Ritual and Performativity: The Chorus of Old Comedy (review)

With this book (originally published as Der Chor in der Alten Komödie [Munich 2001]), Anton Bierl makes a contribution at the intersection of dramatic criticism and cultural anthropology. Bierl's dissertation and subsequent work exhibited a keen interest in the social context of Greek drama and contemporary critical trends.¹ Here, in what was his Habilitationsschrift, he explores the connection between ritual and the comic chorus in three long sections that seem to be interrelated monographs rather than conventional chapters. The first section reviews bibliography and develops a theory of "performativity." The second is a close reading of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, while the third concentrates on phallic songs as kômos (fr. 851 PMG) and their implications for comedy. This study is valuable for its theoretically nuanced and detailed treatment of a difficult subject of interest to serious students of Greek comedy.

Bierl's first section offers a review of anthropologically inflected scholarship on drama. Key influences here are, predictably, V. Turner, C. Calame, B. Gentili, J. J. Winkler, et al. The approach suggested by this list is nicely enhanced by reference to scholarship outside classics, including speech-act theory and linguistics. Although J. Searle is mentioned, the main source for Bierl's notion of "performativity" is J. L. Austin's ever-popular essay "How to Do Things with Words" (1975). R. Jakobson's notion of the linguistic "shifter" is also accorded a prominent place. Noting that performative choral culture was ubiquitous in ancient Athens, Bierl articulates a correspondingly performative view of the Old Comic chorus as essentially ritualistic from macrostructure to the finest details. While participating in the comic plot, according to Bierl, the choristers simultaneously acknowledge that they are engaged in a performance anchored in ritual. Speech-act theory allows Bierl to establish a productive link between performance criticism, ritual theory, and the recent scholarship on self-referentiality and metatheater. Bierl argues that the chorus of comedy employs performative language in order to bridge its own inner (ritual) song and dance and the surrounding context of dramatic plot, festival, and polis. Despite its participation in a contemporary art form, the comic chorus always represents an immediate ritual presence. Bierl even suggests that laughter arises from the tension between the modern "here and now" of the polis and the precivilized past evoked by the ritual chorus. This level of analysis facilitates a productive connection between dramatic genres as well. Stepping back from the theoretical forest, however, I retain certain misgivings about the hypertrophy of the theoretical apparatus with regard to something as robust, direct, and funny as an Aristophanic comedy. Bierl's obsessive manipulation of contemporary intellectual constructs is, in the end, rather exhausting.

The second section of the book features a close reading of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, in which Bierl foregrounds the dual nature of choral action and performance. On one level, the chorus figures as a ritual group unified in honoring the goddess; on another, it is a dramatis persona committed to forwarding Aristophanes' comic plot. An intriguing aspect of Bierl's approach is the suggestion that we regard the dramatic instabilities and reversals of the play in terms of the Ausnahmeritual implicit in the Thesmophoria itself. In this connection I applaud Bierl's redefinition of "parabatic" as a performative mode that complements nicely the well-established lines of literary criticism. Cf., e.g., T. K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca, 1991) 188–91.

The final chapter offers a detour outside the theater. Bierl takes a close look at the ithyphallic song and dance described by Semos of Delos (carm. pop., fr. 851 PMG). The (imagined) performance of an authentic kômos in its cultic and religious context has important implications for choral revelry in comedy. This is not the first attempt at such a connection, but the emphasis on performativity is new. With the interpretation of comedy in view...