[In the following essay, Skillen presents an account of Plato's views on fiction as they are laid out in the Republic.]

Then it will be our first business to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest … the worst fault possible, especially if the fiction is an ugly one, is misrepresenting the nature of gods and heroes, like a portrait painter whose portraits bear no resemblance to their originals …

Nor shall any young audience be told that any one who commits horrible crimes, or punches his father unmercifully, is doing anything out of the ordinary but merely what the first and greatest of the gods have done before … God must always be represented as he really is, whether the poet is writing epic, lyric, or tragedy …

We must stop all stories (of gods playing tricks on men) and stop mothers being misled by them and scaring little children with harmful myths by telling tales about a host of gods that prowl about at night in a strange variety of shapes. So we shall prevent them blaspheming the gods and making cowards of their children.¹

Stories are communications from author to audience and there are a number of dimensions or ‘moments’ of that communication. In his severe, in places ferocious, attack on fiction, Plato has something to say about all of them. Indeed, his view of fiction is best seen as turning on its contrast with philosophical discussion, Plato's ideal form of human communication.

Whereas the philosopher loves, seeks to discover and to share truth, and to that end avoids all distractions and distortions in enquiry or in presentation, the fictioner is under no such constraints. Yet audiences imagine themselves having learnt something and glorify story-tellers as teachers while the philosopher, eschewing artful magic, is ignored.

Authors of fiction, just by making up stories about everything under the sun, pass themselves off as knowing everything about everything under the sun. But their expertise is bogus. All they are good at is putting across plausible tales. Artists are bullshit-artists.

Telling stories involves an illusionist's bag of rhetorical tricks. Story-tellers cast ‘spells’ enlivening the bare bones of their narratives with figurative language, rhyme, rhythm and melody. With such vividness do they impress the minds of their susceptible audiences.

Stories mimic the reporting of real events just as a painting of a bed resembles the bed of which it is a copy. Since, on Plato's view ‘real events’, being of the world of change and accident, themselves lack the greater ‘reality’ enjoyed by the ‘Forms’ they imperfectly embody, the story-teller, who never even witnessed any such event as the one his story relates, is at a considerable still further remove from the Reality that the Philosopher knows—for example Courage Itself. Needing to have experienced no fights, still less does he need to have been moved by such experiences to reflect on courage or on the roots of human conflict. All he needs is the ability to string a compelling yarn together, to have been touched by the blarney stone, not by the philosopher's.

Messages imbibed from stories are as arbitrary and various as the wit and powers of the author and the receptiveness of audiences permit. Just as you can construct any number of plausible sequences, cover with all sorts of patches the holes in threadbare stories, paint your characters in attractive or repulsive colours, so you can get them to admire cunning or ingenuousness, aggression or meekness, extravagance or temperance, as modelled in your stories, all in accordance with what you want your audience to take away with them in their heads.

Audiences are at the mercy of the skilful story-teller's magic spells. Carried along by our emotional sympathies and by our capacity to enjoy in fantasy what we are not in fact doing or undergoing, we suspend the operation of our more rational and critical faculties and indulge ourselves in the world of appearances fabricated by the artist. Not only are we thus whipped up, there and then, to the specific frenzy of tears or rage that is the story's goal, we are habituating ourselves to the pleasures of such frenzied make-believe, getting into that way of seeing and feeling things. So, in contemporary terms, we march off as ‘Rambos’ to fight the ‘Cong’.

Plato contemplated banishing the poets. But his more settled position was scarcely preferable—to make them temple prostitutes of Truth. Given that songs are ‘really spells for souls’:

A true lawgiver will persuade, or if persuasion fails, will compel, the man of poetic gifts to compose as he ought, to employ noble and fine-filed phrases to represent by their rhythms and bearing and by their melodies, the strains of men who are pure, valiant, and a word, good …

You (rightly) constrain your poets to teach that a good man, since he is temperate and just, is a fortunate and happy man, no matter whether he be great and mighty or poor and feeble, rich or poor.²

So in Laws Book II does Plato's new mouthpiece, the Athenean Stranger, ram home the programme of cultural policing advanced in the Republic, deeming it a ‘little short of capital offence’³ for the poet to show the virtuous miserable or the vicious happy. This is one way, perhaps, to deal with the nasty implications with which his brother Glaucon challenges him in the story of Gyges, who, descending a chasm opened up by an earthquake, stumbles upon a corpse from which he removes only a ring:

He was wearing this ring when he attended the usual meeting of shepherds which reported monthly to the king on the state of his flocks; and as he was sitting there with the others, he happened to twist the bezel of the ring towards the inside of his hand. Thereupon he became invisible to his companions, and they began to refer to him as if he had left them. He was astonished and began fingering the ring again, and turned the bezel outwards; whereupon he became visible again.

