Poetry, Drama, Aristotle, Sophocles's Oedipus
To Aristotle, Oedipus the King represented the embodiment of the perfect tragedy and the idealistic representation of a hero. He saw the renown figure of a hero battling mythical creatures transposed into the image of a hero battling with his own self, in terms of his existence and behaviour. He drew certain elements concerning tragedy in his work Poetics, where he also revealed the tragic hero as "an intermediate kind of personage, not pre-eminently virtuous and just," but subject of a personal judgement error that inevitably leads to his downfall. Aristotle's vision of a tragic hero is best understood when in context with Sophocle's Oedipus, where the elements of the Aristotelian tragic hero are present: hamartia, anagnorisis and peripeteia.
Hamartia
A. Translated as a "tragic flow," it is represented as a human weakness and in Oedipus, the protagonist hero is the subject of his own passion, curiosity and pride which eventually lead him to his own destruction.
B. Oedipus, out of sheer impulse, murders, though unknowingly, his real father because the old man had violently accosted him.
C. However, the hero must take responsibility for his actions and acknowledge his guilt, as part of the self-discovery process. Thus Oedipus punishes himself in the end.
II. Anagnorisis
Anagnorisis or recognition refers to the hero's discovery of a fact about his identity or actions that have immediate and irreversible repercussions. The moment Oedipus finds he had actually murdered his father is an anagnorisis. The same, when Oedipus finds he had copulated with his own mother is when he realizes he had lived in a disrespectful manner.
III. Peripeteia
As expressed by Aristotle, the peripeteia is the reversal of a course of events usually launched by an anagnorisis, when the fortune of the hero turns from good to bad. In Oedipus, it is marked as the moment when the Messenger reveals the news of his real parents to the protagonist, news that Oedipus himself had expected to be good, instead it led straight to his downfall.
Aristotle's vision of the tragedy as a literary genre consisted of six elements: Plot or Fable, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle and Melody, all of which, placed in the right context, transformed elsewhere a narrative, into a philosophical piece of art. He explicitly saw tragic plays as a form "to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen" (Aristotle, Part 9). To have a greater impact on the reader, tragedy was expected to arouse pity and fear, but these emotions had to be induced unexpectedly, as an effect of the protagonist's misfortune. Another issue was at stake here, that the misfortune was not to be caused by a perverted character, but rather to be induced by a judgemental error of the elsewhere highly regarded protagonist. The hero had to be portrayed like any other normal human being, having no other higher virtues than common people and no less moral standards. By no means, the path of his evolution could have emerged from desolation to happiness, this alone turning the whole meaning of tragedy upside down. It was expected of the plot to evolve around the good fortune of the tragic hero initially, only to be reduced to a series of events that would cause the character's downfall eventually.
Of the aforementioned six Aristotelian elements of tragedy, the Plot was considered as the most important of all. It suggests the action in the play and it is the central idea around all of the other elements. The Plot includes peripeteia or anagnorisis, occasionally both at the same time. Within the Plot and referring strictly to the character who is the subject of dramatic change, another characteristic is in order: the inclusion of a horrible deed emerged either consciously, or out of ignorance, or mediated by the hero. This was to be treated cautiously if to produce the desired effect to the audience. That is to say, the deed had to be directed towards someone important to the hero; elsewhere, if the hero murdered an enemy, the audience might have perceived the deed as "an eye for an eye," thus diminishing the horrifying effect. The same, if the hero murdered any random person, then the audience, again, might not have...
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