Falling Round

From Aristotle Poetics XIV, "the deed must either be done or not done--and that, wittingly or not wittingly."

The deed was done.  Denise killed Jack.  Was it wittingly?

Our medical and legal system concluded she was psychotic.  That would mean unwitting, right?  But that doesn't satisfy the dramatic need.  For it to be a tragedy Denise can't be acting from a psychotic view of reality.  It's not a reality that a reader can identify with.  This makes the book history according to Aristotle.  Not poetry.

 The deed must be the result of a great error or frailty.

Unless the book is about her break-down.  Which it isn't.  She can write that one if she wants.  Maybe that book will reveal that Denise had visited Delphi and had heard her future foretold.  Then we would have a tragedy.  Her actions to try and escape her fate.  Over time the history of Oedipus turns into myth in service of the tragic ideal, but in the beginning the story starts as history.  Its inconceivability demands a rational story be told--to tame it.

Instead, the book is about me and what I do that year.  I'm witting.  I do deeds, and don't do them.  The deeds done aren't of sufficient magnitude.  Are the deeds I don't do--like killing Denise, for example--sufficient for tragedy?

Where is the drama?  Peripety--the unexpected reversal of circumstance?

There are no sufficiently significant deeds which the reader believes I'm about to enact, and then at the last minute I come to my senses and don't perform.  It is a story where a lot happens, but I'm often passive in the face of it.  My drama is just surviving the year--trying to get me and Libby through it as best I can.  My drama isn't the reader's drama.  So history, then.

Plot isn't story.  It is a chosen set of incidents that map the drama.  A series of cause & effect chains.  A tragedy needs a beginning, middle, and end.  A unity.  Aristotle defines the beginning as "that which does not in and of itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be."

Plot is the artistic equivalent of action.

I have a beginning.

Aristotle tells the poet to exclude the irrational.

PS.  This story is all about hubris.  Believing you can know the unknowable--control the controllable.  Psychosis is an interesting object for hubris.  To know your hubris, it isn't enough to have a intellectual understanding--you have to know it emotionally, in your gut.  You've failed.  And you know you have.  And the magnitude is big.  And, then, you see, years later, your hubris is in tact.  Stronger than ever.

Without hubris we aren't human.  We couldn't walk on the moon, for example, without hubris.  Aristotle wouldn't write Poetics without hubris.  There is no Greek tragedy without hubris.  Luckily there is plenty around.