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Assignment
Name : Dabhi Vipul C
Semester : 1
Roll no : 47
Enrollment no : 2069108420180009
Email : dabhivc04@gmail.com
Paper : 3 Literary Theory &Criticism
Topic : Aristotle 's theory of Catharsis and other views of it
Batch : 2017-19
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English, MKBU
Introduction :
Aristotle (384-322 bc) :
Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist born in the city of Stagira Chalkidice, Greece. His father died when he was small. At the age of seventeen or eighteen he joined Plato's academy in Athens. His writings is on many subjects like a physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre , music, rhetoric, linguistics and politics.
He tutored the Alexander the great. He established the library. He believed in the perception.
Aristotle 's Poetics :
Aristotle's Poetics (Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆς, Latin: De Poetica;[1] c. 335 BCE[2]) is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory in the West.[3] This has been the traditional view for centuries. However, recent work is now challenging whether Aristotle focuses on literary theory per se (given that not one poem exists in the treatise) or whether he focuses instead on dramatic musical theory that only has language as one of the elements.[4]
In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama – comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play – as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes:
Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody.
Difference of goodness in the characters.
Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out.
In examining its "first principles", Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion.[5] Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions".[6]
The work was lost to the Western world for a long time. It was available in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes.[7]
Theory of Catharsis :
Catharsis is a concept in psychoanalytic theory where in the emotions associated with traumatic events come to the surface. The word has its origin in a Greek term for cleansing or purging and catharsis is associated with the elimination of negative emotions affect or behaviors associated with unacknowledged trauma.
The term is applied to literary and dramatic and also to the representations of serious actions that becomes disastrous in the conclusion of protagonist. Aristotle 's classic analysis in which he gave the example of this theory like the tragedies of Greek dramatist as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.
Aristotle defined tragedy as -
"the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself ","incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotion. "
We can interpret Aristotle 's catharsis which signifies purgation or purification both disputed. Aristotle in the first place sets account for the undeniable, remarkable, fact that tragic representation of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed but relieved, even exalted. Also Aristotle uses distinctive effect on the reader which he calls "the pleasure of pity and fear "and that produces good effect.He regards the dramatist 's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of the tragic protagonist and organization of the tragic plot.
Aristotle 's concepts of Catharsis :
Aristotle writes that the function of tragedy is to arouse the emotions of pity and fear, and to affect the Katharsis of these emotions. Aristotle has used the term Katharsis only once, but no phrase has been handled so frequently by critics, and poets. Aristotle has not explained what exactly he meant by the word, nor do we get any help from the Poetics. For this reason, help and guidance has to be taken from his other works. Further, Katharsis has three meaning. It means ‘purgation’, ‘purification’, and ‘clarification’, and each critic has used the word in one or the other senses. All agree that Tragedy arouses fear and pity, but there are sharp differences as to the process, the way by which the rousing of these emotions gives pleasure. Katharsis has been taken as a medical metaphor, ‘purgation’, denoting a pathological effect on the soul similar to the effect of medicine on the body. This view is borne out by a passage in the Politics where Aristotle refers to religious frenzy being cured by certain tunes which excite religious frenzy. In Tragedy:
…pity and fear, artificially stirred the latent pity and fear which we bring with us from real life.
In the Neo-Classical era, Catharsis was taken to be an allopathic treatment with the unlike curing unlike. The arousing of pity and fear was supposed to bring about the purgation or ‘evacuation’ of other emotions, like anger, pride etc. As Thomas Taylor holds:
We learn from the terrible fates of evil men to avoid the vices they manifest.
F. L. Lucas rejects the idea that Katharsis is a medical metaphor, and says that:
The theatre is not a hospital.
