SANGEETHA P
LCL051521
MA ECL



                                                  ASSIGNMENT ON MIMESIS


                                                                  MIMESIS

                                           
                                                              INTRODUCTION

              Mimesis is one of the oldest terms and is the most fundamental in literary and artistic theory. Mimesis is all about imitation. The word mimesis is used in the context of imitative relationship between art and life. It is not the exact reproduction of the original, but instead it gives a life like stimulation of it. In literature there are two ideas prevalent in reaction to mimesis. The first idea imagines that, art is an exact copy of the ideal world. It reflects the world as it is. If the first condition is taken as true it would suggest that art functions the role of a mirror in which the world reflects in it. And if the second idea is true, it is another mirror implicitly turned to the spectator and their beliefs. The point is that in both cases, it is impossible to think mimesis without some reference to psychology or culture. Plato and Aristotle are the two Greek philosophers who discussed about mimesis in detail. Both of them bridge a gap between mimesis and reality but their approaches were different. Plato considers mimesis as a morally corrupting theory while Aristotle considers it as a foundational aspect of human nature.

Mimesis according to Plato

               The word mimesis was first coined by Plato in his Republic. He asserted his central theme that art is an imitation of the ideal world by pointing out that the idea of everything is the original and the things that are made are the copies of the original. In his Republic Plato approaches mimesis in two contexts, first in books two and three and the second is in book ten. He condemns art, especially poetry in his book on the ground of its mimetic nature. According to Plato poetry is twice removed from reality. He asserts this point by giving an example of a painter. If a painter paints the picture of a bed, it would be twice removed from reality in the sense; there is actually an ideal bed which is situated there in the ideal world the copy of which is again being copied by the painter. In his Republic Plato condemns poetry on three grounds; Poetic inspiration, the emotional appeal of poetry and finally its non-moral character.

 What Plato actually wanted is to make the readers capable of drawing the relationship between mimesis and politics. Socrates, the teacher of Plato had responded to the danger of mimesis with political acts. The book goes on criticizing the artistic mimesis. But still mimesis is an integral part of education, for children starts studying through imitation. A small child is introduced to the world of speaking through the art of mimesis.  Throughout the dialogue Plato attributes mimesis to women, children and the insane the persons who are excluded from the Athenian political life. Plato's theory of mimesis is very much a theory of political life as such. Mimesis is considered by him as a danger to the existence of humanity.
          
   Mimesis according to Aristotle

Aristotle's Poetics is a notable work which speaks about mimesis in a different level. He opposes the view point of Plato regarding poets. Aristotle considers the tremendous hold of platonic mimesis over the western art theory in his criticisms of Plato. Aristotle speaks about the various insights that tragedy can provide the human beings. He counters Plato's view regarding drama, poetry and other art forms that these are all inferior to philosophy, claiming that tragedy provides quasi-philosophical insights to human actions. Unlike Plato for whom mimesis is the mirror in which the world reflects and thus is demoralizing and deceptive, Aristotle defines it as a craft which has its own rules, laws and aims. The opening sentence of Poetics asserts this view:

I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let begin with the principles which come first. (Aristotle, 1951: 7)

Aristotle says that he will treat poetry in 'itself' and not as a reflection of something else. Aristotle's Poetics stress the naturalness and advantages of mimesis. Where as Plato's most common metaphors, mirrors, shadows and optical illusions highlights the artificiality and unnaturality of art and literature. Aristotle's initial analysis of  mimesis itself has a concern over art that art has a specific nature of its own. The first three chapters of Poetics speaks about the media, objects and manner of mimesis. In each case he takes a distinction from Plato.

                The medium of imitation concerns the 'materials' used by each art form to represent people and objects. By this what Aristotle meant is that each art form has different means of representation. For example a musician uses rhythm and melody, a dancer uses rhythm alone and a painter uses paint and colour as such for representation.  For Plato, all the art forms including tragedy and comedy are an imitation of the real.   It is, Aristotle argues, ‘the imitation that makes the poet’, not the rhetorical form of the work (Aristotle, 1951: 9). While discussing about the objects of imitation he says that the objects that are depicted by poetry is 'men in action'(Aristotle 1951:11). He considers the individuals and actions depicted in the art as necessarily a higher or lower moral type, while Plato treats them on the basis of their good or bad effects on the audience. Aristotle says that epic and tragedy presents people more good than actually they are and comedy represents people worse than they are. Moral distinctions mark the poetic genre and it is impossible to compare easily to the moral distinctions of life. Mimesis can be seen as functioning a higher role rather than that of a mirror if it can take a path away from the mere reproduction of real life.

