It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance. . . . Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety.
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”
In our world, so marked by tragedy, it may seem perverse to turn to ancient Greek comedy for thinking about politics, as so many political theorists and popular commentators continue to focus on Sophocles and his tragic characters. Wounded veterans, individuals, suffering, explore and voice the words of Sophocles’ Philoktetes, and in contemporary culture find solace in the words of the characters of ancient Greek tragedy.1 The moving spectacle of their performance of these words calls attention to that suffering, and to their sense of betrayal by those who make the decisions for others to go to war, and then neglect their needs, physical and psychic, when they return home.
We need to hear these voices, but also to understand the ways in which tragedy not only articulates the feelings of individuals in contemporary culture, but also that certain readings and interpretations of Greek tragedy have shaped the very structures through which we understand human being in the West, as powerfully argued by Joshua Billings in his work on German philosophy and Greek tragedy.2 Billings identifies “a concept of ‘the tragic’ that extended far beyond an aesthetic context, encompassing history, politics, religion, and ontology” (2). The legacy of tragedy continues to preoccupy those who think about the relationship between antiquity and the present.3 And the foregrounding of ancient tragedy in modernity may foreclose the possibilities offered to the present by comedy.
I seek not only to locate ancient Greek drama in its own historical context, to the always limited extent possible, but also to try to come to grips with the historicity of its reception in early and later modernity, and even postmodernity. In this chapter, I consider first the presence of “the tragic” in modern Western culture, and its intense focus on Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. I then look at Aristotle’s work on ancient Greek drama, and consider how readings of his mutilated treatise have affected the reception of both tragedy and comedy since his time. His neglect of the chorus concerns me in what follows, and I move on then to tragedy’s neglect of comedy, and to comedy’s constant engagement with tragedians, especially in Aristophanes’ Frogs. I end by reiterating my claim that modernity has emphasized the individual over the collective in its evaluation and deployment of ancient drama, using a certain version of ancient tragedy to fashion modern selfhood. And I argue that study of the classical tradition has persisted in privileging tragic characters and neglected comedy in its ongoing encounter with ancient Greek drama, even though the Athenians themselves saw characters and chorus as together making up the drama, and the two forms of theater as inextricably linked to one another, to the fortunes of the city, and to the cult of the god Dionysos.
Miriam Leonard takes a strong stand against a current orthodoxy in the study of tragedy, especially characteristic of scholars of classical antiquity, in her important book Tragic Modernities.4 The work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, informed as Leonard notes not just by Marxism but also, especially in the case of Vernant, by an unacknowledged debt to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, has led to a view of ancient Athenian tragedy as irretrievably bound to its historical moment.5 This is one version of historicism.6 John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin’s Nothing to Do with Dionysos? still very influential in the field of classics, in studies of classical reception, in the consideration of the “tragic” as such, continued to situate tragedy in a premodern world.7 This version of historicizing of “the tragic” has, in Leonard’s view, led to a failure to acknowledge the impact of the idea of tragedy in various domains of modernity.
Leonard’s brilliant examination of this question opens up the discussion of “the tragic” in new directions. Going well beyond the frustrating and chaotic treatment of tragedy in Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence, Leonard painstakingly reveals how the tragic, pace George Steiner, colors modernity in unexpected and sometimes paradoxical ways.8 She shows how philosophical reflection by many modern, seemingly unrelated thinkers, committed to contradictory traditions, nonetheless meditates on the tragic irreconcilability of freedom and necessity. And in so doing, these thinkers participate in the production of modern metaphysics, history, revolution, gender, and subjectivity, at the same time changing our view of ancient tragedy.
Using the work of Raymond Williams to critique Steiner, but going well beyond, Leonard recovers the tragic for the twenty-first century. She moves from Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to Schmitt, Adorno, and Benjamin, to Arendt, Marx, and Williams, to Freud, Lacan, Bowlby, and Butler, again to Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan, examining the political role of the tragic in modernity. Acknowledging the tragic does not require resignation and pessimism, Leonard shows, but rather allows for sober, tragic recognition of revolution and its failures, for example, without surrender to despair and inertia.
One of the consequences of the loss of the second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, his treatment of comedy, to be discussed later in this chapter, is that the traditions of the West, reflecting on ancient drama, focus on tragedy to the exclusion of comedy. There was Roman comedy. There were comic performances in the Middle Ages. But the great rebirth of classical culture at the end of the medieval period rediscovered tragedy, not comedy. Even Dante’s letter to Can Grande, concerning the composition of his Divine Comedy, looks back not to ancient comedy, but to the ascending shape, the consoling happy ending, of Christian mythology, rather than to the raucous, dancing, singing swarms and eccentric female actors in ancient Athenian comedy. And Shakespearean comedy relies more on the erotic back and forth of Roman comedy than on the ribald, obscene ruckus of the Athenians.
Later philosophers of aesthetics and the arts considered the question of drama; the most influential of these was the eighteenth-century German G. W. F. Hegel, who wrote about the arts in various contexts in his many works. Although he considers ancient comedy, he too focuses on tragedy, and locates it within a moment in his history of the human striving for freedom that defines his understanding of the progress human beings have made since time began.9
Greek tragedy was a phenomenon of the polis, the ancient city-state, the origin of the very word “politics.” Hegel discusses the two sorts of “collisions” that make for satisfactory plots in the construction of tragedy, and his remarks on this question resemble those of Aristotle, whom he follows frequently in his treatment of the ancient drama. For Hegel, there are various stages of the possible “collisions” depicted in tragedy: “The principal source of opposition . . . is that of the body politic, the opposition, that is, between ethical life in its social universality and the family as the natural ground of moral relations. These are the purest forces of tragic representation.”10 He includes a second type of opposition, or collision, which occurs when “a man carries out with a volition fully aware of his acts . . . but unconscious of and with no intention of doing what he has done under the directing providence of the gods” (Paolucci, 69). The first sort of collision is exemplified in Sophocles’ Antigone, the second in Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. It is remarkable that the first sort of opposition has fascinated students of tragedy, especially those interested in the politics of the genre, and that the second sort has preoccupied the psychoanalytically oriented.
Hegel writes, modestly: “Among all the fine creations of the ancient and the modern world—and I am acquainted with pretty nearly everything in such a class, and one ought to know it, and it is quite possible—the ‘Antigone’ of Sophocles is from this point of view in my judgment the most excellent and satisfying work of art” (Paolucci, 73). The tradition of focusing on Antigone, the persona, and Antigone, the tragedy, gazes back toward this and other passages in Hegel’s work that conceive the persona as the embodiment, as a personification, of a certain ethical life, and on the Sophoclean plays as the perfect depiction of the collision of one conception of human existence with another: “[The ethical consciousness] sees right only on its own side, and wrong on the other, so, of these two, that which belongs to divine law detects, on the other side, mere arbitrary fortuitous human violence, while what appertains to human law finds in the other the obstinacy and disobedience of subjective self-sufficiency” (275). Hegel understands the tragedy of the Antigone as the clash between these two perspectives, noting all the while that its antagonists are involved in “one whole”: “Antigone, for example, lives under the political authority of Creon; she is herself the daughter of a king and the affianced of Haemon, so that her obedience to the royal prerogative is an obligation.” Antigone is subject to human law. And Creon shares in her subjection to divine law: “Creon also, who is on his part father and husband, is under obligation to respect the sacred laws of relationship, and only by breach of this can give an order that is in conflict with such a sense” (73). So the collision is not a simple one; the two forces, or obligations, are mutually implicated and binding, and the result of their clashing is tragedy. How might Hegel’s reading of this play, the Sophoclean Antigone, change if readers looked beyond the individual characters in light of the dramatic festival, chorus, processions with abundance of food, wine, revelry? Where is the city, the democracy, and the will of the chorus and the demos outside the text? A recognition of the play’s embeddedness in its context inevitably would change the analysis of the forces at play—the support of the people for Antigone, Haimon’s call for compromise, the collapse of hereditary monarchy at the play’s end—but Hegel’s focus on these individuals determined the shape of much speculation in the centuries that followed.
