A Concise Introduction to: Catharsis

INTRODUCTION

In the Poetics (c. 335 BCE), the founding book in the study of drama and literature, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) appears to make ‘catharsis’ (also spelled katharsis) part of the very definition of tragedy. His comment has posed major difficulties in interpretation. The term’s meaning in ancient Greek is hard to translate: ‘purgation’, ‘purification’, ‘cleansing’, ‘clarification’, and other words have all been used, and its contexts can be medical, ritual, intellectual, or everyday (‘cleaning’). In addition, the term appears in the Poetics exactly once, without introduction or explanation, metaphorically, and in a grammatically ambiguous phrase that compounds the difficulty of interpretation. In other words, even if we knew exactly which sense of the word ‘catharsis’ Aristotle had in mind, it would remain unclear how he thought it applied to tragedy. For instance, in the Greek, Aristotle could mean that the emotions create catharsis or that catharsis affects the emotions. Similarly, perhaps he is speaking of the audience’s response, or perhaps of events in the plays. As a result of these problems, the catharsis phrase has prompted literally thousands of commentaries striving to explicate what Aristotle meant. Here are three examples of the divergent understandings of

catharsis: “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action… through pity and

fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions”.

(Aristotle, 1961).

In this translation, the audience’s emotions are purged, that is,

eliminated.