… Having made this discovery, he managed to get himself included in the party that was to report to the king, and when he arrived seduced the queen, and with her help attacked and murdered the king and seized the throne.⁴

Wouldn't every reasonable person agree, asks Glaucon, echoing Thrasymachus and preparing the ground for Adeimantus, that Gyges is in a beautiful position to live a very wicked and happy life?

Now Plato, as certain that the wicked must be wretched as he is ‘that Crete is an island’,⁵ can see that the story of the shepherd is a hard one for his doctrine. This awareness of fiction's ‘universal’ pretensions pervades his thinking on the subject. Hence, in my view, it is diversionary to treat Aristotle's doctrine in the ninth chapter of the Poetics that poetry deals in ‘kinds’, in ‘universals’, in possibilities and impossibilities rather than in the actualities treated by historians, as a fundamental refutation, on the basis of a brief argument in Republic Ten, of Plato. There Plato makes notoriously blinkered play with the notion of imitation, limiting its field to mimicry, echoes, shadows, tracings—to the mechanical, illusionistic and mindless reproduction of the surface appearances of individual things such as beds. Being mechanical, such ‘imitation’ is necessarily both of a particular and of its superficial outline. It cannot achieve either universality or depth. But not only does the Three Beds argument fail in itself to tell us much about art's claims,⁶ it tells us little about those dangers and seductions that preoccupy Plato himself. Similarly, when Sir Philip Sidney, denying Plato's treatment of poets as ‘lyars’, writes of the poet that ‘hee nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lyeth’: ‘so I think none so simple, would say that Esope lyed in the tales of his beasts: for who thinketh that Esope wrote it for actually true, were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts hee writeth of’,⁷ he tells Plato nothing he did not already know. It is true that Plato, rightly enough, criticizes Homer's standing among the Greeks as a historian of the days when heroes and gods commingled. But the idea that Plato thinks that the principal ‘lie’ in fiction is in its ‘affirming’ such propositions as that Gyges the shepherd became invisible or that the Crow dropped the piece of meat is silly. Plato's main attack on art assumes its ‘universal’ statement, its failure to ‘teach’ that the temperate, courageous, rational and just man, the good man, will be a happy man. And this failure is not just a matter of the bad content of most stories, it is built into the very mode of operation of stories that they tend to delight through exciting, implicitly putting it across thereby that the ‘dramatic’, conflict-ridden, exciting life is the desirable life. Plato didn't need Aristotle or Sidney to tell him that Art deals in ‘kinds’ of people and ‘kinds’ of action and upshot. That is why Plato is so concerned that scripts should conform to his ideal requirements of heroism, self-control or justice.

Having said that, it is not utterly clear what Plato endorses in artistic representation, even if we avoid the issues raised by his own dramatic fictions (dialogues) and the dozens of stories, myths and models they contain. Do ‘Paeans in praise’ consist of ‘displays’ of goodness in its lovely beauty? This view is confirmed by Plato's emphasis on habituating the citizenry, especially the guardians, to austerely harmonious cultural (‘musical’) experiences which will infuse their souls with a love of good order. Such an ideal, then, is of art's exemplifying goodness, partaking of the forms of goodness as well as affirming goodness in its content. We then may love goodness in art, imitate the forms displayed and be inspired to goodness ourselves. Good Art, harmonious, restrained and rational itself, directs our attention onto absolute good. Perhaps, though Plato is worried about this,⁸ art ‘displays’ goodness more clearly by contrastively representing what falls short of it. Or would the Platonic canon consist of ‘higher’ versions of the more typical ‘Aesopian’, that is, ‘consequential’, kind: of virtue bringing ‘its’ rewards, vice bringing ‘its’ punishments? In the Laws, Plato certainly talks in such terms, praising the political utility of such stories even had the doctrine that the good must flourish been wrong.⁹ In the Republic the whole thing is confused by Plato's definition of justice as inner harmony, which makes ‘proving’ its benefits to the possessor easier than it should be. Whichever of these two views of ‘paeons of praise’ is closest to Plato's heart, it seems to me clear that they correspond to major strands running through all literature. These strands also correspond to different dimensions in audiences' responsiveness to literature: on the one hand our taking ‘lessons’: ‘so that's what happens to boys who tell lies’, on the other hand our more brutely ‘imitative’ capacity to like, to love, to dislike, to hate: ‘I want to be like him’. Novelists who make their doomed wrong-doers attractive court the sort of dangers that are inherent in the tension within audiences between these modes of taking literature.¹⁰

