Pinpoint of Eternity: The Sufficient Moment in Literature

Pinpoint of Eternity:tsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The Sufficient Moment in Literature P eter Salm -ZxRISTOTLE HELD in the seventh chapter of the P oetics that tragedy must have a beginning, middle, and end, that a beginning is that which does not follow anything by necessity, and that an end is that which does follow something else, but itself is followed by nothing. There is no need to assume that Aristotle’s remarks should be applied to tragedy alone. They were meant to apply to all the genres of literature then practiced. He had after all subsumed Homer’s epics under his definition of tragedy and used the words poetry and tragedy interchangeably. Each fresh attempt at understanding Aristotle’s passage leaves one with a sense of frustration. What is it that, in Butcher’s trans­ lation, "does not follow anything else by cause or necessity” ? It is the "beginning” of a literary work. The definition of "middle” and "end” follows naturally from the first assumption. But from the vantage point of our age, such a way of bracketing reality into dis­ crete units is not possible, except as a convenient means of anchor­ ing our awareness. There are no beginnings, middles, and ends in the stream of hu­ man events; what one person experiences as an end, the other will consider a beginning. Causes and necessities are endless and with­ out beginnings. Only the imaginative faculty can give form to events, and having done this, select those events which will con­ form. Aristotle praises Homer for centering his epic poems around an action that "in our sense of the word is one,” and we must wonder how Homer came to such a unified vision. It is not the same as the 49 Ra c is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y unity of a single character such as Ulysses, as Aristotle assures us in the eighth chapter of the ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA P oetics', nor is such unity properly repre­ sented by a theme like "the wrath of Achilles.” Neither of these would serve adequately to explain the selection of materials in­ cluded in the epic. What the poet creates—if he is successful—is the complete fusion of a given sequence of events with a vital idea or concept which to him arises from that sequence. This is not to say by any means that either the fable or the concept exists as a separate entity before the creation of the work. The events of the plot are selected and shaped according to an idea—and the idea and plot can no longer be isolated in terms of either an ethical or philosophical concept on the one hand, or a chronological series of events on the other. The successful fusion of the two results in a category of human endeavor which is neither philosophy nor his­ tory, but art. We ought not to quibble with the circularity of a process in the course of which data are gathered according to an idea which in turn is determined by the data. It is a creative circularity, the hermeneu­ tic circle par excellence, in which the mind flits back and forth be­ tween idea and fact.1 Concepts are shaped and modified by expe­ rience, which in turn is selected and arranged according to the concept. In works of literature, neither the conceptual nor the fac­ tual aspects are stabilized, until the process of artistic creation, and indeed of the reader’s empathic re-creation, is complete; and when it is, the idea inherent in the work is so enmeshed in its texture that it will be impossible to isolate it from its poetic realization. By the same token, the concrete facts structured in accordance with their poetic "idea” are imbued with a flavor and significance which irre­ trievably set them off from their neutral and empirical ground. The meaning of a poem is not to be located in an abstraction derived from it nor in a generalization, but in a specific aesthetic quality which is its essence. Idea and factuality are fused into a new alloy, as it were, different from...