Unity, Form, and Figuration

Abstract

Unity of one kind or another is a critical dogma at least as old as Aristotle; but vividness—the “as if present” prescription—is older still. When Odysseus asks Demodocus to tell a story “as perhaps one who had yourself been present, or had heard the tale from another” (Odyssey 8.491; Murray trans.), he does not add: “And be sure to have a single action and no irrelevancies cluttering the plot.” For Homer, centuries away from Aristotle’s theory of unity, the storyteller’s imaginative participation in what the Muses know, and nothing else, secures the audience’s participation and shows that “the god has with a ready heart granted you the gift of divine song” (Odyssey 8.498; Murray trans.). Because the Muses are present everywhere, they make obscure things vivid for the gifted storyteller and his audience. The invocation that introduces the catalog of ships at Iliad 2 attests to the great antiquity of this idea: “Tell me now, ye Muses […]—for ye are goddesses and are at hand and know all things, whereas we hear but a rumor and know not anything” (2.484–86; Murray trans.).

Everything we say must surely be mimesis and image making.

—Plato, Critias