The doctrine that poetry should be “probable” or “likely” or “lifelike.” Much of Western critical theory has in some measure accepted the idea of v., though differences in strictness of interp. are major. The primary source is the concept of tó eikós (the probable, the verisimilar) in Aristotle’s Poetics , which is closely related to his fundamental notion of the imitation of nature. If a poem is not lifelike (at least in some sense), it can hardly be called an imitation (q.v.). Aristotle’s account is perceptive but brief, and thus leaves a good bit to the judgment of later critics. He says that the poet describes not historical actions but “the kind of thing that might happen” (ch. 9). Historical occurrences may or may not be probable in this sense, and in tragedy the marvelous or astonishing must and the supernatural may be included. Inch. 15 he gives some scope (though not very much) to propriety of character, as he allows “consistent inconsistency”; in ch. 25 he allows a great deal of scope to the impossible so long as it is “convincing”, and even some allowance that improbable events will happen. And the writer may depart from representation of common reality in depicting the ideal or in following common opinion. In all of this, what Aristotle insists on is universality and the apparent moral and psychological consequentiality of actions. After Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Plutarch, and Horace accept the idea, but tend to restrict it somewhat more than did Aristotle in the direction of the ordinary and the commonly probable.
In the Ren., theorists from Scaliger through the “querelle du Cid”, and later, take the concept seriously and debate its range and meaning. Propriety of character, where Aristotle himself gave little enough freedom, is interpreted so strictly that stock characters tend to become the exclusive ideal (notoriously in Thomas Rymer’s animadversions against Shakespeare), though in one notable instance, Dryden defends the character of Caliban on strict grounds of propriety and v. ( Essays , ed. Ker, 1.219). Somewhat more freedom is allowed in the handling of the marvelous (Christian critics being hardly willing to deny the supernatural a place in serious lit.), though there is great disagreement here. Castelvetro, Maggio, Chapelain, and d’Aubignac discriminate between ordinary and extraordinary v. Rymer, and later—rather surprisingly—Johnson, take a conservative view on this point, Dryden and Rapin take moderate positions, and Chapelain (who wants a more Christian poetry) a radical one. It was on grounds of vrais-emblance that the Fr. Academy censured The Cid of Corneille. Corneille and Racine accepted the principle of vraisemblance or v. quite genuinely, and the struggle in each of them between the abstracted rules (q.v.) and the pressures of their artistic habits and desires was, for both, fruitful.
Though the term has had much less use in the last two centuries, the idea, as a perennial and inescapable demand, persists in various, often implicit, forms: Wordsworth’s turning to the common realities and the “lang. of men”; Coleridge’s frequent appeals to “good sense”; Arnold’s “crit. of life”; the New Critics’ concern for paradox, irony, and “toughness” as giving an adequate, which is to say verisimilar, image of our experience; and deconstructive views that the preferable texts should be “about” their own non-aboutness, i.e. should reiterate, self-referentially, the aporia and collapse which all texts, as all discourse, mean. What gives the reader “infinite” “play” gives the reader no freedom whatever to interpret, since there can be no interp. on evidence, no reason to choose one reading against another. Romantic freedom once more, as in the determinism and progressivism of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and in various forms of volitionism from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche and after, becomes a psychological trap—the will is free to will whatever it wills but with no grounds whatever to do so. What is just and lively and beautiful remains to console, and to triumph.
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