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It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot I. Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot "The plot" wrote Aristotle, is "the soul of tragedy" and tragedy is the imitation of an action. Plot, - the sequence and arrangement of the actions on-stage taking place before our eyes - "is the end for which tragedy exists...It is not for the sake of their characters that the agents engage in actions but, rather, for the sake of their actions that they take on the characters they have."[1] Tragic drama enacts an 'agon': an action carefully structured through the devices of the theatre to create a dramatic rhythm whose effective climactic moments are the combination of reversal (peripeteia) and discovery/insight (anagnorisis). The dramatist steers the forces of the plot to these ends. . This is as artful and artificial a procedure as sonata form in music. Tragedy best arrives at this structure through conflict, and characters therefore will be created by the plot to take on the opposing sides of this conflict. In the Realist Cycle of 12 plays, from PILLARS OF SOCIETY to WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN, Ibsen employs an analytic and retrospective plot structure, taken from Greek drama, rather than the 'narrative' plot structures of BRAND, PEER GYNT, and EMPEROR AND GALILEAN. In Sophoklean drama antithetical forces or values engage in a collision that affirms the human capacity for heroism in the teeth of the manifest design of the gods. In Ibsen's drama, the invariable plot is the devastating yet transfiguring emergence of the evaded Past into the life of the Present. A tragic dramatist's life's work usually reveals one or two major plot structures but a great number and variety of stories chosen to demonstrate the plot in widely different situations. The plot creates the catalyst through which an underlying tragic structure is revealed within the story. 1. Aristotle's Poetics Translated with an Introduction and Notes by James Hutton (New York W. W. Norton & Company 1982) p. 51 |
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