mimēsis praxeōs

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (1) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

To conclude, I would like to return to the question of mimesis, the second focus of my interest in reading the Poetics. It does not seem to me to be governed by the equating of the two expressions “the imitation (or representation) of action” and “the organization of the events.” It is not that something has to be taken back from this equation. There is no doubt that the prevalent sense of mimesis is the one instituted by its being joined to muthos. If we continue to translate mimesis by “imitation,” we have to understand something completely contrary to a copy of some preexisting reality and speak instead of a creative imitation. And if we translate mimesis by “representation” (as do Dupont-Roc and Lallot), we must not understand by this word some redoubling of presence, as we could still do for Platonic mimesis, but rather the break that opens the space for fiction. Artisans who work with words produce not things but quasi-things; they invent the as-if. And in this sense, the Aristotelian mimesis is the emblem of the shift [décrochage] that, to use our vocabulary today, produces the “literariness” of the work of literature.

Still the equation of mimesis and muthos does not completely fill up the [End of Page 45] meaning of the expression mimēsis praxeōs. We may of course—as we did above—construe the objective genitive as the noematic correlate of imitation of representation and equate this correlate to the whole expression “the organization of the events,” which Aristotle makes the “what”—the object—of mimesis. But that the praxis belongs at the same time to the real domain, covered by ethics, and the imaginary one, covered by poetics, suggests that mimesis functions not just as a break but also as a connection, one which establishes precisely the status of the “metaphorical” transposition of the practical field by the muthos. If such is the case, we have to preserve in the meaning of the term mimesis a reference to the first side of poetic composition. I call this reference mimesis1 to distinguish it from mimesis2—the mimesis of creation—which remains the pivot point. I hope to show that even in Aristotle’s text there are scattered references to this prior side of poetic composition. This is not all. Mimesis, we recall, as an activity, the mimetic activity, does not reach its intended term through the dynamism of the poetic text alone. It also requires a spectator or reader. So there is another side of poetic composition as well, which I call mimesis3, whose indications I shall also look for in the text of the Poetics. By so framing the leap of imagination with the two operations that constitute the two sides of the mimesis of invention, I believe we enrich rather than weaken the meaning of the mimetic activity invested in the muthos. I hope to show that this activity draws its intelligibility from its mediating function, which leads us from one side of the text to the other through the power of refiguration.