If all art were equally at three removes from reality,¹¹ there would be no place for wondering whether or not this or that work misrepresented ‘Gods and heroes’ since all fiction would fall short. But Plato is obsessed with the question of demarcation among works. Within his more usual terms, he can distinguish representations from misrepresentations, both at individual (was Socrates like that?) or universal (is that an example of true courage?) level, just as the contrived images to the seeing of which the prisoners in Plato's Cave are confined may be good or bad outlines of what they are presented as. But children, and those more or less confined to the cave of representations—those who learn about life only through the ‘media’ we might now say—are in no position to determine from indices internal to those presentations whether they are good likenesses or not. For that is a matter of the images' correspondence to something outside or beyond them—on the way things are. To know whether the story or image is true then, as distinct from merely taking it as true, accepting it, swallowing it, requires independently grounded knowledge of the way the world is, of the nature of things. At best art gives ‘true opinion’.

Plato wanted to doctor art so that it would earn his certificate of good health. He believed that philosophy at the limit of its capacity could establish that virtue was equivalent to wisdom, that to sacrifice virtue for anything else was a bad bargain and, more strongly still, that the good man cannot be harmed. But he took it that mere stories could not establish that such a truth was a truth. At the level of a coherent and plausible and still more, for most people, an attractive narrative, it was easy to ‘illustrate’ the opposite—to have wicked Gyges live happily ever after. As a story, the philosophical and moral misrepresentation works at least as well on those who do not already have eyes to see as the austere representation of the austere truth. The consequence is that, in the interests of philosophical and moral truth, the artists, devoid of their own anchor, must be held in place by the philosophical authorities. Only then will their story represent, illustrate, what is true. Thus all stories must show the good prospering. We are left with ‘hymns to the gods and paeans in praise of good men’. But this subservience to higher Universal Truth is at the expense, at the level of particulars, of a cavalier willingness in Plato to ‘falsify’, to delete the Homeric hero's ‘unheroic’ ‘womanish’ tears—as hero, he didn't cry! (Nor do Big Girls!) And here Plato gives the impression that historical accuracy, material fact, would have concerned him almost as little as fidelity to text. His Noble Lie, after all, is a lie about history. Indeed the irony is that, given Plato's monolithic and exiguous conception of human virtue and the extremity of such doctrines as the necessary sufficiency of goodness for happiness, there is little by which the ordinary citizen could distinguish between his wholesale censorship in the name of ‘truth’ and that of an authoritarian tyrant concerned merely to kill joy.

None the less, Plato's framework for thinking about art is a ‘realist’ one in the following sense: it is in its relation to truth that, like other rhetorical practices, art is to be judged. This goes even for dance and music whose ideal movement should be in accord with the underlying rationality of the cosmos and, by representing it, help weave it into the loving soul. But although art always presents an image of the world, it cannot give us knowledge, cannot genuinely teach us. Plato looks at art epistemically and finds it, in those terms and hence, given his view of virtue as knowledge, in moral terms, incorrigibly deficient. Art can at best illustrate and popularize truths, knowledge of which is gained only by thought working outside art. Art is also socially necessary for propagating truth among children and sub-philosophical people who can benefit from its inspiring heroes and uplifting examples of good life-patterns. This, what art gives us at its best, is ‘true opinion’. Once we have stopped troubling about Plato's authoritarianism or about his cramped notion of ‘imitation’ as material mimicry, such a view needs to be taken seriously.

Aristotle says that fiction is more ‘philosophical’ than history because it is concerned not just with what has happened to happen, with all its accidental and unimportant features, but with ‘the kinds of thing’ that might or will probably or necessarily happen, hence with ‘universal truths’. Before assessing this famous reply to Plato we must try to understand it. What does Aristotle mean by ‘poetry is concerned with universal truths’? Is this a concern that is intellectually ‘valid’? And is the historical literature (Thucydides?) so low in contrast? If a work says ‘the Crow dropped the meat’ or ‘Creon condemned Antigone’, we are dealing on the face of it with fictional particulars. Now Aristotle says that these particulars of character and plot ‘imitate’ or ‘represent’ qualities and ‘actions’; as I see it, the Crow ‘represents’ the average praise-hungry person, the meat things of material value, Creon (in Antigone) the authoritarianism and calloused sensibility of the statesman and so on. Comic poets, says Aristotle, ‘build up their plots out of probable occurrences and add any names that occur to them’.¹² So particular characters and plot events, for Aristotle, as for Plato, are mere media through which ‘universals’, real themes of real human actions, passions and predicaments, are treated.