Hegel also briefly discusses comedy, the inevitable partner of tragedy when considering ancient Greek drama, in his view the highest form of art in a society, after “symbolic” architecture and “classical” sculpture. Music, painting, and poetry, especially in drama, represent the “romantic,” the most developed form of art; poetry moves from epic to lyric to their synthesis in drama. He includes the role of the chorus in this progress: “The choric song expresses, among the ancients, by way of contrast to the particular characters and their more personal or more reciprocal conflict, the general or more impersonal view of the situation, and the emotion it excites, in a manner which at one time inclines to the objective style of epic narrative, at another to the impulsive movement of the Lyric” (Paolucci, 19–20). Along with this brief recognition of the role of choral song in ancient tragedy, Hegel sees the ethical totality embodied in the tragic chorus as disturbed by the actualization of the tragic characters. This sense of incommensurability, of a troubling of the surface of the drama, is an aspect of his analysis often overlooked in subsequent studies of the “tragic.” And it contributes to my own desire to find turbulence and irreconcilability in comedy as well.
Hegel’s view of the differences between tragedy and comedy departs from a mere classification of the features of comic plays.11 He emphasizes the presence of the central character: “in comedy it is the purely personal experience, which retains the mastery in its character of infinite self-assuredness.” This is a strangely psychological emphasis on the attitudes of the “comic hero,” which refuses the sort of allegorical interpretation made of tragedy, as a collision of forces: “In comedy we have a vision of the victory of intrinsically self-assured subjectivity, the laughter of which resolves everything through the medium and into the medium of such individuality” (Paolucci, 52). Here there is no recognition of the presence or contribution of the chorus, of song and dance, of spectacle in the performances of ancient Athenian comedies. There is a psychologizing of the comic “hero” in Hegel’s understanding that points toward what George Steiner called “the death of tragedy,” a claim that tragedy is no longer possible in the twentieth century, although the fascination with Antigone, so apparent in contemporary culture, seems to give the lie to this portentous prophecy.12
In Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, we find the similar modern neglect of tragedy’s partner in Dionysiac ritual, comedy.13 The laughter of Zarathustra has not yet appeared on the scene. Nietzsche does, however, acknowledge the power of the chorus in tragedy itself: “We must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, disburdening itself again and again in an Apollinian image-world. The choric parts, therefore, with which tragedy is interlaced, are in a sense the maternal womb of the entire so-called dialogue, that is, of the whole stage-world, of the drama proper. . . . The chorus of the Greek tragedy, the symbol of the collectively excited Dionysian throng, thus finds its full explanation in our conception.”14 Nietzsche fully acknowledges the importance of the tragic chorus in this work, although he does not include comedy in his presentation of Greek drama, even as Dionysus is so central to comedy, even appearing in person in the Frogs and in Cratinus’s now fragmentary Dionysalexander (in which the god, likened to Pericles, impersonates Paris and starts a “Trojan” war). Nietzsche does give some attention to the appearance of quasi-comedic satyrs, and to the poet Archilochus, singer of dithyrambs and the iambic poetry that may be connected to the origins of comedy, with its mocking, insulting elements. But he was particularly concerned with the damage done by Euripides to the magnificent synthesis of Dionysiac and Apollinian elements in classical Athenian tragedy.
Joshua Billings lists those “twentieth- and twenty-first century thinkers who have engaged with tragedy . . . : Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt, Camus, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Zizek, and Butler would be only a start.”15 Perhaps a Nietzschean, Sigmund Freud nonetheless followed Hegel in seeing Sophocles, and in particular his Theban plays, as exemplary of what ancient tragedy had to offer to modernity. And he saw Oedipus as an individual subject, an eternal son, a person who resembled those he met in his consulting room.16 Freud memorably referred to the Oedipus myth in his Interpretation of Dreams, finding in Sophocles’ character an unrepressed expression of the desire of all mankind to kill the father and sleep with the mother: “What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears his name. . . . While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found.”17 Psychoanalysis has followed Freud’s lead, and psychoanalytic journals have abounded with discussions of the individual Oedipus and his situation within what came to be called “the Oedipus complex.”
Following Freud’s identification of the myth of Oedipus as an unrepressed version of the destiny of the human individual, male, who desires his mother and wants to kill his father, one of the greatest, and most illuminating, books of the twentieth century on tragedy, written by the classical scholar Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time, is entirely focused on the hero, the character, the individual Oedipus. Knox interprets the persona of Oedipus as a figure representing Athens, the city, the polis tyrannos, and also as exemplary of the intellectual revolution occurring in Athens in the fifth century BCE, observing: “Oedipus is surely the greatest single individual in Greek tragedy.”18 Writing in 1957, Knox sought to historicize the play, but was himself situated within a postwar world concerned with defending individual rights against fascist or communist collectives. For him, the ancient city had become an individual, a single subjectivity, rather than a polis, a swarming collectivity. While he acknowledged the presence of the chorus in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Tyrannos, his analysis subordinated their song, their dance, their interventions, to the hero, the tyrant.
Oedipus long dominated many discussions of the individual, modern and ancient, but Sophocles’ Antigone has captured the imagination of countless theorists and artists of contemporary culture. Billings gives a persuasive account of the turn toward Antigone: “The genealogical viewpoint on idealist thought reveals that what is often thought of as a single movement is actually composed of two distinct (though interrelated) strands: the first centers around the Oedipus Tyrannus (OT), and is elaborated mainly by Schiller, Schelling, and A. W. Schlegel from 1793 onward, then canonized in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art and Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature; the second is centered on the Antigone and seems to emerge from almost nowhere in the writings of Hölderlin and Hegel in 1804 and 1807, respectively, and is canonized by Hegel’s posthumously edited and published Lectures on Aesthetics.” The Antigone replaced Sophocles’ Electra, the most influential of his plays after Oedipus Rex from antiquity to the earlier nineteenth century. Billings associates this new interest in the Antigone to “changing conceptions of genre: its central ethical conflict, political context, and foregrounding of gender relations.”19
In some ways political theory’s investment in the Antigone is a sort of Enlightenment trap that renders it hard to represent resistance, especially that of the collective, the swarm, as the play revolves around a royal household, a ruling family. Judith Butler, in her brilliant book Antigone’s Claim, sought to reorient the earlier emphases by speculating about a psychoanalysis, or an idea of the family, of the grievable, based not on Oedipus but on his sister/daughter Antigone. Butler wrote eloquently about Sophocles’ Antigone, urging consideration of a psychoanalysis that focuses not on the father, not on the patriarchal family, but rather is centered on Antigone, a queer exemplar, product of incest, fixated on her brother Polyneices to the extent that she disregards her heteronormative duty as a bride, a woman who speaks boldly, with parrhesia even, to her uncle, the tyrant Creon.20
In his breezy introduction to Slavoj Zizek’s translation of the Antigone, the contemporary novelist Hanif Kureishi, author of the play My Beautiful Laundrette and the novel The Buddha of Suburbia, among other texts, expresses a common view of the Antigone wrested from the context of ancient tragedy: “Antigone is a particularly modern heroine. She is a rebel, a refusenik, a feminist, an anti-capitalist (principles are more important than money), a suicide perhaps, certainly a martyr, and without doubt a difficult, insistent person, not unlike some of Ibsen’s women. More decisive, less irritating, talky and circular than Hamlet—but, you might say, equally teenage—she has blazed through the centuries to remain one of the great characters of all literature.”21 This assessment, by a playwright, sets Antigone firmly in the twenty-first century. She has survived as a teenager, a “character,” that is, separate, isolated from Sophocles’ tragedy, from his other tragedies, from the tragic works of Aeschylus and Euripides and other lost tragedians, from the festivals of Dionysos in which their plays were performed. Antigone is set apart from the chorus of the play Antigone, as well as from the comedies that accompanied ancient tragic performances, and from the rituals of the democratic city, honoring the city’s dead, subjecting its allies, worshipping its gods, and from its everyday life. Zizek created a “translation” of the Antigone that goes beyond Sophocles to locate the tragic character within the dilemmas of postmodernity. He presents three different endings for his Antigone, as the play reverts to a coda twice before its completion. In the first, the play ends as does Sophocles’, with the character’s suicide. In the second, Antigone convinces Creon to allow her to bury her brother, and the chorus concludes “the ruling class can afford to obey honour and rigid principles, while ordinary people pay the price for it.” In the third choice of an ending, Zizek proposes a conclusion based on the crowd, the chorus—an ending with dire results:
In the third version, Chorus is no longer the purveyor of stupid commonplace wisdoms, it becomes an active agent. At the climactic moment of the ferocious debate between Antigone and Creon, Chorus steps forward, castigating both of them for their stupid conflict which threatens the survival of the entire city. Acting like a kind of comité de salut public, Chorus takes over as a collective organ and imposes a new rule of law, installing people’s democracy in Thebes. Creon is deposed, both Creon and Antigone are arrested, put to trial, swiftly condemned to death and liquidated.22
“Chorus,” which seemed to be a single entity in Zizek’s earlier discussion of the play, now proliferates into a plural being, and degenerates into a mob, reminiscent of the “people” who engaged in the Terror following the French Revolution.23 The use of the word “liquidated” cannot but call up associations with Stalinism. This chorus exemplifies the dark, negative version of the swarm, the very mob the conception of which I argue against in this book, the conviction that a group, a collective, must turn homicidal.
