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PART 1

The Plots of (Greek) Tragedies

First published in The New Indian Express

It so happens that none of what Aristotle wrote for the public in his time � none of the ‘published� works � has survived the close to twenty-four hundred years separating him from us. What we have of Aristotle is notes and half-written works, never meant for widespread sharing, perhaps written only to be of use to students as references to larger works.

One of these texts is Poetics, about sixty-odd pages if one measures in today’s page sizes, and available in half. In it, Aristotle touches upon the components of the two modes of drama � tragedy and comedy. The extant Poetics only covers tragedy and in that too there are a few fuzzy spots where it is difficult to wean any meaning. Yet Poetics contains, without doubt, a robust framework with which to look at tragedy. In fact, it is a particularly thrilling exercise to apply Aristotle’s ideas to famous plays � say those of William Shakespeare.

For Aristotle, plot is the most important element. He defines it as a chain of events in which, apart from the beginning, each individual event is necessary or probable. A tragic plot is specifically endowed with the responsibility of creating ‘pity and fear� in the audience. Tragedies thus ought to have eminent men (in stature, achievements or morals) as their central characters, for witnessing the fall of someone inept or wicked can evoke neither emotion. Taking examples from the Shakespeare universe: Hamlet, as Prince of Denmark, and Othello, as the moor of Venice, broadly fit the eminence criteria. We could extend this to popular Hindi film adaptations by Vishal Bhardwaj too, and if readers recall, we see that Omkara fits the profile but Haider, without any eminence in his character, does not.

For designing a good plot, Aristotle recommends that the main character in a tragedy act in error. This is not so much a moral error as it is an error of judgment, and its revelation is supposed to unleash the emotive potential of the hero, also evoking in the audience a cocktail of pity and fear. Aristotle also recommends that the action of the tragedy should concern itself with characters that are closely related to each other, as in a family or in a love relationship � so that an error, when revealed, hurts deeper. Here is the logic behind all those patricides, fratricides and matricides in the classics.

These two concepts are seen clearly in Shakespeare’s Othello, where the moor, erroneously suspecting Desdemona of infidelity, murders her (in the film, Omkara kills his wife Dolly). When subsequently the error becomes clear to Othello, he kills himself. Hamlet’s case is more complicated (as is Haider’s). He doesn’t as much act in error as he is scared of acting in error. His anguish is borne of inaction, not repentance. With this added complication, Shakespeare isn’t in concordance with Aristotle.

PART 2

Modern Plots

First published in The New Indian Express

Aristotelian plot, again, was a chain of events in which, except the very beginning, each event was necessary or probable. There was a chain of causation linking each event, right up to the resolution.

This doesn’t leave any room for irrationality or falsehoods driving the events or the actions of characters in them. It follows that causation could not be arbitrary in Aristotle’s schema - for him, no event in a Greek play should happen just like that, out of the blue. This explains why Aristotle had a particular dislike for plays in which the resolution was provided through divine intervention.

Aristotle’s rule against irrationality or falsehoods is one that modern writers should find particularly satisfying to break. Modern life is not understood completely if it is not understood as (1) a kind of truce with the simple fact that the self is always lying to itself, and (2) the world is too big to be comprehended.

We, the moderns, know that we don’t know even a percentage of what goes on in our minds; we know that we delude ourselves all the time; we know that our memories, the closest approximations we have of ourselves, constitute a forever-changing entity; we know that we are always participating in virtual lives, propagating a fiction, while being unsure of its sanctity - so, basically, are we ever sure of our selves? And if we are so unsure of who we are, what can be said of our motivations. In terms of literature, if consistency in character isn’t possible, how can causation even exist? What is this thing called plot, then?

It is perhaps prudent to retrace our steps and only say that modernity complicates the issue of causation, and modern plots need to embrace (as they have) the category of irrational motivation in them. Consider Dostoyevski’s seminal work, Notes from the Underground, in which the narrator goes to lengths to prove that men sometimes do things just like that, without any reason or rhyme, just to feel free.

Now to the second point: the world operates in farcical ways, the logic behind its machinations remaining obscure to us at times. For the modern writer crafting a plot, this farce has to be molded in a specific way. Consider Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. For Humbert Humbert’s illicit relationship with his stepdaughter Dolores to begin, Dolores� mother has to be eradicated. One fine day, right in front of her residence, she is mowed down by a car. The event happens without any presentiment, as a bolt from the blue, yet it sort of gels with the story’s momentum. That is Nabokov’s dexterity. Modern plots, like in Lolita, have some space for farces that do the sole task of thrusting a story forward. Very un-Aristotelian.