ford, a. (2011) review of heath, m. unity in greek criticism and poetry

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Unity in Greek Criticism and Poetry

ANDREW FORD

Malcolm Heath, Unity in Greek Poetics (Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 1989) 224 pages, $49.95

o?) y??> YBVoit' ?v etc ye toi? jtoMo?c ?oo? ?

Oedipus Tyrannus 845

T JL HE notion of organic form may well be one of

the most significant, fruitful, and odd ideas the Greeks have

given us. The idea that there can be in nature or in art composite entities so formed that, in Aristotle's famous prescription, "each

part must stand together so that if any part is removed or dis

placed the whole is dislocated and put out of joint" (Poetics

51a32-34), was fundamental not only to Greek aesthetics and

literary criticism, but also to a wide range of thought including

political theory, ethics, and biology. Yet it is, upon reflection, far

from obvious why a play or a painting should be structured like an animal. Nor is it clear why the optimal size and structure of a

state should have anything to do with the constitution of ani

mals, plants, and tools (Politics 1326a34-26b26). And why should virtue resemble "well made works of craftsmen" so as to

be destroyed by excess and deficiency (Ethics 1106b5-14)? Why indeed should it be imagined that all animals are so constructed

that their parts form a whole that "in some way" serves the soul

(Parts of Animals 645b 15-20)? Today we may assume that post modernisms have overthrown organicist thinking, but it is in

fact still vital as a method of reading if not always as a theory of art. One way to appreciate the significance of such ideas and to

understand their persistent appeal is to ask how and where they arose and how they have been reinterpreted. Malcolm Heath's

brief but highly ambitious and provocative Unity in Greek Poet

ics (Oxford, 1989) invites us to reconsider in detail these funda

mental but often neglected questions. It is also odd that Heath's book is, to my knowledge, the only

full-length study of the ancient notion of organic unity, for the

126 UNITY IN GREEK CRITICISM AND POETRY

idea has obviously played a central role in the criticism of the

classics. One has only to think of the Homeric question, which was at first and still often remains a question of whether the

epics are unities or patchworks. Pindar too is a striking case of a

text which has provoked critics to supply for it some Grundge danke or Gedankengang as a way of reining in its astonishing

imagery. Heath's earlier book had focused on tragedy where the

identification of an underlying theme tying together all the scenes or speeches or images of a play has been the business of

very many critics. In his earlier approaches to the question, Heath argued that Greek literature was normally digressive in

practice, and hinted that Greek criticism was relatively indiffer

ent to ideals of unity.1 In the present book he follows up the lat ter argument with a history of the notion of literary unity. His

strategy is to study notions of unity in Greek literary and rhetor

ical critics, what he calls "secondary poetics," and to compare this with "primary poetics," the views of Greek poets and their

audiences about literature, a "network of aesthetic and technical

principles underlying literary production and reception of texts" (2). Comparing what critics prescribed with what poets aimed at and audiences expected leads Heath to make two

claims about Greek and Hellenizing Roman literature: first, our

notions of literary unity are only very late in being formulated

by Greek critics and self-reflective writers, and in fact are the

invention of the Neoplatonists (who play the villains of the

piece); second, Greek critics in fact describe real Greek practice and expectations, and so offer a way of reading ancient poetry that is preferable to imposing on it modern organicist assump tions. His history thus includes a positive argument that we

abandon our "centripetal" aesthetic assumptions that good lit

erature be unified or "thematically integrated" and instead read

classical literature "centrifugally," as it was read by the critics

we have.

Unity, as Aristotle said, has many meanings. For Heath, the

specious unity assumed in centripetal reading is anything that

goes beyond our "natural" expectations that an utterance

"make sense as a whole" or "hang together," that is, that it make

some point that suits its context and addressee (3). Misled by

organicist thinking, critics often assume that in literature we

may expect something more than this simple coherence and

assert a priori that every part of the literary work has a function

Andrew Ford 127

relative to the whole and that the work as a whole has a meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. In practice, Heath wants

to defend "digressive" passages in Greek literature and to resist

the idea that texts are "about" something deeper than what they

explicitly relate. This might provoke a rather strong atomistic

reading, a call against interpretation, but in effect what Heath

wishes to argue against are the methods of Anglo-American New Criticism. Hence he often substitutes for "unity" the term

"thematic integration," a more limited kind of unifying charac

teristic of that school, and the majority of his b?tes noires are

articles of the early 1960s, the surge of New Criticism into clas

sics (a development in which Arion played a central role). But the

idea that we need not always and at all costs seek unity in a work

of art is rather old news to one who follows debates in criticism.

It has been over two decades since New Criticism was "decon

structed," and at least as long since it was realized that its ideal

of an autonomous, perfectly achieved text was questionable. Heath's real target in fact, like most modern notions of litera

ture, comes from the eighteenth century.2 It was then that litera ture was redefined as part of the fine arts and the literary artifact

was reconceived as an autonomous aesthetic object operating under its own rules and requiring a special kind of critical atten

tion.3 Romanticism took up the elaboration of these views

wrought by idealist philosophy, creating a criticism thereby whose aim was to perceive in poetry an organic form which

joined form and content, the general and the particular. The

Romantics were particularly concerned with establishing a psy

chology of the creative artist, and they used the concept of unity to infuse the process of artistic creation with a kind of vitalism

thought characteristic of all organisms and opposed to mere

mechanical construction. Correspondingly, the ideal artifact

was no longer seen as the object of classical rational analysis but

as the result of a dynamic process or activity in which the general

principle and its concrete symbolic embodiment become one. To

the extent that the New Criticism had a theory apart from its

pedagogically useful practices, it may be said to have extended

this psychology into a metaphysics, maintaining that what a

poem said and what it was or "did" were one indivisible thing; rhetorical analysis of "style" was thought to be the same as ana

lyzing imaginative impact ("content").4 Such psychology and

metaphysics do indeed seem to go beyond any Greek remarks on


the work of art as a whole, completed structure, but it is worth

exploring how far these later developments are indebted to the

first critics in the West.

Although pure New Criticism may be dead as a doornail, Heath may be read as addressing a larger problem ?the seem

ingly inescapable but theoretically unjustifiable assumption that we should read our texts in such a way as to piece together a

"deeper" but inexplicit meaning in them. This larger, implicit

meaning is what is guaranteed and discovered by assumptions of

unity, and its attractions persist even after we have admitted that texts are not so perfectly controllable. For the essential organi cist strategy of connecting apparently heterogeneous elements

in a text into a larger, inexplicit whole recurs at least as a prelim

inary move in structuralism and poststructuralism, even if their

final product is not so well wrought an urn.5 Structuralists will not hesitate to bring out a hidden meaning in the name Laius if

it makes a categorical opposition appear; even agnostic decon

structors proceed by bringing parts of texts together (for exam

ple, the meanings of pharmakon in various parts of the

Phaedrus) in order to show their failure to cohere. Although the

goals of such readings are far from the New Critical practice of

finding some unparaphrasable, although finally reassuring,

irony in the text, in that preliminary move both are reading as

closely (and organically) as New Critics. (This might be seen by

asking how far each specific interpretation would be "put out of

joint" if the passage it discusses were removed or displaced.) If one puts aside their different agendas, what is new in the way

they read seems chiefly to be a determination to seek new ele

ments of the text (from metaphorical meanings, categorical

oppositions, phonemes, to contingencies of margins and book

production) that may be activated to reveal this new unity or

antiunity. On the theoretical level, too, unity has a way of

returning as a feature of the "system." Structuralists posit

highly organized and interacting patterns of thought some

where in the human mind or "culture," even if these are only

partly realized in a given text or rite. Unwary deconstructors are

in danger of transposing the scorned unity onto "discourse," an

inescapable realm ruled by antimetaphysical laws like "trace"

and "difference." In a similar way, the history or ideology of some Marxian criticism sometimes takes on the aspect of an

autonomous power (Bradley's "bloodless ballet of timeless cate

Andrew Ford 129

gories") whose universal workings move through and determine

every idea and expression. Post-, non-, and antiformalisms have

not yet managed to get formalism completely out of their sys

tems, as Heath observes in a footnote (149).

