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CONVENITONAL_ARISTOTLE
November 25, 2020
Somewhat famously, Aristotle objected to
the "Deus Ex Machina", the resolution
supplied by divine intervention, in the There's a Woody Allen play that
form of a flashy, spectacular bit of makes fun of this, showing an
stage machinery. ancient greek stage producer
chortling over how well his
That phrase is so famous, even nifty god machine is going to
after going through Aristotle's go over.
Poetics carefully, it didn't
dawn on me that is not actually
used much there-- it occurs
just this once in the S. H. Butcher
translation from 1911:
Section XV:
"It is therefore evident [from the law of SPECTACULAR_ARISTOTLE
probability and necessity] that the
unravelling of the plot, no less than the
complication, must arise out of the plot
itself, it must not be brought about by the
'Deus ex Machina'--as in the Medea, or in
the Return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The
'Deus ex Machina' should be employed only
for events external to the drama,-- for
antecedent or subsequent events, which lie
beyond the range of human knowledge, and
which require to be reported or foretold;
for to the gods we ascribe the power of
seeing all things. Within the action there
must be nothing irrational. If the That point might
irrational cannot be excluded, it should be confuse-- he's saying
outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the *action* must not be
the irrational element in the Oedipus of irrational, not that the
Sophocles." characters can not be.
Rationally, one must
And that's the sole expect some irrationality
reference to Machina. where human behavior is
concerned.
The text seems clear enough--
the divine must be confined
to set-up and breakdown, but
the main plot on stage must
flow naturally from premise
to conclusion.
Consider what's *not* stated here:
CHANCES_ARE
Robeson's rule is that the hero must
extricate himself by his own actions.
No such constraint is imposed by Aristotle's I missed this point for some
"probabilty and necessity". The hero's time, I think, e.g.
henchman can bravely take a bullet for
the hero without being accused of being ARISTOTELIAN_LINES
a god machine in disguise.
Our own heroic fictions would seem to
have additional constraints beyond the
Greek Tragedy-- the Western adventure There are other Western
story is a celebration of individual fictions that differ
agency, where the winning moves are though, such as the
grabbed by the leading man. "romance", where
individual agency is
downplayed and nice
things are supposed to
Something I've been wondering about happen to the heroine
lately: is there any reason we just because she's nice.
should take Aristotle as the oracle
on the way fiction works? Could it
be that he was describing his own
personal reactions and the fashions
of his own moment in time?
Consider that some of the tales in
the Arabian Nights seem colorful
but shapeless, they don't seem much
like what we would call a story.
It would seem that there are ways that
"genre convention" can override any
sense of Aristotelian probability.
When Professor Plum goes on vacation
and stumbles across yet another corpse
murdered under oddly constrained Then there's the form
circumstances, fans of the Professor of the Korean drama,
Plum series do not object. with it's standardized,
insane plot twists that
And okay, you can call that The Premise the fans just get used
from which all else must logically flow, to...
but one thing that might logically happen
is Professor Plum doesn't find a way to KOREAN_POETICS
solve the mystery, and some police
detectives do it while he's still failing
around.
It would seem that Aristotle Fiction
might be just another genre.
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