Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy. Vol. 1: Six Essays in Perspective by Kenneth J. Reckford (review)

250Rocky Mountain Review in the Emersonian view, no generation can make such a claim. Every poet attempts to cancel and displace the work of his precursors, and hence every literary movement suffers such treatment, no matter how hard it tries to portray itself as the last hope of civilization. As Emerson put it: "Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must consider literature ephemeral & easily entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance" (Journal, May 18, 1840). This proposition leads to Poirier's boldest and most questionable set of speculations: that literature properly entertains, not merely its own disappearance , but the effacement of the human subject. At the start of his final chapter Poirier challenges the reader: "HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO DISAPPEAR ?" Genuinely Emersonian writing, he insists, assaults the idea of "mankind" more thoroughly than Nietzsche or Foucault ever dreamed possible . But Poirier repeatedly insists that this "erasure" of mankind does not imply the literal extinction of the species. To misread him in this way is to forget "that writing and reading should be regarded as one kind of experience among many and that for most people a number of other experiences are far more frequent and affecting" (190). Since literature is such a safely unaffecting enterprise, we are not to infer anything as nasty as a genocidal politics from Poirier's transcendental post-humanism. But a reader who refuses to accept these instructions might assail Poirier's position with the same critique that Terry Eagleton has applied to deconstruction, namely that it represents "a hedonist withdrawal from history , a cult of ambiguity or irresponsible anarchism." Indeed, evidence to support this charge can be found in Poirier's own analysis of the contest between literature and technology. "Literature," Poirier argues, "can show what it is like for People to live under the aegis of media other than Literature . What Henry Adams half suspected in The Education, Thomas Pynchon projects as a saturnalia in Gravity's Rainbow" (123). Literature can comment upon the horrors of the technological state, and it can also mimic in its own forms the processes of that state, for as Poirier tellingly observes, "[llanguage itself is a particular form of Technology" (128). In fact, the affinity of language and technology is so strong that literature can become "a form of cultural and imaginative imperialism" (165). Presumably these "imperialist" tendencies are not manifested in properly Emersonian writing; and though Poirier's failure to demonstrate why this should be so raises serious questions about his argument, his study manages nonetheless to "renew" the history of modernism in original and challenging terms. STUART MOULTHROP YaZe University KENNETH J. RECKFORD. Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy . Vol. 1: Six Essays in Perspective. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. 567 p. This is a long book but, to paraphrase (and invert) Dr. Johnson's remark on Paradise Lost, no lover of Aristophanes would wish it shorter. Every chapter , every page gives new insights, new delights to the reader, to the specialist no less than to the novice barely familiar even with the titles to the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes, those only surviving works of Book Reviews251 that lively and bawdy genre, the Old Athenian Comedy. What Reckford brings to his long opus is an enthusiasm of childlike delight, along with the vast erudition of a top scholar of Classical Greek (and this volume is only the first of two promised). Like his Harvard mentor, Cedric Whitman (Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964), Kenneth Reckford is a scholar who actually enjoys his subject. No dry and dusty dissection of dead dissertations here! "Whitman revels in Aristophanes' power and fun," Reckford writes (205), but it was upon a basic disagreement with his teacher about one play, The Clouds, that this present study of Aristophanes is founded: "This book emerged from what seemed a simple wish back in 1967, to vindicate Aristophanes' Clouds against detractors" (ix). The reason for the relative dislike by so many for The Clouds is the play's rather unfair treatment of Socrates, caricatured savagely as a bumbling and sinister intellectual buffoon . That play was even mentioned by Socrates in his Apology (by Plato's hand, of...