              Coming to the third distinction that is based on the manner of imitation Aristotle talks about three types of narration. According to him, poets can speak in their own voice, imitate the voice of the character and present the characters moving and living before the audience. Unlike Plato, Aristotle sees manner of imitation as an artistic choice. To him, through the presentation or narration of a work  its versatile characteristics has been understood. There is a clear cut distinction between art and ethics spoken by Aristotle. Aristotle claims that the ‘standard of correctness is not the same in poetry and politics, any more than in poetry and any other art’ (Aristotle, 1951:99). Aristotle then goes on speaking about the essential and accidental errors in art. If the poet has brought 'technical inaccuracies' in shaping a work, the error occurred is accidental. It is very important to imitate skillfully than exactly:  'not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically’ (Aristotle, 1951: 99).

           Aristotle points out that like children, adults are also getting pleasure out of mimesis, since mimesis provides a fictional distance from things. Therefore after watching a tragedy the audience will get a pleasure rather than pain. The advantage of fictional distance is that we should learn from representations and would deal our situations rationally.  It allows to understand the universal qualities of human life that are revealed by particular actions. Aristotle views imitation as a unique source of learning. Plato openly criticize tragedy saying that it doesnot have any rationality to do with human life. But contrary to this Aristotle sees tragedy as something rational. Although sometimes tragedies deal with irrational desires, extreme emotions etc., good tragedies are always constructed rationally.

Aristotle begins his discussion of tragedy with a definition:
Tragedy, then is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete,  and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action not narrative; through pity and fear effecting the purgation of these emotions.(1951: 23).

Tragedy has six constituent parts-Plot, Diction, Thought, Character, Melody and Spectacle. Plot is the soul of tragedy. It is the arrangement of incidents.  Character is the presenter of the actions, thought is the process of reasoning by the characters, Melody is the song which is used to increase the effect of presentation, diction is the orderly arrangement of words and spectacle is the stage arrangement. While going deeply in to the definition of tragedy laid down by Aristotle, the first sentence itself gives the role of mimesis in tragedy. Tragedy is an imitation or mimesis of action and also this particular action is complete and of a certain magnitude. Completeness is not said here subjectively but is attributed to the structural relationship of incidents:                                                                                              A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A                               beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle
is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.(Aristotle, 1951: 31).

                           There should be an order for each incident. If order is all about the rational relationship among the parts of a tragedy, magnitude describes the processes by which the audience draws this particular relationship:

       a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor again can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator.(Aristotle, 1951: 31).

Aristotle's emphasis on the rationality of mimesis gives way to his extreme focus on the importance of plot. He attributes a supreme level to the plot, because it is only through the depiction of events and actions the character is revealed. Plot is not simply the mimesis of actions but it is the mimesis of action ordered structurally to attain completeness or end. Aristotle focuses on probability and necessity. This particular focus suggests that the realism of a mimetic work not exactly comes out from the mere reflection of the external world instead it celebrates a harmony with the various norms of human thought. Mimesis need to be true to the principles and normal processes of human beings and there is no insist on its truthfulness with regard to the fact to be pleasurable and persuasive.


MIMESIS- VIEWS OF EARLY POETS

In ancient period, poets had actively imitated their admirable forrunners and their artistic conventions in addition to the nature and human lifestyle. They were of the view that imitating the old tradition would help to get succeed in the artistic life. Pope was among those who followed this criteria of mimesis. His sense of nature is quite different:
                                      Unerring nature! Still divinely bright,
                                      One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
                                      Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
                                      At once the source, and end, and test of art.
                                                                        (Pope, 1971: ll. 70–3).
Pope's assertion about the rise of excellent art that it comes from the imitation of role models and not from the random reflection of nature is raised at the end of a critical tradition that dominated the literary and intellectual culture of Europe for about two thousand years. This view of Pope and other poets were challenged by the eighteenth century theorists arguing that imitation is nothing less than plagiarism. Pope's treatise were an imitation of another work named Ars poetica written by Horace. Horace also had an advantageous opinion about mimesis:

                               ‘Study Greek models day and night’ (Russell and Winterbottom, 1972: 286)
           All the classical literary genres were originated from the ancient texts existed long before these. Tragedy, comedy, epic, pastoral etc. finds its origin from Greece. These all were considered as objects of imitation first by Greeks and then by Roman writers. In Roman and Russian literature, imitation takes many forms. Imitation can be cruel as well as complementary. That is it can be used as an instrument of ridicule and at the same time for creative purpose. Mimesis was central to Roman literary criticism and they considered it as an essential feature of artistic excellence. It was also a political and historical practice and The Roman artists saw themselves as the heirs of Greek tradition.
       
          Horace has written an ode on the Greek poet Pindar. What he does is imitation but forges something new with his poetic material. The ode was addressed to Mark Antony's Second son Iulus Antonious . It opens with a suggestion that imitating Pindar is an excessive pride:
                 
                    Whoever strives to rival Pindar
                    O Iulus, is flying on wings
                    fastened with wax by Daedalean artifice
                    destined to lend
                    his name to a crystal sea.
Greek orator Dionysius of Halicarnassus contrasts the two forms of imitation:
An imitation is related to the ancient models in two different ways: the first relationship is the natural result of being for a long time in close contact with the model and living with it, the second resembles it but results from the application of rhetorical rules. About the first kind there is little one can say, about the second one can say on that all the models have a natural grace and charm of their own, while their contrived imitations, even if they are as perfect as imitations can be, always have something labored or unnatural about them.
                                (Quoted in Grube, 1965: 211–12).

Dionysius was of the view that imitation should reproduce the work as exactly it is, with its full essence apart from simply copying the original's verbal and stylistic features. Roman authors always made a distinction between imitation and emulation or between copying and transformation. Seneca, in this context gives an idea that we should seek inspiration from many different sources. ‘We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in’ (Seneca, 1920: 277).
                         One of the most important work of ancient literary criticism is Longinus' On the Sublime. Here Longinus compares mimesis to spiritual possession:
It is like what we are told of the Pythia at Delphi: she is in contact
with the tripod near the cleft in the ground which (so they say) exhales
a divine vapour, and she is thereupon made pregnant by the supernatural power and forthwith prophesies as one inspired. Similarly, the
genius of the ancients acts as a kind of oracular cavern, and effluences flow from it into the minds of their imitators. Even those
previously not much inclined to prophesy become inspired and share
the enthusiasm which comes from the greatness of others.
(Russell and Winterbottom, 1972: 476).

An account of these ancient theorists such as Pope, Horace, Longinus etc tells us how, favourable imitation of tradition serves for the creation of something new out of mimesis. Plato and Aristotle speaks differently about the concept of mimesis.
                                         
                                                     

                                                                     CONCLUSION

Mimesis all together means imitation. The concept of mimesis has been explained differently and intellectually by so many critics. Both Plato and Aristotle repesented nature in their theory of mimesis. Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes:

"At first glance, mimesis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary features of our world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the object it imitates being something like the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always involves selecting something from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what really has no beginning or end. Mimêsis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within the frame is not simply real. Thus the more "real" the imitation the more fraudulent it becomes.
                   
                     Dionysius' concept found a different path apart from that of Aristotle. Dionysius' concern was only with the "imitation of nature" and not with the "imitation of other authors". Analysis of all these theorists and their concepts about mimesis provides us a versatile knowledge in viewing it. Mimesis is a theory which is very much related to human life. Imitation in a way reflects the day to day life and situations of the existing world and its essence is very much reflected in the soul of  human nature.

                                 

                               

Bibliography

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher, New York: Dover, 1951.

Plato. Republic, trans. A. Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Nagarajan, M.S. English Literary Criticism and Theory: An Introductory History, Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2006.

Abrams, Meyer Howard, and Geoffrey Harpham. A glossary of literary terms, New York Cengage Learning, 2011.

Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis, New Delhi: Routledge, 2006.