Democratic Swarms

Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People

Page duBois

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226815756
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Drama

Considers how ancient Greek comedy offers a model for present-day politics. With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. Moving beyond the popular readings of ancient Greece through the lens of tragedy, she calls for a revitalized look at Greek comedy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of Oedipus and his family or tragedy's relationship to questions of sovereignty, this book calls for comedy—its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses, and its rebellious women—to inform another model of democracy.Ancient comedy has been underplayed in the study of Greek drama. Yet, with the irrepressible energy of the comic swarm, it provides a unique perspective on everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the utopian politics of the classical period of Athenian democracy. Using the concepts of swarm intelligence and nomadic theory, duBois augments tragic thought with the resistant, utopian, libidinous, and often joyous communal legacy of comedy, and she connects the lively anti-authoritarianism of the ancient comic chorus with the social justice movements of today.

[CHAPTER 1]

The Tragic Individual

The Tyranny of Oedipus and Antigone

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.

Tragedy, the Tragic, and Modernity

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...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• chapter 1  The Tragic Individual: The Tyranny of Oedipus and Antigone
• chapter 2  The Swarm
• chapter 3  Chorus
• chapter 4  Utopias
• chapter 5  Parrhesia: Saying It All
• chapter 6  Democracy, Communalism, Communism
• chapter 7  Epilogue: The Politics of the Present
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index