Aristophanes’ Comic Poetry and Critical Imagination

• In Event: Women and War in Ancient Poetry

Abstract

The plays of Aristophanes are often celebrated for their originality and creativity. The heroes and heroines of the comic poet change their worlds in the most radical ways imaginable: founding a city of birds in the clouds, striking a peace treaty between a private citizen and a rival city-state, or challenging gender hierarchies and natural distinctions in the polis. In this paper, I argue that Aristophanes’ plays are not only incredibly imaginative, but they also make a significant—yet, thus far, unrecognized—contribution to our understanding of the imagination and its political roles. While Aristophanes himself had no explicit theoretical account of the imagination, his unique contribution to the history of imagination is in uncovering its important critical functions: the fact that the imagination can be used to reveal the artificial and socially constructed nature of the ideas, norms, and beliefs that we so often view as necessary, natural, and unchangeable.

Focusing on several Aristophanic comedies—in particular, Acharnians, Birds, Wasps, and Clouds—this paper argues that the genre of ancient comic poetry, especially in the Athenian context of the Dionysian festival, allows Aristophanes to develop a unique type of political criticism that I would call “the critical imagination.” The critical imagination, I explain, represents a critical reflection on the imaginary foundations of social order—what Cornelius Castoriadis called the “imaginary institutions of society”—that aims to expose their hidden imaginary character. These imaginary institutions rarely represent themselves as a product of the imagination but instead tend to appear as natural, a-historical, and objective. As a result, the critical reflection on the imaginary foundations of society is neither easy nor common. Viewed in this light, scholars often described the critical imagination as simply a critique of the imagination (akin, in a sense, to ideology critique). The Aristophanic model of the critical imagination I develop in this paper, on the other hand, represents the critique of the imagination by the imagination. The strength of this comic critical imagination is found in its capacity to call into question the naturality and necessity of social and political ideas and facts while revealing the workings of the imagination in both maintaining them and allowing for their transformation.

The plays of Aristophanes are a natural site for investigating the ancient Athenian political imagination. Aristophanes often described himself as introducing ‘new’ and ‘original’ ideas. And indeed, it is hard to overstate the incredible creativity and innovation of his plays. At the same time, my reading of Aristophanes shows that his creativity and innovation are inseparable from various forms of social and political criticism. Aristophanes’ criticism, in turn, and his “critical imagination” more generally, cannot be understood outside of the political genre of comic poetry and the cultural context of the Athenian festival. Within the festivals, comedy often operates in an “area of reversal of norms.” In this context, the comic poet could provide a controlled subversion of societal expectations, taking advantage of the general suspension of the customary order during the festival.

The genre of comic poetry and the context of the festival in which it was performed thus provide a uniquely fertile ground for the development of the critical imagination. The plays of Aristophanes on which this paper focuses all work within the realm of fantasy: they invite the audience to suspend their everyday beliefs and norms and entertain new and surprising possibilities that defy their expectations and experiences. The ancient genre of comic poetry, therefore, provides not only an opportunity to produce radical innovation but also a rare reflection on the artificial and contingent nature of the forces that govern society—especially its “imaginary institutions.” As such, it can aid in the development of its audience’s “critical imagination”: an understanding of the constitutive roles the imagination plays in everyday lives and the potential to change the world as it is by taking advantage of the powers of imagination.

Author

• Avshalom M Schwartz, Southern Methodist University