Unity, then, persists as a major theoretical and historical

problem, and any history of the critical concepts involved is

worth attention. Read in this way, Heath's book provokes three

questions: (1) Is his avowedly unorthodox history of the devel

opment of the concept of organic unity right? (2) Whether or

not his history be granted, does "secondary poetics" tell us the

"right" way to read ancient literature? (3) Are the centrifugal

readings Heath offers a fair and adequate account of the ancient

texts? The first question is what grounds the other two, and

Heath's history of organic unity will be the main object of the

present discussion. The short answer to the second question is

"no": Heath himself allows, as he must, that "secondary poet ics" may not have "correctly grasped the nature of even contem

porary composition" (8); thus ancient criticism must have more

complex uses for modern readers. The last question may pro voke the most outraged denials from devoted readers of the texts in question, but Heath's resistance to aestheticist interpre tations of ancient literature is to be welcomed, not only because

it is a good idea to take one's spectacles off from time to time and

hold them to the light to check for rosy tinges, but also because

it is right not to forget the accidental, the contingent, and the

particular in works of art. As the range of literature discussed is

remarkably broad, extending from Homer through Statius,

taking in rhetoric and historiography, Heath's interpretative sal

lies are best regarded primarily as illustrations of the direction

centrifugal poetics would take, and perhaps too as provocations to the complacent New Critics among us. Suffice it to say here

that Heath would put on warning any who think that Hecuba

must be put back together again or who would see in the Geor

gics' Aristaeus epyllion anything more than "a suitably splendid finale to ... an artistically wrought poem in the neoteric man

ner" (63). This aspect of his work must concern any critic who

speaks of "echoes" in the text, or "cross references," "parallels," or "ironies," and who tries to articulate what a text is "really about."

We turn then to the history of notions of literary unity, after

which I will consider what the uses of "secondary" poetics may


be for the study of ancient literature. Heath's history is worth

engaging in detail because, as he shows, the major critical texts

are not simple and are too often quickly glossed over. I find it an

unsuccessful challenge to such communis opinio as we have on

the matter, and in fact will propose my own alternative early his

tory of the idea. I take this opportunity because Heath, always a

stimulating challenger of our assumptions, has raised funda

mental questions I don't find adequately answered elsewhere.

Heath's history is as wide as his literary scope, extending from

the Phaedrus to the Homeric scholia, but I will focus on the key stage: when does literary organicism originate?

Plato's Phaedrus

Heath turns first to Plato's Phaedrus, both to show that it

does not recommend anything like what we mean by organic

unity and to point out that it prima facie demonstrates that no

such principle underlies the composition of Platonic dialogues. His prima facie case is that the Phaedrus is not "thematically

integrated" but falls into two halves around 257c. The first sec

tion considers the nature of love and the soul through a series of

rhetorical showpieces, while the second uses these speeches to

launch a discussion about rhetoric. Thematically, these discus

sions are irreducibly separate, and centripetal attempts to unify the dialogue by declaring it to be "really" about either love or

rhetoric, or by seeking some other unexpressed Hauptzweck that unites them, are vain. In Heath's view, such diversity of

themes was the norm for philosophical dialogue, and is trou

bling to modern readers only because they have misread a

demand for organic unity into the famous passage in which Soc

rates compares speeches and animals. This passage will be an

obstacle for his history, and so we turn to it first.

Objecting to Lysias' speech, Socrates says it was indiscrimi

nately (x?ot]v) thrown together, one part just following on the

next (?^>E^f\?), without any "logographic necessity" that would

explain why each passage comes where it does and not else

where (264b3-8). Socrates goes on to say that every speech should be composed like a living organism. In Heath's transla

tion (17):

I think you will agree with this point at least: that every text should be constructed like a living organism with its

Andrew Ford 131

own body; it must not lack head or feet, but must have its

middle parts and its extremities, composed so as to fit

appropriately with each other and the whole (jtq6JTOVT(x

?Kkf\koi?; Kai ta) ?tap).

Heath (16-22) will argue that this is not a recommendation

for organic unity on three grounds: (1) There is no mention of

"unity" here, only of "completeness." (2) There is no implica tion that a text must have a single theme, analogous to an ani

mal's soul. (3) In any case, this structuring "in bodily form" is

only one among many valid ways of organizing texts.

The first point is true: Plato does not, here or in related pas

sages, use the word unity: the speech is not said to need a unified

body, but only "some sort of body" (o??fi?ti ?xovta). From this

Heath deduces that Plato requires in this passage simply that

compositions be "whole" or "complete" and "appropriately"

(jTQejtovtco?) arranged, the same points he made in the Gorgias

(503e). Since completeness does not imply organic structure, the upshot is that one might therefore insert digressions in a text

"appropriately." One might wonder what right Heath has, hav

ing jettisoned the idea of the whole, to speak of "digressions" at

all, since it is not clear from what they would be digressing. But

a more immediate question is whether Heath has given an ade

quate paraphrase of the text. For, in insisting that Plato is speak

ing of "completeness" rather than "oneness," Heath suppresses Plato's very troublesome "whole" (?Xov), assimilating it some

times to completeness and sometimes to appropriateness:

"[Plato] speaks rather of completeness (requiring that a text

have all and only the parts which it ought to have) and of coher

ent or appropriate order (those parts should be appropriately

arranged)" (18). I have emphasized the "and only" because it

would seem to concede that such a construct deserves the name

organic unity.6

Perhaps for this reason, Heath does not wish to press the

point (cf. 21). Yet it is a significant one, for it helps us distinguish Plato from Gorgias, whom some7 have taken as his forerunner in

Helen ?5 : "painters delight the sight when they fashion a single and complete bodily form (ev o(b\ia Kai oxHfxa teXe?oDc ajteg

yaocovxai) out of many bodies (oc?ucctcdv) and colors." Gorgias seems to have in mind stories like that of Zeuxis' having painted his Helen by combining the best features of five beautiful


women.8 Hence the artistic composition he describes is not

organic unity particularly, but rather a "composite" unity which

arrives when various parts scattered in different places are put

together to make a one, without specifying how this one is inter

nally organized. But note that if Gorgias says "one" but not

"whole," Plato does say "whole," and if he conceived of the

parts as not merely assembled but fitting with each other and

with the whole, would it not be otiose to add "one"?9

Heath's second argument is to insist that the analogy between

speech and animal is adduced only to illustrate principles of

appropriate order ?not unity. Hence to infer from the analogy with an organism the idea that the parts of a text are held

together by supporting some larger "soul" or Lebensprinzip is, as Heath terms it, "speculative" (19). Here we cannot avoid

mentioning the hermeneutical problem that, in investigating this text, Heath assumes in advance the very centrifugal theory he wishes to commend. He insists that the application of the ani

mal analogue must be limited to one aspect of the literary work, its organization, since it is from that point that the analogy arises.10 He thus rules out a priori any implications that might extend the argument beyond such a limited point in order to

prove that Plato does not believe that texts can have implica tions.11 I do not doubt that Heath would rule out many of my

objections to the extent that they tease out inexplicit inferences

from given passages by adducing other passages. Still, one wants

to cry out, "Isn't living the function of the soul?" (Rep. 353d) and insist that the Phaedrus is demanding something more of the

work of art than the Gorgias' recommendation of order. For if it

is invalid to infer from this passage that a speech, like an animal, has a soul toward which its parts contribute, why does Plato

compare a text with an animal rather than with, say, a ship, which needs all its various beams in their right order, or with a

temple, as he does in Gorgias 503 e?