In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then, Antigone has survived, in the references to Hegel’s understanding of her relationship to Creon, in Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of her as the magnificent embodiment of the death drive, in Judith Butler’s focus on her to meditate on questions of kinship and grief, in Bonnie Honig’s emphasis on the sororal, in Tina Chanter’s call for attention to Antigone’s unqualified acceptance of and endorsement of slavery, in Anne Carson’s beautiful, witty translation of Sophocles’ play.24
Interest in Antigone as character continues. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017), a critical success, depicts a situation familiar to readers of Sophocles.25 The novel presents a British Muslim family of Pakistani descent, an older sister Isma, and twins Aneeka and Parvaiz, as well as a British home secretary and his son Eamonn, also of Pakistani descent. The novel recounts the ways in which Parvaiz, the Polyneices character, is first recruited by a jihadi who belongs to a shadowy ISIS-like group, and goes to join them in Asia. The young man comes to regret his choice, and attempts to return to Britain. His twin sister tries to save him through intervention by her lover Eamonn and his father the government official, but her brother is gunned down by his former comrades as he approaches the British consulate in Istanbul. Aneeka, the Antigone figure, seeks to have his corpse repatriated to Britain, his home country, but the home secretary refuses. The novel ends dramatically with Aneeka, who has flown to Karachi to retrieve her brother’s unburied corpse, shown on global television as she mourns him. Eamonn, her lover, defies his father and comes to her, but is overcome by hostile figures who wrap him in a suicide device that is detonated, destroying him, Aneeka, and the corpse of Parvaiz.
Filmmakers also have contributed to an ongoing set of discourses concerning Antigone as character. The South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film, Old Boy, alludes intermittently and tantalizingly to the Oedipus legend, the fated Theban family of Oedipus, his sons and daughters. The central character, Oh Dae-su, is mysteriously kept in a private prison for fifteen years, and then released. He seeks to know who imprisoned him, trying to solve a riddle and encountering various obstacles along the way, but also connecting with a young woman, Mi-do, who falls in love with him, and remains loyal through his many trials, even though she is much younger than he. Eventually he learns through suffering that the author of his captivity is another “old boy” from the Christian school he attended as an adolescent, and that he is being punished for spreading the rumor that his captor and that captor’s sister were involved in an incestuous love affair with one another, the rumors having caused the suicide of the young girl. As he discovers the truth, Oh Dae-su cuts out his own tongue. The final moment in his punishment is revealed when he learns that his lover, Mi-do, is his daughter. The film ends with his splitting into two personae, one a monster who vanishes, the other a father/lover embraced by his daughter/lover.
The theme of incest echoes a salient feature of the Oedipus myth, and of the three Sophoclean plays that trace the history of this cursed family. Father and daughter, the mutilation of the father, the unveiling of a terrible secret, all these allusively, teasingly echo the myth of the blighted Theban family of Laius, Jocasta, Oedipus, and his children. Tropes characteristic of Asian cinema are also developed in the film: the theme of forbidden love, the freedom of adolescents to fall in love in their high school years, before paternal law becomes absolute, the tenderness between father and daughter, lover and beloved. The narrative in this film may be a tragedy, but it is also a love story.
This film was remade, as Moebius, a film in which no one speaks, and was also filmed by the Black American director Spike Lee, with the title Oldboy, in 2013. The plot follows that of Park Chan-wook very closely, but the rumors of incest concern not brother and sister, but a father who is said to have had sex with both his son and his daughter. Once again, after the central character Joe’s imprisonment and subsequent search for the answer to the identity of his tormentor, he is involved in a sexual affair with a woman who, it is eventually revealed, is his long-lost daughter. In the end, Joe breaks with his daughter/lover, and chooses to return to the site of his captivity, the hotel room in which he was confined for twenty years before he was freed.
What fascinates me most about this record of engagement with the Sophoclean plot, or the myth that preceded Sophocles’ use of this material, is that most of these twentieth- or twenty-first-century adaptations of the narrative of Antigone focus not on questions of sovereignty, or mourning and lamentation over burial, as does Home Fire, but rather on the matter of sexuality, whether it be father/daughter or brother/sister incest. Significant aspects of Sophocles’ plays concerning the ruling family of Thebes—Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus—include the choruses; the engagement of the demos, the people, in the struggles of archaic rulership; questions of law and the role of the tyrant; the resistance of the city’s women; the opinion of the city; and issues of enlightenment and philosophical humanism in a turn away from traditional religious practices. All these are ignored, or reshaped to surround the intimacies of the nuclear family, of filial relationships, to the exclusion of a politics that was recognized by Hegel but has since narrowed ever more to the question of erotic partners within the nuclear family, and the tragedies that follow from incestuous unions.
Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy occurs in his Poetics, of which the second part, focusing on comedy, as noted earlier, has been lost. He emphasizes the fact that “the objects of representation” in tragedy are “persons doing or experiencing something” (1448a1), but that “tragedy differs from comedy. The latter sets out to represent people as worse than they are today, the former as better” (1448a7, emphasis mine).26 Such a characterization of ancient comedy ignores the presence of such personae as the imposing, even noble Lysistrata, for example, who brings peace to the warring cities of Athens and Sparta, and can hardly be interpreted as “worse” than many tragic personae, such as Medea, the homicidal sorceress of Euripides.
Aristotle mentions in passing that the word “drama,” referring to these sorts of representations, comes from the verb dran, “to do,” “because they present people doing things” (1448a4). The Dorians claim to have invented both comedy and tragedy; the word for “comedy” is connected with “comedians” strolling about the villages, komai, a Dorian word. Aristotle begins to distinguish between tragedy and comedy, crediting their difference to the nature of the poets who compose them: “For the more serious poets represented fine (kalas) doings and the doings of fine men, while those of a less exalted nature represented the actions of inferior men (phaulon)” (1448b8). From the start, then, Aristotle denigrates comedy, measuring it against the more serious, exalted form of tragedy. He continues this comparative practice: “Comedy, as we have said, is a representation of inferior people, not indeed in the full sense of the word bad (kakian), but the laughable is a species of the base or ugly (aiskhrou) [perhaps better translated as ‘shameful’?]” (1449a21). This vocabulary, difficult to put into English, communicates condescension and disdain for the people of comedy, who in fact include such enlightened characters as Praxagora, the visionary communist leader of the women in the play Ecclesiazusae (Women at the Assembly).
Aristotle emphasizes that tragedy, his subject in what remains of the extant part of the Poetics, is a representation of an action, praxis (1450a12); and continues: “The plot then is the first principle and as it were the soul (psukhe) of tragedy: character comes second” (1450a19). He is much less interested in “song-making,” melopoiia, and in “spectacle,” what is seen, opsis. “The effect of tragedy does not depend on its performance by actors,” he says (1450a28). Built into his analysis is a disregard of performance, of ritual, of tragedy’s embodiment as a religious-political rite in the ancient city.
