‘a grotesque monument of sterility’.^56 Nor is it surprising that the word
‘catharsis’, like‘freedom’and‘justice’, has been used to support pretty
much any prevailing view, no matter how ludicrous or far-fetched.^57
Nonetheless, we shall look at catharsis in a little more detail, for two
reasons. First, because I suspect that part of the reason why this one word
has attracted so much attention is that we think that there’s something
plausible about the idea thatsomething likecatharsis–whatever Aristotle
might have meant by it–can be a feature of theatre, and especially of
tragedy. It has a certain intuitive appeal, despite the critical haze. Second,
because the notion of catharsis has such a long and established place in
the history of philosophy and theatre, for this reason alone, we shouldn’t
pass it by altogether. My aim, then, is to combine a discussion of various
interpretative options with our intuitive sense that something like catharsis
may be a feature of our emotional experience of theatre.
What does‘catharsis’mean?
The Greek word,‘catharsis’, had a variety of meanings. While it could be
used in a relatively straightforward way to refer to everyday cleaning,
modern scholars have tended to focus on two different umbrella terms as
the starting point for their discussions. Thefirst,‘purging’, is primarily a
medical notion. The second,‘purification’, is primarily religious. Before
we look at each term, two qualifications are important. First,bothpurging
and purification relate to Greek institutions and practices–medicine and
religion–which were by no means standardised, which are completely
foreign to a general, modern readership and which (in many cases) remain
relatively obscure even to scholars.^58 In any case (and this is the second
qualification), the suggestion is not that Aristotle thought that tragic
catharsis was actually medical or religious: very likely, he was using the
term metaphorically, or in a technical sense. Both the medical and reli-
gious terms lend themselves to metaphors of various kinds and had
already done so by the time Aristotle wrote hisPoetics. For both these
reasons, therefore, even settling on one of purging or purification won’t
help us enormously. Nonetheless, because they would take us in different
directions, let us say something about each.^59
Purging
For the Greeks, catharsis as‘purging’covered all sorts of different physiolo-
gical processes–among them, basic bodily functions such as menstruation
or the emptying of the bowels (the latter was an accepted meaning of‘cath-
arsis’in English well into the nineteenth century) and medical procedures such
as the draining of pus. Put crudely and literally, it is‘getting something
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