Two pages later Heath more or less gives the point away and

admits that "if an object lacks essential components or contains

superfluous ones, or if a flawed disposition of its components makes it a mere aggregate of parts and not an ordered system, then it is not a single, complete entity." (21) We have here a good

practical definition of organic unity, including the implication that the whole ("system") is somehow greater or other than the

sum of its parts. But Heath will withdraw from this implication,

Andrew Ford 133

calling it a "purely conceptual point." Most theory is. But his reasons for faulting this theory confuse the (correct) claim that a theory has an in-built difficulty with the claim that no such

theory is proposed. Heath observes that because what is "appropriate" will vary

with genre and function, Plato offers us no "substantive criteria"

for deciding on what the "appropriate selection and arrange ment of parts must be in practice." He reasons that because

Plato does not offer us substantive criteria for adjudicating

"rightness" in composition, we need not conclude that all

speeches ought to be so made. At this point (20) the Rhetorica

ad Alexandrum and Aristotle's Rhetoric are adduced to show

that some speeches are best composed piecemeal (Kat? u?qo?), others step by step (?c^e^fj?), and hence that composing "in

bodily form" (ooofiaxoBL? ?) is only an "optional" strategy:

"[W]hile we are at liberty to believe that every text ought to be ... thematically integrated, there are no grounds in the Phae

drus for attributing that belief to Plato" (21 ).12 It is true that in rhetoric (as in other genres, such as historiog

raphy), composition "in bodily form" is only one technique among others for presenting material intelligibly. But in the

Phaedrus Plato clearly means to deny that there is any distinc

tion between rhetoric and other kinds of writing, whether trage dies or laws. This means that his prescriptions will apply to all

good writing in any form. Resisting such a conflation of all

forms of composition is what made Aristotle write separate trea

tises on Poetics, where organic unity is highly prized, and on

Rhetoric, where it plays no role.

It is also true, as Heath says, that the "appropriate" and its

congeners, the "proper" (oikblov), the "fitting" (aQuertrov), the

"right moment" (raiQ?c;), have a central role in sustaining the

ideal of unity for Plato (as they will for Aristotle). And clearly these depend on the function (egyov) of the particular text or

genre, with the result that a full set of procedures for achieving artistic unity cannot be set out. The reason for this is apparent in

the Politicus, where Plato discusses how far scientific measure

ment can help us decide questions of ethics and aesthetics. This

interesting passage (discussed by Heath on 24-25) is announced as a digression about digressions, or as a defense for having recorded some fruitless turns the argument has taken which

might seem pointless on future rereadings (283b). The stranger


sets about to give "a rational basis (rax? X?yov) for praising what is said in philosophical discussions or blaming it as either

longer or shorter than necessary" (283c). Toward this end, he

divides the art of measurement into measuring by comparing one thing with another, as in establishing relative length, speed, or number, and measuring according to a mean or norm. It is

only in reference to the latter that we may determine the good and the beautiful, considering "the mean (uixQiov), the appro

priate (jtQBJtov), the right moment (KaiQ?c), the necessary

(??ov) and all things which are established as a mean and not as

a limit" (284d-e). "All the arts and all their works will be

destroyed" if we attempt to measure their value in strictly quan titative terms (284a). Hence the "beautiful" is defined in the Phi

lebus (64e) as the inevitable result of "measure and proportion"

(uixQOV Kai ov\i\iexQ??), and Plato would not offer us substan

tive (i.e., rhetorically grounded) means for discovering and pre

dicting what is "right" or "beautiful" in a text. But we still

should seek them, and the means for doing so are available, of

course, in philosophy: philosophical dialectic will discover the true nature of the soul and will decide on that basis what it needs to hear in context. This is clear in the Phaedrus when Plato

repeats the key phrase "fitting with each other and with the

whole" in regard to tragedy: the true tragic art is not a matter of

being able to compose all sorts of speeches but of knowing how to make an organized structure (ovoxaoic) from them. It turns

out, of course, that for the tragedian to know how to handle

speeches "rightly" he would have to know the method of Collec

tion and Division (265d-e). And so the tragedian and the orator

and anyone who wants to write well depend on the philosopher. Note especially that it is precisely this demand for universal

organic principles in composition that puts writers in thrall to

the philosopher. From him they will learn the highest forms of

organic analysis: Collection involves being able to "bring

together under one single form particulars that are dispersed (etc uiav xe ?o?av owoQcbvxa ?yetv x? jtoMaxfl ?eojtag

fx?va)"; and Division proceeds by dividing things in two at their

natural articulations, "just as from one single body (&okeq be

ooouaxo? ?^ ?vo?) one divides the limbs into left and right." Hence I would say that Plato does indeed offer an ideal of

organic unity applicable to all written composition, but that it

Andrew Ford 135

depends on a slippery concept of the "appropriate" which he

defines as the special knowledge of the philosopher.

If we claim that Plato does recommend, at least in theory, an

organic unity for all writing, we might then be asked how it

cashes out in regard to the Phaedrus itself.13 For Heath the dia

logue is not simply irredeemably broken-backed, but naturally and rightly inorganic, because that is what is appropriate to the

genre of philosophical dialogue as determined by considering its

end. The end of such writing is only to instill philosophy in the

mind of the hearer, and so the writer is free to take any means

to that end, following up digressions and side issues (jtaQegya)

according to the interests of the interlocutor. Heath adduces the

passage cited from the Politicus and the divagating Theaetetus

and Sophist to confirm that in writing a philosophical dialogue Plato's norms for deciding what topics to pursue in what order

and how long to go on about them are not literary absolutes but

wholly relative to the student. "The appropriate structure of

philosophical discussion is: whatever an ideally skilled teacher

(Socrates) might say to some individual, with his particular pre

occupations and needs" (26). Hence in reading the Phaedrus

Heath concludes that, although the erotic speeches of the first

part are used as a point of departure in the second, the second

part has its own seriousness and purposes and is rather like

"extended action" in tragedy: "[T]he sole ?and sufficient ? rea

son for their being brought together ... lies in the person of

Phaedrus himself"; given these two people, the discussion pro ceeds "in a plausible way" (14).

My first response is to say that it is naive to ground the struc

ture of Platonic dialogues in assumed "real-life" characteristics

of the interlocutors. As soon as the "real," historical Phaedrus

entered the dialogue, he became as shapeable and usable as any element of fiction. Plato could summon from his character what

he liked and repress what he didn't as easily as he could produce a plane tree or the sound of cicadas. An equally important objec tion to this definition of the goal of the dialogue is that the Phae

drus is certainly not written for Phaedrus alone, but for its

readers. As the dialogue is at pains to point out in its final sec

tion, the mere fact of its being written condemns it to be bandied

about among all kinds of persons, even those who may have


ideas and interests very different from those of Phaedrus. Slav

ishly following the whims of some real Phaedrus would never

produce a text suited to meet this eventuality. But we are still left with an apparently bifurcated dialogue

and a demand for unity. If we take this demand seriously, we

may wonder why Plato didn't choose to expound it to someone

with more focused interests.14 One could always say that organic form is an ideal not always achieved, but while this is true, I

think there is more to be said. I will not attempt here yet another unified reading of the Phaedrus, but would point out that the

plea for unity is far from a passing and isolated dictum in the

dialogue and may have a function even if we don't arrive at a

consensus about the work's unity. I note that the two "halves" of the work both end with prayers. After the rhetorical speeches Socrates prays to Love that Phaedrus might no longer waver but live his life "simply," ajiX ?, with undivided focus on loving and

philosophical discourse (257b). A purely moral hope perhaps, but the adverb also describes a literary quality, equivalent to

Horace's simplex (as Heath notes, 63, n. 18). And the end of the

dialogue is a prayer to Pan, that we be beautiful within (?v?o 6ev) and what we have outside (e^coOev) be harmonious in the

highest sense (<|>iXia) with our inside. If we have taken Plato's instructions to heart, how would we make this last prayer fit

with the first and with the whole? Perhaps the first prayer for

"simplicity" may be interpreted only in terms of the first half: that Phaedrus tend to his immortal soul, moved from "within," as distinct from the soulless body, moved from "outside" (245e). So read, it is a prayer for simplicity in the sense that outside

match inside, action follow spiritual good. But when we have

finished the text may we not add another recurrence of these terms when recollection "within" the soul is opposed to the

"outer" recollection of writing (275a)?15 Connected in this way, the prayer to Pan, son of Hermes, father of the logos, is a prayer for "simplicity" in us and in our writing. The complex of pas

sages adds up to a moral and psychological demand for a quality which, in literature, we call organic unity: a matching of inner

and outer, meaning and form, content and style. Whether the prayers of the dialogue have been answered is a

matter for dispute, but it does at least provoke us to try to read

by Collecting and Dividing its phrases. Thereby we ask of the text the same question that Socrates is always putting to him

self: "whether by chance I am a beast more furious and compli

Andrew Ford 137

cated than Typho, or am by nature a tamer and simpler

(?itkovoxEQOv) animal" (230a).16 In fact, irrespective of what we decide, I think, with others, that this must be the purpose of

the demand for unity here: combining this proclamation with an apparently wandering text at the very least provokes us to

read in an analytical and synthetic way, and not to pass over

"chance" resemblances.17 The postulate of organic form then

would be a solution to the problem of committing one's living

thoughts to fixed writing: it is a way to teach readers to come

how to interrogate the text. Thereby Plato imposed on "fixed

and lifeless writing" interpretability and intelligibility for those

out of reach of the supple and adaptive dialectic.

