Grave and Great

Still Butcher on Aristotle: Chapter 6 "The Function of Tragedy"

The action in a tragedy should be grave and great, and at the climax, at Recognition, produce catharsis in the audience.  Involuntary.  A purge of feeling.

Plato:

• 'the natural hunger after sorrow and weeping' is kept under control in our own calamities, but is satisfied and delighted by the poets.  (My emotions were kept under control for the time-frame of my book.  I had convulsions of grief during the early years, but I it wasn't until the day my divorce was finalized that the fatigue, the relief from a long, long fight with Denise, and the exhaustion from anger was mixed in with sobbing.  So when I think of catharsis, and what that convulsion can physically feel like, I think of that day.  How I can set the table for that in The Reader?)
• it makes anarchy of the soul by dethroning Reason in favor of feeling
• through drama man becomes many instead of one

Aristotle:

• the pleasurable calm that follows when passion is spent--"a harmless joy"
• pity turns into fear where the object is so nearly related to us that the suffering seems to be our own

Butcher

• tragedy provides not merely an outlet for pity and fear, but a distinctively aesthetic satisfaction to purify and clarify the feelings.  (I get lost here.  That somehow seeing the events dramatized, the characters and actions, grave and great, universal, and I guess the audience, in concert, reacting to the spectacle--all that is necessary to purify and clarify.  If it is only to provide The Reader perspective, I can imagine accomplishing that in telling my story.  But there isn't the Universal.  My story is the Particular.  It is very grave but not great, and the Reader will miss the collective response of fellow audience members.  And I don't have climax! I'm doubtful about what purify and clarify means.  I don't see how I can provoke it.  How can I excite the Reader to catharsis?)
• the audience is at an ideal distance from the hero.  "the pressure of immediate reality (which raises our defenses and coping mechanisms?) is removed."  (I'm getting closer here to understanding.  Distance. Plus now I can accept the need for "universal," otherwise the Reader won't be able to identify enough with the hero to be empathetic.)
• each thing that happened could not have been otherwise.  (Lots of randomness in my story.  That Aristotle would want refined out.)
• the pain is expelled when the taint of egoism is removed?? (This is too glib.)
• This is my central disagreement. "The private life of an individual (me), tragic it may be in its inner quality (yes), has never been made the subject of the highest tragedy.  It's consequences are not of far-reaching importance; it does not move the imagination with sufficient power."  (And Oedipus does?  Why?  Wouldn't the Reader have more fear if the hero was just an every day individual?  One thing about Greek drama is that (Oedipus, for example) the story is already well known by the audience.  So being great in that sense, famous, provides the audience the opportunity to be constantly comparing Sophocles version with the story they learned growing up.  A side-effect, then, of Oedipus being great, but not the central point.)
• the divine plan of the world. (Butcher reveals some of his baggage.)
• the more exclusive and self-absorbed a passion is, the more does it resist kathartic treatment.  (And Butcher knows this to be true how?)

I am choragus:

There is a Denise in your life.  Don't presume Reason will save you from his or her irrational act.  Either by warning you or by giving you the know-how to stop it.  There is no antecedent to her act.  If I, if you, have the knowledge, you would have acted to prevent it.

I don't have a climax.

• the NGRI verdict was an anti-climax.
• Denise's move back to Trenton Psychiatric was an anti-climax.
• filing for divorce was an anti-climax.
• getting laid, if i had, would have been an anti-climax.

Getting Jack back, now that would been a climax.

And the only moment I get close to that, is when I break down weeping, and as I have written, those moments I cherish.

I want to give that to you Dear Reader.

There is a Denise in your life.  Either you have suffered a tragedy like I, and this story can break through your defenses and quotidian coping mechanisms, and you can weep for your Jack; or you haven't met your tragedy yet. Then the death of my Jack, I hope, can help you see, for a second, what your Denise could do.

Catharsis:

• involuntary
• convulsive
• transport The Reader out of his hubris, his complacency, just for a second
• relief, it's over

The End of Fine Art

I finished Chapter 4 of S. H. Butcher's essay on Aristotle's Poetics.  I'm pausing from my rewrite to collect my thoughts.  I wasn't making much headway today anyway.

