Page 44 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Thus according to this interpretation ‘Catharsis’ means clarification of the essential and universal
significance of the incidents depicted, leading to an enhanced understanding of the universal law
which governs human life and destiny, and such an understanding, even when the incidents
depicted are ugly or repellent, leads to pleasure, the proper pleasure of tragedy. In this view,
Catharsis is neither a medical term, nor a religious or moral one, but an intellectual one. It refers
neither to the purgation of the painful, the excessive, and the morbid, in the emotional responses
of the audience, neither does it refer to the purification or moral conditioning of their emotions.
The term does not refer to the psychology of the audience at all. It refers to the incidents depicted
in the tragedy, and the way in which by his artistic treatment, the poet reveals their universal
significance. ‘Catharsis’ is a process of learning and therefore, pleasurable.
Clarification Theory: Its Merits

The clarification theory has many merits. In the first place, it interprets the clause as a reference to
the technique of the tragedy and not to the psychology for the audience, and thus recognises the
true nature of the Poetics as a technical treatise. Secondly, the theory is based on what Aristotle
says in The Poetics itself, and needs not the help and support of what Aristotle has said in his other
works on Politics and Ethics. Thirdly, it relates Catharsis both to the theory of imitation outlined in
Chapters I-IV, and to the discussion of probability and necessity in Chapter IX. Fourthly, the
theory is perfectly in accord with current aesthetic theories. To quote a few examples : Francis
Fergusson uses the word ‘Perception’. James Joyce ‘Epiphany’ or inner vision, end Austen Warren
uses, “rage for order”, to indicate the nature of the satisfaction or pleasure derived from tragedy.
What all these critics mean to say is that the experience of tragedy is a kind of, “insight experience”,
and this experience is pleasurable, because it is a kind of learning, the learning of the true relation
between the particular incidents of the plot and the universal law of human life. The phrase,
“inside experience’’, used by modern critics to designate the function of tragedy, is very much like
Aristotle’s Catharsis when interpreted to mean, ‘clarification’.
‘Purgation’ and ‘Purification’, only Incidental
However, it must be remembered that according to Aristotle the basic tragic emotions are pity and
fear, and both these are painful emotions. If tragedy is to give pleasure—pleasure that comes from
learning—the pity and fear, or at least the painful element in them, must somehow or the other be
eliminated. Fear is aroused when we see someone like us suffering, and apprehend that a similar
fate might befall us, and so it causes great pain. Pity is a feeling of pain caused by the sight of
undeserved suffering of others, suffering, which we might expect to befall us also. Pity and fear
are reciprocal and painful. The events of tragedy are pitiable because they seem, “undeserved”,
and fearful because we fear that they may happen to us. In the tragedy, the spectator sees that it
is tragic error or hamartia of the hero which results in suffering, and so he learns something about
the universal relation between character and destiny. By the end, he perceives a coherent relation
between the hero’s, character and his fate. “This will alleviate (if not eliminate) his pity and by the
same token reduce his fear for himself. Note that the alleviation is a by product of the learning that
produces the tragic pleasure, not its chief object”—(O.B. Hardison). Thus there is some ‘purgation’
or ‘purification’, but it is merely incidental and secondary.

Hamartia is an error, or a series of errors, “whether morally culpable or not,”
committed by an otherwise noble person, and these errors derive him to his
doom. The tragic irony lies in the fact that hero may err mistakenly without any
evil intention, yet he is doomed no less than immorals who sin consciously. He
has Hamartia and as a result his very virtues hurry him to his ruin.

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