Aristotle's Poetics

It would seem that Aristotle is yet more difficult to deprive of a

theory of organic unity, not only from his definition quoted at

the outset, but from his definition of the ideal tragic plot as "the

imitation of a complete and whole action of a certain size" (xeX,

eia? Kai oXrj? Jtga^eoo?... exotic xt ji?yeOoc). Aristotle goes on to define "whole" as having a beginning, middle, and end

(50b24-27), and says that proper magnitude is essential because

if a text or an animal is too big "one can't consider it all at once

and its unity and wholeness (x? ev Kai x? ?X,ov) are lost from

sight" (50b39-51a2).18 Heath grants Aristotle a "famous and

influential account of literary unity" but tries to drain it of its

force so that finally it is "consistent with, and in some respects

requires, a centrifugal aesthetic" (38). Aristotle, he argues, never proposes anything like our own concept of organic unity, and a true Aristotelian would not attempt to integrate the action

of a play and say it is "about" this or that: "nowhere in the Poet

ics can one find any hint of a centripetal or integrating approach to interpretation at the thematic level" (55). In addition, Heath

tries to establish that Aristotle would have accepted the digres sions in tragic as well as epic texts: "Aristotle's theory of unity

(and his more general discussion of appropriate order) in epic and tragedy finds no difficulty with mobile focus or extended

action ... and is compatible with ? indeed in epic it encour

ages?digression from the unifying praxis at the level of the

text" (55). Heath's analysis of Aristotle's "complete and whole" moves

rather quickly. He sees "complete" as the main term, glossed as

"whole," which is in turn defined as having a beginning, a mid


die, and an end. Unity in drama is a feature only of the plot and

is simply a matter of linking the beginning, middle, and end

actions in a probable causal sequence. But in that case one might continue a play beyond the resolution of its initial situation

("extended action") if the continuing action is causally con

nected with what precedes. In the same way, since Aristotle says in Poetics 8 that an action about one character is not necessarily

complete, Heath deduces that it is conversely true that a com

plete action may be about more than one character (his "mobile

focus").

This interpretation, which he calls a "permissive" reading, seems based on questionable inferences and fails to give any sense to Aristotle's key terms. As in his treatment of Plato,

Heath stresses "completeness" over "wholeness," for complete

ness is construable as more "permissive": "In Aristotle's theory unified implies single and complete; a text must have all that it

ought to have, as well as lacking what it ought not to have" (19, n. 16, italics his). Stressing completeness allows Heath to say that digressions and "mere" ornament are welcome if they fur

ther the dramatic purpose. But he gives "whole" none of its

proper force, as can be seen if we consider it in the Metaphysics. There "wholeness," as applied to artifacts or anything with

beginnings, middles, and ends, is defined as "(1) that from which

is absent none of the parts of which it is said to be naturally a

whole, and (2) that which so contains the things it contains that

they form a unity, and this in two senses ? either as being each

severally one single thing, or as making up the unity between

them ... the continuous and limited is a whole, when there is a

unity consisting of several parts present in it, especially if they are present only potentially, but, failing this, even if they are pre sent actually" (A26 1023b26-34, tr. W. D. Ross). The first part of the definition shows that, if we are to reduce the terms in

Poetics 50b24,19 completeness is to be assimilated to wholeness

rather than the reverse. The second part would seem to leave lit

tle room for digressions. Furthermore, Aristotle's reference to

unity present "potentially" in continuous and limited wholes

would seem to say that in a text there may be an unexpressed relation tying the elements together. This "whole" is surely an

organic whole, and as such is to be distinguished from a "total"

or an "all" (jt?v): "totals" are quantities with beginnings, mid

dles, and ends so aggregated that their position makes no

Andrew Ford 139

difference (water is a significant example); in "wholes," position makes all the difference (Metaphysics A 26 1024al-8; Z 16-17;

11-3). Why should these metaphysical concepts be applied to a

tragedy? Heath has a complicated argument to the effect that a

play should be complete so that it has as many things as possible in it that produce pity and fear; but it would seem that Aristot

le's reason is only so that it be beautiful. The Metaphysics says the greatest forms of the beautiful attend on "orderly arrange

ment," "proportion," and "definiteness in magnitude" (xa^i?,

ov\i\ie%Q?a, x? cuqiou^vov, M 3 1078a36), and the Poetics seems

to follow: "Beauty in an animal or in any thing which is assem

bled from other things must not only have its parts arranged, but

also must be of a certain size" (50b34-36).20

Taking another tack, Heath makes much of the fact that for

Aristotle the "unity" of tragedy resides in the muthos (51al6) and the praxis (51a32): "Aristotle does not talk of 'one poem' as

much as 'one muthos' which underlies the appropriate order of a

poem" (56). Heath uses a presumed distinction between what

he calls the "textual form" of a tragedy (comprising its lexis,

muthos, and opsis) and its "narrative" (muthos, entailing ethos,

dianoia) to infer that, while a digression is not permitted in a

"whole" action, Aristotle never says digressions may not be in a

tragic text (46). Hence in working out his text (i.e., writing

speeches and placing them), the poet regards it appropriate (55all?6) not only to produce a unified action but to arouse

these emotions.

This bipartite analysis of tragedy flouts Aristotle's own tripar tite scheme (50al0-12) and also seems anachronistic. Any dis

tinction we might make between a "story" and its "text" or

"expression" would seem to be swallowed up in the word logos, which is both the structure of a story and a given account of it.

Certainly the distinction is hard to put into Aristotelian Greek, and I am not surprised, as Heath is, that in speaking of proper

"magnitude" Aristotle seems to "slide" between referring to the

plot and to the text (esp. 51a7-8, 56al0-15, discussed on 44). One cannot appeal to the Rhetoric for the distinction between

lexis and dianoia, roughly "expression" and "thought." For in

the Poetics "expression" and "thought" are both subparts of

tragedy, ruled by the architectonic and unified muthos: in trag

edy, lexis or "style" is the expression of "thought," and

"thought" is saying what is germane and appropriate (x? evovxa


Kai x? ?Qu?xTovxa, 50b5), presumably what fits with the char

acter's situation in the story. For Aristotle, as for Plato, a ran

dom sequence of speeches, no matter how full of character and

nicely turned, would not further the goal of tragedy, as Heath

knows (50a29-31). Even "characters" are constrained by the

larger unity; they must be, among other things, consistent:

"even if they be inconsistent, let them be consistently inconsis

tent" (54a26-28). This last clause seems to me typical of Aris

totle's systematic thinking in the Poetics: it is not a "permissive" set of rules designed to leave broad leeway but an attempt to

bring every element of a play under the control of the ideally unified plot, systematizing even the unsystematic.

