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ancient aesthetic sensibility. But we could also suppose that the decimation came about on the basis of political-cultural criteria, and no one can forbid us from imagining that Sophocles may have survived by virtue of a political maneuver, by sacrificing better authors (but "better" according to what criteria?).
If there were many more tragedies than those we know and if they all followed (with variations) a fixed scheme, what would happen if today we were able to see them and read them all together? Would our evaluations of the originality of Sophocles or Aeschylus be different from what they are currently? Would we find in these authors variations on topical themes where today we see indistinctly a unique (and sublime) way of confronting the problems of the human condition? Perhaps where we see absolute invention the Greeks would have seen only the "correct" variation on a single scheme, and sublime appeared to them not the single work but precisely the scheme. It is not by chance that Aristotle dealt mainly with schemes before all else and mentioned single works only for the sake of example.
At this point I am engaging in what Peirce called "the play of musement" and I am multiplying the hypotheses in order to find out, maybe later, a single fruitful idea. Let us now reverse our experiment and look at a contemporary TV serial from the point of view of a future neo-romantic aesthetics which, supposedly, has again assumed that "originality is beautiful." Let us imagine a society in the year A.D. 3000, in which ninety percent of all our present cultural production had been destroyed and of all our television serials only one episode of Columbo had survived.
How would we "read" this work? Would we be moved by such an original picture of a little man in the struggle with the powers of evil, with the forces of capital, with an opulent and racist society dominated by WASPs? Would we appreciate this efficient, concise, and intense representation of the urban landscape of an industrial America? Whenin a single piece of a seriessomething is simply presupposed by the audience which knows the whole series, would we speak perhaps of an art of synthesis of a sublime capacity of telling through essential allusions?
In other words, how would we read a piece of a series if the whole of the series remained unknown to us?

 
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