Aristotle goes on at some length concerning plot, what he considers the best sort of plot, and the place of reversal and discovery as well as calamity and pathos, which he describes as a destructive or painful occurrence (1452b9–10). He names elements of the whole, the parts, the limbs, of tragedy, including “choral song,” the “parodos and stasimon” (the first utterance of the chorus and their “stationary songs”), as well as the kommos (the lamentation shared by chorus and actors). But he does not elaborate on these elements, and moves immediately, notoriously, to describe the best, most complex tragedy as one that arouses pity and fear in the audience. Going into greater detail about various matters concerning the plot, the muthos, the philosopher has but little to say about the chorus, only this: “The chorus too must be regarded as one of the actors. It must be part of the whole and share in the action, not as in Euripides but as in Sophocles. In the others the choral odes have no more to do with the plot than with any other tragedy. And so they sing interludes, a practice begun by Agathon. And yet to sing interludes is quite as bad as transferring a whole speech or scene from one play to another” (1456a19). And that is that. Aristotle’s observations make clear the insignificance he attributes to the chorus, and indicate also perhaps the decline of its importance in his day, in the fourth century, after the classical production of tragedy in the fifth century. Choruses perform mere interludes as time goes on, and these can be inserted, moved from one play to another, members lacking even a role like that of an actor in the action of the drama.
Although it may have been neglected in the debates concerning tragedy, Florence Dupont’s Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental contributes an idiosyncratic and valuable point of view to the arguments.27 I appreciate this book not only for its lurid title, but also for the animus, the unrestrained rage that fuels its polemic, relatively rare in the Anglo-Saxon world. Dupont’s aim in the project is to “deconstruct” (déconstruire) Aristotle’s Poetics and his concepts, and denounce the “aesthetic postulates which poison Western theater” (7). She is concerned with a “rampant and diffuse Aristotelianism” that has invaded the entire territory of contemporary theater production. And she is especially bent on targeting the “fable,” the muthos, the narrative of plays, arguing that everyone thinks theater is the “representation of a story, a history (histoire)” (8). Although her book focuses on Roman comedy, much of her argument remains pertinent for thinking about Greek drama also, tragedy as well as comedy.
Dupont argues that to read ancient comedy properly, rather than looking for a narrative, it is necessary to rediscover its historical reality, and to reconstitute it as cultural event, to study the context in which these plays were presented, and to recognize that these plays require une raison [ludique] (“a ludic logic”). She demands a change in the “habitual hierarchy” of theater production, its privileging of the text and its muthos. She insists on what she calls “indigenous categories” (10); in interpreting and performing these plays, we must be anthropologists. Bracingly reminding us that, as Hegel said concerning Greek civilization, we can no more “sympathize” with it, than with a dog,28 Dupont snidely characterizes the ethnocentrism of contemporary Western thought, pointing to the presence in the European imaginary of, side by side, a dancing Dionysos, some satyrs, and Sophocles revealing to humanity his oedipal truth or the Antigonean values of democracy, as Aristotle finally delivers his edicts on the rules of mimesis (11).
In a section called “The Trap (Le piège) of the Poetics,” Dupont calls for the decolonization of the theater, the revelation of its ethnocentric postulates, the recognition that the Poetics “entraps” contemporary practices of dramatic presentation, observing: “Aristotle has, in fact, isolated the text of theater to make it an object of analysis” (13, emphasis mine). As she makes abundantly clear, the ancient Greek public knew the drama of Athens only through the ritual performances of the Great Dionysia (or, as she neglects to add, at other Dionysiac festivals such as the Lenaia). But her point is well taken, that in considering only what she calls the “fable,” the muthos, the plot, we disregard the fact that the playwrights she lists, omitting Aristophanes by the way, were known as “singers,” aoidoi, not poets in our sense (13).
In Western thinking about theater and its performance, Dupont argues, the concept of muthos, of “fable,” as the French call it, “plot” in English, has become the keystone. But the theory of Aristotle is inadequate not only for Greek theater, but also for Roman and traditional theaters: “Why did he, who claimed to write about Greek tragedy, arrogantly ignore its practical functioning, to begin with, by the chorus, which he makes a character like any other?” (22). In her view, Aristotelianism has progressively “colonized” European theaters. And she goes on to read closely the Poetics, its version of mimesis, or “representation,” and its first audience. As she notes, Aristotle created his own vocabulary and categories for discussing the theater and presented a normative version of “the tragic poem,” that is, tragedy, which makes little reference to the realities of Athenian theater practice.
We have the benefit of earlier work, including an important essay by Simon Goldhill on the context of the drama festivals of Athens, that sets dramatic performances in the social and political and ritual context, of which more later.29 But much of what Dupont complains of in the Aristotelian presentation of drama remains pertinent. She recalls that the festivals opposed both tragic and comic “poet-composers,” who, as noted, called themselves “singers” (chanteurs, aoidoi). And the theater was just one among many musical performances, often given by choruses, offered to the gods during great cult ceremonies (27). The Great Dionysia, as Goldhill also insists, comprised twenty dithyrambs in addition to dramatic presentations, the seventeen plays, tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies, stretching over five days. Tragedies took place within a “liturgical” and “epideictic” context; the great festival took place at the beginning of the season of the year when sailing became once again possible, and visitors arrived from other cities to attend the dramatic performances. As Dupont points out, at the festival the Athenians displayed the tribute from the Delian League, those allies led by Athens, initially to mount a defense against a return invasion by the Persian Empire, but eventually appropriated by the Athenians for their own use, and used in maintaining their own empire. The children orphaned by soldiers who died in war, who were supported by the Athenian state, paraded in the ceremony, which also included the announcement of honors bestowed on the benefactors of the city. Many rituals, processions, and sacrifices took place, as Dupont notes, before and during the Great Dionysia, and all these provided a context for the tragic performances and (although she omits these here) the comic performances as well.
A prize was awarded, chosen by a jury through a procedure Dupont calls “complex and democratic” (28), but victory was obtained not necessarily in terms of “beauty,” but also through taking into account the kairos, “the right moment,” that is, the timing of the matter of the play in relation to the current circumstances of the city. And “the democratic consensus [about the victors] is the occasion to reaffirm concord among the citizens” (29). The jury’s decision bore not on a text, but on a ritual performance, and on the benefactor who paid for the production, financing the spectacle.30 But “Aristotle, far from these historical realities, defines the beauty of a tragedy through objective and aesthetic criteria” (30), and entirely misses its social and religious context. He deprives the theater of its status as an Athenian institution (30, emphasis mine). As Dupont rather melodramatically puts it, “To objectify the theatre, to submit it to a poetic art, to substitute a text for the event, is to take away its reason for being. This is why Aristotle’s Poetics, far from being a treatise of theatrical composition for poets, is a war machine directed against the theatrical institution” (30).
Dupont mounts further accusations against Aristotle. He was not Athenian; “he had never celebrated the Great Dionysia, never sung in the choruses, never been judged or jury, never belonged to the Athenian public which had been initiated from childhood to the musical code, celebrating every year this singular ritual, implicating identity, of the city of Athens” (32). He served those who followed, who wanted in the temporal distance from this theater, for it to be “readable,” “legible,” lisible (32). Aristotle was a foreigner, forced because of his exteriority to negotiate a status exterior to the ritual through reading. He, whom Plato called “The Reader,” cites the tragedies of the fifth century BCE in the fourth century BCE, and this position of estrangement forces him to think about poetic practices as intellectual practices, with the result that he presents tragedy as “a closed discourse, coherent and structured following a narrative, the mythos, which is the kernel, itself organized in some necessary fashion” (33).
In his treatise the Poetics, therefore, Dupont concludes, Aristotle is elaborating “a system of production/reception on the model writing/reading,” leaving out of account “music,” and all the social, religious, and cultural dimensions of Greek theater (35). He excludes instrumental music, songs, and choreography, as “tragedy is reduced to a silent poem” (35). Neither the “enunciative” context nor the “enunciators,” the actors who disappear behind the characters, are taken into account. The “plot,” muthos, substitutes for the real performance as the object of evaluation (36). This, she says, is a rupture from all the Greek tradition that precedes. Song has become poetry, and everything that rooted tragedy in the city and in ritual practice has been eliminated (38).
