Page 196 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Phrynicous, Sophocles, Euripides - were writers of satyr plays as well, and Aeschylus, the most
serious and pious of them all, an initiate into the highest Eleusinian Mysteries, was considered by
the Greeks to be the greatest master of the satyr play. From fragments of Aeschylus' satyr play.
The Bone-Gatherers' we see that this drama gave a parodic, travestying picture of the events and
heroes of the Trojan War, and particularly the episode involving Odysseus' quarrel with Achillesand
Diomedes, where a stinking chamber pot is thrown at Odysseus' head. It should be added that the
figure of 'comic Odysseus', a parodic travesty of his high epic and tragic image, was one of the
most popular figures of satyr plays, of ancient Doric farce and pre-Aristophanic comedy, as well
as of a whole series of minor comice pics, parodic speeches and disputes in which the comedy of
ancient times was so rich (especially in southern Italy and Sicily). Characteristic here is that special
role that the motif of madness played in the figure of 'comic Odysseus': Odysseus, as is well
known, donned a clown's fool's cap (pileus) and harnessed his horse and ox to aplow, pretending
to be mad in order to avoid participation in the war. It was the motif of madness that switched the
figure of Odysseus from the high and straight forward plane to the comic plane of parody and
travesty.
But the most popular figure of the satyr play and other forms of the parodic travestying word was
the figure of the 'comic Hercules'. Hercules, the powerful and simple servant to the cowardly,
weak and false king Euristheus; Hercules, who had conquered death in battle and had descended
into the nether world; Hercules the monstrous glutton, the playboy, the drunk and scrapper, but
especially Hercules the madman - such were the motifs that lent a comic aspect to his image. In
this comic aspect, heroism and strength are retained, but they are combined with laughter and
with images from the material life of the body. The figure of the comic Hercules was extremely
popular, not only in Greece but alsoin Rome, and later in Byzantium (where it became one of the
central figures in the marionette theatre). Until quite recently this figure lived on in the Turkish
game of 'shadow puppets'. The comic Hercules is one of the most profound folk images for
acheerful and simple heroism, and had an enormous influence on all of world literature. When
taken together with such figures as the 'comic Odysseus' and the 'comic Hercules', the 'fourth
drama', which was an indispensable conclusion to the tragic trilogy, indicates that the literary
consciousness of the Greeks did not view the parodic-travestying reworkings of national myth as
any particular profanation or blasphemy. It is characteristic that the Greeks were not at all
embarrassed to attribute the authorship of the parodic work 'War between the Mice and the Frogs'
to Homer himself. Homer is also credited with a comic work (a long poem) about the fool Margit.
For any and every straight forward genre, any and every direct discourse - epic, tragic, lyric,
philosophical - may and indeed must itself become the object of representation, the object of a
parodic travestying 'mimicry'. It is as if such mimicryrips the word away from its object, disunifies
the two, shows that a given straight forward generic word - epic or tragic - is one-sided, bounded,
incapable of exhausting the object; the process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of
the object that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style. Parodic-travestying
literature introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness
of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and most
importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fitted into a high and straight forward genre.
The high genres are monotonic, while the 'fourth drama' and genres akin to it retain the ancient
binary tone of the word. Ancient parody was free of any nihilistic denial. It was not, after all, the
heroes who were parodied, nor the Trojan War and its participants; what was parodied was only
its epic heroization; not Hercules and its exploits but their tragic heroization. The genre itself, the
style, the language are all put in cheerfully irreverent quotation marks, and they are perceived
against a backdrop of a contradictory reality that cannot be confined within their narrow frames.
The direct and serious word was revealed, in all its limitations and insufficiency, only after it had
become the laughing image of that word - but it was by no means discredited in the process. Thus
it did not bother the Greeks to think that Homer himself wrote a parody of Homeric style. [...]
These parodic-travestying forms prepared the ground for the novel in one very important, in fact
decisive, respect. They liberated the object from the power of language in which it had become
entangled as if in a net; they destroyed the homogenizing power of myth over language; they

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