Representation

Use in the book

The fine-arts statement deliberately refuses imitation as an insufficiently understood description of art’s object and substitutes representation. Memory supplies a different context: it represents definite, fixed figures belonging to individuals, whereas ideas concern qualities. The unfinished account stops before completing its description of idea. In the practical account of art, representation must be exact and finished enough to call forth a fixed idea whenever seen again. Theater then qualifies the reality of presentation. An actor should appear half body, half shadow, half reality, and his gestures half feigned, half true, so that the whole spectacle seems a beautiful dream. Determinacy of presentation therefore need not mean the unmediated presence of the represented thing.

Places to read

1. I, p. 117, entry 9, ¶1Representation replaces imitation as the stated aim of fine art.
2. I, p. 136, entry 3, ¶1Memory represents definite figures, distinguished from qualities.
3. I, p. 324, entry 7, ¶2A finished representation produces a repeatable fixed idea.
4. I, p. 370, entry 1, ¶1The actor’s representation has a dreamlike, partial reality.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains representation. It leaves the memory passage’s “The idea cannot be...” incomplete. The actor’s three halves are not arithmetically repaired; they describe an appearance. Believing, seeming, imagining and dreaming remain distinct verbs in that account.