Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres by Charles Platter

166 PHOENIX Libation Bearers. If Ley is willing tomake this radical proposal, why is it so impossible to state a position in hosts of other cases? "The Chorus" chapter can be looked at much more briefly. It is not at all a study of the theatricality of choruses in Greek tragedy per se, but a series of summaries of scholarly views on the nature of choroi that preceded or coexisted with tragedy?in epic, lyric, dithyramb, satyr play, and comedy?with accompanying summaries of views and controversies in the scholarship on music and dance. Only the final ten pages of the chapter deal directly with tragic choroi, not through full analysis of any particular choros but by seeking to define general qualities, e.g., "I would propose that apprehension and the drive for reassurance became the defining dynamic of the tragic choros,with tragic tension created and supplied through the decisions of actors/characters, who will either satisfy or frustrate this underlying demand" (197). Leys "Conclusion" is a five-page summary of the two big chapters. On the final page, he makes a muted assertion: "Yet itwould be misleading to suggest that the book does not constitute an argument or lead to a more general conclusion. In both chapters, I have concentrated on the centrality of the choros to the performance of tragedy, insisting respectively on the presence of the choros as ameans to grasp themode of tragic composition and on the cultural vitality of choreia in all the theatrical forms that are developed atAthens" (206). Even ifwe grant this achievement to Ley, it is far from what the book could have and should have delivered. Stanford University Marsh McCall Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres. By Charles Platter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2007. Pp. 272. In this volume Charles Platter sets out "to take seriously the phenomena of carnivalization and intertextuality ... developed by Bakhtin" (37) and, from this critical vantage point, to draw attention to the dialogism of Aristophanic comedy. The fruits of this project are, he suggests, an understanding of this comic dramatist that "emphasizes the ambivalence of Aristophanes' thought and produces readings different from traditional narratives of Aristophanes" (37)?the traditional narratives being characterized as those which reductively identify a particular set of political sympathies or aesthetic commitments as the master code with which to read Aristophanes' plays. In short,thisis a studyofAristophanic comedy thatdevelopswhat might be charac terized as a "poetics of populism": how does the comic poet achieve the widest possible appeal to his audience within the competitive arena of the Athenian dramatic festivals? However, it is also a foray into the development of Bakhtin's thought and its application to the classics; as such, Platter's book requires a two-fold response, examining both the author's contribution to the interpretation of Aristophanes and his participation in the debate surrounding Bakhtin and classical literature. That debate is part of a movement that has gained considerable momentum in recent years, to the extent that one critic has recently likened the importance of Bakhtin in literary studies in the early twenty-first century to that of Derrida in the latter part of the twentieth.1 1T. Whitmarsh, "True Histories: Lucian, Bakhtin and the Pragmatics of Reception," in C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas (eds.), Classics and theUses of Reception (Oxford 2006) 107. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 167 The book consists of a collection of five studies of Aristophanes, each occupying a chapter, framed by a brief conclusion and an extensive methodological introduction on Bakhtin's theories of language and literature. The first two studies focus on Acharnians and Clouds. In a sense, these chapters have a common project: to show how the dialogic nature of language knocks away the props from under the usual interpretations of some key moments in these plays. In the case of Acharnians, Platter shows how the value of Dikaiopolis' literary criticism, his reactionary preference for Aeschylus, is undermined by the patchwork of comic and tragic language that he uses, revealing him as a rustic who does not understand poetry nearly as well as he would like to imagine. Turning to Clouds, Platter demonstrates, in my view particularly successfully, how the...

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