The World of English Literature

The Role of Plot in a Tragedy

Plot in a Tragedy

Aristotle says: “We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy, is plot.” E. M. Forster in his Aspects of Novel says that a plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and the queen died of grief’ is a plot.

A plot is a sequence of evens in a narrative. It is divided into three parts, those are:
1. epitasis or rising action: in which the incidents described tend to reach a definite conclusion.
This part is divided into exposition and complication. The Dramatist seeks to explain the necessary events that occurred before the beginning of the dramatic action to the audience. That purpose is served by the exposition.

2. peripety or climax or the turning-point of the incidents which follows the rising action.
Peripety or climax deals with the fortune of the hero, which is, in fact, the turning point of his life and career. In this section, we have the Aristotelian anagnorisis. In Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, for example, Oedipus comes to realise that he has killed his father and married his mother. It is extremely revealing. The hero has the anagnorisis or recognition of the grim truth, and that is the turning-point of his life.

3. the denouement or falling action, in which the incidents are brought to a conclusion.
It deals with that part of a drama, when the hero is faced with an inescapable situation, and is left with no alternatives.

Aristotle thinks the plot to be the soul of Tragedy. But since the Renaissance, ‘character’ has been of supreme importance. When we read a play called Hamlet, we feel that Hamlet’s character is what matters most. When Aristotle speaks of ‘plot’, he uses the word in a very comprehensive sense.

In Greek, there’re three words which is very famous: ethos which is translated ‘character’, muthos ‘plot’, and praxeos ‘action’. The meaning of the Greek ethos is far narrower; it excludes behaviour and is limited to a certain moral bent in a person’s make-up, which may, or may not, express itself in action. Praxeos, the latter word thus including not only what we call action but the greater part of what we mean by character. The word muthos, translated ‘plot’, includes not only, as the English word suggests, the external happenings, the bare bones of the story with ‘character’ left out, but every activity, mental, emotional, even verbal, by which ethos becomes praxeos; in other words, what we call character is as much a part of muthos as is plot in our sense of the word. All that muthos excludes is moral tendencies - qualities - which have not expressed themselves in action. It is in this sense that Aristotle is using the words when he says that ‘Tragedy is not an imitation of persons’ - that is to say of what people have it in them to be before their ethos becomes praxeos - ‘but of action’, ‘the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity and not a quality,’ and, “the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak of tragedy, is plot.”

Aristotle makes three rather brief remarks on the plot:
1. The plot must have a certain length
2. It must have a certain structure
3. It must be the soul of the drama.
The length of the plot must not be enormous. It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The plot must not be “like a creature a thousand miles long.” The beginning, middle, and end must be integrated. The middle is atonce the cause and sequence of the beginning, while the end is the consequence of the middle. In a drama, the causal connection and inevitability are essential to mark it not only artistic, but logically convincing. For example, Oedipus Rex. The play begins with the plague in Thebes, which can be removed only when the guilty man is punished. The middle relates to the discovery that Oedipus himself is the guilty man; and the end in his punishment.

Some critics have complaint that the ‘exposition’ of the plot in ancient Greece did not rouse sufficient interest, for the audience knew all about the plot even before going to the theatre. Aristotle, however, does not always suggest that only the well-known traditional stories and legends are what dramatist should exclusively draw upon. Even if the stories are known to the audience, there is no harm. It is the artistic handling of the plot that matters. The question of exposition gives rise to another problem - how much should the dramatist expose? If there is no dramatic suspense, if the last page of a detective fiction or a thriller is well in advance, the known audience will feel bored. Lope de Vega says: “keep your secret to the end. The audience will turn their faces to the door and their backs to the stage when there is no more to learn. For Example, while Hamlet is taking to his mother, the arras suddenly moves. Hamlet does not know who is behind it. He assumes that it must be the king. Later the person proves to be Polonius. Shakespeare has thus kept it guarded secret from the audience.

Aristotle says that a work of a art must be complete and have “all the organic unity of a living creature.” Tragedy must be “complete in itself,” and must be “a whole”, and “complete in itself.” The same idea is repeated as “one action, a complete whole.” An epic, like a tragedy, “is based on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself.” The comparison of a plot and a living creature is very apt. He compares work of art with a living being. A work of art is complex thing., which, as Humphry House points out, “involves the interaction of parts in effective movement.”

When Aristotle speaks about the magnitude or ‘right size’ of a plot, he means that it should have proportion. As regards the proper size of a tragedy, Humphry House says that it governed by two criteria:
1. The function of tragedy itself; it must be of such a size that it can adequately display the hero passing by a series of probable or necessary stages from misfortune to happiness, or vice versa.
2. The capacity of the spectator or reader; the play must not exceed the length that compressed by the human memory: otherwise the essential unity of impression will be lost. But, so far as it consistent with its comprehensible as a whole, the longer the better.

Peripeteia and Anagnorisis

Aristotle speaks of two types of plot - simple and complex. A simple plot is one without peripeteia and anagnorisis; while a complex plot has peripeteia or anagnorisis or both.

Peripeteia has been translated as ‘reversal of fortune’. A peripeteia occurs when a person sought to aim at a particular result, but the reverse of the result was produced. It brings about the irony. In Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Barabas was boiling oil in a cauldron to destroy his enemy, but he himself dropped in it and died. While in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth heard the equivalent prophecy of the witches and sought to kill Banquo and all his enemies. But in reality, he got no peace and security, but only the damnation of his soul.

Anagnorisis may be translated as ‘recognition’ or ‘discovery’. Anagnorisis is a sudden realisation of a grim truth. Aristotle has spoken of six types of anagnorisis. The first type relates to the discovery by signs. The second type is the discovery, rather arbitrarily suggested by the dramatist. The third type of discovery is based upon memory. The fourth type of it is made through reasoning. The fifth type is based on false reasoning. And the last type is made by natural means.

A simple plot has no tragic irony. A complex plot is more artistic, and it is based on errors and irony. The hero of tragedy is suffering from hamartia, i.e. tragic error. Hamartia is only a false step - a leap in the dark, which brings about the downfall of the hero. For example, Desdemona dropped her handkerchief, and that was a fatal mistake. Othello made a serious mistake when he gave credence to Iago’s report. For all practical purposes Iago’s villainy did not bring about the tragedy. As Meredith rightly points out:
In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be, Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.

No extraneous force brings our disaster. Our enemy is always lurking within ourselves. And that enemy is hamartia. In an ideal tragic plot, peripeteia, anagnorisis, and hamartia are all inextricably interwined and deeper the tragic irony.

posted by Yunita Ramadhana @ 3:12 AM