29. Ajax and others: John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy
One's attitude to other individuals and other cultures tends to swing like a pendulum between ‘How like me after all’, and ‘How inconceivably unlike’. John Jones's On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy embodies the second reaction at the extreme end of the swing. After you have read it the Greeks will seem far further off than you dreamed.
The book falls into two parts: the first and shorter on the Poetics and the second on the tragedies. They are mutually relevant, but they do not necessarily stand or fall together. You may – and I do – agree with the first part and be much more doubtful about the second.
On Aristotle, Mr Jones appears to me simply right. We are familiar with the idea that the Renaissance critics misrepresented his theory of poetry. Mr Jones maintains that the moderns, seeing him through the coloured glasses of Shakespeare and Romanticism, have fared no better.
He holds that there is in Aristotle no doctrine of the tragic hero, the great flawed character. All that comes from mistranslating hamartia and substituting singulars for plurals in certain passages.
We have also misunderstood the function of character in Aristotle. To us, doubly introverted, first by Christianity and then by liberal individualism, behaviour is primarily a symptom: something from which to infer the ‘haunting latencies’ of the psyche.
For Aristotle, it is the actual: what we regard as the inner reality is mere potentiality. Hence, as he ought to be, Mr Jones is very good on Masks.
Very fine points are here involved. It makes all the difference whether we translate mellein as ‘to intend’ or as ‘to be about to’. The former rendering throws us into a quite un-Aristotelian subjectivism.
All this I fully accept, and with gratitude. It clears away many cobwebs. It might even help to banish from many a critical work, and from many a syllabus, the phantom subject called ‘Tragedy’. There is one omission. Mr Jones distinguishes well between praxis and muthos: but I wish he had explained praxis itself. To render it by ‘action’ invites misunderstanding.
I also wonder whether he would, as I would, go a step further and say that Aristotle, that very great man, was never less great than in the Poetics. It is difficult to think well of a book which, however diversely interpreted, has always had a bad influence on criticism and dramaturgy.
When we turn to the tragedies, I find Mr Jones harder to agree with and certainly harder to understand. His polemic against the picture of Aeschylus either as a monotheist or as a ‘primitive’ seems to me sound: so is his comment on Clytemnestra's identification of herself with the ‘thrice-gorged bitter avenger’.
But when he refers to the predicament of Agamemnon, ordered to sacrifice Iphigenia, as ‘the beautiful, wisdom-yielding dilemma’, and says that in such deadlocks Aeschylus sees ‘the world making sense’, and a sense whose cruelty is ‘unqualified but not absolute’ because they are not divorced from ‘the rich concrete objectivity of life’, I don't think he is giving his readers as much help as they need.
He is trying to make the words ‘unqualified’, ‘absolute’, and ‘life’ (a very dangerous monosyllable nowadays) do more than they can.
He attributes to Sophocles a vision of ‘mutability’ and is at pains to distinguish this (to its advantage) from the medieval commonplace about Fortune's wheel. But not, I submit, at pains enough. Nothing that he says seems to me to establish so wide a difference as he desires.
And even this second part is full of interest. The analysis of the ‘Ajax’ is especially good, and Euripides, though severely, and justly, criticised as an artist, emerges from Mr Jones's treatment as a really gigantic figure in the history of the European mind.
No one who cares for the subject should neglect this book: though works equally profound have been more lucid.