BTW, Chapter 4 is nicely entitled "The End of Fine Art."

Why have I been reading Poetics and Butcher's criticism?  It's interesting.  It's a nice counterweight to writing time.  When I write I eventually hit a wall.  My mood darkens, thoughts become heavy, foggy.  Reading Poetics is half-time.  Like the coach  putting correctives up on the board, and then telling the team we're not committed, not working hard enough.  Then kicking our ass out of locker room onto the field for the afternoon writing shift.

So what are some of my questions or conclusions:

1. Will The Reader react with pity and fear?  That is my intent.  I want recognition that there, but for the grace of god, go I.  To get past the headline--soccer mom kills 12 year old son--to--it could happen to you.  And here's what it would feel like if it did.
2. Plot: I don't stick to the probable impossibilities.  I include the improbable incidents that happened. Thus sacrificing coherence. Why? Because they happened.  In order for The Reader to imagine what it feels like.
3. The deux ex machina is Denise's psychotic action.  Outside the plot.  If it wasn't an irrational act it would be the fitting climax of a tragedy.  Aristotle writes "when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near or dear to one another--if, for example ... a mother kills her son--these are the situations to be looked for by the poet."  The story turns into memoir when the author is the father.  Poetry (or tragic drama) if the poet was a third party.
4. Where nature fails art steps in.  Aristotle's view that art perfects nature--imitating the particular in a way to reveal the universal ideal to the [cultivated] audience.  In one regard I do NOT want to do this.  I want to show nature fails.  No amount of Reason can stop it.  It is hubris to think you can.  And I don't want to allow The Reader an escape by believing that Reason could have triumphed.  However, I do need to be artistic or poetic.  I am selecting, editing, shaping incidents.  I am writing.  I want what I write to breathe life into my grief (confused thoughts, chaotic emotions, shock ... ) on the page in a way The Reader can personally imagine.
5. The poet imitates nature.  She creates a picture or "phantasy" on "the border-line of sense and thought." This is where the book operates--on that border-line.  The phantasy is an after-image that stays (or can be recalled) in the mind after the object that first excited it has been withdrawn.  Produces, in Aristotle's view, the spontaneous and necessary union of intellect and sense.  (Sense, here is sensory perception.)
6. The book is history not poetry in that it relates what happened, not what may happen.  Poetry exhibits a more rigorous connection of events than history does.
7. Oh yes, lest I forget, my memoir depicts meaner mortals, average people, not heroes like Hamlet.  The Reader does not "think of measuring the intrinsic probability of what they say or do."  Heroes are allowed to be or do the implausible.
8. Length: if it is too small, the whole is perceived but not the parts.  If too large, the parts are perceived but not the whole.  (The story is currently at risk of being too large.)
9. Side-effect: expose the fiction in the word psychosis.  That everyone is seduced by.  When it happened.  By real actors in the story.  And by The Reader.
10. Quoting Coleridge, Butcher says poetry steals access through our senses to our minds.  I do want to do this.  Particularly if "mind" includes the subconscious, the visceral, can I say, our emotional understanding as well.
11. Goethe, not Aristotle writes: "I had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically round them off and elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the same impression in hearing or reading my representation of them."
12. Ok back to Aristotle. I agree, aesthetic enjoyment proceeds from an emotional rather than from an intellectual source.  The main appeal of poetry is not to the reason but to the feelings.  (This reminds me that the whole reason I started writing poetry was because I was confronted at points in this memoir, with trying to say something that prose couldn't express.)
13. The pleasure of art is not for the artist but for those who enjoy what she creates.  (This reminds me of what Nick Flynn said during audience Q&A about catharsis.  He doesn't achieve catharsis writing poetry; he does sometimes achieve it reading it.)  Venue: http://www.poetshouse.org/programs-and-events/readings-and-conversations/art-losing-nick-flynn-marie-howe-kevin-young
14. tragedy reveals the true nature of a thing.  Yes, I agree with that.  I would like my book to achieve that.
15. the end then, is a state of feeling, it is a feeling that is proper to a normally constituted humanity
16. a poet charms the mind not instructs it

Examples of Aristotle's hubris:

1. poetry turns facts into truths
2. what has never anywhere come to pass, that alone does never grow old
3. no one can be a good poet who is not first a good man
4. philosophy is higher than poetry.  if poetry serves emotion (and sense) and philosophy serves reason, that philosophy is only higher than poetry, if reason is higher than emotion.
   Reason that only works in the ideal world, and fails when it confronts reality (i.e. my story), places philosophy lower than poetry.