Both Lucas and Herbert Reed regard it as a kind of safety valve. Pity and fear are aroused, we give free play to these emotions which is followed by emotional relief. I. A. Richards’ approach to the process is also psychological. Fear is the impulse to withdraw and pity is the impulse to approach. Both these impulses are harmonized and blended in tragedy and this balance brings relief and repose. The ethical interpretation is that the tragic process is a kind of lustration of the soul, an inner illumination resulting in a more balanced attitude to life and its suffering. Thus John Gassner says that a clear understanding of what was involved in the struggle, of cause and effect, a judgment on what we have witnessed, can result in a state of mental equilibrium and rest, and can ensure complete aesthetic pleasure. Tragedy makes us realize that divine law operates in the universe, shaping everything for the best. During the Renaissance, another set of critics suggested that Tragedy helped to harden or ‘temper’ the emotions. Spectators are hardened to the pitiable and fearful events of life by witnessing them in tragedies. Humphrey House rejects the idea of ‘purgation’ and forcefully advocates the ‘purification’ theory which involves moral instruction and learning. It is a kind of ‘moral conditioning’. He points out that, ‘purgation means cleansing’. According to ‘the purification’ theory, Katharsis implies that our emotions are purified of excess and defect, are reduced to intermediate state, trained and directed towards the right objects at the right time. The spectator learns the proper use of pity, fear and similar emotions by witnessing tragedy. Butcher writes:
The tragic Katharsis involves not only the idea of emotional relief, but the further idea of purifying the emotions so relieved.
The basic defect of ‘purgation’ theory and ‘purification’ theory is that they are too much occupied with the psychology of the audience. Aristotle was writing a treatise not on psychology but on the art of poetry. He relates ‘Catharsis’ not to the emotions of the spectators but to the incidents which form the plot of the tragedy. And the result is the “clarification” theory. The paradox of pleasure being aroused by the ugly and the repellent is also the paradox involved in tragedy. Tragic incidents are pitiable and fearful.
They include horrible events as a man blinding himself, a wife murdering her husband or a mother slaying her children and instead of repelling us produce pleasure. Aristotle clearly tells us that we should not seek for every pleasure from tragedy, “but only the pleasure proper to it”. ‘Catharsis’ refers to the tragic variety of pleasure. The Catharsis clause is thus a definition of the function of tragedy, and not of its emotional effects on the audience. Imitation does not produce pleasure in general, but only the pleasure that comes from learning, and so also the peculiar pleasure of tragedy. Learning comes from discovering the relation between the action and the universal elements embodied in it. The poet might take his material from history or tradition, but he selects and orders it in terms of probability and necessity, and represents what, “might be”. He rises from the particular to the general and so is more universal and more philosophical. The events are presented free of chance and accidents which obscure their real meaning. Tragedy enhances understanding and leaves the spectator ‘face to face with the universal law’. Thus according to this interpretation, ‘Catharsis’ means clarification of the essential and universal significance of the incidents depicted, leading to an enhanced understanding of the universal law which governs human life and destiny, and such an understating leads to pleasure of tragedy. In this view, Catharsis is neither a medical, nor a religious or moral term, but an intellectual term. The term refers to the incidents depicted in the tragedy and the way in which the poet reveals their universal significance. The clarification theory has many merits. Firstly, it is a technique of the tragedy and not to the psychology of the audience. Secondly, the theory is based on what Aristotle says in the Poetics, and needs no help and support of what Aristotle has said in Politics and Ethics. Thirdly, it relates Catharsis both to the theory of imitation and to the discussion of probability and necessity. Fourthly, the theory is perfectly in accord with current aesthetic theories. According to Aristotle the basic tragic emotions are pity and fear and are painful. If tragedy is to give pleasure, the pity and fear must somehow be eliminated. Fear is aroused when we see someone suffering and think that similar fate might befall us. Pity is a feeling of pain caused by the sight of underserved suffering of others. The spectator sees that it is the tragic error or Hamartia of the hero which results in suffering and so he learns something about the universal relation between character and destiny. To conclude, Aristotle's conception of Catharsis is mainly intellectual. It is neither didactic nor theoretical, though it may have a residual theological element. Aristotle's Catharsis is not a moral doctrine requiring the tragic poet to show that bad men come to bad ends, nor a kind of theological relief arising from discovery that God’s laws operate invisibly to make all things work out for the best.
