focusing on around tragedy and the various different methodologies. But at the same time, he's speaking to a certain kind of. Let me say this. There are pieces of this where he seems to be speaking to some kind of more universal structures that would carry through and be applicable in different times.

Then there are other times where he seems to be talking very specifically about the tragic poets that are relevant to his time and the experience of seeing tragedy in Greece at that time. You know, as Davis points out in his introduction, that there was a very short window of time in a very, you know, very narrow geographical region and a very small group of people. But that the experience of seeing these plays in that amphitheater with 30,000 participants, it must have been a wholly different experience for the audience than what we are thinking of when you're talking about Netflix and Chill and watching, you know, Breaking Bad or whatever.

So I'm not sure much as he mentions at one point that towards the end he talks about the criticism of tragedy being inferior to epic poetry. And he says, you know, that it's vulgar because it appeals to a lower common denominator than because it. It actually shows stuff as opposed to just talks about it. What he says is, hey, first of all, that's a criticism of the performance, not of tragedy itself. Right. I really enjoyed this reading. I think there's a lot of interesting things in it. You know, I'm not a screenwriter, but like I said, I'm a Fan of opera.

I would disagree with Wes about Shakespeare on some things because I think Shakespeare's plots are not consistent and complete in the way Aristotle would want them to be.

46:34 Wes: I do want to say, though, just like people still write plays and go to plays. So we've been talking about movies and tv, but I don't know a lot about contemporary plays, but I'm sure there are many that are tragic. And if you go to, you can still go to see, say, a Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire, or you could go to see Chekhov's Uncle Vanya or something. These are tragic, essentially. I think they fit the criteria. I'd have to think about it more carefully to say how closely they fit Aristotle's criteria. But I think you could say there are experiences of tragedy. It still is an entertainment for people, but you really have to go to the theater to get that. I don't see it really happening in movies very often or on tv.

47:18 Mark Linsenmayer: Well, you should do a Death of a Salesman subtext. I think that would be cool.

47:21 Seth: Or Ozark. How about an Ozark subtext?

47:24 Wes: See, I don't see that as tragic either. I've watched all three seasons, by the way.

47:29 Seth: I don't know if it's tragic, but it's really good.

47:31 Mark Linsenmayer: Okay, I had a few more thoughts on this. So I recorded a song. More of an essay than a song, but, well, you can decide if it actually works as a song or an essay called the Structure of a Tragedy. And next episode we're talking about Camus the Plague, which may actually fall into the category of a more modern, existential tragedy. See what you think. Thanks, everybody. Follow us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. We love you. Go support us.

47:55 Seth: Good night.

47:55 Mark Linsenmayer: Good night.

48:12 Mark Making Music: The structure of a tragedy is firm and there will be no change. You need some grievable lives, bigger than life, but still relatable. There has to be a situation where it's like they're programmed by their characters, good characters, to do some things that are ill advised. And if the fates weren't stacked against them, they would lead to normal ends. But causal systems juxtaposed the battle. Luck stuck in, lies exposed in one great reveal that brings the hero low. A great reversal whips its lash in one fatal blow. And there's no therapy. 12 steps, no deep healing or relief.

Though maybe compensation in the abstract to rebalance karma. So watching gods might nod their heads at wisdom in the system. They accept no blame for falling, feel no shame, for maybe it's above their pay grade. If the fates weren't stacked against you. You could elevate your pain, but your character's not character enough to bring amusement to them. Only genius architecture stereotypes will make them cry. All us normal schmucks can just go, simply die. But we're not matched like clockworkers, in lockstep to our deepest fears. Complexity makes understanding, understanding tragedy an ad hoc mess.

More often it's the common things, the simple things that kill us. We eat too much or smoke too much or work too much or lie around all these systematic ills, too boring, too relate that give us cancer, maybe Alzheimer's and viruses and broken hearts. The structure of a tragedy is firm and there will be no change as long as we are living. There is loss and it's how you take it. Maybe don't exalt your suffering except when making art, which is a pastime, a distraction, its truth is always partial. Still, the contours of your life are as worth trouble tracing as any old kings, so don't let them tell you that you're less than or buy into some anti democratic view of art where someone's skill obscures what art is.

It's a form of breathing, of excreting, a form of being no more and no less. Reflections, we need reflections. We need refractions coming from all directions. That's how we make sense. We need what sense there is for taking analysis pales before chance. We know narwhal we do know defining in advance what we hopefully live through.