behavioural imitation: when husbands commit adultery, their wives often
imitate them or follow their example. Third, impersonation or mimicry:
Dionysus gets dressed up like Heracles in order to fool people into
thinking he’s Heracles; a human can mimic perfectly the sound of a
nightingale. Fourth, imagination or play-acting: children imagine that
they are their favourite heroes and re-enact a famous story.^2 Finally, a
slippery notion of‘metaphysical mimesis’, which involves some kind of
correspondence relation between the world as it seems to be and the
world as it really is.
There are some features that all of these cases have in common. We can
discern, in each example, an original and a kind of copy: the palm trees
(original) and the pillar (copy); the husband and the wife; Heracles and
Dionysus; hero and child; the real world and the world as it appears to
be. We should add two points about this copy. First, it should be obvious
from the examples that‘copy’ here means something other than‘exact
replica down to the last detail’: the adulterous wife is probably not doing
exactlywhat the adulterous husband did; Dionysus doesn’t lookexactly like
Heracles–just enough to pass for him. So the copy needn’t be an exact
copy–just a copy in some relevant way. But, to move to the second
point, we shouldn’t go to the other end of the spectrum and claim that
the copy needn’t correspond in any way to the original. Despite the dif-
ferent kinds of example, we can say that the copies do more than merely
representthe originals. On a treasure-map, the symbol,‘X’, marks the spot
where the treasure is buried. The correspondence between the‘X’and the
treasure is merely symbolic, conventional. It could have been an‘O’or a
‘T’. But the examples ofmimesisthat we’ve seen are something more than
that: the copy corresponds to its original in more than a merely conven-
tional or symbolic way. The copy is, in some sense,likethe original.
Common features can also be identified among a subset of the mean-
ings ofmimesis. Visual imitation, behavioural imitation and impersonation
lie more or less comfortably within our standard use of‘imitation’. This is
less true for the last two, for play-acting and metaphysical mimesis. If we
saw a group of children playing at being characters fromfilms or players
on a football team, we wouldn’t naturally say that they were‘imitating’
those characters; we’d say that they were pretending to be them, or ima-
gining that they were them. As for the final category, metaphysical
mimesis, we’d have to use up more space than is available understanding
the metaphysics in each separate instance to understand what is implied
and whether it’s covered by‘imitation’or some other term.
Setting the metaphysical aside, and concentrating on the first four
conceptions ofmimesis, it may be helpful to think of thefirst three kinds
(visual, behavioural, impersonation) as occurring at the third-person level,
and the fourth, imagination, as occurring at afirst-person level. It is to a
22 From the World to the Stage