But this goes no way towards addressing Plato's objection that such works can at best illustrate truth, express ‘opinion’ that corresponds to, but does not amount to, knowledge. For Plato a piece of art cannot prove or genuinely show that something is so. And what we have in Aristotle's Poetics, especially with its pragmatic preoccupation with what ‘works’ on and pleases audiences, does not address such issues. Hence, it seems to me, we are left wondering what the ‘purgation’ of pity and fear,¹³ the tragic catharsis which leaves us with a clear vision, really amounts to in ‘philosophical’ terms. Aristotle's account leaves the question of the intellectual status of a work just where it is with Plato, something to be settled wholly from outside, by our prior beliefs about what is necessary, possible or probable. The dramatists may arrange kinds of events in a manner that strikes us as plausible, as ‘verisimilitudinous’. But this makes his achievement no more ‘philosophical’ than a successful advertisement or piece of propaganda and scarcely deserving to be ranked as inherently superior to the humble work of a historian sifting through prejudicial generalities and fabricated particulars to arrive at a balanced understanding of the unfolding of some war. Aristotle, then, allows no space for the audience's ‘received wisdom’, its stock of implicit maxims to be called into serious question by a work of literature. Rather, for Aristotle, the audience's ideology constitutes the given framework of belief and attitude within which the work must be experienced as ‘convincing’ and ‘satisfying’. It is doubtful if Plato's withers would have been wrung under the pressure of a run-in with Aristotle's Poetics. After all, it is only in a slightly different context in the Republic that he writes: ‘The diagrams [the geometers] draw and the models they make are actual things, which may have their shadows or images in water; but now they serve in their turn as images, while the student is seeking to behold those realities which only thought can apprehend’.¹⁴

One tends to say, expounding Plato, that art ‘operates at the level of appearance and appeals to the emotions’ as if, through repetitive conjunction one could just see these two accusations as necessarily connected. But it is worth questioning the connection if only to see that it is there. In my view it is something like this: if an object is, at some time and place presented to us, we are, as Plato stresses, exposed to it from a specific point of view. We therefore have only certain of its attributes in focus—the attributes which are its ‘appearance’ (to us). Since, on Plato's view, the painter, and by analogy the poet, presents us with a representation of some such appearance (a view from the bridge, say) he controls the aspect of what is depicted (the stable, say) that we are able to attend to. Now it is part of what constitutes ‘the emotional’ that it entails a more or less non-voluntary focus of the attention on some aspect of a situation (its injustice in anger, its menace in fear, its baseness in contempt, etc.). Hence, in necessarily determining, whether deliberately or not, what aspect of a situation he or she is presenting to us, in thereby, and necessarily, restricting us to seeing it, for the moment, in that way (as unjust, as menacing, as base—think of even a stable under such alternative aspects) the successful artist is determining the way we see it and hence its emotional significance for us. Gripped by his bed-painter analogy, with its mono-focal implications, and illiberally blind to the complexity of viewpoint to be seen in the Iliad or the Oresteia, Plato, though not explicit about it, seems to me to have such a picture of the poet's hold on his audience.

Plato issues an epistemic and moral challenge to fiction which is independent both of his ontology of the Forms and of his patriarchal authoritarianism. If, like him, we are to distinguish between the genuinely revealing in literature and the many ways in which we can be fooled or distracted, we need to address the problem in as many-layered and serious a way as he did.

Notes

1. Republic II, 377-381 (Desmond Lee's translation for Penguin).

2. Laws II, 660e (A. E. Taylor's translation).

3. Laws II, 662b.

4. Republic 359c-360d.

5. Laws II, 662b.

6. This section is convincingly discussed by Christopher Janaway in ‘Plato's Analogy between Painter and Poet’, British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 31, No. 1 (January 1991), pp. 1-12.

7. The Defence of Poesy 935, 948.

8. ‘Sour Grapes’ simply presents the fox's self-deception. Unlike the more typical ‘The Fox and the Crow’ it does not concern itself with the consequences of vice.

9. Laws II, 663b.

10. Tolstoy, for example, brings adulterous Anna to a terrible end. But the forbearing Dolly and especially the feminine paragon Kitty, despite their vindication by the plot, are not a match for her as ‘characters’. Hence contrary to Tolstoy's intention Karenina became a romantic role model. No wonder he later espoused a view of literature at least as exiguous as Plato's.

11. Three removes? Shouldn't it be two? The best sense I can make of Plato's counting here is to insert a ‘second’ remove between the carpenter's bed and the painter's, namely the ‘actual’ appearance of the bed presented to the painter given his position. Plato, after all, insists that the painter does not copy the craftsman's bed as it materially is, let alone the form of Bed, but as the material bed appears (‘You still have to draw that distinction’) (Republic 597). It is, of course, very difficult to represent a thing's appearance, its arrangement in the visual field. You can get that wrong—or right.

12. Poetics, ch. 9.

13. This is more than a problem about whether Aristotle means that we are purged of our pity and fear or that our pity and fear are purged of their impurities.

14. Republic 510.