PLOT

INTRODUCTION
Aristotle’s Poetics has often been accused of being ‘lopsided’ in its treatment of the subject of poetry, of devoting a major portion of the discussion to ‘Tragedy’ rather than any other form of poetry. This accusation, however, is met by the answer that the work is of a fragmentary nature, and a lost portion might have dealt with other forms. However, within the treatment of tragedy, there is a slight imbalance. Of all the constituent elements of tragedy, plot is given the most attentive and extensive coverage. This is not surprising, considering that Aristotle thought the plot to be the very ‘soul of tragedy’. It should be remembered that Aristotle’s conception of tragedy is ‘biological’ i.e. he compares tragedy to a living organism. Just as the living organism takes on a definite shape because of its skeleton, plot gives to tragedy an important design. Plot is as important to tragedy as the skeleton is to the living organism.
DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT
According to Aristotle tragedy is
“the 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 of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions”.
So the tragedy is the representation of action and action consists of incidents and events. Plot is the arrangement of these incidents and events. It is better for the poet to choose a traditional story and then proceed to make out of it his own plot. Stories taken from history, mythology or legend are to be preferred, for they are familiar and easy to understand and they serve as guide-lines for characterization. Having chosen his story or having invented it, the artist must subject it to a process of artistic selection and ordering. Only relevant incidents and situation are to be selected and they are to be arranged that they seem to follow each other necessarily and inevitably. Moreover, the incidents chosen must be serious that is to say weighty of some importance, and not trivial, because tragedy is an imitation of a serious action having certain magnitude.
The making of story into plot involves what Humphry House calls “episodizing”, or making into episodes. It is implied that there should be a logical connection between the events, the whole being governed by the law of probability and necessity. So the tragic plot must be a whole, complete in itself; it should have a beginning, a middle and an end. There might be earlier parts of the story the antecedents and that may be communicated by the dramatist in due course. But the beginning must be clear and intelligible even without them. It must not provoke us to ask why and how. A middle is something that is consequent upon a situation that has gone before and which is followed by the catastrophe. The middle is everything between the first incident and the last. The middle is followed by the end. An end is that which is consequent upon a given situation but which is not followed by any further incident or situation. The middle must follow naturally and inevitably upon the beginning and must logically lead to the end or the catastrophe. Thus artistic wholeness implies logical link-up of the various incidents, events and situation that form the plot.
As regards ‘magnitude’ the plot must have a certain length or size. It should be neither too small nor too large. The plot should be long enough to allow the process of change from happiness to misery initiated by the beginning to be properly and completely developed, but not too long for memory to encounter it as a whole. If it is too small, its different parts will not be clearly distinguishable from each other as in the case of living organism. Within these limits, the plot should be as large as possible. O.B.Hardison remarks “The precise rule is that the magnitude should be whatever is required for a change to occur from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad through a series of incidents that are in accordance with probability or necessity”. In other words, magnitude implies that the plot must have order, logic, symmetry and perspicuity.
The plot may have variety but it should have a unity. This unity arises from the fact that every event has a logical connection with the rest of the action and none of them is irrelevant. There might be episodes but the same must be properly integrated with the main action. Otherwise the episodic plots are the worst of all. The unity of plot does not consist in the unity of the hero, it consists in the unity of action. The plot should be an organic whole so that if one of its parts is displaced or removed the whole should be disjointed and disturbed.
A defective plot is that in which the rules of probability or necessity are not observed. The best tragic effect of pity and fear can be produced only if the plot contains elements of surprise and accident. But there should be a sort of ‘inevitability’ in the events.
The above discussion makes it clear that Aristotle emphasises the Unity of Action but has little to say about the Unity of Time and the Unity of Place. About the Unity of Time he merely says that tragedy should confine itself as far as possible to single revolution of the sun. No law is implied here about the Unity of Place. Aristotle only mentioned once when comparing the epic and the tragedy that epic can narrate a number of action going on simultaneously in different parts while in a drama such simultaneous action cannot be represented for the stage is one part (place) and not several parts or places. In this respect too Aristotle was very much misunderstood by the Renaissance and the French critics who deduced from his statement the rigid unity of place.
Aristotle classifies plots into three kinds:
1) Simple Plot. 2) Complex Plot. 3) Plots based on scenes of suffering.
The word Simple and Complex, here have technical terms. A simple plot is one which does not have any Peripety and Anagnorisis, but the action moves forward uniformly without any violent or sudden change. A complex plot implies reversal of intention or situation and recognition. Reversal of situation is change by which the action veers round to its opposite. Recognition is a change from ignorance to knowledge. Both these parts of the plot turn upon surprise. Aristotle, however, prefers the complex plot. The ideal tragedy is one which results from human error, error on the part of friends and relatives, error on the part of the hero himself. The ideal tragedy is a story in which the calamity is due to a false move blindly made by a friend or kinsman or by the hero himself. Atkins says “It is a tragedy brought about, not by the deliberate purpose of some evil agent, nor yet by mere chance, but by human error”. F.L.Lucas agrees with Atkins and remarks “there is nothing more brilliant in ‘the Poetics’ than this recognition by Aristotle of the Tragedy of Error, of the Peripetia, as the deepest of all”.
In Aristotle’s conception, “Hamartia, Perepetia and Anagnorisis all hang together in the ideal schematisation of the tragic plot”. Hamartia is the tragic error and it is related to the character of the hero but in a successful plot it is so closely worked into the plot as to be inseparable from it. The miscalculation of the hero causes a chain of incidents which result in the change from good fortune to bad which the tragic plot depicts. Both Peripetia and Anagnorisis are incidents, and parts of the plot.
The Peripetia is the fatal working of the plot to result the opposite of that intended .For example events do not turn up according to the intentions of expectation of the hero. They move in an opposite direction to his intention.
The Anagnorisis is the recognition of truth; it is the change from ignorance to knowledge. For example, Oedipus’s knowledge of his parents that motivates him to some action and determines the direction of the action in the story Recognition and reversal can be caused by separate them.
Besides the complex and simple plots there are also spectacular plots. This type of plot depends on incidents of suffering, Aristotle rates it very low. It is the plot which drives its effect from the depiction of torture, murder, maiming, violence, death etc. According to Aristotle, the tragic effect must be created naturally and not with artificial and theatrical aids. Such spectacular plots indicate a deficiency in the plot.
The unraveling of the plot should be done naturally and logically and not by the use of arbitrary devices like chance, supernatural intervention etc. Atkin is of the view that “Gods should intervene only where it becomes necessary to explain the past, or announce future events external to the action”. Aristotle does not consider poetic justice as necessary for tragedy. Similarly there is happiness for some of the characters and misery for others. Such a double ending weakens the tragic effect and must be avoided. It is more proper to comedy. Thus, Aristotle is against the mixture of the tragic and the comic of Tragicomedy.
CONCLUSION
Aristotle’s concept of plot is in keeping with what we have come to call ‘classical’. There is an insistence on order, pattern, and design. The chaotic material of life should be brought under systematic discipline, so that events seem to happen in a logical sequence with no irrelevancies. There has to be a single action consisting of episodes, which are logically connected and causally related. Aristotle considers the ‘fatal’ plot as being more tragic. He prefers that plot which shows a change form good to bad fortune as being more fit for tragedy. Further, the complex plot involving Peripety or Discovery, or both, is preferable to simple plot. It is true that the modern concept of tragedy has changed a great deal—any living literature naturally involves change and modifications. Yet we find that in some aspects Aristotle’s theory of Plot is still very much valid, for they are universal principles.