The question of the chorus looms large in Dupont’s critique of Aristotle. As she notes, “The chorus introduced into tragedy a different enunciation, collective, sung, tied to the ritual of the Dionysia” (50). But Aristotle, focusing on the praxis, on the action of the drama, cannot use “a ritual definition” of the chorus, nor does he consider the orchestra, the dancing floor in the middle of the performance space in ancient Greek theaters, because in her view he never even thinks about spatiality in this context. He turns the chorus into another character, a personage like the others, played by a single actor, which reduces the chorus to the chorus leader, and the chorus leader to an actor in the action, the praxis, the muthos of the play (51). Aristotle is critical of the choruses of Euripides (Poetics 56a26–32), praises Sophocles’ use of the chorus, and “cannot envisage that song—that is to say, ritual song—could be the raison d’être of the chorus” (51). Nor does Aristotle understand that the audience of tragedy is Athenian, citizen, or celebrant of the Dionysia; he envisions only a reader, and as Dupont claims, his version of “reception” “presupposes a social elitism in contradiction with the democratic ideal of the Great Dionysia” (57).
Dupont is also critical of the notion of catharsis, generally seen after Aristotle as a crucial element of the experience of tragedy. It belongs to the medical vocabulary, and Aristotle seems to use it to suggest that certain types of music excite in listeners troubles, such as pity and fear, which are at the same time soothed and purged; the model is homeopathic, common in antiquity, the idea that difficulties are cured by what has caused them. The wounds of love, as in the De rerum natura of Lucretius, are cured by love. The muthos, showing human beings passing from happiness to unhappiness, from unhappiness to happiness, arouses painful feelings that are immediately healed by the pleasure that the muthos itself offers as a shaping, a morphe, an “intelligible form” (65). Once again, in Dupont’s view, Aristotle ignores entirely the social experience of theater in order to produce theory. And, of course, his incivisme, his formalism, his lack of citizenship, his lack of belief, made him unloved by the Athenians, who saw him as a collaborator and an atheist. He took refuge with the kings of Macedonia, and had to exile himself to Calchis upon the death of Alexander (65).
So the performance called tragedy, inseparable from a musical contest, “exploded” in the hands of Aristotle into diverse fragments (66). Dupont calls this “a mutilated theater” (66), bequeathed to the Greek world and taken up by those who followed, so that the text of this dramatic performance, ripped from its Athenian roots, provides a theoretical basis for modern theater, desacralized, disenchanted, deritualized, and based on text, as tragedy is identified with its muthos, leaving no room for spectacle, or what she calls “theatricality,” or metatheatricality (76). Tragedy has become a text, and its pleasure of a purely cognitive sort, deprived of its sensual, sensuous dimensions.
Dupont’s careful and meticulous denunciation of Aristotle, and of those who follow him, speaks to me of all that is missing, first of all when considerations of ancient drama treat only tragedy, and its plot, and its characters, neglecting the chorus. And when ancient comedy is left out of the picture. Comedy and tragedy are inextricably bound together in the rituals and celebrations of ancient Athens. They can be said implicitly, because of their very juxtaposition in the city’s celebration of Dionysos, to critique and nourish one another. And they both feature choruses. The collective presentation of the anonymous body of the chorus may stand in for the collective body of citizens, according to some scholars, but it also brings onto the stage populations that are less often visible to the readers of high tragedy. Queens, consorts, goddesses, heroines of the epic and legendary past, appear as characters, but the chorus can be Persians, the captive and enslaved women of Troy, the ecstatic Asian worshippers of Dionysos, and in comedy, even insects and animals, varied and heterogeneous and low in comparison to tragic highborn or immortal personages.
If Dupont is correct, then the tradition of reading Greek tragedy that includes Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and many others shares in the dismemberment and reduction of its ritual and spectacular elements. There are limits, and perhaps unsavory consequences, to using Aristotle to think through tragedy and then to take this notion of “tragedy” to think through modernity. And comedy, even more, has been omitted from our political or psychological or even cultural assessment of the value of Greek drama for thinking about the present.
As mentioned earlier, Dupont’s work must be considered along with Goldhill’s powerful and influential essay in Nothing to Do with Dionysos? which firmly situates tragic performance in its ritual and political context.31 Yet, although he acknowledges the presence of comedy performances in the city’s celebrations of the god, Goldhill’s focus is on tragedy here. Responding to Oliver Taplin’s claim that “there is nothing intrinsically Dionysiac about Greek tragedy,” Goldhill frames his essay by asserting that “scholars . . . distort . . . the fundamentally questioning or agonistic nature of Greek tragedy. This article [is] . . . meant . . . to aid the understanding of Greek tragedy as a social, political, and theatrical phenomenon” (98). Goldhill points to the rituals and ceremonies that preceded the dramatic performances at the Great Dionysia, the festival in honor of the god Dionysos, which included crucial elements of political, polis-related matters that draw this worship, the theater, and empire, the military, and tribute into a nexus. Dionysos’s statue was carried about, and there was a great procession and then sacrifice at the Dionysos precinct at the heart of the city, followed by a celebration. Poets announced the subjects of the plays they were presenting in the theatrical competition. Libations before the tragedies were poured out by the generals of the city’s military, tribute from the cities of the Athenian Empire was displayed on the stage of the theatrical performances, and divided into large sums and placed in the theater’s orkhestra, the dancing floor, and “before the tragedies the names of those men who had greatly benefited Athens in some way were read out in front of the whole city” (104). And Goldhill concludes this learned and groundbreaking essay in this way:
Tragedy must be understood, then, in terms of the festival of which it is a constituent part and the silence of critics on the preplay ceremonies is indicative of a general unwillingness to consider both the extended context of the tragic texts and the particular difficulties involved in reading this literature of transgression and impasse. The tragic festival may at first sight seem to have little to do with our expectations of the Dionysiac religion under whose name it takes place. But in the interplay of norm and transgression enacted in the festival which both lauds the polis and depicts the stresses and tensions of a polis society in conflict, the Great Dionysia seems to me an essentially Dionysiac event. (128–29)
Note that the festival, which included comic performances as well as tragic, has become “the tragic festival.” And even those performances of comedy that included the god Dionysos himself as a character, of which only Aristophanes’ Frogs is extant, receive less notice. It is not that Goldhill does not recognize the importance of comedy, the obscenity and lampoons, “all under the aegis of the one god,” but that finally the presence of comedy is subordinated to the weightier significance of tragedy.
Such an emphasis is consistent with modernity’s privileging of a particular understanding of tragedy over comedy. If it is because comedy is seen as too topical, too bound up with the specific historical circumstances of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, because comedy abounds with ridicule and abuse, often obscene, of members of the original audience, or simply because comedy addresses themes that no longer have the dignity and immensity of reference required for great literature, comedy has all but vanished from considerations of the relevance of antiquity to the present, unless it be for the exceptional performances of Lysistrata, the utopian antiwar play of Aristophanes. This particular comedy, to be discussed more fully in what follows, has had a significant performance history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as feminists and others have seen and even enhanced a play that represents a Panhellenic women’s sex strike in the name of a Panhellenic peace. This exception may prove the rule, that performances of Aeschylus’s, Sophocles’, and Euripides’ tragedies, whether in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, or North America, have been seen to speak more directly to the concerns, the tragic circumstances, of the recent past.32
The classical scholar Richard Janko has attempted to create what he calls a “reconstruction” of Aristotle’s work on comedy, the second book of the Poetics.33 Relying on a document known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, an anonymous treatise, lacking a title, and uncovered in 1839, as well as on scattered allusions in other texts, and the documents assembled as the Prolegomena to Comedy, Janko argues that his reconstruction sheds considerable light on what Aristotle had to say about comedy.34 He cites various known Aristotelian texts that comment on the genre, including the Politics, where the author mentions again the matter of catharsis in relation to dramatic representations. Does catharsis, then, play a role in the audience’s experience of comedy? And if so, of what are they purged, or cleansed? Is it pleasure and laughter, and if so, why need they to be cleansed or removed from the spectator?