Dramatic uses :
Catharsis is a term in dramatic art that describes the effect of tragedy (or comedy and quite possibly other artistic forms)[6] principally on the audience (although some have speculated on characters in the drama as well). Nowhere does Aristotle explain the meaning of "catharsis" as he is using that term in the definition of tragedy in the Poetics (1449b21-28). G. F. Else argues that traditional, widely held interpretations of catharsis as "purification" or "purgation" have no basis in the text of the Poetics, but are derived from the use of catharsis in other Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian contexts.[7] For this reason, a number of diverse interpretations of the meaning of this term have arisen. The term is often discussed along with Aristotle's concept of anagnorisis.
D. W. Lucas, in an authoritative edition of the Poetics, comprehensively covers the various nuances inherent in the meaning of the term in an Appendix devoted to "Pity, Fear, and Katharsis".[8] Lucas recognizes the possibility of catharsis bearing some aspect of the meaning of "purification, purgation, and 'intellectual clarification'" although his discussion of these terms is not always, or perhaps often, in the precise form with which other influential scholars have treated them. Lucas himself does not accept any one of these interpretations as his own but adopts a rather different one based on "the Greek doctrine of Humours" which has not received wide subsequent acceptance. Purgation and purification, used in previous centuries, as the common interpretations of catharsis are still in wide use today.[9] More recently, in the twentieth century, the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" has arisen as a rival to the older views in describing the effect of catharsis on members of the audience.
Purgation and purification
In his works prior to the Poetics, Aristotle had used the term catharsis purely in its medical sense (usually referring to the evacuation of the katamenia—the menstrual fluid or other reproductive material).[10] Here, however, he employs it as a medical metaphor. F. L. Lucas maintains, therefore, that purification and cleansing are not proper translations for catharsis; that it should rather be rendered as purgation. "It is the human soul that is purged of its excessive passions."[11] Gerald F. Else made the following argument against the "purgation" theory: "It presupposes that we come to the tragic drama (unconsciously, if you will) as patients to be cured, relieved, restored to psychic health. But there is not a word to support this in the "Poetics", not a hint that the end of drama is to cure or alleviate pathological states. On the contrary it is evident in every line of the work that Aristotle is presupposing "normal" auditors, normal states of mind and feeling, normal emotional and aesthetic experience."[12]
Lessing sidesteps the medical attribution. He translates catharsis as a purification, an experience that brings pity and fear into their proper balance: "In real life," he explained, "men are sometimes too much addicted to pity or fear, sometimes too little; tragedy brings them back to a virtuous and happy mean."[13] Tragedy is then a corrective; through watching tragedy, the audience learns how to feel these emotions at proper levels.
Intellectual clarification
In the twentieth century a paradigm shift took place in the interpretation of catharsis with a number of scholars contributing to the argument in support of the intellectual clarification concept.[14] The clarification theory of catharsis would be fully consistent, as other interpretations are not, with Aristotle's argument in chapter 4 of the Poetics (1448b4-17) that the essential pleasure of mimesis is the intellectual pleasure of "learning and inference".
It is generally understood that Aristotle's theory of mimesis and catharsis are responses to Plato's negative view of artistic mimesis on an audience. Plato argued that the most common forms of artistic mimesis were designed to evoke from an audience powerful emotions such as pity, fear, and ridicule which override the rational control that defines the highest level of our humanity and lead us to wallow unacceptably in the overindulgence of emotion and passion. Aristotle's concept of catharsis, in all of the major senses attributed to it, contradicts Plato's view by providing a mechanism that generates the rational control of irrational emotions. All of the commonly held interpretations of catharsis, purgation, purification, and clarification are considered by most scholars to represent a homeopathic process in which pity and fear accomplish the catharsis of emotions like themselves. For an alternate view of catharsis as an allopathic process in which pity and fear produce a catharsis of emotions unlike pity and fear, see E. Belfiore, "Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion." Princeton, 1992, 260 ff.
