Unity in Greek Poetics by Malcolm Heath - Review by Andrew Ford

Review: Unity in Greek Criticism and Poetry
Reviewed Work: Unity in Greek Poetics

by Malcolm Heath
Review by: Andrew Ford
Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the

Classics, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fall,1991), pp.
125-154
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
the most significant, fruitful, and odd ideas the G
given us. The idea that there can be in nature or in ar
entities so formed that, in Aristotle's famous prescri
part must stand together so that if any part is rem
placed the whole is dislocated and put out of join
51a32-34), was fundamental not only to Greek ae
literary criticism, but also to a wide range of though
political theory, ethics, and biology. Yet it is, upon ref
from obvious why a play or a painting should be stru
an animal. Nor is it clear why the optimal size and str
state should have anything to do with the constitu
mals, plants, and tools (Politics 1326a34-26b26)
should virtue resemble "well made works of craftsme
be destroyed by excess and deficiency (Ethics 1106b
indeed should it be imagined that all animals are so co
that their parts form a whole that "in some way" ser
(Parts of Animals 645b 15-20)? Today we may assume
modernisms have overthrown organicist thinking,
fact still vital as a method of reading if not always as
art. One way to appreciate the significance of such
understand their persistent appeal is to ask how and w
arose and how they have been reinterpreted. Malc
brief but highly ambitious and provocative Unity in G
ics (Oxford, 1989) invites us to reconsider in detail th
mental but often neglected questions.
It is also odd that Heath's book is, to my knowledge
full-length study of the ancient notion of organic un
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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 (?cê^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? Jtgaêoo?... 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" (xaî?,
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" (kcixcuiejiêyu?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.

Unity in Greek Poetics by Malcolm Heath - Review by Andrew Ford

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Unity in Greek Poetics by Malcolm Heath - Review by Andrew Ford

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Review: Unity in Greek Criticism and Poetry

Reviewed Work: Unity in Greek Poetics

Review by: Andrew Ford

Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the

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

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

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

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

gories") whose universal workings move through and determine

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

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

women.8 Hence the artistic composition he describes is not

calling it a "purely conceptual point." Most theory is. But his

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

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

ideas and interests very different from those of Phaedrus. Slav

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

difference (water is a significant example); in "wholes," position

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

can claim to constitute necessary conditions of an appropriately

of unity from pre-Socratic cosmological and metaphysical spec

sophical Collection and Division. Isocrates resisted this system

Heath shows. The Neoplatonists then must not be understood

Criticism and Literature

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

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

than documenting Rezeptionsgeschichte. At least I think several

deeper, nonliteral significance into literary texts by the allego

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