Aristotle's Poetics: some affirmations and critiques

Ingrid Hoofd, National University of Singapore

The Greek philosopher Aristotle described in his 'Poetics' a set of rules to describe an 'ideal narrative'. These broadly consist of the following:

• A story needs a plot which is constituted as a beginning, followed by a middle and closed off with an ending. These points of entry, middle and exit should be clearly defined, and should not be meddled with.
• The highest level of tension in the narrative should coincide with the actual middle of the narrative.
• The story should be about a hero/protagonist, who should be a representation of someone 'important' in the polis, because these characters are crucial for the existence of the entire polis.
• The tension in the narative comes from a conflict, which is condensed in the character of the antagonist. The plot should be aimed at working through this conflict.
• The narrative should arouse feelings of pity and fear in the spectator, who will identify with the hero and who will, from working together with the hero through the conflict, eventually get a feeling of 'katharsis' (a mental/psychic kind of 'cleansing' or an obtaining of a 'new understanding'). The whole narrative's aim is the bringing about of katharsis in the spectator.
• To be worthy of the name 'tragedy' or 'epic', the narrative should be of a 'definite magnitude'. It remains unclear what Aristotle exactly means by this, but it is a term that, as I will show later, can be applied to defining the ideal hypertext narrative.

In my opinion, there are three points to start with at which Aristotle's conceptualisation of an 'ideal narrative' cannot be applied to reading hypertext in our postmodern era:

1. Aristotle had a very 'biological' idea of the connection between the narrative and the reader: as if the events in a narrative where somehow materially injected in certain parts of the brain or nerve system of the spectator/listener. The reader is thus regarded as some biological 'constant', which is an allusion that no longer holds in our era where readers are highly differentiated on axes like age, gender, ethnicity and geographical location.
2. Similarly, Aristotle regarded the context or intertext of a narrative as mostly 'constant'. His concepts are very situated in the specific historical and geographical space of Greece some 2000 years ago.
3. Therefore, his idea of 'mimesis' as a truthful reflection of 'reality' therefore also cannot hold since today it would make more sense to talk of 'multiple realities' for different readers. The reader activity and background therefore becomes much more important in thinking about what happens when hypertext narratives are 'read'.

We would therefore need to transform these notions into a set of rules that are more applicable to our age, and thus regard the reader(s) of hypertext, as well as the intertextual/contextual surroundings of a docuverse as all being variable texts (see figure 1).

It would thus from the outset be better to talk about 'mimeses' instead of mimesis. Furthermore, the idea of a rigid begin, middle and end in hypertext will not hold, because the strength of hypertext lies exactly in the emphasis on multiple readers who will plunge in where they want to. This does not mean that there is no begin, middle and end in a docuverse though; as The "Reconfiguring Narrative" in Hypertext 2.0 poses, "Linearity .. then becomes a quality of the individual reader's experience.." (p.184), these attributes will be assigned by the docuverse's reader(s) and will thus be variable, but still there.

figure 1

continue towards a vector-model of hypertext narrative