Literary analysis of catharsis
The following analysis by E. R. Dodds, directed at the character of Oedipus in the paradigmatic Aristotelian tragedy, Oedipus Rex, incorporates all three of the aforementioned interpretations of catharsis: purgation, purification, intellectual clarification:
...what fascinates us is the spectacle of a man freely choosing, from the highest motives a series of actions which lead to his own ruin. Oedipus might have left the plague to take its course; but pity for the sufferings of his people compelled him to consult Delphi. When Apollo's word came back, he might still have left the murder of Laius uninvestigated; but piety and justice required him to act. He need not have forced the truth from the reluctant Theban herdsman; but because he cannot rest content with a lie, he must tear away the last veil from the illusion in which he has lived so long. Teiresias, Jocasta, the herdsman, each in turn tries to stop him, but in vain; he must read the last riddle, the riddle of his own life. The immediate cause of Oedipus' ruin is not "fate or "the gods"—no oracle said that he must discover the truth—and still less does it lie in his own weakness; what causes his ruin is his own strength and courage, his loyalty to Thebes, and his loyalty to the truth.[15]
Attempts to subvert catharsis
There have been, for political or aesthetic reasons, deliberate attempts made to subvert the effect of catharsis in theatre. For example, Bertolt Brecht viewed catharsis as a pap (pabulum) for the bourgeois theatre audience, and designed dramas which left significant emotions unresolved, intending to force social action upon the audience. Brecht then identified the concept of catharsis with the notion of identification of the spectator, meaning a complete adhesion of the viewer to the dramatic actions and characters. Brecht reasoned that the absence of a cathartic resolution would require the audience to take political action in the real world, in order to fill the emotional gap they had experienced vicariously. This technique can be seen as early as his agit-prop play The Measures Taken, and is mostly the source of his invention of an epic theatre, based on a distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt) between the viewer and the representation or portrayal of characters.
Aristotle 's views :
The Place of Catharsis in the Definition of Tragedy
The term ‘Catharsis* occurs in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy :
Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of a narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper catharisis, or purgation, of the’se emotions.
We see that the term is also linked with the concept of pity and fear. It is, therefore, necessary to consider the meanings of pity and fear as connected with tragedy.
The Place of Pity and Fear in Catharsis
The terms, ‘pity’ and ‘fear’ are closely connected in Aristotelian theory. There are different types of fear. Fear can be centred on an individual, in the form of some vague feeling of insecurity and anxiety. It could possibly derive from a feeling for others, even for society or the state. Fear could be the outcome of facing some inexplicable event, or some disastrous and awful incident. Fear may also arise out of feelings of guilt, or rather a recognition of this guilt in ourselves, when we see it portrayed in someone else. It is apparent that tragedy can easily encompass all these forms of fear, either singley or collectively.
Pity, we are told by Aristotle, is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves (i.e., by the misfortune of one like ourselves). In the Rhetoric, fear is defined as “a kind of pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future”. The impending evil in this case must be near at hand, not distant. Anything that causes fear in us if it happens to us, causes pity in us if it happens to others. Pity is a “sort of pain at an evident evil of a destructive or painful kind in the case of somebody who does not deserve it, the evil being one which we might expect to happen to ourselves or to some of our friends, and this at a time when it is near at hand.”
Pity and fear are related emotions. Pity turns to fear when the object is closely related to us that the suffering seems to be our own, and we pity others in circumstances in which we should fear for ourselves. Pity is derived from the feeling that similar suffering might befall us. It is because of this that the tragic character should be like ourselves’ and at the same time slightly idealised. In such a case, we feel pity for the suffering of the innately good person, while having a sympathetic fear for one who is so like ourselves. Aristotle everywhere says that pity and fear are the characteristic and necessary tragic emotions.
The essential tragic effect depends on maintaining the intimate alliance between pity and fear. According to Aristotle, pity alone should be not be evoked by tragedy, as many moderns have held; not pity or fear, for which Corneille argued; not pity and admiration, which is the modification under which the Aristotelian phrase finds ‘ currency in the Elizabethan writers. The requirement of Aristotle is a combination of pity and fear, as Butcher says.
The tragic fear is impersonal in the artistic sense. It is not really the crushing apprehension1 of personal disaster. In reading or seeing a tragedy, one does not really fear that one would be placed in similar circumstances, or be overtaken by the same calamities that overtake the tragic hero. But there is a feeling of horror or of vague foreboding, as Butcher observes. The tension and excited expectation with which we wait for the catastrophe derives from our sympathy with the hero, with whom we tend to identify ourselves. Butcher says in this context : “We are thrilled with awe at the greatness of the issues thus unfolded, and with the moral • inevitableness of the result. In this sense of awe the emotions of fear and pity are blended.”
