McGlew, 'Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-mcglew-aristophanes
A. M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 328. $64.95.
ISBN 0-521-44012-2.
Reviewed by James F. McGlew -- Allegheny College
A. M. Bowie's Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy is
the first book in English since Francis Cornford's The Origin
of Attic Comedy (1914) that is devoted to the relationship
between Old Comedy and Greek myths and rituals. Bowie, like
Cornford, argues for the provocative position that comedy is
essentially engaged with myth and ritual. But while Cornford
looked to mythical and ritual paradigms to reconstruct the remote
origins of comedy its narrative structure and its character
typology without probing the reception of Aristophanes' plays,
Bowie turns to myth and ritual to explain the meaning and
influence of Aristophanes' individual comedies in the context of
late fifth-century Athens. Bowie looks for the receptive
"filters," by means of which comedy's fifth-century encountered
and understood it. In this project, Bowie employs the strategies
of structural anthropologists; in his words, he is looking for
the "'grammar' of Greek culture" (4), which he reconstructs true
to his structuralist methodology not primarily out of the events
and persons that made up the Athenians' daily social and
political experiences, but from the Athenians' memories and
participation in myth and ritual, those aspects of Greek culture
that are most foreign to modern readers of Aristophanes. Bowie
also follows structuralism in deemphasizing the personal beliefs
and authorial intentions of Aristophanes himself. He is
interested more in comedy's audience than its author, and in
perceived, rather than intended, meanings. Comedy, for Bowie,
belongs in a context defined by public and religious festivals;
it was not an instrument of personal persuasion: the "function
[of Aristophanes' comedies] in the city was not principally for
one man to lecture the audience," rather "they were part of [the]
displaying of the city to itself" (10).
After a chapter on method and perspective, Aristophanes:
Myth, Ritual and Comedy devotes a chapter to each of
Aristophanes' eleven extant plays. (It should be noted that Bowie
says little about Aristophanes' fragmentary plays and almost
nothing about those of his contemporaries.) Bowie's organization
is chronological. He reads each play in a complex relation with a
distinct set of myths and rituals which he uses to reconstruct
its distinctive meaning for its Athenian audience.<<]] But he
sees commonalities among the plays of given periods. He reads the
Knights, Clouds and Wasps against Athenian
rites of passage (Bowie believes the ephebeia existed in
some form in the fifth century), which are variously imitated,
manipulated or reversed in the course of the three plays. Bowie
reads the Lysistrata and the Thesmophoriazusae,
which he takes as examples of (male) Athenian views of women,[[]]
in close connection with the Athenian festivals the Thesmophoria
and the Adonia, and with related myths (Lysistrata with
the Lemnian women). And he finds similar connections between the
Ecclesiazusae and Frogs, which he sees as part of
an extended critique of tragedy and its social lapses.
Bowie aims to put Aristophanes in the thick of everyday
Athenian life. He exhibits a genuine interest in reconstructing
the religious and cultural elements that Aristophanes' audience
brought with it to the theater; every chapter is full of
insightful readings and pervaded by an impressive knowledge of
Athenian ritual and myth. Yet for all its intelligence and
perspicacity, I found this book often frustrating. Its insightful
interpretations seemed to me to be interspersed with misleading
mythical analogies, and Bowie's reconstruction of the audience's
perspective on the social and political implications of
Aristophanes' comedy sometimes seems limited and reductive.
Rather than list points of agreement and disagreement in his
separate receptive interpretations of Aristophanes' eleven
surviving plays, I intend to use this review to explore the
methodological dimensions and substantive characteristics of
Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy, from which both its
insights and problems arise: how Bowie reconstructs the receptive
meaning of Aristophanic comedy, and how, in reading comedy, he
also reconstructs meaning in comedy and the audience that
discovered it.
I will begin with Bowie's methods. While Bowie draws on
structural methodology, he shows little interest in the structure
of comedy itself. Bowie is right that only by "special pleading"
(4) was Cornford able to make Aristophanes' extant works fit the
ritual paradigms of cosmic struggle and renewal that he posited
at comedy's origins. But in discounting the receptive
significance of comic structure, he leaves critical questions
about the generic relation of myth and the comedy untouched. He
does not discuss how comedy's generic engagement with myth and
ritual distinguished it from other genres of choral lyric or
whether the filters that shaped comedy's reception also came into
play when the same citizen body sat as the audience of tragedies,
political rhetoric and other forms of public discourse or, again,
how the comic performance activated the expectations of its
audience and how, in turn, it reshaped them. At the same time,
explicit and veiled references to Greek myths and rituals are
given a remarkable authority as keys to the minds of comedy's
fifth-century audience.[[]] In fact, what justification Bowie
gives for his use of myth and ritual needs to be much stronger
than it is: "the analyses of Aristophanes' plays will make most
use of ritual and mythological material, partly because there is
so much explicit use made of Greek myth and ritual in the
comedies, and partly because we can reconstruct a good deal of
the significances of these myths and rituals in Greek culture
generally and so assess their meaning in the narrower area of
Aristophanic drama" (3).