Heath appeals to Aristotle's treatment of epic to show that he

does permit digressions "on the level of text." In a difficult pas

sage Aristotle uses "episode" not, as usually in the Poetics, to

refer to a segment of the text, but to mean digression, adducing the catalogue of the ships (59a35?36). Moreover, digressions contribute to the special virtues of epic, length and grandeur, and so may be said to belong to the appropriate order even of an

"optimally unified" epic (54). One cannot object to this, for

Aristotle is quite clear at 62b2-3: ?xi fjxrov uta r\ uiurjoi? f| x v

?jtojtoi v. But problems arise when Heath tries to see Aristotle

recommending "digressive" episodes for tragedy, too. The far

thest he can get is to say "although Aristotle does not discuss

diversity and digression in tragedy, the regret which he

expresses in 59b28-31 at tragedy's inevitably greater uniformity

suggests that he would wish to see such opportunity for diversi

fication as does exist within the order appropriate to tragedy

exploited to the full; and there is no reason to suppose that he

would have objected if this were done, within limits, digres

sively." (54) Divining a sense of regret from these words is what

I would call speculative; even so, we are far from arriving at a

program commending "extended action" and the like in trag

edy, for "episodes" should be as "germane" (otKetov) to the plot as possible (55bl3,59b28).21

Heath's attempt to argue away the ideal of tragedy as embod

ying organic unity runs into the insuperable objection that it is

just in its greater concentration and compactness that tragedy excels epic, for tragic unity is "not watered down" with irrele

vant episodes (62b3-ll, discussed on 54-55). For the ideolo

gist, that a given epic may be in some ways not unified yet still

commendable does not overthrow the value of unity in poetry.

Andrew Ford 141

The Iliad is more unified than the Cypria, but the Oedipus more

unified still, as mimesis strives toward its perfect realization.

And so it has little weight to say that "extended plots and digres sive texts were not optimal for Aristotle; but this is no more

than a relative preference" (55). It is after all in the Poetics that

Aristotle says x? ?? x?Xo? uiyioxov ?jt?vxoov (50a23). A stronger argument by Heath in this connection is that,

while a unified praxis is the goal of the qualitative parts of trag

edy, the goal of tragedy itself is something larger, the production of pity and fear. Heath would put it that tragedy finally aims not

at unified plot structure but at emotional stimulus, and that

Aristotle does not impose the demand for unity on this level

(45). Hence "complete" tragedies may well include digressions or "mere" ornament if they further the cathartic purpose. Such

elements may even be said to be parts of the whole if they "take

off" from the text at a reasonable point (47).22 (Once launched

they can go on as long as they like.) Current interpreters of the

Poetics would respond that the emotional effect is enhanced by

unity: pity and fear arrive most strongly only after the perfectly structured text has forced upon us certain moral feelings. Still, it remains true and important that the final end of tragedy is not

the production of unified plots but the production of pity and

fear in the spectators. And anything that effects this is presum

ably welcome in a tragedy. But it would not be welcome in the

Poetics, which is trying to discuss as systematically as possible the rational procedures for achieving this emotional end. A

powerful but irrelevant speech might draw a shiver from Aris

totle, but he would not have any technical grounds for under

standing why it worked or for approving it in his treatise. A

similar case is the issue of dramatic "spectacle." Aristotle allows

that opsis has very powerful effects on the emotions but says it

has nothing at all to do with the tragic art (ipuxay yiKOv |i?v,

?xexv?xaxov ?? Kai f]Kioxa o?cetov xfj? jrotryxuajc;, 50b 16-17). Such things as horrific costumes and bombastic speeches were

no doubt everywhere in ancient theater, but Aristotle is trying to look through them to discover the best scientific way for a

writer of tragedies to succeed. It is vain to try to find a technical

justification of digression in this techn? and untrue to jettison the idea of organic unity in the attempt.

Hence I am again not surprised that Aristotle's account of

"appropriate" order is "incomplete" (41) because "no criteria

for assessing plots in abstraction from texts which realize them


can claim to constitute necessary conditions of an appropriately ordered text" (40). Heath is repeatedly troubled that organicists offer us no substantive means for discovering and predicting

what is "right" in a passage ?of Horace he will say, "... like

Plato he does not offer substantive criteria for evaluation" (64). But we cannot conclude that the apparent championing of unity has no force because it has no substantive criteria; we cannot

read a "permissive" sense into the "one" because it is governed

by the kairos. The point of the kairos is that it is not reducible to

art, and there will always be some central but slippery term like

decorum in classical criticism that regulates the application of

rules but which can't quite be cashed out. Plato used the "appro

priate" without defining it in order to make all good writing come under the special expertise and judgment of the Philoso

pher. It is on just this point that Isocrates often disputed Plato's

"Rhetoric," insisting that, because a sense of the kairos is essen

tial to the orator but not systematizable, there can never be a

fully teachable art of rhetoric. Aristotle vindicates writing "arts"

of rhetoric and poetics, but in the latter he will use the appro

priate, as he does the "probable," to shelter poetics from

demands of strict historical truth or rigorous philosophical cause and effect: if the stories in poetry need only be appropri

ately (i.e., probably) structured, they need not be true or per

fectly logical. The free play allowed by concepts like the

"appropriate" or the "proper" is essential to the structure of

these theories, and Greek aestheticians recurrently have recourse to such terms at the crucial moment when precept

must turn into execution.

In fact, this is not just a feature of classical aesthetics but part of the price of systematizing literature. Systematic analysis of lit

erature requires that concepts and values formed in different

spheres of inquiry be projected onto the literary object. So, on

one reading, organic theory in the Romantic period was a trans

fer to art of theological values, of a grand, beautiful, and intelli

gible design behind the mechanistic working of things.23 A

certain amount of slippage is needed in the literary system because one is assimilating individual speech acts, made in par ticular situations, to universal principles. In Plato and Aristotle, it might be argued, the central role held by terms like the "appro

priate" stems from the fact that the demand for organic unity was a transfer to written texts of an interest in and idealization

Andrew Ford 143

of unity from pre-Socratic cosmological and metaphysical spec ulation. Such is indicated by the use of the animal analogue in

both the Phaedrus and Timaeus, and by Aristotle's introduction

into the Poetics of terms like "one," "whole," and "complete," all of which are defined in the Physics and Metaphysics. When

notions like the "one" as the ideal form, or "unity" as a tension

of opposites, enter literary theory (mediated, at least in Aristot

le's case, by medicine and biological studies), some adjustments need to be made.24 (In a similar way, the term katharsis plays a

key role in defining tragedy for the Poetics, even though its liter

ary meaning is not altogether easy to disentangle from its use in

telestic ritual, music, and medical theory.) To attempt an "art" of speech is to reduce speech to rules and

forms; placing an unartful concept in the center of that system of rules is necessary to account for the variety and unpredictabil

ity of great writing. The "right" is an escape valve by which one

may release other unwanted pressures on text ?social, philo

sophical, utilitarian. Far from being a defect in the system, then, the "appropriate" is what makes classical (and indeed also neo

classical) literary criticism possible, and allows it to claim to be more than an arid formalism. (Heath's valued "variety" is just such a term for him, a good in itself that presumably explains

without predicting good composition of texts.) As my chief objections to Heath's history are centered in this

earlier period, and as the early history of this important topic is so little gone into, I may conclude by summing up my alternative

history. In my view Plato did indeed extend a sophistic idea

about artful composition into an ideal of organic literary unity.