Having dealt with the emotions of pity and fear, let us now go on to the concept of the catharsis of such emotions. Various interpretations have been offered regarding the term.
‘Catharsis’ Taken as a Medical Term : Purgation Theories
The term ‘Catharsis’ has been interpreted in medical terms, meaning purgation. In medical terms (especially in the older sense), purgation meant the partial removal of excess “humours”. The health of the body depended on a true balance of the humours. Thus purgation of the emotions of pity and fear does not mean the removal of these emotions, but that the passions or emotions are reduced to a healthy, balanced proportion. Catharsis in this sense, denotes a pathological effect on the soul comparable to the effect of medicine on the body.
1. Like Curing the Like : Some critics who favour the medical sense of the term Catharsis, explain the process in the light of “homeopathic” treatment, in which a little substance of something” cures the body of a excess of the same thing. It is a case of the- ‘like curing the like’. A passage in the Politics of Aristotle bears this out, where the effects of music on some morbid states of mind is talked about.1 The emotions should not be repressed; they must be allowed an outlet, so that the mental equilibrium is maintained. In the Poetics, Aristotle refers to the curing of religious frenzy. According to Plato, a crying child is rocked to sleep by. singing a song. The outward restlessness (induced by. the rocking) allays or cures the inward restlessness, and brings about calm.
In his Preface to Samson Agonistes, Milton expresses a similar view, that the effect of tragedy is to “temper and reduce . .. (Pity and fear and such emotions) to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated”. Pity and fear are artificially produced in tragedy, and it expels the excess
1. The passage in the Politics which gives strong justification to the view, that catharsis is a “relief to overcharged feeling” : Those who are subject to the emotions of pity and fear and the feelings generally will necessarily be affected in the same way; and so will other men in exact proportion to their susceptibility to such emotions. All experience a certain catharsis and pleasant relief. In the same manner cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men of these emotions lying latent in us. Bernays, and before him Twining, put. forward the pathological theory of the effect of tragedy. The stage, according to them, provided a harmless and pleasurable outlet for instincts which demand satisfaction, and which can be indulged here more fearlessly than in real life. In the pleasurable calm .which follows when the passion is spent, an emotional cure has been wrought. Freud’s theory of psychological cure of neurosis is similar to this, when he says that a neurotic can be cured by being made to recall painful childhood experiences.
2. Unlike Curing the Unlike. In the neoclassical period, the medical interpretation of the term took on an “allopathic” light. Catharsis was seen to be in the nature of the unlike curing the unlike. The arousing of pity and fear, the more tender emotions, brought about a purgation or evacuation of other emotions like anger and pride. The sight of the incidents aroused pity and fear and the spectator is purged of those emotions which caused the incidents of suffering in the tragedy.. If the suffering in the play was caused by anger or pride, the spectator was cured of these emotions.
Dryden in his preface to Troilus and Cressida, says that it is not “the abasement of pity and fear, but of such aggressive and evil emotions as pride and anger through the feeding and watering of the soft-hearted emotions.
Psychological Interpretation of ‘Catharsis’
Some critics have tried to give a psychological explanation to the term ‘Catharsis. Herbert Read considers it in the light of a safety valve. Tragedy gives a free outlet to the emotions of pity and fear. The result is a feeling of emotional relief. This, one notes, is quite closely related to the purgation theory.
A. A. Richard puts forward as ingenius theory. He says that the emotion of pity is an impulse to advance, while fear is an impulse to withdraw. In tragedy both these impulses are blended, harmonised into balance. Emotional excess is thus brought to a balance. However, the theory holds good only for the emotion of pity and fear, and it restricts the range of tragic emotions to these.