Bowie's views comedy as a conservative genre. He reads many of
Aristophanes' heroes as anti-heroes, who transgress the social
order without much effort to restore it. "A particularly common
technique in Aristophanes is to juxtapose reference to these city
festivals to the actions of his heroes, so that the ideology of
the city is contrasted with the deeds of the main characters,
often to the discredit of the latter" (8). "The plays offer a
vision of a release from constraints, but also show where it can
lead if unchecked" (16-17). Comedy, in Bowie's book, comments on
(or invites its audience to comment on) its heroes' fantastic
quests and visions by referencing (or allowing its audience to
discover references to) pre-existing images and patterns. There
is a duality inherent in comedy; for Bowie, Aristophanes' plays
typically imagine brave new worlds, but simultaneously undercut
their own fantasies. In this sense, Aristophanes' fantastic
constructions seem cathartic in their social function: they
cancel themselves, as self-parodies, leaving his audience with an
appreciation of the complexity of the real world but no sense of
alternatives to it: "fantasy in Aristophanes," Bowie remarks in
concluding his discussion of the Frogs, "is always put at
the service of a greater understanding of the nature and indeed
unavoidability of reality" (252). Bowie makes no mistake in being
wary of attributing too much to comic constructions: comedy did
not compete with the pnyx. Yet surely it was not limited to
buttressing questionable social and political structures by
reducing all hopes of alternatives to dystopic fantasy.[[]]
The second point concerns Bowie's presentation of
Aristophanes' poetic persona. Bowie wants to see Aristophanes
"freed from debates about his personal views, political, social,
and sexual orientation, attitude towards intellectual matters,
changing attitudes to Athenian life with the passage of time, and
so on," and he believes Aristophanes should be "allowed to see
his name become synonymous with his texts" (293), or, in fact,
with the performative context of his plays. It is refreshing to
see nothing in Bowie's Aristophanes of the poet's poet, whose
primary engagement was to a literary tradition (the Aristophanes
of Cedric Whitman's Aristophanes and the Comic Hero
[1964]). Bowie's discussion of the relation of poetry and
politics in the Frogs (238-53) is particularly valuable in
this respect. Yet, if Bowie is right to beware
overly-aestheticizing Aristophanic comedy, it can hardly be
doubted that comedy was a vehicle of authorial as well as civic
identity. And while it is certainly correct to distinguish the
persona of the comic poet as literary fabrication, it is wrong to
treat that persona, because it may have diverged from the persona
the same author fabricated in other public and private media, as
unimportant for comedy. Bowie's dislike of discussions of the
authorial persona and intentions is often intense. But he
sometimes seems to be fighting anonymous ghosts: "not
infrequently too one can see that the 'Aristophanes' constructed
by those who would know his views bears no small likeness to the
author of the study in question" (10).
Bowie's disinterest in Aristophanes' self-image and his
disinclination to see much political agency in comedy are perhaps
linked to his view of Aristophanes' audience, who seem more
religious than the Athenians of other scholars, and certainly
more conservative. He seems to read Aristophanes' plays from the
perspective of those who not only gave myth and ritual a
principal place in their interpretive frameworks, but who were
also nervous, sensitive, even somewhat humorless about religion
as well as comedy, and far more impressed by innuendos touching
upon religious and ritual procedures and than by comedy's
abundant social and political arguments.[[]] Bowie's audience
took Aristophanes very literally. Its members were likely to
agree with Aristophanes' heroes that Athens was "a place full of
disagreeable, even intolerable, aspects," yet they would soon
decide that those same heroes, when they were allowed to have
their way, built worlds with "features which, especially from a
democratic viewpoint, are even more worrying" (171). Comedy did
not apparently do much to ease their worries or lift their
spirits, and it certainly did little, even temporarily, to make
them adjust their opinions on what was good or bad for the city.
That there were such Athenians can hardly be doubted (I think of
Plato's Euthyphro as an example of the type). But few scholars
would see them as typical of Athens at any point of Aristophanes'
career, and fewer still would construct them as Aristophanes'
"ideal audience." It is better to attribute too much, than too
little, complexity and sophistication to Aristophanes'
contemporary audience.
We must appreciate Bowie's familiarity with Greek rituals and
myths and his subtle use of these in reading Aristophanes' plays.
He moves the modern reader closer to the very different receptive
world of late fifth-century Athens. Yet he fails to support his
insightful readings of the mythical and ritual parallels in
comedy with a examination of the generic characteristics of
comedy, or, more importantly still, with a satisfactory
discussion of the place of myth and ritual in the minds of
Aristophanes' contemporary audience. Aristophanes: Myth,
Ritual and Comedy leaves many important questions unanswered.
NOTES
1. Bowie believes that the intensity of the links between plays
and their mythical and ritual referent varies. Peace, for
example, is a play that evokes the Athenian Anthesteria, but in
less immediate ways than other plays recall other rituals (149).
2. Bowie dismisses the view of unnamed scholars' view of
Lysistrata as "simply a 'feminist' drama" (204).
3. Bowie's argument that the Acharnians is not only about
war and peace provides an example: "a reconsideration of the
function of mythology and ritual reference in the play will show
that it is in fact dealing with a much greater range of questions
of central importance to the city" (18).
4. On the Wasps, for example, Bowie remarks "once again,
there is no overt protreptic from Aristophanes: the vices of
democratic and tyrannical justice at opposite ends of the
judicial spectrum are set before the audience, who may do with
them what they will" (100). Sometimes, Bowie attributes more to
Aristophanes: "the plays ... may not have been propagandistic for
a particular political position, but may have worked to raise the
audience's consciousness of the problems facing them" (11). And
he appreciates more complex readings when he finds them in
secondary sources (so Bowie's discussion at 149-50 of Albio
Cassio's treatment of Peace in Commedia e
partecipazione [Naples, 1985]).
5. It certainly reduced Aristophanes' rich mixture of utopic and
dystopic in the Birds' Nephelcoccygia, for example, to the
level of moral banalities. Bowie offers a detailed reading of the
establishment of the Bird city against the myth of Tereus, which
ingenuously paints the foundation of Nephelcoccygia as an
aberrant exercise in city foundation; nonetheless, Aristophanes'
audience, Bowie believes, understood the play "as giving a clear
demonstration of the dangers of wishful thinking of a better
world in the sky and exaggerating the problems of the democracy"
(171).