MODIFICATIONS TO ARISTOTLE'S POETICS

How a theory based on multi-source indiscrete emotions clarifies the narrative arts.

by E. Garrett Ennis

The Poetics is one of the oldest known works on literature as an art form. The approach it
uses is also a logical, emotion-based one, that treats the field as something that, if not totally
scientific, is understandable. Nonetheless, the approach used in Aristotle's Poetics was never
fully adopted in the study of literature or art as a whole, and apparently to many, it's
considered to be "limiting," or otherwise incomplete.
In my own work on it, I've found specific reasons that the otherwise sensible study of
storytelling has led to so many dead-ends. And even moreso, these reasons can be extended
to understand the overwhelming frustration with attempted theories of theater, movies, books
and other forms of narrative art, and create something that's much more understandable and
satisfying for future work.
The key idea here is that entertainment is judged by the amount of emotion it produces
in the viewer, and the feelings in question can actually come from multiple sources in and
around the entertaining thing. I've taken to calling it emotional indiscretion, and I've discussed
this theory in various forms in my own work, and my ideas have also been discussed in many
publications, books, sites, and international newspapers. But I'd like to use this document
specifically to go into far greater technical detail about the specific parts of emotional
indiscretion and how it functions.
Also, we will use Aristotle's Poetics as the text to comment on (specifically the 1974
translation by S.H. Butcher that is freely available on Project Gutenberg's website), but the
role of the Poetics here is mainly to represent a much larger concept of literary theory. Mainly
the attempt to study and understand entertainment purely by viewing and analyzing the work
itself. In other words, what appears on the page, stage or screen.
This approach, while sensible on the surface, is actually the source of the gaps and
contradictions that have made this field of study so difficult, so much so that clear answers
have never emerged, despite billion dollar industries being built that ride on understanding
and executing these types of stories, and studies being conducted by extraordinarily talented
people, over the course of many years, or even centuries.
In this document, we're going to reproduce key parts of the text of the Poetics, and
comment to point out these gaps, as well as how an indiscretion-based theory fills them in. I
should note also that since literally thousands of years have passed since the writing of this
document, (and I've studied the field for a huge portion of my own life), I could swamp the
document in multiple small points and clarifications of the normal, page-stage-and-screen
based theory itself. But the point here is not to nitpick something very old or get lost in details,
but instead to illustrate the significance of the emotional indiscretion concept, as well as the
conceptual shift that it represents in this area of human studies.
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I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to inquire into the structure of
the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into

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whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come
first.

Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their
forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one: another in three respects,―the
medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.

For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of
colour and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by
rhythm, language, or 'harmony,' either singly or combined.
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Here, in the introduction, the storytelling arts (and other forms of art) are referred to as
"modes of imitation." We'll focus, of course, on the story-based arts. It's certainly true that
stories almost always have elements that are similar to reality, but there are many problems
that occur when we use this as the key part of their definition.
For example, why do we not watch documentaries, or security-camera footage, instead
of films or plays? Or, in Ancient Times, why did people prefer fictional work to court
transcripts, or simply observing other people? And our favorite works, while they are often
realistic, are not judged solely by their level of realism. Many of the most successful stories of
all-time, like Star Wars now, or the Odyssey in Ancient Greece, depict magical powers, Gods
and monsters, or fantastical events that are quite unrealistic, and these unrealistic parts are
key to their appeal.
The answer in this case is to refer to these arts as means of emotional stimulation, and
not just imitation of reality. Imitation of reality is a useful part of this process, since real
situations most easily stimulate the brain's emotions, but most real situations don't contain
enough emotional simulation to make us happy. This is why we don't only watch
documentaries, or security-camera footage, or read court transcripts. We only do when those
things happen to have documented an emotionally-stimulating event.
Sections II and III deal with who should be labeled as a "poet," ways of distinguishing
different types of art, and who invented various genres of drama, there many unlisted genres
of stories and more accurate methods of classifying them, mainly due to the types of emotion
they generate, but those are the type of details that aren't the purpose of this document, we'll
pass over these sections from now on.
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IV

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation
is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of
living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.
We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to
contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The
cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose
capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it
they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the
original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause.
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Here, Aristotle (or the original author whose work is attributed to Aristotle, but we'll say
Aristotle for convenience) first touches on the idea of emotional pleasure as the purpose of

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stories. He also appears aware that believable stories ("reproduced with minute fidelity") tend
to produce more pleasure in us. He also accurately states not only that we get a specific
pleasure from learning, but that that learning may relate to the viewer's personal experiences
in the world itself. And likewise, that viewers who may not share those personal experiences
will not draw the same pleasure.
However, there are a few key steps here that Aristotle does not take. As we said, he
does not recognize that the pleasure itself is the purpose of the artistic work, and also, he
appears to discard the idea of outside experiences being key to the pleasure produced by a
work, and focuses instead on how viewers who don't share the key outside experiences may
draw pleasure from other internal aspects of the play itself, such as how it is executed, colors
on stage, and so on.
This realization, about the incredible influence that outside knowledge has on our
experience when reading or watching a story, is a sort-of self-burning bridge. I did not realize
it myself until a decade into studying this topic, but once I did, it clarified and explained so
many things that I can't figure out how I thought about certain things before. Likewise, I'm not
entirely sure how this leap may not have occurred to Aristotle or anyone else, but part of it
might be that he wasn't fully focused on the emotional-stimulation as the pure cause of a
story's effect.
Having said that, it wouldn't be difficult at all for anyone who views writing along the
lines described in this section to be able to see how the effect of outside experiences goes
much further than just recognizing a metaphor in a story, but it seems clear that while writing
this, Aristotle wasn't aware of the full extent of the phenomenon, which creates the deeper
flaws we'll go into as the document continues.
The rest of section IV talks about various individual writers of Aristotle's time, and the
method by which he believes these styles found their form. The process described remains
true today, as stories evolve through quality being produced through skill or luck, and the
good ones being retold and eventually imitated until their best parts become conventions,
though people can rarely say why these conventions work.

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Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type, not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the
Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To
take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.
...
Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ, in that Epic
poetry admits but one kind of metre, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavours, as
far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action
has no limits of time.
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My previous papers on humor addressed why comedy must not be painful or destructive. The
reflex action of laughing out loud can be very dangerous if a person is being hunted or
otherwise needs to stay quiet, so our laugh reflex "turns off" when we feel anxiety (and not
coincidentally, some anxiety-lowering medications are also referred to as "laughing gas").
But more importantly, this section is the first reference to one of Aristotle's "three
unities," the unity of time, which he states is necessary for an effective story. Needless to say,

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this is an intelligent observation that was especially impressive given the time in which it was
made, but yet is clearly inconsistent with what we can see, since there are many stories with
fractured timelines that people know and love.
There are actually two purposes that a coherent time frame serves. One is to allow the
audience to understand where they are and what's going on at any given point in the story,
which helps their brain to "suspend disbelief," in other words process the situation as though it
was real and feel a genuine emotional reaction. The other is to match the sequence of events
to the way that the brain processes a situation, in terms of beginning at a small emotional
level and building in interest as more information is revealed, leading to a moment of high
tension and emotional payoff.
These two purposes, of course, serve to generate good emotions from the viewer. But
the good emotions are the point, not the unified time. And once we see that, we can then
understand how fractured timelines can violate the concept of unity of time, but still make for
great stories, because they generate the same good emotions in other ways.
In the first case, other measures can be taken to let the audience understand what's
going on. The most simple of these are chapter headings in books, which are easily
reproduced as title cards in non-chronological movies like "Reservoir Dogs." Also, these
stories, when done well, provide their own alternate method of organizing the presentation of
the ideas, such as having a section focusing on each individual character in "Reservoir Dogs."
For the second benefit, matching the audience's natural way of getting interested in
and enjoying a situation, non-chronological stories can still show the key events that do that
for the audience, even if those events do not occur in the story world in the actual order they
are shown to the audience. "Pulp Fiction," for example, begins with a low-energy conversation
that matches the audience's low-energy at the beginning of a story (starting at too high an
energy level will exhaust the audience early), and then leads into the two characters pulling
guns and deciding to rob the restaurant they're in. This does not actually happen in the story's
timeline until later, but the pulling of the guns makes us wonder what happens next and
triggers our interest, which is what is supposed to happen early in a story anyway.
So in both of these cases, we see another method of describing the essential aspect of
the story, that being generally, coherency and generating the right feelings for the audience at
the right time, that goes more to the core cause, and as a result also accounts for various
examples that seem to contradict the previous version.