Ethical Interpretation of ‘Catharsis’
The ethical interpretation of’Catharsis’ regards the tragic process as an illustration of the soul, a lighting up which results in a more philosophical attitude to life and suffering. The spectator sees the largeness of the disasters presented onstage and realises that his personal emotions are insignificant beside such a catastrophe. It brings him to a balanced view of things. Man sees himself in proportion to the large design of the universe. In the words of John Gassner, “only enlightenment, a clear comprehension of what was involved in the struggle, an understanding of cause and effect, a judgement on what we have witnessed”, can bring about a state of mental peace and balance, and result in complete aesthetic gratification1.
Another set of critics said that the effect of tragedy was to harden or ‘temper’ the emotions. Just as soldiers become hardened against death after seeing it so many times on the battlefield, so too, constant contact with tragedy on stage hardens men against pity and fear in real’life. This is, undoubtedly, a bit far-fetched, if not totally absurd.
The Purification Theory of ‘Catharsis’
One meaning of Catharsis is ‘purification’. Some critics have interpreted the term in the light of this meaning. These critics reject the interpretation of Catharsis in the lights of medical terminology. Humphry House, for instance, says that Aristotle’s concept of Catharsis was not as a medical term. He interprets the word to mean a kind of “moral conditioning”, which the spectator undergoes. He comments that purgation means ‘cleansing*. This cleansing may be a quantitative evacuation or qualitative change in the body, in the restoration of the proper equilibrium. In this context he says : “A tragedy arouses pity and fear from potentiality to activity through worthy and adequate stimuli; to control them ,by directing them to the right objects in the right way; and exercises them, within the limits of the play, as the emotions of the good man would be exercised. When they subside to potentiality again after the play is over, it is a more “trained” potentiality than before .... Our responses are brought nearer to those of the good and wise man.” Catharsis results in emotional health. Catharsis is thus a moral conditioning. It is a purification of the excess and.defect in our emotions, so that emotional equilibrium can be restored. According to House, Aristotle’s whole doctrine only makes sense if we realise that the proper development and balance of the emotions depend upon the habitual direction of them towards worthy objects.
Butcher, too, agrees with the purification theory. He observes that Catharisis involves “not only the idea of emotional relief, but the further idea of purifying the emotions to be relieved.” He says, further, that, the poets found out how “the transport of human pity and human fear might, under the excitation of art, be dissolved in joy, and the pain escape in the purified tide of human sympathy.” Tragic experience, onstage, purifies the feeling of pity and fear of its morbid content.
The Clarification Theory of ‘Catharsis’
There are some critics who show that the implications of Catharsis are to be found in the Poetics itself without any need to refer to the Politics or the Ethics. Writing of the imitative arts, Aristotle points out that the pleasure in the imitative arts is connected with learning Pleasure does not come from joy alone; even the pictures of dead bodies can give pleasure if well executed. This shows that pleasure is linked with learning; that pleasure is there in anything fitted to instruct. It is paradox that even the ugly and the repellent1
can and do give pleasure. A similar paradox’lies there in tragedy. The tragic incidents are painful. They might present horrible situations of man blinding himself, or a woman killing her husband, or a mother killing her child. Such events would horrify us and repel us in real .life; yet, in tragedy, they afford us a special pleasure. It is a pleasure peculiar to tragedy.
• Aristotle himself tells us that tragedy has its own kind of pleasure, and that we must seek from it this pleasure—”the pleasure proper to it.” And Catharsis involves such a pleasure. The function of tragedy is to provide the pleasure peculiar to it. This pleasure involves the presentation of events which arouse pity and fear. According to this theory, Catharsis becomes an indication of the function of tragedy, and not of its emotional effects on the, audience. Cathasis is related to incidents of the tragedy, not to the emotions of pity and fear evoked in the audience. ‘Catharsis’ involves a Process of Learning
Tragic pleasure rises from the fact that imitation produces that sort of pleasure which comes from learning. This learning comes from our discovery of a certain relationship between the particular events presented in the imitation and. certain universal elements embodied in it. As has already been remarked, the poet selects and orders his material according to the laws of probability and necessity. He presents “what might be”,-more than “what is”. This is.what makes a poet more philosophical than a historian, for he makes the particular into the general; he deals with the universal. The events are presented as free of all accidentals, transients, and chances, which might obscure their true significance. Tragedy brings a better understanding; it bring the spectator “face to face with the universal law.”
