As if swept up by a sinister, laughing wind, the characters
of Aristophanes scattered across the American election. Sophists, sycophants,
demagogues, and tyrants—all Greek figures employed by the Athenian “Father of
Comedy”—blew across the political and media landscape. Swap Donald Trump and
his caballing acolytes with the pseudopopulist heroes and villains of
Aristophanes and few would notice. “The Theatre,” Trump declared, “must always
be a safe and special place”: if only he knew the Aristophanic arsenal amassed
for ridiculing his “ancient Trumps” like Cleon and Alcibiades. The comedian
coined demagogue and devised its comic archetype, an
eel-fisher who catches nothing in clear waters but reaps bounties by stirring
slime. Thus if Trump never existed, Aristophanes would be forced to invent him.
Mere decades after democracy’s inception in Athens, the playwright yoked it to
comedy; when democracy mires itself in the mud, we spot him on the scene. From
carnivalesque populism to debates over political correctness, Aristophanes
whispers his stage directions to the political order. No one else so
effortlessly captures the careening hypocrisies of born elites who pursue
populism. No one else understood that the populist farce, in the repetitions of
history, comes before the tragedy—the reverse quip of Karl
Marx. The winds blow Aristophanic.
Peisetaerus of Birds becomes the best
backbone for Trumpian flesh. A bombastic sophist, fancying himself a developer
for the tremendous new city of Cloudcuckooland—to be surrounded by
a great wall—Peisetaerus means “persuader of his comrades” in Greek.
Disillusioned with Athenian (American) life, he quarrels with the gods
(Washington elites) after pitching his increasingly grandiose schemes to the
birds (American people). Peisetaerus bests the Olympians (Rubio, Bush, Kasich),
eventually being crowned tyrannos: a buffoonish sophist-god-tyrant.
The apotheosis of Peisetaerus—god of the gods—marks the finale of Birds,
ending its prophecy for 2016.
There was no sequel, but a great many Trumpian motifs: a
scam university in Clouds, an assault on the judiciary in Wasps,
a meat salesman’s campaign for power in Knights (sausages, not
steaks). Right out of Trump supporters’ nightmares, Praxagora of Assemblywomen wins
the election and encourages her fellow women to implement a socialist regime.
Yet Aristophanes was no Marx; intractable ironies stifle these political
programs. The quasi-feminist sex strike in Lysistrata leaves
critics wondering whether Aristophanes—like Trump says of himself—“is the best
for women” or simply practices classic Athenian misogyny. Aristophanes believed
in democracy more strongly than Trump, but in both we find a kind of comedic realpolitik.
Winning the Dionysia festival, like winning business or votes, was paramount.
“Vote for us,” cry the titular creatures of Birds, “or we’ll shit
on you.” Scholars interrogate the playwright’s politics as the Aristophanic
question par excellence; now its uncertainty is itself
Trumpian.
Aristophanes’ cornucopia of churlish wit belongs mostly to
the left these days, but electing a “pussy-grabber” represents a dubious
right-wing victory against “political correctness”—of all political terms, the
most incoherent. Though often used against left identity politics, this
linguistic policing classically belonged to the right, protecting authority and
the state. Its logic is patriotism; civil language was civic.
Even the irreverent Aristophanes offered a “safe space” for certain
conservative elements in Athens. Classical Greek obscenity did not recognize
tainted words, argues Jeffrey Henderson, only a concept of bringing shame
(crucial in Trumpian rhetoric). In Henderson’s fine translation—the first
unexpurgated one in English— Peisetaerus decrees that if the gods trespass
(through the fabled wall) “then clap a seal on their boners, so they can’t fuck
those women anymore.” Yet obscene language in Aristophanes and Trump conceals
reactionary political prohibition. The first “politically incorrect” comedian
was sometimes a hypocrite, a term whose meaning was aptly
embroidered by ancient drama, whose mantle robes Trump so extravagantly today.
The spirit of 2016 was a carnival of sinister comedy
rejecting policy-politics-polis as serious inquiry. Mikhail Bakhtin
understood carnivalesque literature as turning the world upside down; each play
of Aristophanes indeed turns Athens inside out. Bakhtin wed the carnivalesque
with the grotesque: the openings and protrusions of the body, elements that are
“disgusting”— Trump’s favourite word. Trump injected the grotesque into
politics in an Aristophanic throwback. He made politics bodily again: about
menstruation (Megyn Kelly), his small, germophobic hands (the “short-fingered
vulgarian”), and his histrionic hair (Aristophanes, famously bald, lacked
Trumpian technologies). The penile exchange between Trump and Marco Rubio was
ripped right out of Birds with its cocks of many feathers. If
Straussians fancy robing naked power with decorum, then Trumpians dress it in
the costumes of old comedy, padded outfits affixed with giant leather
phalluses.
The notion that jesting statements are harmless first ran
aground when Aristophanes lampooned Socrates in Clouds, influencing
the jurors who later sentenced him to death. This literary-political
relationship haunts G. W. F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Leo Strauss.
Aristophanes’ engagement with the real inhabitants of Athens, however, is
inseparable from his rhapsodic imaginings of the polis undergoing
sexual and socialist revolutions. His comedies are neither utopias nor
dystopias, yet each reveals the contingency of the political order. Some escape
Athens, others return to an older Athens, each rips through the status quo like
the thunderous flatulence in Clouds—the “winds” of revolution and
deviance. Already recognized as the “prince” of comedy, he should be hailed as
patron of dissent and political imagination.
Western democracies claim and clamour over their Greek
heritage. Yet they repressed Aristophanes—who insists he is among the greatest
comedians of all time—and now his spirit returns, demanding exaltation. If
greatness demands relevance, then Trump vindicates Aristophanes. A superlative
satirist before satire even had a name, Aristophanes coined spoudaiogeloion, or
the seriocomic. Tragedy seems apt for the terrifying state of the world today,
but hearing the raucous, knowing laughter of Aristophanes, we must study how
comedy arms and disarms; laughter can be both virtuous and vicious. Post-truth may
be the word of year, but we are not postcomedy—as dire as this seriocomedy
proves to be. Trump claims the world is “laughing at us”: as always, the
questions are who to laugh with, who to laugh at, and when there must be no
laughter at all.
Working between
rhetoric and philosophy, Jonathan Doering studies the reception and presence of
classical and modern rhetoric in French thought, and examines sophists both
ancient and modern. He is finishing his PhD at the Centre for the Study of
Theory and Criticism in London, Ontario.
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De IN THE MOMENT, 13/01/2017
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