Much of Janko’s reconstruction focuses on laughter, on its causes and how to produce it in the audience, through jokes or various forms of wordplay or dance. And again, there is little mention of the chorus in the restoration; the chorus is named as one of the parts of comedy, the song sung by the chorus listed in the sources, but there is no discussion of the choral participants in this form of drama. In the reconstruction, Janko proposes the following: “A Comedy is a representation of an absurd, complete action, one that lacks magnitude, with embellished language, the several kinds of embellishment being found separately in the several parts of the play: directly represented by persons acting, and not by means of narration: through pleasure and laughter achieving the purgation of the like emotions. It has laughter, so to speak, for its mother. I explained the meanings of the terms here when tragedy was defined” (93).35 As Janko reconstructs it, the focus of this second lost part of the Poetics seems to be on the generation of laughter in the poet’s audience, for example through the deployment of “vulgar dancing” (95). Once again, as with tragedy, discussion of the parts of the drama centers on plot; Aristotle may have listed diction and song as important elements in all comedies, “but instances of thought, character and spectacle [are observed] in not a few.” Janko adds: “Spectacle is entertaining but not germane to the art of poetry, as the effect of comedy can also be obtained from reading it.” Here again we see Aristotle the reader, even as he may acknowledge that comedy must be represented, and therefore “consists of spoken diction and choral song in its separate parts” (98).
These bare bones, the survival of an extensive treatise oriented perhaps toward the composition of dramatic works, rather than to criticism in a modern sense, were known to ancient readers, and therefore had their impact on the history of drama and its interpretation in the centuries that followed. Aristotle’s scant attention to the chorus, meager in the case of tragedy, almost nonexistent in this reconstruction of the treatise on comedy, may owe something to the circumstances of performance in his day. As mentioned earlier, in Middle Comedy, and in New Comedy, after the era of Old Comedy, of which we have only fragments and the few comedies of Aristophanes still extant, choruses became less significant.
In thinking about tragedy, and about its impact, its formative influence on conceptions of modern subjectivity, it is evident that the tradition, following Aristotle, neglects the presence of the chorus, and increasingly, over time, focuses on the characters of the drama. If there are remnants of the presence of a chorus in the closet tragedies of Seneca, in Shakespearean, in Racinian tragedy, the role of the chorus, if there is one, is taken up by characters, lower-class speakers, characters not central to the plot, who comment on the action or provide some sort of relief from the pained, agonized experience of such creatures as Seneca’s Oedipus, of Phèdre, “la fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé,” of Lear or Macbeth or Hamlet. But can we call any set of actors in such tragedy, or even the players in Midsummer Night’s Dream, a chorus?
Looking back at Athenian tragedy, with the intention of bringing to the fore, or giving adequate weight to the chorus as well as to comedy, a reader might see a different sort of drama than someone reading for individual characters. In Aeschylus’s Persians, for example, one of the earliest of Athenian tragedies, produced in 472 BCE, just eight years after the battle of Salamis, when the Greeks finally chased off the Persian navy, the chorus is made up of Persian “elders,” who open the play with a song that locates its setting in the Persian capital of Susa, in the palace of the emperor Xerxes.
The Athenians agreed not to permit tragedies to refer to recent, actual events, after the poet Phrynichus presented a play in 494 BCE that depicted the fall of the city of Miletus, an Ionian city, ally of Athens, and the audience was moved to tears, the playwright fined for reminding them of their misfortunes (Herodotus 6.21.10). Aeschylus’s remarkable play, which attributes humanity and pathos to the recent enemies of the Panhellenic alliance against them, the Persians, avoids referring to the catastrophe empathically suffered by the Athenian audience, setting the tragedy in the Persians’ capital and making its chorus barbarians, Persians.
The Suppliants, another tragedy of Aeschylus, has a chorus of Danaids, that is, daughters of the legendary Danaus, who are fleeing from Egypt, from ethnic Egyptians who seek to possess them. They are significant figures in this tragedy, not merely commenting on the action of the characters, but beginning the play by begging for refuge from their pursuers: “Zeus Protector, protect us with care. / From the subtle sand of the Nile delta / Our ship set sail” (1–3).36 Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy The Oresteia, features a chorus of elders of the city of Argos, who witness, sometimes passively, the speeches of the play’s actors and protagonists. The chorus sings magnificent songs alluding to the haunted and cursed history of the house of Atreus, its episodes of cannibalism and child sacrifice, its entanglement with Helen, who is seen as a lion cub destroying the house, bringing destruction not only on Troy, but also on the palace of her husband’s brother.
The chorus of Aeschylus’s second play of the Oresteia trilogy is composed of female figures, the Libation Bearers, or Choephoroi, a chorus of “foreign” serving women, or slaves, who accompany Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s daughter Electra as she mourns her father and greets her brother Orestes, returned for vengeance. From the start, these slave women, veiled in black, express their terrible grief, lamenting at the bidding of their mistress:
My cheek shows bright, ripped in the bloody furrows
of nails gashing the skin.
This is my life, to feed the heart on hard-drawn breath.
(24–26, trans. Lattimore)
The last play of the trilogy features a chorus of Furies, the punishing chthonic goddesses bound on vengeance themselves, for Orestes’ subsequent murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. They form a terrible, frightening, active chorus, driving the hero Orestes near to madness until they are subdued, buried under the Acropolis, and rendered benign, at least temporarily, by prayer. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the chorus is made of the daughters of the god Oceanus. In their engagement with the fettered Prometheus, they afford the explication of the reasons for his captivity and torture, sympathizing with his sufferings, attributing them to the great power of Zeus. They take up the female role of lamentation:
A dirge for you came to my lips, so different
from the other song I sang to crown your marriage.
(556–57, trans. Grene)
Women mourn.
Nicole Loraux’s work has illuminated this feature of tragedy, the ways in which women’s grief and mourning resound, sometimes wordlessly, through performances of the Athenian tragic drama.37 She points out:
Cassandra or Antigone, Helen or Iphigeneia will borrow a song that was ordinarily intended for the dead, a deceased other, and apply it to themselves, the living. This reappropriation is important, even if those who engage in it, unlike the chorus of Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens, are not always brave enough to state:
zosa goois me timo
“While I live, I honor myself in my dirge.”
In passages like these, which depict threnody as a melodic wailing, it appears impossible to reduce the lamentation to moaning. In almost every case, even if the cry dominates, music, whether it be soft or loud, is evoked at the same time; in most cases, music accompanies these evocations, which are often sung.38
Loraux’s discussion of these moments, singing by characters or by the members of the chorus, emphasizes the role of mourning, and of music, that element lost to us in our understanding of ancient tragedy. Loraux echoes Charles Segal’s observations concerning classical drama, the argument that “tragedy made weeping itself a sort of song, since, in its own music, namely, that of the flute (aulos), tragedy hears a weeping voice.”39 As Dupont argued as well, our experience of ancient Greek drama as “text,” as written and passed on to readers, can never approach the richness of performance. And we need to try to feel our way toward tragedy’s implicit expressions of mourning and lamentation, the centrality of choral dance and song in tragic performance, and, just as fully, comedy and its choruses’ embeddedness in festival and performance, their audience’s engagement with riotous, anarchic, collective enjoyment and laughter.
Something that continues to preoccupy me, nonetheless, is the modern fascination with tragedy and lamentation, the attachment to the tragic, without a concomitant gaze at laughter and the comic, the presence of comedy in the ancient city, which has been erased often from modern considerations of ancient drama and its relevance to the present. Joshua Billings cites Schlegel, and argues that “the concept of the tragic is related to the sense of ‘seriousness,’” reaching for the infinite, for the sublime. Schlegel, Billings writes, “sees the tragic as prior, the quality on which tragedies are built. The tragic appears independent of its particular instances.”40 Tragedy partakes of tragic infinitude, its reach for sublimity, its seriousness, and for critics stands consistently as higher, superior, weightier, and more significant for modernity than comedy or the comic. Yet the Athenians themselves saw these two genres, tragedy and comedy, as inseparable, as bound together in worship of Dionysos. Is it an accident of transmission, the loss of the part of Aristotle’s Poetics that was concerned with comedy, that has ensured that modernity forgets the necessity of the dialectic relationship between the two varieties of drama?
