I am happy to get your letters,
but I am sorry to hear all the bad
news, although I know nothing gets
the best of your good natures. I
don’t know what else I can tell you.
You must know by now that Dorn
read in SF Nov 12, but did you know
that your letter arrived saying
What does it all mean?
Somewhere in the Helenistic
period, between Aristotle and
Horace, the procedure must have
become academic, and the concerns
became philological instead of
philosophical, pedagogical attempts
to codify the advances of previous
ages, worrying about the transmission
of texts.
Aristotle’s sense of imitatio
was that art should imitate the uni-
versal, the generic form, the rational
principle lying behind the random
multiplicity of particular objects
as we experience them, which was a
dialectic to get at the common denom-
inators of human experience, whereas
Horace’s sense of imitatio was that
an artist should imitate the methods
of other authors. The subject became
narrower, away from great heroic sub-
jects such as in the Iliad, and
became more private, concerned more
with exact representation. In other
words, it became an imitation not of
the universal, but of the particulars.
Here lies the problem of the neoclassics.
The neoclassics, in trying to
recapture the ancient wisdom, naturally
assumed that Aristotle and Horace agreed
with each other, but in fact they
are separated by a couple hundred
years and their interests are basically
opposite. Aristotle was concerned with
philosophical theory, but Horace was
concerned with rhetorical technique.
Aristotle wanted to get at the universal,
but Horace only wanted a set of rules
by which he could influence an audience
more effectively. The neoclassics
therefore thought that they could get
at the universal through strict
imitation of particularities, and they
went through great pains trying to
justify adherence to the four so-called
Unities, which said that if you want
your play to be believed you better
make it conform rigidly to what happens
in the real world: you can’t jump in
the play from London to Rome, your
characters can’t grow old in the time
it takes to perform the play, and so
on, which was a lot of bull, and
which Samuel Johnson and Colleridge
and Keats said later was a lot of bull,
giving us “suspension of disbelief”
and “negative capability” and so forth,
which are nice concepts, and good sense
too.
The neoclassics, inspired by the
rise of the scientific method, tried
to measure qualitative things in
quantitative terms; in other words,
they thought they could get at
the universal, or the divine, if they
could make it more precise, more
particular, i.e. secular. Gradually
the neoclassic sense of imitatio came
to be that art should imitate
particular psychological states, the
way an object is apprehended rather
than the object itself, but they still
had great difficulty with this notion
because inherent in it are a confusion
of opposing principles.
Thence follows the shift from
mimetic principles to symbolic ones,
losing hold of that common denomin-
ator: anything should be represented
by anything.
But these are simple things.
Simple, when the dog of life is barking
up your nose; change is simple when
some things never change; they’re
simple things because they don’t make
an inexplicable fool of you, growling
and biting ahold of your tattered
motley. Although it’s not all that
bad for me.
I’m rarely sick; my good friends
don’t get in accidents on Halloween
night; I don’t have to worry about
part-time jobs. My only gripe I guess
is that I have too much I want to do,
and to do one is not to do another.
To see friends is not to study; to
write is not to see friends; to study
is not to write. What to do? I’ve
started a campaign, writing letters
to my friends about my studies, but
I feel as though I’m shortchanging
all three.
love,
Tom
13 November 1975