Reflection

INTRODUCTION Mimesis is a crucial concept in the study of art and literature because it concerns what many people view as the fundamental relationship between art and the world: the idea that art holds, or should hold, “a mirror up to nature” – whether the inner world or the outer – or else creates a fictional world analogous to the real one.

The concept is, however, deceptively difficult. One reason is that the word, from ancient Greek, has no satisfactory translation into modern languages. It is usually translated as ‘imitation’, but some scholars prefer ‘representation’ or sometimes ‘expression’, and the word encompasses copying, impersonation, emulation, and mimicry as well. Many scholars today prefer to use the word ‘mimesis’ itself rather than try for an approximate translation. Always, however, it involves some sense of similarity. Because of the concept’s broad scope and numerous implications, it is also used in philosophy, physiology, anthropology, feminist theory, and other fields outside the arts, bringing further complications and alternatives in the term’s meaning.

Another source of difficulty is that art can ‘imitate’ or ‘represent’ so many different things, such as objects, behaviour, social conditions, social identities, characters’ thoughts and feelings, the author’s thoughts and feelings, previous writers, and so on. Likewise, there are numerous aspects of the things that one can portray. For example, a painting might attempt to depict someone’s physical appearance as accurately as possible, their significance in society, the artist’s personal reaction, and so forth. Historically, views on what objects and aspects mimetic art should portray have changed, but the older views may continue even as new ones arise.

DT+ FUNDAMENTALS

A Concise Introduction to: Mimesis Tobin Nellhaus

Independent Scholar

Last update: 06/02/2019

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There are also differing views on whether mimesis is something people consciously produce, an artistic process, a perception or response to the art, or the result of a common nature that two objects share. Two important – but not always explicit – controversies concern the relationship between mimesis and truth,however defined, and whether the effects of mimesis on its audience are harmful or beneficial.

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HISTORY The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c.427-c.347 BCE) was the first to define art as fundamentally mimetic. The connection he created between mimesis and art has dominated aesthetic theory to the present day. His book The Republic (381 BC) had the greatest effect on aesthetics, and contains some specific attacks on theatre. Having defined art as mimetic, Plato criticised art – and especially theatre – on two major counts. The first involved the relationship between mimesis and truth. For Plato, true reality consisted of abstract forms, such as the general form or shape of a bed. A carpenter can make a particular embodiment of this abstract form by building a physical bed one can actually sleep in. But its particularity puts it one remove from the true reality: the form. A painter, Plato continues, creates merely an appearance of a physical bed, a mimesis: the painting is at another remove from the truth. Likewise, an actor playing a king is at two removes from the true nature of a king – and similarly, two removes even from knowledge of it. Mimesis, then, is a triviality that distracts us from truth. Plato’s second line of criticism concerns the effects that mimesis has on its audience. When an actor portrays someone grieving, the audience responds mimetically by grieving itself. Thus, the spectators are dragged away from the behaviour which is best for the soul – in this example, stoic reserve in public spaces. Generalising this point, art and especially theatre feed the poorest, least rational part of the soul of the audience, fostering an evil that enjoys watching shameful or immoral actions. Because of these deleterious results, Plato argues, a city intending to form the best people would ban artists and playwrights from its midst. In other works, Plato assessed mimesis with more intricacy and sometimes appreciation, and there are points of ambivalence, contradiction, conjecture, and even satire in The Republic itself. Nevertheless, the fundamental claims in The Republic have been debated and often assumed ever since: that art, particularly theatre, is mimetic; that mimesis should be understood in relation to truth and reality as in some manner ‘true’ or ‘false’; and that the mimesis has a profound (perhaps mimetic) influence on its audience, with possible psychological, ethical and political consequences.

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Plato’s student Aristotle (384-322 BCE) viewed mimesis quite differently from his mentor. In The Poetics (c. 335 BCE), much of which is about Greek tragedy, Aristotle agreed that art is mimetic, has a connection with truth and reality, and can provoke strong audience response. But far from being harmful, mimesis is a natural human activity that is both necessary for learning and pleasurable.

The mimetic nature of drama shapes plot and character construction, Aristotle maintained. The imitation of the actions of noble people led to serious plays (tragedy), while the low-born carry out more lowly and ridiculous activities, leading to comedy. However, plays do not present things that happened (which would be history): instead, their mimesis concerns things that can happen, if they follow a necessary or probable chain of events. He took a broad view of dramatic logic, encompassing chance occurrences that feel necessary or suitable (such as poetic justice, in which, say, a murderer is killed when a statue of his victim falls on him). Plausibility is foremost to him: it is better to have events that are impossible but plausible than possible but implausible. Likewise, characters should act in a manner that is necessary or plausible for a person of that type. The best plots evoke fear and pity for the characters – emotions that might not be enjoyable in ordinary circumstances, but are part of the pleasure we take in dramatic mimesis and, far from harmful, are generally beneficial.

The importance of plausibility in Aristotle’s argument shows that his concept of mimesis was markedly unlike Plato’s. Plato viewed mimesis as a relationship between an artwork and external reality, and so it could be judged true or false. Aristotle, in contrast, saw mimesis as the representation of an imagined world that should be internally coherent and lifelike, imitating the way we understand things.

In ancient Rome, another sense of mimesis came to the forefront: emulation. The Greek dramatists were understood as having tapped important elements of human nature, so they were a source of inspiration and a model which the Romans pursued by writing similar plays. As later Romans slowly extended their role models to earlier Roman authors, and medieval and Renaissance writers looked toward antiquity, a tradition emerged. At the same time, among some authors there arose a sense of rivalry with their forebears and a desire to improve upon the past, and

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with it, to improve human nature itself. One can see mimesis as literary emulation in the works of the ancient Roman playwrights Plautus, Terence and Seneca, who looked back to the Greeks.

After the fall of the Rome Empire (476 CE), there was virtually no theatre (and relatively little literary writing) in Europe for centuries. The concept of artistic mimesis was largely unknown. However, a religious sense of mimesis arose within Christianity, adopting on one hand the idea of the ‘imitation of Christ’, and on the other the concept that the world was full of meanings revealed by similar appearances, symbolic connections, and supposed ‘sympathies’ or common natures among things, events and/or texts. When theatre re-emerged in the 14th century, this form of mimesis was particularly evident in Biblical drama. On the continent, the plays focused only on the end of Jesus’s life, so came closest to mimesis as the ‘imitation of Christ’. In England, where episodes were selected from the entire Bible, scenes often incorporated religiously based similarities or symbolism. For instance, in York play cycle, Noah’s ark symbolised the Catholic Church, and the killing of Abel could prefigure the killing of Jesus. Another York play provides an example of objects acting in ‘sympathy’, when banners bow before Jesus despite the efforts of the men holding them. However, much medieval theatre utilised non-mimetic types of representation.

The Renaissance was a transitional period for mimetic theory. Religious mimesis faded. In contrast, the tradition of emulating Roman writing, which never completely disappeared, resurged. However, drama’s mimetic content began a shift toward representing larger social or public matters, often touching on current affairs, as suggested by the rise of history plays, tragedies attentive to power structures or following court intrigues, farces about merchants and professionals (especially lawyers and doctors), and the genre of ‘city comedies’ (see, for example, the entry on Ben Jonson (1572-1637). Social stratification was a general keynote.

Yet simultaneously, an important new interest in individuality and self- representation emerged. Allegorical characters were traded for (or became submerged within) more complex, psychologically driven figures like Hamlet and Rosalind, or replaced by social stereotypes such as fops. The idea that “all the world’s a stage”, which had an ancient pedigree, took on a new life as the social world came on stage.

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The Renaissance also saw an intense re-ignition of anti-theatrical feeling. Although the objections were often couched in religious terms, the basic criticism was the same as Plato’s: acting was inherently false and unnatural, and people were likely to imitate what they saw on stage. Therefore, theatre was a corrupting influence.

During the same period came a major change in dramatic theory. Aristotle’s Poetics was almost unknown in the West until the mid 15th century, when printing made it available. By the late 16th century, European scholars’ desire to emulate the classics led them to transform Aristotle’s largely descriptive and inductive account of Greek tragedy into a set of dogmatic rules prescribing how drama must meet tragedy’s mimetic requirements, injecting provisions that had little or no basis in the Poetics . Aristotle’s view that mimesis involved necessity or probability was made the lynchpin of an argument purporting that an audience member could observe only a single activity during a single time in a single place (the ‘unities’ of action, time, and place).

Some playwrights sought to obey these rules, while others shrugged them off (and in England, few writers even knew of the rules). But in France during the 17th century, the unities became official doctrine, backed by the king himself. The academicians thereby turned dramatic mimesis into a matter of following the neoclassical rules at least as much as portraying an action. It wasn’t unusual for playwrights to push the rules to the limit, and some also took advantage of them by focusing tragedies on a character’s acute psychological and emotional crisis. Given France’s political and cultural power, within a few decades the rules regarding playwriting spread throughout Europe, and continued to influence it for two centuries.

Romanticism, which arose in the late 1700s, regarded artistic geniuses and heroic figures as unique spirits motivated by inspiration, authenticity and originality springing from nature itself. People should seek to return to a state of nature, and break free from the shackles of society and rationalism. Natural genius resided in the inner mind – it was inborn, not taught. Artistically, originality was the absolute adversary of mimesis as imitation (a narrow interpretation that has stayed with us). The individual stood in opposition to all such conventions and traditions.