Fifth-century rhetoric had as one of its main achievements the

analysis of speeches into separate parts and the stipulation of the

functions proper to each. (This clearly is the point from which

Plato takes off in his Phaedrus, 266d-267a.) It may be that Gor

gias influenced Plato when he noted that originally separate

parts could be combined into a beautiful one, although he did not express this as an organic whole. In any case, the ideal of the one as a perfect form had had an aesthetic and quasi-logical

appeal at least since Parmenides, and in this vein Plato insisted on unity as a virtue in theory (if not always in practice) for all

well-made speeches, significantly using the animal as analogue. This enabled him to universalize rhetoric as comprehending all

good composition and to systematize it under the aegis of philo


sophical Collection and Division. Isocrates resisted this system

atization, always insisting that the kairos was undefinable and

unteachable, and organic unity plays no role in Aristotle's treat

ment of the rhetorical art. But in his Poetics Aristotle did take up Plato's concept and his analogue, although for his own pur

poses. Whereas Plato recommended grounding fine writing in

philosophy, Aristotle used poetic unity based on the probable and the likely as a way of finding order and system in the imita

tive arts without reducing them to history or philosophy. In fact, it is arguable that the postulate of artificial organic wholes was

the founding move in treating poetry as literature, as fiction

which, while indeed capable of having educational and moral

influence in society, is made in accordance with an art that is not

the art of politics, nor of the sciences, nor history, but the art of

poetry (Poetics 60b 13-21). This was a break which the Poetics

itself made possible and what distinguished it from the abun

dant, if mostly lost, historical, quasi-scientific, philosophical, and moral criticism of poetry that preceded it. If some of the

laws of poetry are independent of other laws, they must never

theless have had some sanction for Aristotle, and he found that

sanction in a postulate about poetry that has remained central to

academic criticism to the present day: all its elements, although not finally answerable to the world of politics, or of philosophy, or the real world, must answer at least to each other, and find

their form and function as parts of a whole seeking its proper end.25

There is no doubt that in ancient criticism these ideas have

nothing like the centrality they assumed in the Romantic period and later. Plato and Aristotle were less interested in con

structing a theory of literature than in incorporating an under

standing of literature into their philosophic systems.26 Yet, in my

view, the postulate of a perfectly unified, perfectly intelligible, work of verbal techn?, even if impossible in practice and theoret

ically compromised from the start, was what enabled properly

"literary" criticism to be started. It was an ideal that at once con

stituted "the literary" as a class of writings that could be

expected to work in ways peculiar to itself and also provided

philosophical and rhetorical critics with abstract and systematic

premises on the basis of which to discuss and evaluate this new

entity. This master demand persisted even as it was modified and

corrupted, as when applied to historiography and rhetoric, as

Andrew Ford 145

Heath shows. The Neoplatonists then must not be understood as inventing the concept of organic unity but as extending its

integrating strategy to include elements of the text ? such as the

setting, the names of characters ? that had been passed over as

details, contingent elements, in earlier readings. They were not

the last to find new grist for the old mill.

After this initial period,27 I find Heath's history valuable for

showing the hazardous history of organicism in later rhetorical

theory and rhetorically influenced theories of historiography. Here he shows that some idea of organic unity was often

repeated but given little practical force, or was reinterpreted so

that it could be combined with irreconcilable principles. The

rhetorical approach was fundamentally not organicist, but it was

important and long lived. Heath provides much evidence for

this part of ancient literary reception, especially in the Homeric

scholia.28 Throughout, he quite rightly highlights the role of

"variation," poikilia, as a literary virtue for Isocrates (and a vice

for Plato), and traces its enduring importance in rhetorical criti

cism. In particular, he throws into relief an important set of

terms, new to me, a cluster deriving from Rhetoric and the Poet

ics for strategic "delaying" and "varying." Of course, there is at any time no single "secondary poetics,"

but a congeries of rival ones, and I would insist that notions of

organic form belong, at least since Plato, to the history of Greek

literary criticism alongside the views Heath documents. But it

remains then to ask about the use of ancient critical theories for

reading ancient literature.

Criticism and Literature

The history of criticism is interesting both in itself, as a strand in

the history of ideas, and as providing a perspective from which to check our own assumptions about literature. But Heath raises

another of its possible uses, as a guide to "historically valid"

(155) reading. I would not hold that the history of the idea of lit

erary unity I advocate here tells us how to read Greek literature.

Just because a directive that writings should have an organic

unity is issued from the groves of academe does not mean that

any poets then or thereafter were obliged to do anything other

than what they had wanted to do all along. But Heath would

claim a greater significance and validity for ancient criticism. If we ought to be aware of our own "presuppositions and prefer


enees" when reading these "texts from a remote culture," "[i]t

follows that if we wish to understand Greek texts we need to

reconstruct, among other things, the constraints and ideals of

coherence which informed their composition" (3). This is a

defensible historicist hermeneutic, and as such should engage those who would set up as experts on ancient literature. To be

tenable, though, it must face two problems. The first is that con

temporaries (like any particular audience) are imperfect guides to literature. Heath responds that a "convergence between

ancient theory and practice" has at least "evidential value" (11) and that to assume "a measure of continuity and understanding

within the Greek literary tradition" has more to be said for it

than to assume that ancient practice "coincidentally" coincides

with our preferences. But this recourse to "secondary poetics,"

increasingly common in Homeric studies, becomes particularly

questionable if we consider the Homeric scholia, a millennium or more removed from the texts. Heath admires the scholiasts

because they took from Hellenistic rhetorical theory a "flexible

interpretative model, and one well-adapted to their object of

study," Homer (?ntamo?Ki?o? (103). It is fair to say that there is no reason to presuppose that the scholiasts' preconceptions about Homer are less appropriate than ours, and Heath notes

that "the cultural continuity was greater, not least because of

the extent to which the Homeric poems formed and dominated

later Greek literary practice" (122). Yet the cultural continuity from an Ionian bard to an Alexandrian librarian may in the end

be pretty thin, and chronological proximity is no guarantee of

fidelity. We cannot suppose that Blake read Milton more cor

rectly than did C. S. Lewis simply because he was culturally con

tinuous with him and a century or so closer in the bargain. Moreover, Heath fails to see that every critic or reader uses

books for purposes of his or her own. This means not only that

"secondary" poetics was in reality far from univocal, but also

that it can never be regarded as the disinterested exposition of

the way these poems seemed to their ancient readers. The Hom

eric scholia, for example, come to us through schoolmasters

who had particular tasks to do. Hence, in the criticism they

practiced, poikilia sometimes seems less an authentic Greek lit

erary virtue than a way of dismissing what is not understood: to

label a passage as "variation" may describe without explaining it

(except insofar as it tautologically appeals to the author's inten

Andrew Ford 147

tion to vary or to the audience's needs for rest and spice). For a

specific case Heath takes the scholia on Helen's catalogue of

Greek warriors in the teichoskopia: they commend Homer's

"variation" in having each Greek praised by a different person or

in a different way. Heath seconds this observation and objects

(109, n. 23) to attempts to read significance into the fact that

Ajax is given such short shrift in the catalogue (he is identified by one line, 3.229, as opposed to nine for Agamemnon and twenty six for Odysseus). But one may grant that Homer wishes variety and still wonder why he has chosen to use brevity as his means

of variation and Ajax in particular as its object. Anyone who has

read a good deal of the Homeric scholia knows that the value of

ancient criticism cannot reside in its mere antiquity but must be

in its adequacy to the texts; we are always taking from them

what we find congenial and discarding the rest.

The second problem besetting historical hermeneutics is the one I referred to in discussing the Phaedrus: we get the historical

understanding by which we hope to regulate the reading of

ancient texts from interpreting other "texts" (whether they be

Thucydides, inscriptions, or artifacts); but are we to read these as unified or not? Heath's answer (5, n. 3) is that "naturally" we

do have to make some effort at putting a text together as far as

we can, and in criticism the preferred interpretation is that which is both most comprehensive and economical. But there must be limits to our synthesizing impulses: "The a priori inte

grating tendency must, however, be controlled by a historical

understanding of the kinds of interpretation appropriate and

plausible in a given case; and this is the aim of my reconstructive

poetics." This answer, while inevitable, proves to be significant, since it in fact limits in advance what Heath is willing to con

sider as "appropriate" or "plausible" interpretations. Some form

of this hermeneutic circle always dogs interpretation, and the

best answer may simply be "you pays your money and you takes

your chances." But note that, although relentlessly opposed to

larger unities, Heath still must interpret his texts in light of a

larger literary whole, an historical plausibility or appropriate ness that derives from a sum of texts. This means that his alter

native criticism remains, like New Criticism and like any

"formalism," intrinsic, and so will send interpretation back to

larger, if more loosely evoked, unities.29 Hence it is not acciden

tal that the "center" remains in his notion of the "centrifugal,"


even as "digressions," supposedly to be valued in themselves,

reincorp?rate an idea of the whole.

