Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe, revised by Donald Russell, Loeb Classical Library, no. 199, Harvard UP, 1965.

Aristotle’s Poetics, a foundational text of Western literary theory, offers a meticulously structured examination of tragedy, mimesis, catharsis, and dramatic form. From a Marxist perspective, however, its analytical brilliance coexists with historically conditioned ideological limitations.

Historical Materialism and Poetics

From the standpoint of historical materialism, Poetics reflects the ideological framework of the slave-owning Athenian polis, in which artistic production was both shaped by and served to reinforce class hierarchies. Aristotle’s emphasis on tragedy as the highest form of art—rooted in the lives of nobles and kings—implicitly marginalizes the experience of the laboring classes. His insistence on the necessity of hamartia and the tragic hero’s “fall from greatness” enshrines the worldview of the ruling elite, reproducing the aesthetic consciousness of a society in which political power and economic control were the prerogatives of a narrow class stratum.

Aesthetic Form and the Base–Superstructure Dialectic

Marxist aesthetics, from Lukács to Eagleton, has grappled with the dialectic between artistic form and the socio-economic base. Poetics excels in formal analysis—its taxonomy of plot structures, character types, and unity of action anticipates modern narratology—yet it divorces these forms from their material conditions of production. By abstracting tragedy into universal principles of beauty, pity, and fear, Aristotle obscures the concrete historical realities shaping Athenian drama: civic festivals funded by the state, choruses drawn from citizen-soldiers, and the ideological function of theater in cultivating civic unity.

Thus, while Poetics illuminates the mechanics of narrative construction, it neglects the relations of production underpinning art, an omission Marxist critics would later address by foregrounding class struggle, labor, and ideology in aesthetic theory.

Ideology, Catharsis, and Social Function

Aristotle’s concept of catharsis—the purgation of pity and fear—invites Marxist scrutiny for its conservative social function. Tragedy, in his view, restores emotional balance and social harmony rather than fostering revolt or critique. As Brecht would later argue, such aesthetic closure risks neutralizing dissent, transforming art into a tool of hegemony rather than emancipation. From a Marxist lens, Poetics thus serves less as a universal theory of art than as a document of class ideology, enshrining the values of order, hierarchy, and moral resolution within aesthetic form.

Conclusion: Enduring Value and Limitations

Despite these critiques, Poetics remains indispensable for understanding the formal evolution of narrative art. Its systematic approach to plot, character, and structure continues to inform literary criticism across traditions. Yet, form cannot be divorced from history: the tragedies Aristotle celebrated were not mere aesthetic objects but products of specific economic, political, and ideological conditions.

Poetics offers profound formal insights but requires historical materialist reinterpretation to uncover the class-bound assumptions underpinning its theory of art.