Aristotle's Poetics and plot

I've started Aristotle's Poetics, the Penguin Classics version. I'm only into the intro by Malcolm Heath, but it's already fascinating. The first thing that caught my attention in a big way was Heath's discussion of the primacy that Aristotle assigns to plot -- as contrasted with character. The argument at its most basic goes something like this: even if we know nothing about the character, we can imagine what a normal person would do in a given situation; thus a story, at it's simplest, can do without a complex character, but not without a series of connected actions (i.e., plot). "Do" here is key, as Aristotle sees action as the core of a story.

The most interesting part is Heath's caution that Aristotle's discussions of plot focus on the underlying sequence of events in a story. "The reader," he writes, "should be careful not to forget the level of abstraction at which Aristotle is working throughout the chapters on plot: he is not concerned here with the construction of the verbal artefacts (his spelling) which are tragedies, but with the design of the patterns of events which underlie them."

He makes the distinction again here: "Aristotle is often quoted as if he had said that a play has a beginning, a middle and an end. This is wrong. It is the plot, the underlying sequence of actions, that has this structure."

I've come across this distinction before -- most recently reading Gerrard Genette -- is important, because the "artefact" often mixes up the time, beginning at the end of a story then flashing back to the beginning then coming back to the end again. In some cases, the story focuses only on the moment of crisis in a story.

I'm thinking of Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. The couple has spent quite a while together and Hemingway's account could have begun before they met, showed them meeting, the discovery that the woman is pregnant, and the scene on the train platform where they heatedly discuss her getting an abortion. But Hemingway only shows the scene on the platform -- though he very cleverly alludes to the larger story with these two lines: "He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights."

You are what you analogize

A stanza from Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was display on the home page of Poet.org this morning.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

The poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow and Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica, in that it seems to be a meta-poem, a poem about writing poems, about the nature of art.

The entry for Stevens on the site placed him between the English Romantics and the French Symbolists -- between, and I'm interpolating here, "inflection" and "innuendo." Which got me onto Symbolism (so attracted to abstraction, the French). The Poetry Portal says the Symbolists "rejected the pastoral tradition, and took their themes and images from city life, emphasizing its bleak, hallucinatory and/or illicit aspects."

This is, of course, only one characteristic of the Symbolist movement. But it got me thinking about the imagery and analogies (not to mention forms and techniques) writers use change over time.

Homer derived most of his imagery from nature. The exception to Homers nature-based imagery may be the scene in the Iliad in which Hephaestus makes armor for Achilles; his animated forges and girls made of metal are VERY unnatural, the stuff of science fiction. These rare technology-based images aside, Homer was grounded in nature. How many Homeric similes in the Iliad depict a lion ravaging a sheep while quaking shepherds watch? His audience were farmers themselves and intimately acquainted with nature, so those analogies were accessible to them.

It makes sense then that people living in cities would write for other people living in cities by using urban imagery. Suburbanite that I am, I'm wondering how to work Starbucks and rush-hour traffic into my writing.