This rhetorical secondary poetics, then, does not offer a real

alternative to the vexing problem of unity I mentioned earlier, and this may be due to the fact that properly literary criticism

was founded on the assertion of unity. It seems that, even now, once we set out to sequester literary interpretation from other

forms of reading, it follows hard upon us to read texts in a way that accounts for the presence of each of its elements and its rela

tion to the others. Until recently, such a procedure might have

been felt to lend literary studies an air of scientific precision and

objectivity by converting its slippery object of study into the

datum of the text. But as it becomes more clear that intrinsic

criticism may be asking too much of a text when it asks it to

explain itself, we enter a period in which literary texts are

increasingly studied as documents whose construction is of less

interest than the light they may cast on the society or culture

that produced them. This approach risks flattening out or ignor

ing what is most remarkable in such texts, yet the prospects for

establishing a literary study that is theoretically distinct from

history, sociology, or psychology (indeed, that may describe the

supposedly nonliterary reading of those disciplines) are not

bright. One hardly knows how to use secondary poetics to

ground literary studies in such a way as to escape the appeal of

abstract unity and the formalism it entails. Perhaps only Gorgias in the early Greek tradition proposed a nonorganicist way of

reading that did not reincorp?rate the center; at least one could extract from him (possibly following Democritus?) a materialist

view of reading that atomizes the logos into a series of discrete

assaults on our senses. His metaphorical language in the Helen seems to suggest that language falls on the mind and stamps it in

mechanical fashion, affecting us without communicating any

larger pattern from which to construe a meaning or knowledge. Antithetical to reasoned explication, such a view at least accounts for the experience we have had of being deeply moved

by a poem long before we understood it. But it is hardly a work

able academic criticism.

The consequence of these studies, then, should not be rigidly to regulate our reading but to provide a history of one strain in

the reception of classical texts. Nevertheless, I think the study of

ancient criticism in relation to ancient literature has more uses

Andrew Ford 149

than documenting Rezeptionsgeschichte. At least I think several

such uses can be shown in the particular case of the idea of

organic unity. On a basic level, if organicism was being dis

cussed among critics of a given time, the idea might have been

something that other writers of that time would have responded or referred to. In fact, if, as has been argued, the sophists were

mooting ideas of the literary "one" in the fifth century, then

unity might be an effect that writers sought to create or to flout

in structuring their works.30 Such is the lesson I take from

Heath's demonstration that Isocrates embraced "variety" and

digression in practice and only feigned that he was forced to do

so by ineptness or stress of circumstance. But does not Isocrates'

need to apologize itself imply awareness of some ideal of unity? A second way that contemporaneous ideas of language and order

may have entered literature is as materia po?tica. For some kinds

of poets at least, rhetorical notions of speech and language could

be useful for their depictions or explorations of human nature.

So, to take a minute example, Euripides' Electra wavers like a

rhetor although she is impassioned: "How shall I begin my

reproaches to you, what end shall I choose, and how shall I orga nize (x?E,(?) the middle of my speech?" (Electra 907-908). But

the most interesting aspect of the relationship between the pro duction of literature and of criticism may be that, at a time when

poetry and criticism were not yet wholly distinct, literature

could have assisted nascent criticism in forming its fundamental

concepts, concepts that would eventually come to be seen as jus

tifying criticism as a quite separate, intrinsically valid discourse.

Hence the notion of literary organic unity may be rooted not

only in cosmology and metaphysics, but also in poetry and

theology. Greco-Roman literature from its earliest stages through high

classicism and into its Hellenistic complications amply docu

ments a prodigious search beneath appearances for a truth or

pattern that may underlie them and give them a single, useful

meaning. The drive to find a hidden, comprehensive meaning beneath seemingly random juxtapositions is evident as early as

Homer, whose characters, from the prophet Calchas to Odys seus' mill slave, search high and low to read Zeus' inscrutable

order. The same impulse activates much early cosmological

thought, and already by the fifth century we have, alongside the

kind of exposition provided by rhapsodes, attempts to read a


deeper, nonliteral significance into literary texts by the allego rists, Stesimbrotos, Theagenes, and the Derveni commentator.

Somewhere in this line, short of mature literary criticism but not

mere "thoughtless" poetry, I would situate my epigraph from

the Oedipus. Oedipus supposes that the many cannot be equal to the one as a hermeneutic principle: he is trying to reconcile

the story that Laius was killed by a band of men in Phocis with

his own memory of having single-handedly slain a noble man in

the same place. He is caught in a problem of interpretation, try

ing to educe from these stories and from Apollo's oracle a coher ent account of the past and of his own place within it. Oedipus'

problems in unraveling and putting together these texts is also

part of a larger problem of interpretation in the play. A great deal will depend on what interpretation proves to be true,

including whether oracles, our texts from the gods, have mean

ing. To the chorus it seems that if Oedipus is as good at riddles as Teiresias, there is no certain way of judging among interpreta tions (kq?oic o?)k eoxiv aXr]8fi?, 501). To Jocasta the "fact" that

the oracle that Laius would be killed by his son went unfulfilled shows that we have no true "seer's art" (709); so she concludes

that we should realize that chance rules our lives and live at ran

dom (e?c?j, 979), without any hope of understanding the future.

Oedipus of course will keep on reinterpreting and seeking revi

sions in these accounts until they point at one solution and we

see that the many did indeed intend one all along. Sophocles will

have him understand that prophecy may indeed be true because

there are laws governing seemingly inexplicable acts and words, laws created, as the chorus puts it, "to walk on high through the

heavenly aether" (865-7). These, presumably like the "unwrit

ten laws" of the Antigone (454), are the hidden coherences that

guarantee the truth and meaning of the dissonant texts of his life

without being explicitly present therein. The language here

points to a poetic or theological rather than literary search for

organic order in the world and language, but I would maintain

that it is an ancestor to the search for unity that we readers take

up. When we try to interpret texts we are also testing how far

the many can be subsumed into a one; even if it seems doubtful

that a certain science of criticism exists, we may persist like

Oedipus in pressing every "clue" (221) and "sign" (1059) for its

meaning. At the end we may conclude with Jocasta that texts are

composed at random and don't fully make sense of our lives; or

Andrew Ford 151

we may decide with the chorus, again for no certain reason, that

there is a disembodied order that sustains and unites these diva

gations into a single pattern. This passion to seek order is very far from the cool, distanced rhetorical reading Heath com

mends. But we would not be flouting the intentions of all ancient

poets if, like Oedipus, we continue to read and continue to see if

the many can be one, simply on the grounds that, as a poet of our

own time has put it, "Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation."

NOTES

1. Especially The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (Stanford, 1987), and "The Ori

gins of Pindaric Criticism,"/HS 106 (1986), 85-98.

2. See D. L. Patey, "The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon," Modern

Language Studies 18 (1988), 17-37.

3. It is unfortunate that Heath's last chapter, "Some Post-Classical Develop

ments," which is admittedly "modest" and to be supplemented by the excellent

tenth chapter of S. Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics (Chapel Hill, 1986), stops essen

tially in the eighteenth century (letting Boeckh take the place of Hegel), just when modern notions of literature are getting under way. For recent accounts of

the eighteenth- and ninteenth-century foundations of modern criticism from, so

to speak, the Left and the Right, see T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic

(London, 1990), and M. H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts (New York and

London, 1989). 4. On the filiation of Romantic/idealist aesthetics and modern New Criti

cism, see W. J. Handy, Kant and the Southern New Critics (Austin, 1963). 5. J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, 1981), 157, calls organic form the

"linchpin, as it were, of the New Criticism ? which more than any other con

cept regulates our analysis of poems." See R. Shusterman, "Organic Unity:

Analysis and Deconstruction," pp. 92-115, in Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Phi

losophy, Deconstruction and Literary Theory, ed. R. W. Dasenbrock (Minneap

olis, 1989), as well as the essays by Christopher Norris and Richard Rorty in the

same volume.

6. I don't know why Heath gives his case away by adding "and only"; can an

animal have extra definable, but nonfunctional parts ?e.g., warts, although not

heads ? and yet still be whole?

7. Heath cites and rejects (19, n. 10) W. Siiss, Ethos: Studien zur ?lteren

Griechischen Rhetorik (Leipzig, 1910), 51, 74, but might also have referred to

M. Polenz, "Die Anf?nge der griechischen Poetik," NGG (1920), 171, and

"nPEITON," NGG (1933), 54, especially as he will find great fault in the role of

the "appropriate" in these theories.