The tragic poet selects incidents embodying pity and fear and then “presents them in such a way as to bring out the probable or necessary principles that unite them in a single action and determine their relation to this action as it proceeds from its beginning to its end. When the spectator has witnessed a tragedy of this type, he will have learned something; the incidents will be clarified in the sense that their relation, in terms of universal, will have become manifest and the act of learning, says Aristotle, will be enjoyable.”
In the light of this theory, Catharsis refers to the incidents of the tragedy rather than to the psychology of the audience. Catharsis is not purgation of emotions, nor is it a purification of emotions. It refers to the way in which the poet has a presented his incidents of pity and fear, to rise from the particular to the universal. Catharsis is not the catharsis of the audience but of pity and fear themselves.. Indeed, Aristotle does not refer to the audience in the definition of tragedy. It becomes inevitable that he is talking of the work of tragedy itself. He is talking of the suitable embodiment of pity and fear. In this sense Catharsis means simply “the ideal state”, but with reference to the tragedy, and not with reference to the emotional state’ of the audience. Pity and fear take on the ideal form in course of the ‘composition of tragedy. Of tragedy Aristotle says : “We must not demand of tragedy any and every kind of pleasure, but only that which is proper to it. And since the pleasure which the poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation, it is evident that this quality must be impressed upon the incidents.” Thus the pleasure peculiar to tragedy comes from pity and fear. Imitated in. a work of art • these two emotions, which may not be pleasant in real life, afford pleasure. And the problem of any writer is to suitably formulate the pleasure peculiar to each genre of poetry.
There is in this theory, a clarification involved. There is a clarification of the essential and universal significance of the incidents presented in the tragedy. It leads to an understanding of the universal law governing the universe, and produces the pleasure peculiar to tragedy. Catharsis takes on an intellectual tone, rather than a medical or religious tone.
The Relative Merits and Demerits of the Theories
The purgation theory and the purification theory of Catharsis have obvious limitations. They cannot explain the whole process involved in Catharsis. A fundamental, drawback of these theories is that these theories are concerned with the effect of tragedy on the audience, i.e., with the psychology of the audience. Both views concentrate not on what tragedy says or what tragedy is, but what tragedy may do to us; they lie rather in the field of experimental psychology than in that of literary criticism. They treat “pity and fear” as references to something in the audience rather than to something (scenes and elements) in the play. In actuality, Aristotle was writing a treatise on the art of poetry, and was concerned more with technique of writing poetry than with audience psychology. As theories of psychology, the two theories are not bad in themselves, but it is doubtful if it explains the term as Aristotle intended it to mean.
Modern critics advocate the clarification theory. This theory refers to the incidents of tragedy rather than to the reaction of the audience. It is more concerned with what tragedy is i.e., with the nature of tragedy. According to this theory, purgation or purification is only incidental to the pleasure of tragedy. But comprehension of the relation of the particular to the universal as embodied in tragedy, brings about a peculiar pleasure. It is an intellectual pleasure which lies in realising the relationship between the hamartia of the hero and the suffering which results, the relationship between character and destiny. There is design incorporated into the tragedy. The alleviation1 of pity and fear is a ‘by-product’ of the learning process, not the chief object of tragedy.
Conclusion
Aristotle is a. great critic, and what he said centuries ago will continue to influence thinking as it has done all this time. It is unfortunate that he has not explained some of the terms which seem so very significant to his central thesis. The term ‘Catharsis,’ for instance, has been interpreted so variously that it is difficult to come to an agreement as to what Aristotle really meant. Of the theories advanced to explain Catharsis, the clarification theory appears to be the most acceptable, perhaps, for it tends to relate Catharsis to the work rather than to the psychology of the audience. And, after all Aristotle was writing on the art of poetry, not about the effect of poetry. All the same, the last word on Catharsis has hot yet been said.
Work cited :
http://www.engliterarium.com/2008/11/aristotles-concept-of-catharsis.html?m=1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)
http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.in/2010/08/aristotles-conception-of-tragic.html?m=1
