Lyric, epic, dramatic, orphic, hermetic, peithic

Recentest significant change or addition: May 10, 2015.

There seem four poles in art:

Four genres (aside from intermediate genres) of art may be distinguishable accordingly.

James Joyce focuses on two of those poles — (A) the artist and (B) "others" (the subject matter) — in defining forms or genres of literary art, and adopts the three-way lyric-epic-dramatic distinction. The artist, expressing personal emotion, is at the heart of the lyrical form, while the dramatized world of others, with the artist refined out of existence as it were, is at the heart of the dramatic form. The epic form is intermediate between the two.

Gerald L. Bruns in Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (1974, 2001, praised by Gilbert Sorrentino) divides the poem into two genres — the orphic, focused on emotion and the artist as singer calling the world into existence, uniting with it; and the hermetic, focused on ability or technique, on form in the formalist sense, and on the art work itself to the exclusion of the outside world.

Following the pattern of object (subject matter), sign, interpretation, and establishment or recognition, I've usually distinguished and ordered art's poles as (1) subject matter, (2) artist, (3) artwork, (4) audience. In terms of the dependence of signs and observations on the real, such conceptions of those series are fallibilist but not relativist. Following the similar pattern of agent, bearer, act, borne, I've usually distinguished and ordered the human powers (or human causal principles) as (1) will & conation, (2) dealing, ability, (3) affectivity, and (4) cognition. In the case of the forms or genres of art, the two series come to seem aligned in opposite orders.

Putting these ideas together (but omitting the intermediate form (epic) for simplicity's sake since we have more than two poles now):

* Note: I made the word "peithic" up just now from Ancient Greek peitho meaning "persuasion," "persuasiveness," or the goddess "Persuasion." The idea of which I'm thinking seems to include, but be broader than, the idea of rhetoric.

Why post this in the Speculation Lounge? I just thought of this division of genres the day before yesterday I think it was. It seems right but who knows and maybe I'll change my mind.

Here's a way to look at it in a two-by-two square (skip):

It is to be noted that the foci on various human powers are notwithstanding that art generally is a kind of cognition regarding the affective; more particularly it could be characterized as understanding in what effects one feels things; works of art are embodiments of such understanding. It is not systematic, scientific knowledge, which is knowing in or on what light or basis one knows things. There cognition is featured at both levels of the definition. With art, cognition is featured at one level and affectivity at the other. Such definitions use the same style as some use in order to define the economic realm as that of decision-making about means. For a four-by-four of 16 areas so definable, see "A periodic table of aspects of humanity which lend themselves to social compartmentalization."

Problem. I take as a problem an irregularity in such structures, and try to see such an irregularity as reflecting an underlying regularity, an ordering, whatever. The four poles of art seem irregular in regard to which ones can or must be persons. The artist is a person or people. The audience (which can include and even be limited to the artist) is a person or people. The subject matter could be persons or non-persons, even abstract objects. How can the artwork be a person at all? Should one distinguish (fictional or non-fictional) people as subject matter from (fictional or non fictional) people as they end up being shown in the artwork? When art involves performers, does that count as the artwork's being people? — and, when one reads a book, is one, like a musician reading a musical score, "performing" the book in one's mind? — doing some kind of double duty as artwork (performer) and audience? One has to get science-fictional in order to think of an artist making actual living persons for artistic purposes (I don't even mean architecture of persons and souls; I mean making actual people for the same reasons that one would make a poem, a painting, a drama, a song, etc.). If the artist "merely" modifies rather than makes actual people, — again, for artistic rather than merely cosmetic ends — it seems somewhat less science-fictional, though still morally awful. Well, I'll have to think about all those things.

End of main discussion.

From Chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, his young persona Stephen Dedalus speaking:

The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others.

A bit further on:

Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad TURPIN HERO which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

- posted by The Tetrast, initially @ 3/12/2009 11:21:00 AM [top of post] [top of page] Copyright © BenjaminðA.ðUde11.