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VI

Of the poetry which imitates in hexameter verse, and of Comedy, we will speak hereafter. Let us now discuss Tragedy,
resuming its formal definition, as resulting from what has been already said.
...
Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality―namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought,
Spectacle, Song. Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the objects of imitation. And
these complete the list.
...
The tragedies of most of our modern poets fail in the rendering of character; and of poets in general this is often true. It is the
same in painting; and here lies the difference between Zeuxis and Polygnotus. Polygnotus delineates character well: the
style of Zeuxis is devoid of ethical quality. Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well
finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which,
however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

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It's not always clear when Aristotle (or the translator) is using the word "quality" to refer to
whether or not a story is good, or whether or not the story has the traits that he considers
necessary to put it in the category of "tragedy," or whatever genre or area of storytelling he
may be talking about. But we can still gather from the context that Aristotle is commenting on
both the traits of the genres of story, and how those traits contribute to making a good story.
In this case, he focuses on the role that plot plays in the success of a tragedy. Plot, of
course, is important in all genres of storytelling. But it seems important here to point out that
there are, in fact, books and movies and plays that fail on the plot level, usually by having no
plot (a common novice mistake) or a confusing one (a common professional mistake), but
which nonetheless are profitable and/or have good reviews. Given how fundamental plot is to
the experience of reading a story, it's important to understand how to modify this rule of "have
a good plot" to solve this contradiction.
A plot in a story serves to make the audience want to pay attention to what they're
seeing. We have an instinct in our brain that makes us want to watch situations where people
are trying to achieve a goal ("Destroy all monsters"), or there is something we are curious
about ("What is the Matrix?"), or there are potential good or bad results that we may have to
deal with ("There's a bomb on a bus..."). These things make our brain generate dopamine,
which causes us to enjoy paying attention to the thing in question. In other circumstances, like
when a work project starts to come together, we can feel dopamine as well (it's often called
"flow"), and the result is the same.
But the point of the plot in the story is to generate this interested reaction, and not just
to have the goal, question or source of tension. A story can have a clear goal, question, or
source of tension, and still fail if those don't generate interest. But, likewise, a story can NOT
have a clear goal, question, or source of tension and still succeed. If the audience has that
interested reaction in some way while they're watching. The key to this, is that that interested
reaction can be generated from anything the viewers have in their minds while they're
watching the story. Which includes things they are collectively aware of about the story's
creation or the author or performers themselves.
So, for a quick example, we can use the movie "Batman v Superman: Dawn of
Justice." The movie was set-up to not only have the two titular characters fight, but to also
include a "Death of Superman" story, the villains Lex Luthor and Doomsday, a continuation of
the plot of the previous film "Man of Steel," and an introduction of the superhero Wonder
Woman in order to set-up a sequel featuring the Justice League superhero team.
Needless to say, the resulting movie is overloaded with plotlines. It was also
shepherded by a director who was not a professional writer, and went through rewrites before
filming. As such, it is very confusing, to the point of being almost incoherent at times. The
movie's plot does not succeed at all.
But nonetheless, I enjoyed watching it. This is because I was interested in seeing how
the introduction of Wonder Woman would be handled. So I had the necessary pleasure
chemical, which is normally generated by a story's plot, flowing in my head throughout the
movie. This outside curiosity, "when will Wonder Woman show up? How will she look?"
functions precisely the same as if I as a viewer was wondering who committed the murder in
a mystery film. Our brains do not divide fiction and reality, they simply generate the chemicals
in response to what they see, and we feel as though all come from the story we are watching.
This inability to separate our feelings is why I refer to this as emotional indiscretion,

5
after the concept of dietary indiscretion in some animals, which occur when they will eat any
small object without regard to whether or not it is something they are supposed to be
consuming.
But to continue with how it functions here, besides outside questions, outside sources
of tension, like movies that may attack a public figure the audience knows ("Citizen Kane"
may be an example), or outside goals, like a group of friends and family reading an amateur
writer's first work and rooting for them to succeed, function the same way.
So here, we see that the actual dictate for a story should not be the quality of its plot.
It's certainly good to study that as a writer, but when we look at the actual causes of success,
we must say, much more accurately, that there must be a goal, question, or source of tension
in the audience's mind either from the story or surrounding it, in the real world.

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IX

Of all plots and actions the epeisodic are the worst. I call a plot 'epeisodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one
another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please
the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to
break the natural continuity.
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Here we touch on another aspect of what Aristotle calls "plot unity." Namely, the idea that
plots should all be joined by a likely sequence of events, or a sequence of events that are
each necessary to show to tell the story. In most cases, this is quite true. However, we come
again to the non-linear plots which seemingly violate this idea. And another aspect of how
they work, which also comes from indiscretion.
Episodic plots don't have a single consistent plot element in them that keeps the
audience's interest from one scene to the next. They tend to also, as a result, lack the ability
to build tension inside us over the long term, which is normally released at the end of the film
to give us a powerful feeling of satisfaction. And quite a few movies (and books and plays)
have suffered from this problem. However, we can again go back to "Pulp Fiction," which had
a largely episodic plot, but was one of the most successful movies ever made.
There is in fact an overall plot device to "Pulp Fiction," that holds the audience's
interest from one scene to the next, and it is a mystery. Where is Quentin Tarantino going with
this story? People who knew of Quentin Tarantino's earlier work, or, slightly later, of "Pulp
Fiction's" reputation, watched waiting to see how Tarantino would bring the story together.
This includes him setting out the various pieces in the same way an architect would, before
bringing them together into a house over time, at which point we can marvel over how
everything fit. It helps even more that they had a huge respect for Tarantino's original style
and talent, all traits that make us further interested in a main character.
Thus, here, to achieve an actual applicable rule, that avoids these inconsistencies, we
must amend Aristotle's statement. If we were to state it in his words, it should say that a
dramatic work will fail if there is no probable or necessary sequence inherent to either the plot
or the situation in which the audience is watching.

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But again, Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best
produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as
cause and effect. The tragic wonder will thee be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even
coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell
upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance.
Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.
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Here, Aristotle touches briefly on how tragedy functions on the audience's emotions. He
states that tragedy works best when it functions as cause-and-effect. This is absolutely true
and even today, many writers do a poor job of making a tragic result in a story follow properly
from immoral actions. I suspect that this is because they aren't really aware of how and why
tragedy works for an audience, and it's fairly amazing that Aristotle noticed this himself
thousands of years ago. But, we can take this opportunity to state exactly why that is, and use
this as another opportunity to hopefully clarify and extend on what's stated.
In the above paragraph, Aristotle states that tragedy shows events inspiring fear or pity,
and he states later that this creates what he calls catharsis for the audience. This can be, for
a general list, facing our fears (purgation), releasing pent-up hostility (purification), wanting to
see something bad happen to a bad person (tragic pleasure, which is often misunderstood to
be a desire to see bad things happen to people in general), or in making us appreciate what
we ourselves have (tragic wonder), or feeling comfort in seeing that others suffer the same
pain we do (pity).
Many of these are fairly self-explanatory, but in the case of tragic pleasure, proper
cause-and-effect is crucial. As we stated, for a tragic story to work properly in-and-of-itself, it
is not enough to have a bad thing happen to a person, the bad thing must happen to a bad
person. And even then, it works best when the thing that makes the person bad is what
directly causes the bad result.
So, for example, we draw some pleasure from seeing an arrogant character lose at the
end of a story. But, we will draw even more pleasure if the character loses because of his
arrogance. He should not just have the wheels fall off his car at the end of the race, the
wheels should fall off because he was too cocky to check them (and of course, it would have
to be believable that the wheels might fall off in the first place). And likewise for various other
bad traits.
This is pleasurable to us because it confirms our belief that humility is good, and that
the arrogant person was never actually better than we are. Or, likewise, that the invincible
menace was never actually unbeatable, or that ghosts aren't real (as seen on "Scooby-Doo").
We get a pleasure chemical released in our brain when our mental model is reinforced, and
that is exactly what is triggered.
However, if you noticed, we used a very specific phrase above, when we said that this
was what was necessary for a tragic story to work properly in-and-of-itself. And, as you might
guess, we thus come to the multi-dimensional aspect that indiscretion introduces. Because
that pleasure chemical is released whenever something we want to believe is confirmed. And
there are many beliefs that an audience member has, which can be confirmed or denied in
different ways in the course of reading a book or watching a play or movie. And this can lead
to tragic stories that consist of awful things happening to good people, violating the very
technique we just discussed, which nonetheless are successful.
Here's how that works. When we're young, it's important to us to establish our maturity.
To be "big boys" or "big girls," when we're toddlers, to wear make-up or play with more

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dangerous things and so on. When we're adolescent, that translates to a need to distance
ourselves from things we feel are childish. This includes safe, bright, cartoonish
entertainment, with clear morals and happy endings. As a result, watching a story with a dark
tone and depressing ending, often makes these teenaged viewers feel more mature. This, as
a result, confirms that belief that they have about themselves, and thus, releases the same
pleasure chemical as a happy ending does for most other viewers. This is why "grittiness" is a
popular style for adolescent comic book readers. But younger children, who are easily
frightened by dark tones, and adults who already feel mature, don't get that same pleasure,
and thus "gritty" films only have a limited audience.
To go a bit further, we can look briefly on where these gritty stories come from on the
writer's side. New writers draw great pride in completing their first work. It confirms their belief
that they are writers, can work hard, and many other things. So they have that same pleasure
chemical flowing in their brains throughout the process of writing their first work.
As a result, they don't need the plot of their first story to create a feeling of happiness in
them. So they instead opt for what feels different from what they normally read, which most
clearly to them, is to write a story that is utterly depressing. This is so consistent that as a
book reader (a job I used to have full-time), you come to expect the graphic murder of at least
one infant in every first-time writer's novel. And likewise, newer and younger comic book
writers are often the ones who produce the "gritty" stories that adolescents enjoy so much,
and DC Comics, when handing their comic franchises to a filmmaker who hadn't produced
many comic stories before, found them coming out extremely dark.
With that in mind, we can amend the concept of tragedy and its value in a story,
replacing the requirement of tragic flaws and cause and effect with a more general rule that
removes these inconsistencies. Namely, that the story or situation around it must confirm
something the audience wants to be true. It may be that people who have good traits tend to
get rewarded in the end, which is the most common in the history of storytelling, but it may
also be that the audience themselves are smart, mature or popular people. Or other things.

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IX - XI

Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons
destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in
the Oedipus. There are indeed other forms. Even inanimate things of the most trivial kind may in a sense be objects of
recognition. Again, we may recognise or discover whether a person has done a thing or not. But the recognition which is
most intimately connected with the plot and action is, as we have said, the recognition of persons. This recognition,
combined, with Reversal, will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are those which, by our
definition, Tragedy represents.

...
Two parts, then, of the Plot―Reversal of the Situation and Recognition―turn upon surprises.

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In this section, Aristotle discusses the value of surprise. It is certainly true that a plot that
leads the audience to believe one thing and then shows them something different (but still
logical) will produce a pleasurable feeling, as the brain gets a momentary rush of energy
(likely a quick release of adrenaline) to quickly react to and understand the new thing.

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 But naturally, we must wonder about how stories that do not reverse on their own logic
can nonetheless generate surprise. Or, in fact, how stories can generate that same beneficial
reaction by STICKING to their own logic.
One example might be "The Mist," a film by Frank Darabont adapted from a novel by
Stephen King. In "The Mist," people in a grocery store find that a strange cloud seems to have
enveloped the world outside them. And anyone who attempts to leave is quickly heard
screaming and then apparently dies. In the end (and of course, this is spoiling the surprise of
the movie), the people manage to pile themselves into a car and drive out into the mist, trying
to get back into the world. But they find only more mist and dead people, until they eventually
shoot themselves. We see later, as the story ends, that rescue workers arrived, clearing the
mist, but only to find their dead bodies in the car.
"The Mist" was actually a well-received film. As we discussed, a depressing ending can
make the audience feel good by making them feel more mature for having watched it, but the
ending here has another effect. It was surprising. I gasped at it, and according to the reviews,
others felt the same way. But given Aristotle's dictum, this should not be the case, after all, in
the above model, surprise comes from a reversal of the story's situation. But we are led to
believe from the earliest parts of the movie that the mist has enveloped the whole world. And
anyone who goes into it dies. Thus, the heroes entering the mist, finding nothing, and dying is
not a reversal of the situation, it's a perfect continuation of it. It's exactly what we've seen
throughout the movie's plot, and it's realistic, given that no one is surprised when people
trapped in hopeless situations don't make it out in real life. So how could it produce surprise?
By now, the answer is probably clear. The situation within a plot is not the only logical
course of events that an audience is following. There is also the situation of watching the
actions of the plot's creator, (the author, playwright, director and so on), as they perform a
service for us, and reacting to that as well. Thus, we develop expectations about that situation
as well, and violations of that course of events can produce surprise just as easily. Thus, here,
we expect through years of experience that a studio movie will have a happy ending, since it
is the most common way to give us the positive emotional effect for which we're paying. And
as a result, when a movie like "The Mist" gives us a tragic ending, we have the same surprise,
and though they may not have enjoyed the sad aspect of it, people still reacted positively to
that surprise, in the same way they would a surprise ending in the actual plot.
So, to amend the above, we must say that the technique of reversal, or surprise,
depends not on a reversal in the plot itself. But a reversal of the audience's expectations of
either the course of events in the story or the course of events they experience when viewing
stories in general. Which can lead to a number of expectations and a number of possible
reversals, and which all will generate the same pleasure and successful result.

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XIII

The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad. It should come about as the result
not of vice, but of some great error or frailty, in a character either such as we have described, or better rather than worse.
The practice of the stage bears out our view. At first the poets recounted any legend that came in their way. Now, the best
tragedies are founded on the story of a few houses, on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes,
Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible. A tragedy, then, to be perfect according to the
rules of art should be of this construction.

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In this section and the ones that immediately follow it, Aristotle writes, in his own terms, about
the necessary traits for a good main character in tragedy as he sees it. Essentially, he says
that the character should not be an inherently bad person, since the audience would only be
happy to see them fail, which would then produce joy instead of sympathy at seeing another
person share their pain. But they should not be too perfect either, or the audience will not
identify with them and not feel threatened by what threatens the main character (which
generates tension and adrenaline for them).
Instead, Aristotle states, a good tragic main character must be a decent person who
makes a single mistake or has a single great weakness. So we identify with them, and feel
emotional release at seeing them feel the same pain we do for their honest mistake. There
are many successful stories that have sad endings, as we've discussed, but here, we can talk
about how the method of producing this powerful emotional effect has been achieved without
the recommended method.
The best example I can think of for this is the novel, "A Confederacy of Dunces." The
main character is hardly an everyman, he is anti-social, unmotivated, and quite arrogant. On
top of that, the novel is very much a comedy. Yet and still, the success of the novel is far
beyond what you'd normally expect for its genre. In fact, it won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and
was considered the first comedy to do so. But in fact, the great effect of the novel is actually
akin to one of Aristotle's Tragedies.
This is because the author, John Kennedy Toole, was a struggling writer who
committed suicide 11 years before it was published. That story, of a talented artist who is
unappreciated, and gives up on life too early, is a perfect tragic set-up. In fact, the wikipedia
article on Toole himself is far longer than the article on the book. There are, of course, far
more people who feel like they do not get their due in life, and who benefit from the belief that
if they give up, they will miss the payoff that is just around the corner, than there are people
who would identify with the novel's protagonist.
But, as a consequence of the way our brains work, there is no difference between the
emotional release we feel when reading Toole's work and imagining and identifying with his
loneliness and pain, and confirming that it is indeed clever and worthy of being seen, and the
emotional release we would feel if the novel itself presented the same story.

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XV

In respect of Character there are four things to be aimed at. First, and most important, it must be good. Now any speech or
action that manifests moral purpose of any kind will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is
good. This rule is relative to each class.
...
Thirdly, character must be true to life: for this is a distinct thing from goodness and propriety, as here described. The fourth
point is consistency: for though the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be
consistently inconsistent.

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For this part, we have to make a more general change to Aristotle's rules, which applies to

10
that specific passage of "The Poetics" and others that take the same form. Instead of stating
that the character in the literary work must have these identifiable traits, or as in the previous
passage, have a single error or flaw that causes their mistake in order to produce the
emotional effect of tragedy, we must say instead that either the character in the literary work,
or someone associated with the work in the real world, must display those traits.
This is actually true of the way audiences take in stories in general, which means that
we need to alter the way we look at the concept of protagonists as a whole in stories. As best
as I can tell, the best and clearest way to view the way audience's really process movies,
books, or plays is that they are actually following the stories of three heroes while they are
watching. The fictional story of the hero they are watching, the story of what the creator is
doing in the real world, and their own personal story, in terms of what the movie, book or play
they are watching is doing for them.
To give a brief example of this, let's take Robert Rodriguez's famous indie film "El
Mariachi." "El Mariachi" was shot on an amazingly low $7,000 budget, but looks much more
expensive, and launched his career. However, initially, when he showed the film to movie
executives, he didn't tell them how much it cost, and they ignored him. It wasn't until later,
once the budget and the story of how he made it was well-known, that one of those same
executives told him "how much heat" they had taken for being "the guy who passed on 'El
Mariachi.'"
This is because the movie, viewed in a vacuum, is a straightforward low-budget story
of a guitar player who fights a drug lord after accidentally stealing his guitar case full of
weapons. It's not particularly unique, profound or memorable. However, the story of grit,
overcoming odds, and shocking talent that was Robert Rodriguez's shooting of the film was
unique, profound and memorable. Very much so. And everyone who watched it with that
knowledge had a completely different feeling of quality when they saw the film then the
original executives did.
But likewise, "El Mariachi" is a special film to me, not just because of Robert
Rodriguez's story, but because of my own. It inspired me to start studying screenwriting and
storytelling, and showed me that you don't need huge amounts of money or high-powered
connections to be successful. Thus, while the main story of the film is unremarkable, the story
of the creator, and the story of me, are both powerful, and the two combined make it a
standout film in my memory. Note also, that if the film itself was remarkable, it would be on an
absolute peak level for me, of the type that causes people to watch movies hundreds of times,
attend conventions, stalk the filmmakers and so on. But since it wasn't, it's merely one of
which I'm very fond.
Now of course, we generally like ourselves, so we don't apply heroic traits to our own
personal story as a protagonist in the same way. But having discussed this concept, we can
see that in actuality, all rules that Aristotle, or in fact anyone who studies writing, proposes for
a good protagonist, can function just as well if they exist in the film's creator and can also
harm the story in the viewer's eyes, if the creator has the same traits that would find unlikable
or bad in a protagonist.

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As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the
probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of
probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the
unravelling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the

11
'Deus ex Machina'―as in the Medea, or in the Return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The 'Deus ex Machina' should be employed
only for events external to the drama,―for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human
knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the
action there must be nothing irrational.
__________________________________________________________

Here, we revisit the previous rule about plot construction, that events in the story must be
what is needed to communicate what's going on or what would make sense, so we can
believe and thus emotionally react to what we're seeing. He mentions also that some things
should be "external to the drama," but of course he means things in the story's world that we
don't actually see played out in its telling, like the origin of the Joker in "The Dark Knight."
Regardless, we can use this opportunity to point out another example of how this
method of plot and character can be unpredictable. "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" has a
very confusing plot, that features Deus Ex Machina, when basically, two side characters
reveal themselves to be space aliens and rescue the heroes from certain doom. "The Rocky
Horror Picture Show" was reviewed very poorly when it was first released, and things like this
were the reason why. And it did, among other things, violate Aristotle's dictum, having events
that were necessary to resolve the plot, but by no means probable.
However, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" has gone on to become a very popular film
among a small audience. By traditional measures, there's no way to explain this. However,
people started to watch the movie differently. They began treating it as a sort-of group activity,
wearing costumes, bringing props, and, most importantly, talking back to the screen at key
points. Like, for example, saying, "What's white and sells hamburgers?" directly before Brad
talks about stopping at the castle they passed.
We've spoken already about how the tension and intellectual involvement created by
an activity like this can fill-in for a confusing of the plot, but here, we see specifically as well
how believability relates to this. The Deus Ex Machina in the Rocky Horror Picture Show's
ending does and did harm its effect as a story, but yet ultimately it performed better in terms of
building an audience then most other movies that have proper endings according to Aristotle's
recommendation.
This is because the emotions created by associated events tend to be stronger than
ones created by the story itself. For one, because there are more outside things happening,
often on a longer and larger scale than the movie we are watching, but also because
believability in real world events is always perfect. Whereas fictional stories often struggle to
achieve it, and can almost never capture it to the level of actual reality.
So, the tension and interest created in the audience by the challenge to say the right
lines before the key points in the movie, is actually a much more robust interest than what
normal movies can actually generate. And likewise, though the villain of the story represents
the audience more than the heroes ("The Rocky Horror Picture Show" became a cult favorite
in the LGBT community, and the heroes are normal straight people, while the villain is an
LGBT person), the emotional confirmation lost by having a villain who they don't enjoy
watching lose, is overpowered by the stronger emotional confirmation of participating in a
group event with so many other movie watchers who enjoy the same things and are in the
same community.
So, to resolve this inconsistency, we have to adjust Aristotle's recommendation about
plot and character functioning to fit with the way we've changed other things so far. The
source of the audience's interest and emotional confirmation be it from the real world or the
story itself, must be something that is logical and believable. But if it comes from the real

12
world, the plot itself does not necessarily have to be.
Let me underline here, though, that these are not just casual recommendations, or a
general description of how to have a good time at the theater, which doesn't relate to the
notion of how to create a good work of storytelling. What we are describing here, these
modifications to these general rules, are necessary changes to the existing guidelines of
storytelling themselves. The techniques and ideas that have been developed over time, and
are generally used to evaluate and learn to write books, plays and movies, do not properly
function without this understanding. They run into the contradictions we are talking about
above, and will produce confusion without these modifications.
This is why writers have traditionally driven each other crazy by contradicting each
other's notions about how to tell a good story by pointing out these successful works that don't
fit. And thus, why the popular saying "there are no rules in writing, but you break them at your
peril," was created. These changes allow us to see more precisely how these traditional rules,
which clearly have some application but frequently fail, actually work, and to develop a
stronger version of them that actually do lead to consistent failure when they aren't followed.

__________________________________________________________

XVI

...of all recognitions, the best is that which arises from the incidents themselves, where the startling discovery is made by
natural means. Such is that in the Oedipus of Sophocles, and in the Iphigenia; for it was natural that Iphigenia should wish to
dispatch a letter. These recognitions alone dispense with the artificial aid of tokens or amulets. Next come the recognitions
by process of reasoning.

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In this part of section 16, Aristotle has been describing the pleasure that comes from making a
key realization. In other words, the joy we feel when our brain draws a new and valid
connection in what it sees. He mentions, in his own words, that this is often done poorly in
dramatic works, by the author having some obvious symbol indicate what is important, or by
having the characters make a realization, but that the most effective method is when
everything plays out in a believable manner, and the audience can see the connection
themselves, by "process of reasoning."
This feeling is the most powerful pleasure that a person can naturally have from
observing other events without physically participating themselves, and thus it generally is the
greatest height that a dramatic work can achieve. If you've ever heard someone talk about
seeing the world in a different way, achieving enlightenment, having a "eureka moment," or
similar things, this is what they are referencing.
However, there is an entire class of movies that has a divisive effect on audiences,
precisely because this actually can work in a manner differently than what Aristotle describes.
Naturally, the assumption he makes is that the "recognition" (to use his term) must arise from
the events themselves. However, if you attend a film festival, you'll see a ton of movies that
seem very arrogant, don't connect to most audiences and make no sense, but which have a
very devoted group of fans who love to over-analyze them. One example being filmmakers
and art-house fans who invented what they called the "Auteur Theory," in the 1950's, where
they analyzed every movie in terms of what it revealed about the filmmaker's psyche, and
searched it for hidden meanings.

13
 The "Auteur Theory" was very popular among film students and certain others, but
added basically nothing to mainstream filmmaking. This is because it involved a perspective
on movies that falls outside of the normal model, which is the awareness of the filmmaker
themselves while viewing the film. When normal audiences view most movies, they tend to
know very little about the filmmaker, and thus don't think about anything except what's in front
of them (unless it is specifically exposed to them through the media or a popular story).
However, film students are involved in figuring out how to make movies, and studying
the filmmaker's decisions. In doing so, they draw connections between what they see on the
screen and what they believe the filmmaker intended. And if you might notice, this is the
same form that Aristotle describes for generating the pleasure of recognition, except that it
comes from the combination of real-world people and incidents (the filmmaker making a
movie) and what the viewers see on-screen, such as the idea that the Mother obsession in
Hitchcock's "Psycho" was a sign of his own problems with his parents. And in fact, this
recognition does not even require that the plot incidents themselves make sense or be well-
executed.
As a result, these film students and connoisseurs draw the powerful pleasure that
Aristotle describes as "recognition" while viewing these films, by playing this game of
connection between filmmaker and what they see, and normal audiences get nothing of the
sort. And in fact, when the filmmakers themselves are deliberately putting across these
symbols and clues, without thought to the normal plot, they end up creating what we describe
as "pretentious" cinema. Loved by a few, but creating confusion in most.
Perhaps also, we can see that this disagreement is a natural result of separate and
totally valid emotional experiences between the art-house fans and normal movie goers, and
not, as we may often assume or say, from foolishness by either group. This by itself might
have a significant effect on how we think about and discuss our various opinions as fans of
books, movies, theater, or other things.

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XVII

In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before
his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover
what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies. The need of such a rule is shown by the fault
found in Carcinus. Amphiaraus was on his way from the temple. This fact escaped the observation of one who did not see
the situation. On the stage, however, the piece failed, the audience being offended at the oversight.

__________________________________________________________

Here, Aristotle describes what was apparently a classically-known blunder in the theater of his
time, when a playwright made a mistake by using a door that the audience was previously led
to believe was a temple as a place for a previously-dead character to emerge, which
(according to an analyst named J.R. Green) led to anger due to being illogical and possibly an
insult to their beliefs. Aristotle does not name the play, and it doesn't seem to be clear in
history exactly what the mistake was, but it can still bring up some useful points.
For one, there are, as stated, confusing stories that nonetheless succeed for other
reasons. But there are also errors in storytelling that come from insufficient explanation, which
is what Aristotle seems to be describing here, since the play did not give the audience an

14
indication that the door previously used for the temple was now supposed to represent a
tomb.
We actually can see something similar with the "Lord of the Rings" films, which were
adapted by Peter Jackson. They were extraordinarily successful. But I found the story pretty
confusing. Obviously, they were trying to take an evil ring to a volcano and destroy it. But the
large number of characters, battles, kings, and villains is extremely hard to follow in the
movie, and as a result, I just sat and kind of vaguely stared at the screen. When I mentioned
this to the person who watched one of them with me on the way out of the theater, they
replied "oh, I thought it was only me."
Nonetheless, the Lord of the Rings films were extremely highly-rated by critics and on
sites like the Internet Movie Database. They also won a large number of Academy Awards,
and grossed over a billion dollars. From one perspective, you could say that no one
understood the movie and everyone was just pretending they were great, or that people were
rating the beautiful and innovative visuals over the coherence of the story. And likewise, I'm
sure there are many people who would frustratedly blame me and the people who didn't
follow the movie for not paying attention.
But actually, I think there's something else at play. The "Lord of the Rings" films were
based on the books. And many people who watched the movies and loved them, were
already familiar with the books, which give you as much time as you need to grasp what's
going on before you turn the page. As a result, those people didn't need to follow the plot as it
was presented in the movies for them to understand what was going on.
Furthermore, Peter Jackson, the director, was obviously very familiar with the books
while he was writing and directing the films. This means that he was actually greatly
disadvantaged judging whether or not the plot of the films themselves would come across to
an audience who didn't know the books. This was no problem with most viewers who were
also familiar with the books, but created a problem with people who weren't.
Obviously, this jibes quite well with Aristotle's recommendation that the playwright
visualize what will be in front of the audience while putting together their story. But we can
also add that the playwright must be aware not only of what the audience will know, but what
he or she knows in the process of writing, which effects their ability to judge what they are
writing.
The example we use here is very straightforward, deliberately so since we are
introducing it, but many other feelings writers and filmmakers can have will also throw off their
ability to judge the effectiveness of their story, including if they are, for example, frightened by
things that the audience won't share, such as a fear of a childhood teacher that may look like
the villain. This goes much deeper but that is likely enough for now. I'd also like to add that the
idea of indiscrete emotional processing occurring in both viewing and creating suggests
Aristotle's recommendation here in a natural and logical way.

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XVIII

The poet should endeavour, if possible, to combine all poetic elements; or failing that, the greatest number and those the
most important; the more so, in face of the cavilling criticism of the day. For whereas there have hitherto been good poets,
each in his own branch, the critics now expect one man to surpass all others in their several lines of excellence.

__________________________________________________________

15
In this part, Aristotle takes a moment away from recommending dramatic techniques to
recommend that specific choices be made by the writer in order to please critics who look for
certain amounts of ability or ambition in a writer. This is, of course, true, and I'm sure almost
any writer could tell you that a writer's personal reputation is important when it comes to
critics, and to the success and prospects of their work.
But it's also clear here that Aristotle, and perhaps others, do not make the leap from
recognizing more exactly how a writer's reputation seems to bias the reviews and sales of
their work. They don't seem to make the step to seeing that the inability to distinguish feelings
about each is the cause of it, and thus to starting to investigate all the ways that can work,
which leads to some of the ideas we've been discussing. It seems like a pretty simple insight
once it's said, but I found a few reasons why it might not have happened.
First, you have to realize that these things are about the emotions they generate in the
viewer, and then you have to study those emotions hard enough to recognize when a
dramatic work is in the proper form to cause those emotions in the viewer, and thus should be
successful. Very few writers actually do these things, and even if you do, there are steps
beyond that. Aristotle, after all, did study things in this way, and as far as I can tell, knew more
than enough that he should've been able to determine that certain works fulfilled his
guidelines and should've succeeded.
However, even if you do that, the next step is to then see that many works should
succeed by these guidelines and don't, and likewise, how many works should not succeed but
still somehow do. From our modern perspective, with the internet, box office grosses, and so
on, this is easy to see. But not as much from Aristotle's. And on top of that, Aristotle was
studying a group of works that were all presented in a similar context. He was analyzing plays
shown to similar audiences, on the same stages, with similar amounts of knowledge about the
playwright, and perhaps most importantly, similar notoriety.
Consider it this way. If someone studies boat-racing, but they only look at races that
happen on a peaceful lake, with consistent wind, and the same types of boat, they will end up
constructing a tidy book that lists certain fundamentals of how to row, or construct a sail, or
keep the boat clean, and those fundamentals will work. In that context. But if you extend the
boat race to an ocean, and allow all different types of watercraft, different headwinds, and
different tides, boat-racing suddenly becomes much more complex, and boats with perfectly
constructed sails, for one example, will lose to other boats with worse sails that happened to
be in the proper wind. Likewise, a boat with a flawless rowing team, according to the
traditional theory, could lose badly to one with an amateur rowing team that happened to be in
a favorable tide.
This is the difference between the entertainment world that we can see now and the
one that Aristotle was likely studying. As a result, he probably saw a much more direct
connection between his theories and the results of the play, and things like the reputation of
the writer, while something he could pick up on, were far less effective in changing results
than a properly written story. He didn't know the extent of the fringe because the fringe was
relatively small and meaningless.
But what's interesting about that, is that we can see similar results today, when works
are compared that also exist in similar contexts of outside emotional situations. Wide-release
movies, that are heavily advertised, with actors and filmmakers who tell the world how great
and brilliant they are, are compared almost entirely based on the actual quality of the films.

16
 The outside emotions generated by the huge reputation and marketing associated with
these stories cancels out, and places a huge focus on that actual quality as the tie-breaker.
But outside of that context those outside emotions cause huge warping effects on how people
perceive books and movies they consume. And in fact, the lack of outside reputation and
emotion does too, in a way that is enough for its own discussion later.
But if you are already known and successful, you are in what might be called the "eye
of the storm," where many outside factors are working in your favor and evening you up with
your competitors, and merit alone seems to be the primary determinant. This could even have
been true of Aristotle himself, given that he had a relatively large reputation of his own in
ancient times, which effected the uptake of his theories and thus shielded him from some of
the chaos that may have given him a stronger hint about the these things.
There is of course, even more to it than that. The instinct, which mashes together these
experiences in order to give us the general feeling that we use to judge a dramatic work, is
completely silent. It doesn't tell us what made us feel interested while we were watching a
story, regardless of whether it was a skillfully executed plot or, for one example, curiosity
about whether the lead actor was going to forget his lines. And on top of that, we cannot
separate these causes in our own brain.
Just like we can't "unsee" certain ugly things that may end up on our computer screens
and have to simply avoid clicking those websites in the first place, we cannot "unknow"
outside events when judging movies. Even if we're aware of them, we can only guess what
we would've felt otherwise. This is, for another example, why spoilers ruin stories for us.
Beyond that, things are even further clouded by the fact that the huge amount of
uncertainty this phenomenon creates in predicting entertainment is hidden by people
pretending after the fact that they knew what was going to happen. People like to stretch the
truth and present themselves in a better light, and one very handy way to do it is to claim that
you knew a certain movie would be a hit, or a certain actress would be a star as soon as you
laid eyes on her. In some cases, the person may indeed have liked the actress or script when
they saw it, but the times they liked something that turned out to fail are not going to be
mentioned. So we get a large number of interviews from creative people that imply that
certain work is and was great and succeeded because it was great, and everyone knew it
would be great beforehand, that simply gives a horribly false impression.
Lastly, after Aristotle's time, there are many other people who have been able to view
entertainment from the much larger lens of modern media, and thus also able to see all these
results that violate the idea that fulfilling our artistic fundamentals should make something
successful. People who view these things honestly have thus coined phrases like, "In
Hollywood, nobody knows anything," which is from William Goldman's "Adventures in the
Screen Trade."
The phrase became famous, which means that many other people identified with it, but
also that very few people would acknowledge that confusion out loud. There are many
opportunities to simply hand-wave away this confusion by blaming people for being childish,
random, not sharing the "great taste" of oneself, and so on. These save our ego from the pain
of reconsidering our ideas, but also likely helped conceal this concept for a very long time.
Let's move on.

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XIX

17
It remains to speak of Diction and Thought, the other parts of Tragedy having been already discussed. Concerning Thought,
we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs. Under Thought is included
every effect which has to be produced by speech, the subdivisions being,―proof and refutation; the excitation of the feelings,
such as pity, fear, anger, and the like; the suggestion of importance or its opposite. Now, it is evident that the dramatic
incidents must be treated from the same points of view as the dramatic speeches, when the object is to evoke the sense of
pity, fear, importance, or probability. The only difference is, that the incidents should speak for themselves without verbal
exposition; while the effects aimed at in speech should be produced by the speaker, and as a result of the speech. For what
were the business of a speaker, if the Thought were revealed quite apart from what he says?

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Here in part 19, as well as parts 20 and 21, Aristotle touches on the specifics of dialogue in
plays. He doesn't see much of it as different from the other requirements he has mentioned,
but he does point out that things should be shown to the audience instead of explained
verbally.
This is absolutely true, and has held as a guideline for as long as people have been
performing. With the exception, probably clear by this point, that the quality of dialogue in a
dramatic work is largely effected by what the writer is able to show. If the proper scenes are
set-up to demonstrate the key points to the audience, the dialogue does not bare any weight
for communicating the plot, and characters are free to talk around what they are doing, in the
same way that we do in real life (how often do you discuss driving or where you need to go
while you're in the car with someone else).
This same phenomenon comes into play when certain actors are chosen to appear in
plays or movies. Actors are often chosen because their micro-expressions, tiny aspects of
how they present themselves and move, help to make certain roles they play more believable
Jeff Goldblum, for example, played many fast-talking scientists, Arnold Schwarzenegger
played barbarians and expressionless machines, and pop stars often debut in movies as
characters who are also singers because their natural mannerisms will help make-up for their
lack of experience.
However, that same boost from an actor's natural mannerisms can also come from
their known life story. Sylvester Stallone, an unknown actor playing his first major role in a film
he wrote, was nominated for multiple Academy Awards for playing an unknown boxer getting
his first shot at a World Championship. The aligning of those stories was no coincidence, as
Stallone's real situation boosted the emotional appeal of the movie itself.
But on top of that, the knowledge of his life situation also effected how the dialogue in
the movie could be written. As we said, no one needs to say something if the audience has
been shown it already in the movie. And likewise, it doesn't have to be shown to the audience
if they know it already from the real world. So, no one had to tell Rocky Balboa that he was a
"nobody" as a boxer, the movie itself was able to simply present Rocky as he was and follow
him believably in his daily life, safe in the knowledge that the audience already knew and felt
that Rocky was an underdog without anything else having to be said. This boost in the quality
of the dialogue, and efficiency of the film, was generated by the outside events.

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XXII

...the strange (or rare) word, the metaphorical, the ornamental, and the other kinds above mentioned, will raise it above the

18
commonplace and mean, while the use of proper words will make it perspicuous. But nothing contributes more to produce a
clearness of diction that is remote from commonness than the lengthening, contraction, and alteration of words. For by
deviating in exceptional cases from the normal idiom, the language will gain distinction; while, at the same time, the partial
conformity with usage will give perspicuity. The critics, therefore, are in error who censure these licenses of speech, and hold
the author up to ridicule.

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In this section, Aristotle gives an opinion that metaphors and the occasional fancy word are
beneficial to a story by giving it a style that raises it above what the audience normally hears.
He adds though, that it must partially match normal words and phrases so that the audience
can still know what it means, and that critics who mock writers for using overly fancy words
are incorrect, since those words can be part of otherwise clear writing and thus improve the
piece. As a result, Aristotle is implying that a play's quality has an objective truth to it, which
can be misjudged by critics.
This is actually a classic question in analyzing art. Whether it is "subjective"
(dependent on the audience member's personal opinion without predictability), or "objective"
(dependent on what is actually on-screen and coming out of the speakers, with perfect
predictability). It comes up most often as a form of haphazard defense when people normally
try to describe guidelines for good writing to other writers who have violated those guidelines.
The knee-jerk response they will give is "it's all subjective," said in one way or another.
But, of course, "pure subjectivity" would mean that someone could not predict at all whether a
given person would like or dislike a movie, no matter what is in it. But yet, I've never seen
anyone who would claim that 2-hours of ear-splitting noise and static would rate higher with
an audience than "Batman Begins." So the idea that a movie is "all subjective" is flatly wrong.
There are, in fact, common elements to movies and art that make some more successful than
others with essentially any audience. This is what my work, and the entire business of art and
entertainment, depends on to function.
Aristotle is far on the "objective" end of the spectrum. His theory says essentially
nothing about the opinion of individual audience members, and here we see that he even
goes so far as to dismiss the opinions of some (in this case, critics), as being incorrect. I
believe Aristotle's is far closer to what seems to be true, but his stance seems to have
problems as well. After all, it suggests that one could predict with near-perfect accuracy
whether an audience member will like a movie, without knowing anything about that audience
member.
However, I've never seen anyone who claims that a children's cartoon would not be
more successful if shown to an audience of 3-year-olds than if it were shown to an audience
of 60-year-olds. And you cannot claim that the children's opinion is somehow "wrong" either
way, because you would then not be able to explain why those animated films are extremely
successful with children, while, say, "The Godfather" fails miserably with them, despite the
fact that "The Godfather" fits Aristotle's recommendations extremely well. This means that any
theory that discounts who will be viewing the work must be not completely correct.
So, when both these problems are taken into account, we can see that the references
to "subjectivity" by some people are actually attempts to deflect criticism of their own work,
which don't stand up to investigation. But the "subjectivity" claim survives because the
Aristotelian approach runs into so many errors, particularly the ones we've been describing in
this document. These people are vaguely aware that the Aristotelian "rules" can be dismissed
with examples, without understanding why. Likewise, people on the other end are aware that

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there are some consistent things that dictate a story's success, without being able to fully nail
down what they are.
The truth seems to be that the quality of a dramatic work itself, absolutely does matter
to its success, the person viewing the work does matter as well. But, as we've established
here, the context in which a work is viewed is a third leg of the stool that must also be taken
into account. But once it is done, it becomes possible to have a truly solid theory.
The human mind processes three sets of events when it is taking in a fictional work.
The fictional story, the story of a creator presenting their work to the world, and their own
personal story, what that creative work means to them personally. A child will enjoy an
animated film with clear, brightly-lit environments and happy faces because they are small
and easily frightened, and need an uncommonly safe environment so that they personally can
feel comfortable watching. A man will rate a movie higher if the success of that film confirms
something he wants to be true about himself or people like him (such as if the protagonist
looks like him, and people still wanted to see the movie). And of course, people will tend to
rate a movie higher if the film itself has a good story. But each of these sets of events seems
to contribute about one-third of the emotional reaction that people have.
When this is taken into account, and we apply the guidelines for a good story to all
three stories, the fictional, factual and personal story that are entering the head of an
audience member, we start to get very consistent results. The endless back-and-forth about
the need to study and work in certain ways, and obvious flaws in the results of that study, start
to lose its ground, and we can see a real, consistent set of ideas start to take shape. But in
three-dimensions. Which leads us to many more things.

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XXIII

As to that poetic imitation which is narrative in form and employs a single metre, the plot manifestly ought, as in a tragedy, to
be constructed on dramatic principles. It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a
middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in
structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that
happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be.

__________________________________________________________

Here, Aristotle restates some of the fundamental aspects which apply to dramatic works,
pointing out how they relate to shorter stories. But in the process, he restates the fundamental
idea that is completely correct, but, viewed differently, gives way to a more thorough model of
drama and art as a whole. The key point being when he says that a dramatic work "resembles
a living organism in all its unity, and produces the pleasure proper to it."
People often misunderstand the idea that a dramatic work should produce "pleasure,"
thinking that it means that only happy, tapdancing, childish work is dramatically appropriate.
This is not at all how the human mind works or what produces pleasure.
In reality, our brain gives us pleasurable feelings for not just simple, positive things like
butterflies or hugs, but also for validating our mental model, which can include not only good
events but also sad events that we predicted coming or which validate our own sad
experiences. As well as seeing things that improve the connections in our minds, increase our
status or decrease the status of people who display anti-social or bad traits, and for seeing

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things that can potentially benefit our understanding, including competition, role models, and
many other possibilities. Aristotle was well-aware of this in stating that work should be judged
by the "pleasure" produced, since he goes into these types of pleasure in this document. And
on top of that, he was aware of these things thousands of years before people today who try
to dismiss his conclusions using this invalid caricature of them.
But, as correct as Aristotle's general idea was, he naturally wasn't aware of how that
pleasurable feeling is produced in our brains. He can't be blamed for this at all, as
neuroscience was essentially non-existent in his time (and even today it is extremely inexact).
But it still gives us an outline of how these things work which is very important here.
Specifically, the "pleasurable feelings" that we get from a dramatic work come from the
release of various chemicals in the brain.
They appear to be dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, low cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins,
and perhaps others. The key though, is that we only have a limited number of them to reflect
a large number of situations. And this it the key reason that the results of our pleasure-based
experiences, including watching plays, movies, art or entertainment, depend on a mashed-up
combination of these various things we sense while watching. But moreso, we can actually
map which parts of an experience trigger which types of pleasure in our brain, and thus, we
can know which things outside a dramatic work are akin to the different parts inside the work
itself, and which thus can replace that aspect of the work, if it's missing or poorly-executed by
the writer themselves.
This matches generally with some of the things we've talked about, such as being
curious about where the writer is going with a story as a replacement for the story having a
unity of action, causing seemingly disjointed stories to perform as though they followed
Aristotle's recommendation. But it goes far beyond that.
Because the feeling of interest in a story is caused by dopamine, and there are several
things which can cause dopamine to flow in the brain. Not just curiosity about what a writer
may be doing, but also an interest in a person due to them having outstanding personal traits,
which is what makes us feel starstruck. A main character in a story can make us interested if
they have huge muscles or a great brain, but the same is true if the creator of the story has
great personal traits, and we as the audience are aware of it.
While there are a lot of new elements introduced by this, they are in fact
understandable, and can be listed. I've gone to the trouble of constructing a hierarchy that
lists the various parts of the experience of following a story, and then lists things that fulfill
those inside and outside a dramatic work, which makes for a useful overall guide to judging
the success of a work, both in looking at the work itself, and understanding how outside things
can bolster or substitute those elements in that work or others.
__________________________________________________________

XXIV

In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the
action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events
simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem. The
Epic has here an advantage, and one that conduces to grandeur of effect...

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Earlier, we talked about how the power of reputation and large-scale marketing contributes to

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the way people judge large-scale work. This relates more directly to what Aristotle is talking
about here. Aristotle is well-aware of the fact that the number of people effected by an event
plays a role in how emotionally-powerful we find that event to be, but it also plays a key part in
how we judge writing and other artistic work from known and unknown creators.
Like we said, among works that all have been shown to large numbers of people and
have had a marketing push behind them, people don't notice the emotional reaction they have
to that feeling of importance and "break the tie" between them by judging which work seems
better in and of itself, creating the "illusion of meritocracy" in making a work successful. But
before, we mentioned the lack of outside reputation having a profound effect, we can talk
about that now.
A great example is Vincent Van Gogh. Today, he's considered the perfect example of
unrewarded genius. A painter who knew very little success during his life, was depressed and
emotionally-disturbed, and ultimately shot himself. But some years afterward, his work
became very famous, to the point that one of his paintings sold for over $80 million at an
auction in 2017. In a merit-based theory of art, one similar to the assumptions made by the
Poetics, which have trickled down to countless other views over the centuries, this is actually
a major problem. How could an artist who we now judge to be as talented as Van Gogh have
known no success during his life?
The traditional answer is to blame the audience. To say they lack the ability to
recognize great art when they see it. This also has the aforementioned side effect of saving
our egos from the pain of failed predictions. But that runs into several more problems, such as
asking why the public, who had already idolized the work of Da Vinci, Michelangelo,
Rembrandt and others, suddenly became fools when it was time to judge Van Gogh? A
possible response is to say that Van Gogh's style was different than those artists, and while
we can probably find several famous artists at the time whose work was not that different from
Van Gogh's, we don't need to, because there's another bit of information that is far more
powerful. Van Gogh did not like his own work.
"Starry Night," long considered to be Van Gogh's greatest masterpiece, was bad
according to the man himself. When he sent the painting along with several others, to his
brother, he barely mentioned it in his accompanying letter, referring to it only as one of several
paintings that "said nothing to him," and later directly calling it a "failure."
Now, if the question is about taste, the public having no ability or experience to
recognize a great painting when they saw it, why did Van Gogh agree with the public? If
anyone had the artistic talent and vision to recognize great work, shouldn't it have been Van
Gogh himself? Maybe it's just a fluke? He painted it in a frenzy, and then didn't properly
appreciate his achievement? Unfortunately though, this is a pattern among creative people
we idolize today. Franz Kafka wanted his books, which we now call literary genius, burned
after he died. But perhaps Van Gogh and Kafka were both in some state of depression, and
thus couldn't judge their own brilliance properly?
This explanation struggles as well, because Leonardo Da Vinci also didn't like the
"Mona Lisa." Da Vinci was a busy and relatively successful painter and inventor with
influential supporters, who had been hired on commission to do the portrait. Nonetheless,
when he finished it, he left it in the back of his studio, never turned it in, and there's no record
of him ever making any special mention of it to his friends or associates.
Depression, public foolishness, or many other ad hoc explanations don't seem to
explain this tendency of great artists to have the same shrugging opinions of their work as the
public did when they were alive. But the concept we have been discussing handles it very

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well. The feeling of epic effect, of strong reputation, that Aristotle is describing in the above
passage applies just as much to epic effect in the real world, when we look at a work that is
known to have it. We are so used to it, in fact, that a work that has no reputation tends to be
severely emotionally-lacking for us. This is why so many artists have found their own work to
be unexciting in so many cases.
And likewise, when those works do cross over to being publicly displayed, or they
excite a particular person who does that for them, it happens because some other event
triggers that same necessary emotional boost for them. Such as an art director liking a
painting because it may remind him of the hills where he played as a boy.
Likewise, artists have strong emotional reactions to their own work when it has these
types of emotional boosts, which can lead to some potentially very interesting ideas about
why artists and writers consistently make certain odd decisions with their work at different
points in their life and career, including why new writers have a strange but consistent
tendency to kill dogs and babies in their stories, which is probably too much of a tangent to go
into now.

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XXV

...there are five sources from which critical objections are drawn. Things are censured either as impossible, or irrational, or
morally hurtful, or contradictory, or contrary to artistic correctness. The answers should be sought under the twelve heads
above mentioned.

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Here, Aristotle touches on a general list of critiques that people make against dramatic works.
Each of these are quite valid, but they let us show an additional dimension to how these
critiques work. The terms he uses correspond to various things that we use today, that works
are not believable, that the plots don't make sense, that they are morally wrong, or that
certain aspects of the plot don't deliver on being exciting, funny, romantic or whatever else is
necessary.
The key is though, that some of these things are more important to the effect of a
dramatic work than others. Believability and logic are necessary to connect to a work in the
first place. Moral correctness, alongside a properly executed plot, are necessary to care about
the work and draw pleasure from its ending (to reiterate, even a tragedy can provide this
pleasure if it happens to a bad person, or to someone we identify with that thus makes us feel
like the pain in our own lives is shared by others), after we are able to connect to it.
There are many things we believe, after all, that we don't care about, like that our
neighbor is sleeping in their bed at night. Once those are in place, we then need to worry
about how well executed more specific parts of the story are, like how well they show societal
change, how enlightening their moral lessons may be, and after that, whether or not their well-
done temporary pleasures, like excitement or humor, are well-executed.
Some stories like "Star Wars," may be notorious for having dialogue that the audience
doesn't enjoy, or a romance that falls flat because it's not realized in the first film, and the key
characters turn out to be related in subsequent films. But nonetheless, the success of "Star
Wars" cannot be questioned.
This is because, in a very general sense, "Star Wars" delivers far more on the scale

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and wonder of the world it creates, the moral satisfaction of various elements (like Han Solo's
personal turnaround at the end of the movie), any many other things. Thus, a model that
reflects the various criteria that Aristotle lists must also represent those things in proportion to
how effective they are. I prefer a hierarchy, in the form of a pyramid, but some ranking is
essentially required.

__________________________________________________________

XXVI

The question may be raised whether the Epic or Tragic mode of imitation is the higher.
...
Tragedy like Epic poetry produces its effect even without action; it reveals its power by mere reading. If, then, in all other
respects it is superior, this fault, we say, is not inherent in it.

And superior it is, because it has all the epic elements―it may even use the epic metre―with the music and spectacular
effects as important accessories; and these produce the most vivid of pleasures.
...
Thus much may suffice concerning Tragic and Epic poetry in general; their several kinds and parts, with the number of each
and their differences; the causes that make a poem good or bad; the objections of the critics and the answers to these
objections.

__________________________________________________________

Following from the previous section, we see Aristotle finishing "The Poetics" by musing about
whether epic or tragic poetry is more emotionally-powerful. A hierarchical model can show us
that an epic work which portrays an entire society being transformed by an idea or hero, being
an improvement to our mental model, can in fact be more powerful than many forms of
tragedy, which often show a bad person suffering consequences, since this is merely an
underlining of things we already know.
So if those modes of entertainment are well-executed, epic work will tend to be more
successful than tragic work, which is what we see, since stories from "Gilgamesh" to "The
Iliad" to "The Lord of the Rings" generally captivate audiences on a larger-scale than stories
where tragedy is the main thing offered. There are certainly successful and great tragic
stories, like "Romeo and Juliet," but they don't bring in the box office grosses that the epic
films do.
However, there's another aspect to this hierarchy concept. In the last paragraph above,
where he mentions that music is an important accessory to the pleasure of the dramatic work.
It is actually similar to section 25, where he likens the choices of imitation a poet must make
to those of a painter. Because these hint at a deeper idea. Other forms of art also play on the
same basic pleasure chemicals as storytelling. This means that the same indiscretion-based
results can be applied to their fundamentals.
Let's demonstrate with one fast example. I have not spent a lot of time on music, but
let's say for the sake of argument that the repetitive structure of a song, where it loops back to
a chorus, produces a feeling of confirmation in the listener, which in this case is oxytocin.
Naturally, it's part of basic songwriting theory that music should have a structure like this, and
most successful songs do have a chorus or repeating structure of some type.
But some don't. One specific example is jazz music, which is known for being very free
flowing. Nonetheless, jazz music is a very widespread genre. Not as well-known on the pop

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charts, but certainly with its own audience. How can this be if jazz music violates such a
fundamental aspect of songwriting theory? Well, it actually turns out that jazz music is most
commonly performed as part of an improvisational group. Jazz musicians play together, and
essentially make up the song as they go. Feelings of status, group belonging, also give us the
feeling of confirmation. So as a result, the experience of participating in a jazz band, or
watching the jazz band perform for us in a private club, produces the feeling of oxytocin that
is not provided by the informal structure of the music.
Let's take that a step further though. If that's the case, if a feeling of belonging and
safety can make-up for a lack of structure in the music, it would have to go the other way as
well. A well-structured song being able to make-up for a lack of stable feeling in a moment of
one's life. Well, we can see that. My favorite example is from the Discovery channel
documentary, "Life of Ludwig Van Beethoven," at about the 19-minute mark, from Kurt Masur,
the music director of the New York Philharmonic. He states that "[Beethoven's] first and
second symphony, they are so heavenly, and so wonderful, that you just feel you are safe.
That you are living a peaceful life."
Likewise, in an interview on the show "Loose Women," the pop musician Nelly Furtado
talked about using songs to get through a tough time in her life. She said, "I thought to myself
'I'm so lucky that I can write songs because I can soothe myself with them.' But then a friend
told me that what they do is find a song they connect with, and that's how it helps them." So in
both cases we can see how the feeling of confirmation (specifically oxytocin) released by the
structure of a song substitutes for a lack of stability in life, and likewise, how a stable life
situation substitutes for a lack of structure in an entire genre of music.
It appears that the same can be done for every form of art. Not just storytelling, and
music, but painting, as we've discussed with Van Gogh, and even games. Each one a
fundamental modification to the theory of each, which is necessary to be able to fully
understand their results. "Non-Euclidean geometry," where spaces can be curved, turned out
to be crucial to modern astrophysics and our modern understanding of gravity. And while I
don't wish to suggest lofty things, this "Non-Aristotelian" approach could likely turn out to be
very significant to the study of art as well.
But while it is a departure from Aristotle's method of thinking, I am certain that, had
enough data about entertainment, and information about the brain been available in Aristotle's
time, he would have been able to discover this phenomenon as well. I'd be fascinated to hear
his thoughts on it, and where he would've taken it, since it very likely will lead to many new
things in the future.

If you'd like to hear more about emotional indiscretion, as I've introduced in this document,
you can check out my video work at youtube.com/StoryBrain, where I have an entire playlist
of theories and content I've made about the idea, and I can be contacted with any questions
at twitter.com/StoryBrain1. I also will be publishing more on this, detailing the hierarchies that
I've referenced, and other related ideas in some upcoming books and other articles. Thank
you for reading.

-Garrett

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