ARISTOPHANES' "BIRDS" AND THE METAPHOR OF DEFERRAL

Author(s): GREGORY DOBROV

Source: Arethusa , Fall 1990, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 209-233
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26309421

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 ARISTOPHANES' BIRDS AND
THE METAPHOR OF DEFERRAL

GREGORY DOBROV

A striking feature of Aristophanes' Birds is that it takes place entirely

outside any likely context: whereas the strategy of the earlier plays
through Peace had been to reach into the recent past (and present) to
color an Athenian situation with fantasy and myth, the adventures of
Peisetairos and Euelpides entail the invention of a rather unfamiliar
future. Birds is unique in the Aristophanic menagerie for the obstinacy
with which it has resisted attempts to capture its general theme. Is the
play that was first seen by an Athenian audience at the Great Dionysia
of 414 B.C. an allegory of the Sicilian Expedition, a parable concerning
human nature, another criticism of modernity and sophistic technique,
sheer fantasy, or some blend of these and other motives? From its
origins in Hellenistic scholarship,1 the controversy over the meaning
of Birds developed by the end of the nineteenth century to the point
where a bibliography (Behaghel 1878/79) could classify work on the
play under six categories, each representing a distinct band in the
interpretive spectrum. The debate, which is largely one between critics
who detect political tendency in whole or in part and critics who treat
the play as Utopian fantasy, persists as historicists and Utopians explore
the byways of their respective approaches.2 I submit, however, that this

V. Coulon 1925.73-98, solved a few long-standing textual problems in the second

hypothesis to the play. By reestablishing Boissonade's emendation σκοπό s for
στίχος, in particular, he clarified the context of this word that points to an
ancient scholarly controversy.
The political approach is well reviewed in Katz 1976 and Newiger 1983. On the
Utopian end are studies such as Schwinge 1977 and Bertelli 1983. More exploratory

209

ARETHUSA VOL. 23 (1990) 2.

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 210 Gregory Dobrov

scholarly dialectic should not

conflicting opinion, but rather
metaphorical strategy produce
Instead of merely seeking to id
in this article I treat the play
"comedy of language," whose po
the originary metaphoricity and
Birds distorts the well-establi
solution and subsequent agonisti
pointed deferrals and repressi
sense and nonsense: Aristopha
colored only by the general lang
w. 30-54), and then fills the v
■ rVi ΐ λΙλ rvklÎnnoKï nimrnccoc tko frtrpr«1r\ClirP

(Verneinung, repression) both of the terror and anxiety of Athen

politics as well as the horrific aspects of man-bird metamorphosis as
appears in the grim story of the Thracian lingual castrator Tereus.
In a quick-paced feedback the bi-directional man-bird metaphor
of the play informs the textual network of jokes, puns, and allusions
while the originary features of language are projected outward and g
direction to the major moments of the comedy. We confront first th
Ερως, or generalized search of Peisetairos and Euelpides fo
Father(land) elsewhere which, in its otherness, has them speaking
terms of a possible future that must be invented; the interview w
Tereus that follows is catalytic in the development of the plot
allowing Peisetairos to read in it the metaphor of his destiny as a bir
and, finally, a god. From a suspension of sense we reach the turn
point at which the cloudy "meaning" of Nephelokokkugia emerge
be poured retroactively into the initial semantic void. The very name
the city turns out to describe Peisetairos' sophistic snare of langu

readings with Utopian roots have been: Whitman 1964.167-199, