1 Omnipresent Error and Aristotleās Hamartia
Errare humanum est. Indeed, as the ancient Romans and many before them were well aware, to err is human. Error is a fundamental aspect of human existence, and learning to acknowledge and accept oneās imperfections is part of becoming an individual. And yet, as universal as error is, grappling with error is no easy process, as is clear from numerous and often divergent attempts to articulate theories of error , transgression, and correction in virtually every field of thoughtāfrom philosophy to psychology to the natural sciences and jurisprudence. It is arguable that the literary genre that engages most directly with error is the drama. Engagement with error , be it a tragic protagonistās fundamental moral weakness or the incorrigible ways of a ridiculous comic character, forms the backbone of most dramas, and Aristotle ās theorization of hamartia or dramatic error is at the enigmatic core of the very beginning of formalized drama theory.
Aristotle ās concept of hamartia has been interpreted in many ways throughout history, and the understanding of Aristotle ās comments on hamartia carry wide implications for the history of drama. On one hand, there is the understanding of hamartia as tragic guilt , or a weakness in moral character. This is countered by the understanding and translation of hamartia as tragic flaw, tragic mistake, or an unconscious error unrelated to a characterās morality . While the tragic guilt side of the debate would perhaps see Oedipusās hamartia as his curiosity to know everything, his arrogance, or his drive to violently kill the man on the road, the other interpretation, which is currently more prevalent, would see Oedipusās flaw as an unconscious accident, such as his ignorance of his misdeedsā implications or his āblindā inability to know his fate.
While French and German neoclassicist drama explicitly supported the tragic guilt interpretation, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ās (1729ā1781) theater and theory would forever turn this interpretation on its head. I suggest that Lessingās reinterpretation of tragic error is not only inspired by a close reading of Aristotle but that it is also closely linked to his reflections on the acting body. Furthermore, a number of dramas by other authors writing in the decades following Lessingās reinterpretation of tragic error continue to explore the corporeal and linguistic aspects of fallibility from various angles. Dramas by Denis Diderot (1713ā1784), Friedrich Schiller (1759ā1805), and Heinrich von Kleist (1777ā1811) explore the location, signification, and correction of error . This study provides an account of how some eighteenth-century dramas attempt to controlābut sometimes also lose control overāmeaning and truth through spectatorship and readership.
Lessing, Diderot, and Schiller were all deeply involved in the German and French projects of theater reform , in which ideas about error play a central role. Both the German and French reform projects of the eighteenth century, despite their differences, were defined by a desire to redeem the acting profession and embrace a new form of bourgeois tragedy committed to both theatrical illusion and the complex representation of the growing middle class. I suggest that the these authorsā dramatic works seek to control stage error by theorizing the art of acting at the same time as they experiment with questions of morality , perception, and representation on stage. The last author under consideration here, Heinrich von Kleist did not have an agenda of theater reform , but undertook an individual revolution in theatrical style, radically questioning the capacity of language and humans to lay claim to truth and error , and thus building on the project set out in previous works. The dramatic texts chosen for this study showcase changing perceptions of error in theater .
The Greek term hamartia as used by Aristotle has no precise German equivalent and can alternatively be translated as Irrtum (error ), SĆ¼nde (sin ), Versehen (slip-up), Fehler (mistake), or fehlende Einsicht (imperfect understanding), depending on the context. 1 These diverse terms evoke error ās presence in mathematics, the natural sciences, religion, and philosophy. 2 Error , as an epistemological category, has been at the core of many philosophical studies, and Freud includes an entry on Irrtum in his work on psychopathology in everyday life. 3 While error is certainly a universal element of human existence and has been a subject of discussion at least since biblical times until the present day, some recent studies on error have pointed to the Enlightenment as a key time period for inquiry around the sources of error in perception and human knowledge. Zachary Sng, for instance, describes the eighteenth century as āa period during which the relationship between knowledge and various forms of error was interrogated with particular fervorā (5) and analyzes the ways in which some eighteenth-century philosophical writings portray errors āas unpredictable convulsions in the machinery of knowledgeā (5) that often trigger, productively, a āradical suspension of any simple opposition between literal and figural, proper and improperā (7). Part of error ās complexity and perhaps one of the reasons it inspires fascination at particular moments in history lies in its occupation of the no-manās land between mind and the material world, as it often marks that which is out of the individualās control. Scientific, philosophical, religious, and psychological discourses all offer different answers to the question as to the location of error in the mind or the body. Whereas philosophy, religion, and the natural sciences engage with the pervasiveness of error in particular ways, tragedy and āthe tragicā use human fallibility as a central drive for aesthetic production.
In order to understand the way in which Lessingās radical reinterpretation of hamartia marks a paradigm shift in the history of drama and the theatrical arts, one must first cast a glance at Aristotle ās own enigmatic statements on hamartia in the Poetics . Aristotle ās Poetics, the first systematic poetics in Western civilization, outlines the elements needed to compose a ācomplexā drama, which Aristotle perceives in all accounts as superior to simple drama because of its ability to arouse maximum phobos (fear ) and elios (pity ), which he describes as the goals of drama (Poetics, Chapter 13). Three moments form the core of the complex dramaās plot structure: hamartia , anagnorisis , and peripeteia . Within a drama, hamartia is the first of these to occur. Moreover, it serves as the link between the anagnorisis , or moment of recognition, and the peripeteia , the dramatic turning point. Indeed, the anagnorisis does not pertain merely to the recognition of an individual or isolated fact, but to the cognitive moment of realization that a previously held belief is an illusion, as is the case when Oedipus realizes that the oracleās statements are in fact true and that he and his father have wrongly ignored the prophecy. Hamartia is thus an essential prere...