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The playwrights rejected the Neoclassical rules, with their ostensibly Aristotelian origins. Pursuing ideals or a spiritual nature beyond the everyday world, Romanticism revived a Platonic concept of reality, and it similarly opposed mimesis. At the same time, Romantic art remained mimetic insofar as it sought to express or represent an imagined world driven by the necessities and probabilities originating in the hero’s spirit.

The mid-1800s saw the blossoming of aesthetic realism in the modern sense of lifelike appearance, occasionally encompassing portraits of the social world (especially at first), but soon emphasising an individual’s psychology and inner circumstances. Although realisms had appeared earlier – in fact some sort of realism often seems implicit in mimesis – generally they involved the representation of religious or social types, each character must appear unique, even as they bear markers (such as clothing) that indicate social position. The use of seemingly trivial details is commonplace in modern realism (their use was infrequent until then), but the lynchpin is individual personhood. In a sense, modern mimesis combines the Platonic demand for accurate reflections of reality with Aristotle’s self-contained artistic worlds driven by plausibility, both of which are founded on the concept that mimesis must affirm or belie a truth.

Modern realism transformed theatre and drama in numerous ways. Several dramatic genres developed, such as social realism, naturalism and psychological realism. Sets became three dimensional boxes with a ‘fourth wall’, actual doors, and real (often functioning) props. Actor training methods devised by Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and others aimed to make the actor think in terms of the character’s personal circumstances and goals.

Certain apparently non-realistic types of theatre operate from the same assumption that the goal of mimesis is the individual psyche. Expressionism, for example, sought to stage the protagonist’s extreme emotional and psychic state. The stage design in memory plays and similar dramas often suggests locations (for instance, through just a few items of furniture) rather than depicts them. Both forms of theatre, despite non-realistic staging, are within the ambit of psychological mimesis.

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CRITICISM

Following Plato, there has been a tendency to think all art and especially theatre is fundamentally mimetic. Likewise, there has been a tendency to believe that an important factor in evaluating art should be its character of being in some way a true (or false) reflection of reality, or (per Aristotle) a plausible or implausible fictional world. However, these assumptions are generally based on an overly selective consideration of theatre history. In classical Asian performance traditions, for instance, mimetic truth was considered far less crucial. Even within the West, there have been several periods when mimesis lost its importance.

One of the lengthiest such periods is the Middle Ages, when art’s primary consideration was its religious and didactic value. Mimesis, such as the ‘imitation of Christ’, served those ends. Another type of drama in the Middle Ages was even less mimetic: morality plays. These plays were structured by allegory, where the emphasis is on symbolism rather than similarity. The symbolic nature of the characters was declared bluntly by names such as Everyman, Good Deeds, Pride, and Mercy. The allegorical plot represented these characters’ moral and spiritual interrelationship in a symbolic manner, rather than through an imitation of human actions.

Occasionally, mimesis has also been explicitly rejected. As noted above, Romanticism opposed mimesis as a constraint on human nature. Aestheticism, a movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, saw beauty as foremost – evaluating art in terms of its relation to truth and reality was unimportant, even pernicious. Throughout the 20th century, theatre theorists and practitioners, including Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) have either objected to mimesis or had little place for it (Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was more ambivalent). Certain types of performance art refuse mimesis as well, emphasising the real body and aiming to avoid any hint of fictionality.

Scholars have also pointed out that mimetic ‘probability’ is culturally- specific and bears ideological content. What one culture calls plausible behaviour can be odd or incomprehensible to another. It can also be a constraint on the less powerful within a society (often women and ethnic

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minorities). In that case, they argue, one may be able to challenge cultural norms by using parody, itself a mimetic form.

Historically, there has been far more discussion of mimesis in drama than in performance. But theatrical performance – western or not – has often had major non-mimetic elements. The Chorus in ancient Greek theatre represents symbolically, not mimetically. If a character addresses the audience directly (say, to make a local reference), or when in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1953), a character runs to bathroom – not to a fictional bathroom, but the theatre’s real one – the fictional world is ruptured in a non-mimetic fashion. Although some scholars have argued that music (or at least some music) is a mimetic representation of emotions, it might still be objected that the replacement of speech with song in musicals stretches the notion of plausibility rather far. Many other examples can be provided to suggest that mimesis may have limited value for understanding performance. However, mimesis is a supple concept, and there is no reason one concept should cover every aspect or possibility of art.

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FURTHER READING

Auerbach, E. (1953). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gebauer, G., Wulf, C. (1995). Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society. California: University of California Press.

Halliwell, S. (2002). The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lucian.uchicago.edu. (2017). mimesis (1) | The Chicago School of Media Theory. [online] Available at: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/mimesis/ [Accessed 26 September 2017].

Newworldencyclopedia.org. (2017). Mimesis - New World Encyclopedia. [online] Available at: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mimesis [Accessed 26 September 2017].

Potolsky, M. (2006). Mimesis. New York: Routledge.