4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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shape, rhythm and life-span of every organism. Everything has its own
life-plan, its own “indwelling form.” It is this form which art imitates.
Aristotle’s idea is sublime. It imparts to everything – from thought
to the slow unwinding of a galaxy to the lives of people to the grain of
sand – a living, intrinsic, and dynamic participation in creating, being,
becoming, and ceasing. From the Aristotelian perspective “individuality”
is seen in its original meaning: not divisible. Things are integral
both inherently and in their relationships to their environments. Destiny
is the interplay between what is inborn and what is met. Every
acorn is an oak-in-process. But between acorn and oak is sun, rain,
wind, lightning, and men with axes. “Count no man happy until the
day of his death,” intones the chorus at the conclusion of Oedipus. That
tragedy is fulfilled, and ended, but not so Oedipus the character – he
goes on to other adventures. As Aristotle said, “Tragedy, then, is the
imitation of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain
magnitude” (Aristotle 1961: 61). Of an action, not of a person’s life.
Oedipus’ life offered to Sophocles two complete actions – Oedipus and
Colonus. Another author might have found more, or less.
From a naive biographical vantage, tragedies are about broken lives,
early death, unfulfilled promises, remorse, maimed ambitions and
tricks of fate. What has a “beginning, middle, and end” is the artwork.
At the deepest level a play is about itself. Aristotle suggests that the
playwright takes from life an impulse – a story, an idea, an image, a
sense of person. This impulse is the kernel of the artwork whose process
is a twisting and transformation of the impulse until, at a decisive
moment, the artwork breaks off and becomes itself. From then on, the
artwork makes its own demands in accord with its indwelling form or
action. These, as artists know, may be stubbornly unlike those of the
original impulse or conscious plan.
Thus an Aristotelian artwork lives a double life. It is mimetic in the
Platonic sense, but it is also itself. As Fergusson points out, the relationship
between artwork and experience is one of “analogy.” The root
idea of mimesis is sophisticated by Aristotle, but not transmuted. Art
always “comes after” experience; the separation between art and life is
built into the idea of mimesis. It is this coming after and separation that
has been so decisive in the development of western theater.
An analogy will make clear exactly what I mean by “coming after.”