Poetic justice and injustice

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Abstract

When Barthes asserts that we must not emotionally adhere to fiction in order to maintain objectivity, he is reactivating a questioning that goes back to the Greek tragedies. But the reader's inner experience is ambivalent: awareness of the fictional and fictitious nature of the work does not preclude empathy. Even more complex is the transition from belief to moral judgment: does aesthetic appreciation necessarily coincide with moral appreciation? And is the reader's judgment based on an internal, narratological and structural morality?

In the Poetics, plots were classified according to the positive or negative fate to which the righteous or the wicked were destined. If we conceive of these categories less as labels than as a Combinatorics system, the Aristotelian system may still be fruitful today, when the transitivity of narrative has updated moral judgment. By cross-referencing the many possible variations between happy ending and poetic justice, and by historicizing different societal value systems, we can problematize human justice and divine justice in the light of literary justice.