CHAPTER X
LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS
Aristotle's best known contribution to literary criticism is his statement that tragedy has the effect of a catharsis upon the reader and helps him to discharge emotions of pity and fear that overburden him. We have considerably amplified Aristotle's views, as we include under tragedy the recording of any very painful event in prose or verse, in dialogue or narrative. We believe that perusing literature in general relieves the reader of all nerve-racking emotions and produces a homeopathic effect upon him by the aesthetic voicing of his unconscious feelings.
Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, gives us a good survey of several Italian commentators who correctly interpreted Aristotle's view of the purgation of the emotions of fear and pity as aesthetic, and not ethical. The first of these critics was Robortelli (1548); Vettori and Castelvetro followed him, while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emotions similar to pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. Minturno likened the purgation to the physician's method, while Speroni pointed out that pity and fear, holding men in bondage, were properly to be expurgated. These men anticipated the great work of Bernays in the nineteenth century, who destroyed the centuries-old fallacy that Aristotle had in mind the moral purification and reformation of the reader. Even Lessing erroneously thought that this was Aristotle's meaning.
Moreover, Milton, who had traveled in Italy, must have read these Italians when he gave us his correct interpretation of the passage in the preface to Samson Agonistes. Milton properly understood Aristotle's meaning of the function of tragedy. It was to "temper and reduce them (the passions) to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated."
We know now the true interpretation of Aristotle's view of the function of tragedy from a passage in his Politics. He was thinking of the relief the spectators' surcharged emotions obtained by witnessing similar emotions expressed. His real meaning was perceived by Henri Weil and Jacob Bernays, two great Jewish classical scholars of Germany. Bernays states moreover in his work,[180-A] first published in 1857, that any literary work telling of unhappy events has a homeopathic effect on the reader. This is true, for even if we do not actually suffer, the capacity and possibility of suffering are latent within us. Though Bosanquet, commenting on Bernays in his History of Aesthetics, believes tragedy or poetry must be written in verse, he is forced to admit that even Vanity Fair and Cousin Bette would come within the definition of tragedy developed by Bernays; for the reader finds his own emotions expressed in these works no less than in Sophocles and obtains relief when he reads them. Bosanquet further admits that any serious and even formless portrayal of life may be placed within Bernays's theory adding, "It may indeed be admitted to be a development inherent in Aristotle's theory."
Aristotle perceived that the spectator of tragedy was putting himself in the place of the characters, living their lives emotionally and sympathizing with them. Since the
novel or lyric poem depicts human sorrow, and the reader is purged by reading these literary forms, just like the spectator of tragedy, all literature has the effect of an aesthetic catharsis upon the reader.
The novels of Thackeray and Balzac are poetry in parts and the emotional influence in reading them is the same as in seeing a tragic verse-play acted. Bosanquet, however, does not fully accept Aristotle's theory as applied to tragic stories in prose because he regards poetical prose rhetoric and not poetry. Would he exclude from the domain of tragedy the entire episode in Hardy's Return of the Native, of the death of Eustace's mother? Hardy's tragedy is as real as the tragedies of the Greek playwrights. The novel fulfills all the requirements of poetic tragedy in that the reader is purged and relieved of pity and fear and kindred emotions. For tragedy is not to be found only in dialogues in verse, but in narration and dialogue in prose, and its function is to relieve us of any choking emotion, besides fear and pity.
Aristotle is the founder then of psychoanalytic interpretation of literature and is a forerunner of Freud. He however refers only to the catharsis upon the spectator, but not to that of the author's work upon himself.