Tragedy rarely if ever acknowledges the existence of its partner, comedy, unless it be in odd moments when slaves, for example, express fear and dismay at their vulnerability to their masters’ whims. Such a scene occurs, surprisingly perhaps, in Sophocles’ Antigone, when a slave messenger anxiously hesitates to report to Creon, the new tyrant, Antigone’s defiance of his threat.41 Euripides indulges much more frequently in these games, coming close to blurring the line between tragedy and comedy, as in his tragedy Helen, sometimes called a “tragicomedy” or a romance, or in the Orestes, where a Phrygian slave speaks and sings, comically, in a dialect and to an alien new music:42
Greekish sword—kill dead!
Trojan scared, oh.
Run, run,
Jump in slippers, fast, fast,
clop-clop clamber over roof.
(1368–71, trans. Lattimore)
The Phrygian messenger conveys his report in language bravely translated by Richmond Lattimore, a stuttering pidgin speech that mocks the barbarian, who is implicated in a comic scene with the “hero” of the play, Orestes, then forced to beg for his life, and to say, memorably, “Slave man, free man, everybody like to live” (1524). Orestes spares his life after this scene of comical gibberish, groveling, and the assertion by the slave of his humanity. Performed in 408 BCE, near the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Orestes has sometimes been interpreted as revealing Euripides’ exhaustion with his city, his disillusionment with self-congratulatory representations of the Hellenes, and as a prelude to his possible exile in the court of Macedonia, where it is claimed by some biographers he died a very few years later, supposedly torn apart by the royal hounds. Such an interpretation may owe more to the sorts of projections typical of biographical speculation on poets’ life cycles, rather than taking account of the radical experimentation, finally foreclosed, of this play’s form.
The moment of tragicomic mockery of the barbarian slave notwithstanding, with these rare Euripidean exceptions, tragedy remains the genre of high seriousness. And in post-Aristotelian interpretation, readers lay stress on the plays’ characters, their subjectivity, their character, their individuality and choices, and tend to curtail their attention to the collective presence of choruses, often made up of women, barbarians, old people, beings far from Freud’s exemplary human being, Oedipus the king.
The plays of Old Comedy often refer to tragedies, and tragedians, denouncing such playwrights as Agathon, Euripides, and others. The most intense extant engagement with tragedians comes in the Frogs, produced around the same time as Euripides’ Orestes, and taking on the question of tragic poets in a direct and comic vein. The play begins with the journey of Dionysos, accompanied by his slave Xanthias, into the underworld, for reasons that are not made clear until near the end of the comedy. The comic interactions between the god and his slave provide an extraordinary example of parrhesia, free speech, or saying it all, even about the gods, to be discussed more fully in chapter 6. In these early scenes Dionysos is revealed as cowardly, unable to control his bodily functions, willing to trade places with his slave to avoid trouble, and barely able to tolerate even the suggestion of the torture that was routinely inflicted on slaves involved in legal matters.
The critique, of the relative merits of two characters who represent opposed generations of tragic poets, proceeds after encounters of Dionysos and his slave with two separate choruses, one made up of frogs, who surround the lake that the dead must cross to enter the underworld, and another of initiates to the Eleusinian mysteries, who, because of their initiation, experience a happier, most blissful existence in the underworld. The frogs make up a sort of swarm, uttering the deathless line brekekex koax, koax, a noise that Dionysos himself repeats (250).
Sean Gurd, in his fascinating book Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece, has this to say about Aristophanes’ frog song: “Brekekekex koax koax is by no means meaningless (no nonsense ever is). But it derives much of its significance from the fact that it comes from the outside of human language: it paradoxically embodies both a pure music and a pure sound or noise.”43 The frog chorus includes what is outside, beyond the human, defying capture in words, while tragedy in contrast glides along smoothly, never really accommodating the politics of the swarm. Comedy makes experimental, tentative gestures, imagining froggy being in a move toward what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “perspectivism,” or “multinaturalism,” the attribution of thinking, a point of view, to the animal.44 Jeffrey Henderson translates the frogs’ sounds, which accompany their cry: “a chorale spangled with / bubbly ploppifications” (248–49).45 The word he translates is a hapax legomenon, occurring only this once, a neologism, a invented multisyllabic frog word: pompholugopaphlasmasin, “the noises made by bubbles rising” (LSJ).46 Dionysos associates the sounds, the music, the noise, with farts, even as he repeats the frogs’ song. The frogs exhibit a porosity with their environment; they are the song, the dance, the bubbles of their lake.
The frog chorus is contrasted with the second chorus, which appears as Dionysos and Xanthias approach their goal, the domain of Pluto and Persephone, divinities of the land of the dead. This chorus is made of a far more serious group, the initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries, devotees of Persephone and her mother, Demeter, who have achieved a more blissful afterlife than the uninitiated. They call on Iacchus, Dionysos under the name used at Eleusis, and invoke the rejuvenation that comes with their worship:
Lo, the meadow’s ablaze with flame,
and old men’s knees are aleap
as they shed their cares
and the longdrawn seasons of ancient years,
owing to your worship.
(341–48)
Their song summons a frequent theme of comic plays, the return of geriatric men to the gamboling and frolicking of their youth. The leader of this chorus of the dead addresses the audience, asking various categories of miscreants to stand apart from their dances, one who, for example, “shits on the offerings for Hecate while singing for dithyrambic choruses” (366). They invoke Demeter, goddess of grain, as well as Dionysos, divinity of the wet, of wine, both necessities of human existence. Dionysos, god of the theater, a character in this comedy, is thus summoned to participate and to approve the singing and dancing of choruses, as the initiates, singers and dancers, sing to him: “Iacchus lover of choruses (philokhoreuta), escort me on my way” (403). Although the chorus complains of being badly dressed, they thank the god for finding a way for them to perform, and lustily appreciate the tear in a young girl’s dress that allows them to leer at her exposed nipple.
The choruses’ role is most important in these early scenes of the comedy, when Dionysos and Xanthias, his slave, are nearing the abode of the dead. A strange moment occurs when the god takes Heracles’ lionskin back from his slave, and the chorus comments on his versatility, his ability to “shift to the comfy side of the ship / and not just stand fast / in one position, like a painted (gegrammenen) / picture” (535–38). Dionysos is a man of metis, of “cunning intelligence,” an opportunist like the politician Theramenes, mentioned at the end of the choral song.47 The god responds with a speech suggesting the possibility of his voyeuristic participation in Xanthias’s pleasures:
Wouldn’t it be hilarious
if Xanthias, a mere slave (doulos),
were lying all atumble
on Milesian coverlets, and kissing
a dancing girl, then asked for a potty,
and I was looking over at him
with my weenie in hand,
and he caught me watching,
recognizing a fellow rascal, then
punched me in the mouth and knocked out
my front row of chorus men?
(542–48)
The god likes to imagine himself watching his slave, masturbating in front of him, assaulted by his slave, losing his teeth, which are likened to the members of the chorus who have just been admiring him for his flexibility in moving between the dress of a slave, that of the god that he is, and his costume as Heracles, who has been to the underworld before him. Later he encounters Heracles himself, the mortal whom Odysseus found in the underworld, but who also dwells as an immortal on Olympus. The disruptive analogy drawn between members of the chorus and teeth (tou khorou tous prosthious, 548), a metatheatrical gesture of hostility, suggests a metaphorical connection between the god himself and his chorus, the celebrants of his divinity in comedy.
Dionysos is the great god in whose honor the festivals are celebrated, whose image attends the performances, who watches over the choruses, the actors, the spectacle of the drama. How can we account for the incongruities of this play, the god mocked and ridiculed, exposed as a coward willing to take the place of his slave, with the judge who appears in the later part of the play, the divinity who will choose which one of the deceased tragedians, Aeschylus or Euripides, will be conveyed back to the upper world to aid the city of Athens in its time of trouble? Perhaps the question of parrhesia, of saying it all, to be considered more fully in a later chapter, applies here as well as in those scenes in which the choruses of other comedies insult and taunt the politicians of the day. Dionysos is the people’s god, the one who gave them the gift of wine, of forgetfulness of the pains and suffering of laboring lives. And he is the god of the theater, of transformation and possession on the floor of the orchestra, of the capacity to play the other, to enter the existence of another, slave, woman, bird, frog, in the ludic situation of the theatrical performance. Yet he is insulted, mocked, ridiculed in this comedy.