Now Plato's turn.  Hubris?

1. art reveals to sense the world of ideas.  I know a conceptual artist that surely subscribes to this view.

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.

Finished Read-thru

I finished reading the manuscript.  As far as my editorial decisions ...

• Yes, have a Greek Chorus.
  I couldn't differentiate the voices.  General cacophony sometimes.  Sometimes they all were saying the same thing.  Offering advise.  Listening to me, offering comfort.
  But there is one friend who I can decide whether she is a primary character or part of the chorus.  In Greek drama they are well defined types: soldier, nurse, slave.  To answer my question about this character--she really is a type--a foil for me to confide certain things to which I can't to others.  There is something that makes her unique.  But I'm reluctant to have many primary characters ... because I'm little afraid of further consequences to them.
  Is Grace my choragus?  
• Yes, have fugues ... me drifting in and out of fantasy more towards the end of the book.  As I begin to imagine my life going forward.  But edit them.  Be more judicious of their use.  And they aren't fugues in the psychiatric sense of the term--I don't lose touch with myself--I'm not dissociating.  I do indulge in them.  The escapes though are small.  Tiny.
• Yes, leave the writerly stuff in there.  But, like fugues, be very judicious.
• I have some ideas on how to edit the letters (sent, not sent) and the main story line of August 2006 and 2007.  Give the letters and email to friends and family (Greek chorus) primacy, and prune my narrative where it is redundant ... not advancing the plot or key to revealing the emotional arc of the story.
As I dive into the rewrite, this will be more clear.
One of the first things I'll do next, is read these letters in isolation to rest of the book and outline to plot. 

I wish I had an idea how many words or pages to shoot for.  Unfortunately, I'm still adding content.  Not much.  Just from a email here or there.

fugue

fyo͞og/ noun

1. 1.

   MUSIC

   a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
2. 2.

   PSYCHIATRY

   a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment

Soul Mates and Others

Thanks to +Amy Lemmon for taking these three poems for ducts.

                                       The wood fights
and grabs a life already lost.  The pitch
sweetens with each swing.  Then pops: a ping
pong ball smashes basement walls.

Reading Page 263

I am reading my way through.  Trying to find the editorial answers, either in my dreams at night, or in the text that already exists.  Need to make those decisions before I begin the writing part of this revision.

I've posted on the editorial question of the Greek Chorus and all the secondary and tertiary characters in my story.  Other questions:

• where do I locate myself in this re-write:  physically in Seattle?  emotionally post-divorce?  where is the present tense in the story?
• how to I go about editing the letters?  where does my structure, and any given too-long-letter to Denise, become tedious to the reader?  how much really can I indulge(?) in depicting my grief vs advancing the story.
• and the writerly stuff ... who wants to read another memoir that features the heroic odyssey of the protagonist becoming a writer

I'm on page 263.  I can handle about 20 pages at a time before the cumulative effect of triggered memories and thus, emotions, fogs my brain.  Today was the first day I check, repeatedly, to see if I'd hit my 20 page milestone.  I'm feeling dragged down by it.  Wondering what I hope to accomplish.  I'm thinking if I was the reader, I'd be saying, come on Bill, get on with it.  Stop so much this navel gazing.  Looking at the book--the book split open on this page--the reader sees she's only halfway through and groans out loud.  (I imagine the book physically.  Not an E-book.)

I like to get a second session in after a break ... could be reading about Greek drama or walking down the hill to a coffee shop and getting that third cup of coffee.  I am immersed in the story.  Feeling the familiar ache in my neck and shoulders.