8. C. M. J. Sicking, "Organische Komposition und Verwandtes," Mnem. 16

(1963), 229. One should perhaps also bear in mind here Empedocles fr. 23 DK.

9. We might infer from the Timaeus what Plato would mean by calling an ani

mal or a text "one." In 32d-33a the Cosmos as living body is fashioned by the

Demiurge so as to be "whole . . . complete, from complete parts, and, futher


more, one, since there was nothing left over from which another such creature

might be made." Here "one" has nothing to do with any relation among the

internal parts of the (as yet undifferentiated, 33c-34d) Cosmos, but seems to

imply singleness viewed from the outside of a creature or work: it uses its con

stituent elements so that there are none left over to furnish material for another

creation. The application of this sense of "one" to literary works may be found

in Aristotle's praise of Homer's epics because only one or two tragedies can be

made from them, while poems like the Cypria or the Little Iliad yield matter for

many tragedies (Poetics 59a37-59b5). 10. More than once Heath seems to be able to rule out references to unity by

circumscribing the "point" of an illustration rather severely. Thus he says (20) that "even when the analogy [seil, of texts and animals] is engaged in the fourth

century, there is no hint of a unitary theme." His note says that in most of the

cases where Aristotle uses the analogy (50b34-51a4) it is to illustrate the proper

magnitude of a text. Yet note (1) this use follows immediately upon a reference

to the "aforementioned" ideal of organic unity and (2) a certain magnitude is

required so that the unity of the beast or book be perceptible (see below). 11. Sometimes Heath narrows his focus to the point of blinding himself. So

to support his claim that only the external bodily form of the organism is in

question in Phaedrus 264c, he says that fourth-century authors speak metaphor

ically of the "soul" of a text only to contrast written and spoken discourse (19). This is not correct: Aristotle refers to plot as the "first principle (arche) and, so

to speak, the soul of tragedy" in Poetics 50a38, and that a Lebensprinzip is in

question is proved beyond doubt by comparing De Anima 402a6: "the soul is

the, so to speak, arche of animals."

12. As an illustration, Heath says (21) that two students of Plato might per

fectly well disagree about whether digressive rhetoric should be allowed in trag

edy; that is, they may agree that tragedy should be an appropriately ordered

whole, but not agree about what is appropriate in the ordering of tragedy. In fact, if both disputants agree that the text must be "whole" in Heath's terms, the

debate is really about whether, in the given general context, the disputed piece of rhetoric is digressive or not. The one who would include it would say it

"belongs" in the whole and would be loathe to call it digressive. 13. Heath has debated this point more fully with C. Rowe in Oxford Studies

in Ancient Philosophy VII, ed. J. Annas (Oxford, 1989). 14. In speculating on why Plato might have chosen the historical Phaedrus

for his essay, it is interesting to compare our only non-Platonic literary portrait of the character. Alexis (fr. 245 K = Athenaeus 562a) presents him as one with

philosophic interests in love and in composite unities: he appears "philosophiz

ing" about love, concluding that neither the painters nor other image makers

know love's nature, for he is neither masculine nor feminine, god nor man, fool

ish nor wise, but assembled from all elements, having many forms in a single

shape (?vl Timo) xe n??X ei?n (|)?Qcov, 245.9 K). 15. The parallels are noted by C. Griswold, Jr., Self Knowledge in Plato's

Phaedrus (New Haven, 1986), p. 228, who adds (p. 229) that, despite a differ

ence in vocalic quantity, Il?v, may make us think of Jtcxv, "all," "whole."

16. Similarly in 271 a-b the true rhetorician must decide whether the soul is

"one and uniform" (ev kc? ?uxhov) or "of many parts, as the body is shaped."

Andrew Ford 153

17. In a similar way Plato's later paradox of announcing in writing the futility of writing is often read as a provocation to do philosophy; recent examples with

further references are Griswold, pp. 219-226, and G. Ferrari, Listening to the

Cicadas (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 204-232.

18. Compare 59a32-34, where Aristotle says that an overly large epic plot will be "hard to perceive as connected" (oi)K euouvojixoc), and one of con

stricted length will be "overly complex because of its variety" (kcixcuieji^eyu?v ov xf) JtoiKiXia). The use of evovvokto? in Politics 1326b24 is worth comparing.

19. Commentators ad loc. generally take "whole" and "complete" as practi

cally synonymous, as they are in Physics 3.6 207a8-14. But it may be that "com

plete" (xeXe?o?) is added to suggest "fully developed," anticipating the reference

a few lines below to a beautiful animal as having a certain size (50b35ff.). Teleios, as used of "fully grown" animals, would imply that the necessary parts must not

only be present in the whole, but developed fully so that they can do their work.

(So in zoology one doesn't understand the real nature or function of an animal

from the embryo or intermediary stages.) 20. Here Aristotle mentions only "orderly arrangement" and "appropriate

size," but Else thinks "proportion" is implied, adducing Topics 3.1 116b21, where proportion is the beauty of the limbs of the body; see his Aristotle's Poet

ics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 283.

21. In a notable metaphor, Aristotle denies that there can be an indefinite

number of substances because that would make nature "episodic" and "badly

governed" (quoting Homer, Iliad 2.204: "let there be only one chief," Met.

A1075b37ff.). 22. This distinguishes acceptable "episodes" from faulty eu?oX,iu{x, 54, note

39.

23. M. H. Abrams, "From Addison to Kant: Modern Aesthetics and the

Exemplary Art," pp. 16-48 in R. Cohen, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics (Berkeley and London, 1985).

24. Aristotle knew that unity in artifacts is only approximate: cf. Metaphysics A26 1023b34-35 on continuous and limited wholes: "Of these things them

selves, those which are so by nature are wholes in a higher degree than those

which are so by art" (tr. W. D. Ross). Douglas Patey, to whom I am indebted for

many valuable suggestions on this paper, informs me that I am duplicating here

in some respects the argument of Pope: "Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see/

Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er should be" (Essay on Criticism 233-234). 25. Halliwell, in a study that minimizes the autonomy of art for Aristotle, yet

observes (n. 3 above, p. 96): "The concept of unity, in one version or another, is

one of the most pervasive and arguably indispensable criteria in the understand

ing of art."

26. So G. W. Most, who finds these pronouncements of less importance than

I: "Der verscheiden Gesinnten Sinnesverbindung: Zur poetischen Einheit der

Alten," pp. 1-29, in K. Gloy and E. Rudolph, eds., Einheit als Grundfrage der

Philosophie (Darmstadt, 1985). 27. Some clear later instances of organicism are undervalued; I do not think

Heath can argue away Horace's simplex ... et unum (Ars Po?tica 23) claiming

that he approves o? variare (AP 29), only condemning its unskillful (prodigaliter)

application (63-64). Neglected in this discussion are Horace's injunction to


select plot incidents that are sibi convenientia (AP 129); admitting the fabulous

only on certain grounds: sic veris falsa remiscet, primo ne medium, medio ne dis

crepet imum (AP 151-152); delineating characters so that servetur ad imum

qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet (AP 126-127). 28. On this topic, I would like to draw attention to a valuable monograph,

Roos Meijering, Literary and Rhetorical Theories in the Greek Scholia (Gro

ningen, 1987). 29. This is the danger in reifying the "centrifugal tendency characteristic of

Greek literary aesthetics in general" (63). Patterns get names, like "mobile

focus," "contrastive material," or "extended action," not as ways of codifying a

reader's experience (i.e., "I've seen dramatic actions that extend beyond what I

think is sufficient") but as literary entities in themselves. To use Heath's own

metaphor, the revolution in criticism he proposes is not a Copernican rejection of an outmoded Ptolemaic astronomy, but amounts to inserting epicycles into

the system to save it.

30. That poets might know and knowingly reject secondary poetics is an

important possibility Heath never considers ? as if the poet has no choice but to

choose from an arsenal of familiar but slightly odd literary devices.

ford, a. (2011) review of heath, m. unity in greek criticism and poetry

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