Poetics revisited

Last September, before I fell ill, I began writing a series of my thinking-out-loud essais about Aristotle’s Poetics and its application to the modern craft of imaginative writing. I did not intend to abandon that series; it has remained in my mind, though other things have hitherto prevented me from attending to it. Most recently I have been shirking it because of the need to re-read the four pieces I have posted so far; I was afraid to find out that they were so bad that they made my eyeballs bleed.

Tonight, as a preparation for resuming work, I sat down and made myself read the whole lot over, and so far (I am relieved to say) my eyeballs are structurally intact and my blood is all safely bottled up inside my body. To refresh the memory of my 3.6 Loyal Readers, here are links to the existing essais:

1. Poesis
2. Vice and virtue
3. Medium and genre
4. Tragedy, comedy, and agon

The fifth chapter of the Poetics touches lightly on the subject that some critics have wrongly supposed to be the main topic of the whole work: the so-called Aristotelian unities. Before I was taken ill, I began work on an essay about the unities, and how an unhealthy emphasis on them (and on other critical shibboleths of a similar kind) has warped and deformed literary criticism in modern times. I had just done tuning up the orchestra and was launching into my theme with a melodious crash when my brain slipped its gears and all composition stopped. So while I have not made my eyeballs bleed, I find that I am now forced to remove my brain from its housing and beat it unmercifully until it divulges the lost secret of what it was going to say next.

You heard me, brain. Spill the beans by the time I count to three, or I am going into the do-it-yourself surgery business.

One—

Two—

Three. OK, boys, bring me the can opener.

Tune in for our next thrilling instalment, in which I will either be a drooling idiot or have some cutting things to say about neoclassicism and the kind of criticism that treats literature as Drama’s red-headed stepchild. (Or both.) It should be amusing either way.