Is Aristotle to blame for the linear narrative?

I was reminded today, as I read for my MA in creative writing, that I used to despise that sentence, “A story must have a beginning, a middle and an end” repeated to me by my English teacher.

To Aristotle plot was everything. However Aristotle made the point in Poetics, thus, ‘good poets…draw out the plot beyond it’s potential, and are often forced to distort the sequence’ (Aristotle, Poetics p 17).

I got to thinking, isn’t imposing a structure on something taking away the creative aspect of it, to a certain extent?

In his work Intertextuality, Graham Allen sites Mallarmé’s In Coup De Des, in which ‘narrative’ is avoided’ (Mallarmé, 1994:122, cited in Allen).

Drawing on Barthes, Allen differentiates between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts; writerly texts are non- linear. ‘Life…, in the classic text, becomes a nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering of received ideas’. (Barthes, 1974: 206, in Barry, p. 89)

Allen observes Barthes suggestion that,

The radically plural text does not allow one code to dominate over any other…liberates the disruptive force of the intertextual. (Allen, Intertextuality, p. 90)

There is hope yet for writers who resist the linear, who perhaps, like me, enjoyed the gaps in stories like The Twelve Dancing Princesses or The Ladybird book, The Discontented Pony, because everything was not explicable and neatly tied up at the end.

Bibliography:

Primary Source

Graham Allen, Intertextuality, (London & New York: Routeledge, 2006)

Aristotle, Poetics ed., Malcolm Heath (London, New York, 1996)

Secondary Sources:

Barthes, Roland, Image-Music-Text, Stephen Heath (trans.) Hill and Wang, New York, 1977

Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text, Richard Miller (trans.) Hill and Wang, New York, 1975

Grimm’s, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, (various sources)

Ladybird The Discontented Pony, (unknown date)