ROBERT BRUSTEIN
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responsibility for explaining it. This essay is my tardy effort to face
that task.
The relationship between politics and the arts in the theater has
been a matter of contention ever since Thespis first broke ranks with
the Chorus. The first to start these fevers roaring was Plato, who
refused to admit the illusion-making dramatist, or any artist for that
matter, through the portals of his ideal republic. Plato believed in a
reality beyond the tangible or material, where an idea is more real
than the physical object itself. Since a painting of a chair is an imita–
tion of an already unreal object, it is even more distant from the
truth; and an actor impersonating a character in the theater virtually
obliterates reality altogether. For Plato, the dramatic artist is a fabri–
cator and, hence, a menace to a republic which puts a premium on
the faculty of truth-telling. (In less obdurate moments, Plato is will–
ing to tolerate an art which holds up ethical models of behavior for
humankind to imitate-what he called
ethos.
But nevertheless, he
maintains that the artist is a serious threat to a utopian politics.)
Aristotle's
Poetics,
written not too long after Plato rejected the
artist, may very well have been an effort to refute this argument.
Rather than considering the dramatist a liar, Aristotle held that
works of art, particularly tragedies, were among the highest forms of
human activity; far from masking reality, they had the capacity to
bring us even closer to the truth than politics or philosophy.
It
is
significant that, in listing the elements of tragic writing, Aristotle
found
n-rythos-
variously translated as plot or fable or action- to be
preeminent, while
ethos,
or character, he placed second in order of
importance. Behind these was
dianoia-what
a character says about
the course to be pursued, what a person believes, his social moral–
ity- which is sometimes translated as "politics" or "thought."
In short, Aristotle considered the imagination to be not a source
of fantasy or illusion, but rather the supreme human faculty, and
imitation, which Plato scorned, to be an important mode of under–
standing. He didn't exclude politics from the drama but he believed
that one's morality was of interest less for being right or wrong, than
for the way it illuminated action and character. In this regard, Aris–
totle's concept of
hamartia
assumes a crucial importance in his tragic
theory. Although sometimes translated as tragic flaw- medieval
Christians appropriated the word to mean sin, suggesting a severe
judgment on human morals and
behavior-hamartia
more accurately
means tragic error, which is to say a mistake that brings on tragedy.
We suffer tragedy not because of our character or beliefs but because
