"The most important rule of theatre [says an old theatre adage] is that the king is never played by the actor playing the king, but by all the other actors around him.'...
"The greatest playwrights know everything about human nature not because they have some mystical, clairvoyant insight into you or me, but due to the structural constraints of their format: in order for tragedies to work — for problems, decisions, and plot twists to be accepted by the audience as true — the writers must learn to tweak the interactions between the characters until those seem logical and believable to all. Accessing good theatre gives you a significant cheat code for accessing human thinking and behaviour. Read Sophocles, watch Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare adaptations, see Molière or Chekhov on stage, enter a book club debate about Brecht, David Mamet or Yasmina Reza, and you will experience many 'Aha!' moments that will be assets in your subsequent life."You will also, of course, feel aesthetic pleasure and what Aristotle calls catharsis* ... which is why most people engage with plays in the first place. The great knowledge that you will be gifted is just the bonus."~ Anna Gát from her post 'Tyranny as Tragedy'* Increasingly, the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" rather than the more commonly held "emotional purgation" has gained recognition in describing the effect of catharsis.
"Without doubt 'katharsis' [in the original Greek spelling] is the most celebrated concept in the entire field of literary criticism" says Leon Golden, yet Aristotle, in The Poetics, his work on aesthetics, "provided neither a definition nor a commentary for this key term". "That katharsis is meant to represent some form of moral [or emotional] purification has been held [widely] ... [but] there is not a single word in The Poetics itself to justify it." Golden argues that what Aristotle meant by the word is "the intellectual pleasure of learning" — and so "'katharsis' in The Poetics should not be translated as 'purgation' or 'purification' but, rather, as 'intellectual clarification'."
3 comments:
"...the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" rather than the more commonly held "emotional purgation" has gained recognition in describing the effect of catharsis."
Yes indeed. That is it. Still so very important.
Also, where the emotional response happens it is often the result of a powerful intellectual experience.
Thank you for putting it succinctly.
I thought you all might enjoy a story that seems somewhat related, The Knight’s Tale: How Myth Gave My Son a System of Meaning
It's a father's story of how his autistic son, often in strife at daycare and school with having meltdowns and all the usual stuff that happens as such children struggle to comprehend their world and operate within in it.
What changed my son’s life wasn’t stricter discipline or better behavior charts. We had tried those, and they never touched the root of the problem. What he needed wasn’t punishment; what he needed was coherence.
Incredibly that coherence arrived when he was "knighted" at a at a Renaissance fair when he was 7 years old. With his parent's encouragement (they were pretty desperate) he began to live the story of being a knight and it made all the difference in the world, even into young adulthood.
@Tom: Nice story.
That makes sense: the image would help integrate the world for him until he's ready to make that integration more conscious.
Good art works that way. :-)
@Anon: "... the emotional response happens as the result of a powerful intellectual experience." Nicely summarised.
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