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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
I. Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot The tragic dramatist, wrote Aristotle, is above all a maker of plots. The plot is "the soul of tragedy" and tragedy is the imitation of an ACTION. This is the nature of its manifestation in theatre space and time: everything else should be subordinated to the action unfolded in the theater as plot. "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] This might be the most frequently neglected axiom in drama interpretation which, particularly if the dramatic style is Realism, frequently subordinates action in dramatic art to the revelation of character. Tragic drama enacts an 'agon': an action carefully structured through the devices of the theatre to create a dramatic rhythm whose most effective climactic moments are the combination of reversal (peripeteia) and discovery/insight (anagnorisis). It is to these ends that the dramatist steers the forces of his or her plot. They are the central actions around which the whole design of the play is structured. This is as artful and artificial a procedure as sonata form in music. Tragedy best arrives at this rhythm through conflict, and characters therefore will be created by the plot to take on the opposing sides of this conflict. This formula applies above all to Greek tragedy. In the Realist Cycle of 12 plays, from PILLARS OF SOCIETY to WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN, Ibsen employs this 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 discovers the human capacity for heroism in the teeth of the revealed design of the gods. In Ibsen's Realist Cycle, it is the devastating yet transfiguring re-emergence, or re-enactment, of the evaded Past into the life of the Present. To illustrate the working of these perennial plots on human reality the dramatist will devise many exemplary characters and stories. A tragic dramatist's life's work, therefore, usually reveals one or two major plot structures only, repeated in play after play; but a great number and variety of stories which are chosen to demonstrate the truth of the basic 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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