In the underworld, Sophocles, recently dead, does not challenge the preeminence of his great predecessor Aeschylus, the latter’s right to hold the “chair of tragedy” among the dead. But Euripides, also recently dead, proposes to take the chair from his elder, claiming his superiority to Aeschylus. The contest that ensues, judged by Dionysos, focuses on three elements of their respective tragic legacies, and reveals perhaps what some Athenians themselves may have thought to be most significant about the plays, before the philosopher Aristotle could pronounce on the question of tragedy in his Poetics.
The agon, the contest between the two tragedians, not only concerns the sort of advice, counsel, aid that the dead playwright might bring back to the city of the living, but also focuses quite explicitly, and in some detail, on stylistic features of their plays. The arguments assume on the part of the audience a great familiarity with the varying styles of the tragedians, with their ideological orientation, but also with issues of performance and even of diction. In a world where many were illiterate, or barely literate, where so much was conveyed through hearing, the play takes for granted that a sophisticated audience, or some part of it, could recall the rhythms, the very lines of tragedies seen and heard in the past, and would bring to this play that attention and recognition that modern readers familiar with ancient texts, without the sort of aural memory skills held by ancient spectators, can only imagine. Gurd, in Dissonance, argues that in fact we may be more receptive to the sounds of this poetry than other recent generations have been: “The end of humanism has made us more corporeal and more subject to affective resonances (for good and ill)—in short, we are more ancient than we have been in a long time.”48
In any case, the play clearly expects spectators to follow the mock contest between Euripides and Aeschylus, bringing some knowledge of and familiarity with the differences in orientation and style their plays exhibited. The chorus insists that members of the audience can follow the intricacies of these debates, the arguments for one tragedian pitted against the other:
And if you’re afraid
of any ignorance among
the spectators, that they won’t
appreciate your subtleties of argument,
don’t worry about that, because
things are no longer that way.
For they’re veterans,
and each one has a book (biblion)
and knows the fine points;
their natural endowments are masterful too.
(1108–15)
This is an interesting claim. Could every spectator, or even many, have had a copy of the tragedies, or of those being discussed? Was their reliance on oral, aural performance so adept that they could follow the complexities of reference the two tragedians employ as they wrestle for the chair of excellence?
Aeschylus convinces the god Dionysos that he is the better man, winner of this contest, and that he should return to the upper world with the god. It is Aeschylus who has good sense, intelligence, who doesn’t waste time sitting around chatting with Socrates, as the chorus suggests Euripides does, “ignoring the best / of the tragedian’s craft” (1491–95):
To hang around killing time
in pretentious conversation
and hairsplitting twaddle
is the mark of a man who’s lost his mind.
(1496–99)
Pluto sends Aeschylus off with his blessing, and with the instruments of suicide for various characters still living in the city, who should hurry down to the underworld before he tattoos and fetters them, as he would treat slaves.49 Aeschylus has a final word, demanding that Sophocles be given his chair in the underworld, that Euripides, criminal, liar, beggar, must never sit there in the place of honor.
Dionysos the god may be some sort of “comic hero” here, in this play, one of the first examples of literary criticism in the Western tradition. But he is, of course, also the god revealed to be a coward and a fool in the earlier part of the play. In an abrupt, jarring rupture with this earlier portrait of the divinity, he is latterly the patron of the dramatic festivals, exhibiting his concern at the end of the play to save the city of Athens, to find a thinker and writer who will offer wise counsel in its time of trouble. There is much less focus on a consistent characterization and plot in the comedy, and on the plots of the tragedies themselves, than readings of Aristotle would suggest.
The post-Aristotelian understanding of the heart of tragedy as plot and character mistakes some aspects even of the Aristotelian argument, when looked at from the point of view of this comedy. If Aristotle is principally concerned with the muthos, the story, the “plot,” as it is usually translated, his interest in ethos is not necessarily in “personae,” characters in our modern sense, but rather in the sort of character, that is, ethical disposition, of the persons depicted in the tragedies. And this emphasis is prefigured in the Aristophanic Frogs, where Aeschylus condemns his rival Euripides for presenting low, base, depraved, perverted persons who encourage base behavior in his audience. The bad examples, persons with low ethical standards or low social standing, women and slaves, drag down the city’s morale and its ethical stance.50
Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove wrote a version of the Frogs, first performed in 1974, later revised by Nathan Lane and expanded by Sondheim himself, in which Dionysos goes to hell to bring back George Bernard Shaw, who is bested by Shakespeare, chosen by the god to accompany him back to the upper world. In the original production, staged in Yale University’s gymnasium, the chorus was played by the university’s aquatics team, which swam around a boat crossing the pool. The production, much revised, had its day on Broadway.
But in general, in terms of scholarly interest and investment, and even entertainment, comedy has suffered. It has been seen as a poor cousin of tragedy, even though ancient performances of tragedy and comedy were intimately connected, inconceivable separated from their mutual presentation in Dionysiac festival. Tragedy has been the elite, privileged genre. And comedy studies have been more insular, more concerned with questions of authorship, of dating, of issues associated with the fragments of writers now lost to us, with the interpretation of comic vocabulary, and with the explication of historical and political references in the texts than offering opportunities for reflection on the great questions by philosophers and political theorists.
And possibly, I would argue, there has been a gendering of scholarship as well. If women for centuries had little or no Greek, they had even less access to the obscenity, the scatology, and the sexual insults rampant in the Aristophanic plays. Obscenity in Old Comedy was often not translated, elided or euphemized in generally circulated translations, or rendered into Latin, as in the standard dictionaries, so only classicists who knew the obscenities of Latin could read the obscenities of Greek. Here again, Jeffrey Henderson performed a great service in The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (1975), which considered in depth the obscene vocabulary and figures of speech of Aristophanes.51 But the masculine dominance of the study of Greek inherited from a segregated education system in Britain may have had its effect on the gendering of the study of comedy in the Anglo-Saxon world. Women may not have been present at the original performances of Aristophanes’ plays in fifth-century BCE Athens, and they have been distinctly less present than men in the bibliography of studies of Attic comedy in modernity, until the important work of Edith Hall and other feminists, especially those interested in Lysistrata as a peacemonger. Are women still being sheltered from obscenity? The study of ancient Greek comedy, as opposed to Roman comedy, richly served by the scholar Amy Richlin and others, sometimes appears to be an isolate among the subdisciplines of classics, more attached to earlier modes of intellectual work.52 The dominance of men in the field, the rejection to some degree of cultural studies approaches to the issues raised by comedy, the unwillingness at times to connect with debates within the humanities as a whole, seem to point to a more traditional methodology than has characterized other subdisciplines of classics in recent years. And the intervention of nonclassicists, as has happened in other fields of the discipline, perhaps especially in interpretation and deployment of Athenian tragedy, seems much less common.
After Aristotle, thinking about ancient Athenian drama has centered on tragedy, its plots, its personae. There has been an attempt not only to locate tragedy in its historical moment, to clarify its place within the rituals and institutions of the ancient city, but also to deploy the significance of tragedy in new historical circumstances, in the more recent past. Oedipus and his daughter Antigone have captured the imagination of modernity and postmodernity. Modern man is Oedipalized, postmodern woman Antigone. The emphasis on the individual, the agent of choice, as the subject of suffering, has taken center stage. Tragedy, with its characters, especially these personae of Oedipus and Antigone, set on stage by Sophocles, dominates the references to ancient society into the twenty-first century. The chorus, at the heart of tragedy and comedy, as well as ancient drama’s setting in democratic celebration of the god Dionysos, although acknowledged in classical scholarship, has fallen away from contemporary interdisciplinary discourse. Comedy and the chorus have faded into near invisibility, and do not compel the same interest for those curious about the classical tradition, invested in philosophy and the politics of the present. And it’s for this reason that in the chapters to follow I center on the possibilities comedy can offer to contemporary cultural debates, in particular what it reveals about strong, victorious women, about parrhesia, the freedom to speak, about utopianism, and about collectivity, communalism, and the power of the swarm in democracy.