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Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres.

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In an article published in 1993, Charles Platter threw down the gauntlet: "I think Bakhtin seriously underrates the complexity of Aristophanes" (209-10). In Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres, Platter backs up his claim by showing the rewards of reading Aristophanes through a Bakhtinian lens. In each chapter, Platter spins out innovative readings of select scenes; taken as a whole, his book offers an important contribution to classics' ongoing incorporation of Bakhtin whose catchphrases, such as carnivalesque and dialogism, are now becoming common fare in some areas of classical scholarship. Platter's text will be of central interest to anyone wanting to venture into the complexities of Aristophanic language as well as for those seeking innovative methodologies that can be exported into studies of other authors or genres.

The application of Bakhtinian ideas to Aristophanes is neither new nor straightforward. Since the late 1960s, when Julia Kristeva brought Bakhtin's work to center stage in literary studies, numerous classical scholars have tried their hand at applying Bakhtin to Aristophanes. But such a project places the Aristophanes scholar in a tricky bind. On the one hand, Bakhtin's theories of carnival, laughter, dialogism, and the grotesque all seem to cry out for Aristophanes. On the other hand, Aristophanes is puzzlingly absent from much of Bakhtin's thinking on the history of laughter. The much less famous tradition of Menippean satire and the Socratic dialogue receive pride of place in Bakhtin's formulation. The Sirens' song of recasting Aristophanic comedy as Bakhtinian carnival, then, can all too easily make us forget the dangerous pitfalls of such an undertaking.

The main impediment to connecting Aristophanes and Bakhtin derives from classical Athenian drama's role as part of state-sponsored festivals. This institutionalized starting point for Aristophanic laughter clashes with Bakhtin's theory of carnival: "[Carnival laughter] always remained a free weapon in [the people's] hands" (Rabelais 94). This means that any simple equation of Aristophanic comedy with Bakhtinian carnival quickly confronts the reality that Old Comedy simply was not a popular, organic, bottom-up, antihierarchical event that those at the top of the social power structure grudgingly tolerated. Thus, anyone wanting to apply Bakhtin to Aristophanes must carefully consider how to proceed. Can we understand the Dionysiac festivals of Athens (both the City Dionysia and the Lenaia) as examples of carnival despite the fact that they were run by the polis? Or can we can we see the Athenian democracy as a government rooted in the same popular currents as carnival (though such a position would call into question the very concept of a carnival festival)? Or is there some other way out of this apparent bind? The closest that Platter comes to answering these questions in Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres is the comment that "[e]ven what appears to be comedy's overall aristocratic bias becomes intelligible in carnival terms as the attempt by the polis to institutionalize carnival laughter and so limit the disruptive and destabilizing forms that carnival laughter could take" (2).

We can gain a deeper understanding of Platter's stance on this issue by...

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