Art Reflection 1: On Poetics by Aristotle
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Heneral Luna(2015) is the centerpiece that I have chosen to show how tragedy is told of the historic event, how epic is told of Heneral Luna’s heroism, and how comedy took place during the time of the Revolution of the First Philippine Republic against the Americans.
One of the emotions brought about by art is often sentimentality. Sentimentality connects us to what we value and reminds us of our nostalgia for the world around us. However, such emotion does not come from knowing what objects we find sentimental value in, but rather it’s from where we can find what we value the most and how our sense experience reminds us of our values. From this point of view, we can partially put together what Aristotle discusses in Poetics about tragedy as a genre. Consequential events in tragedy aim to show the feeling of extreme distress and sorrow, which keeps us piqued to the ugliness, and undesirable features of such an event. It is not because of how characters are to be relied on to carry the story up to its end but of how the events themselves imitate our worst fears. Comedies may elicit the fear of how characters doom themselves, but we forget how such characters are portrayed in mockery for their actions. Epics try to show how the main character’s heroism is bigger than themselves, but we forget that it comes from a narrator’s view. It is only in the tragedy that Aristotle finds the propensity of art forms to be its highest from the abilities and techniques of the artist to animate their stories to be as believable as if they were true.
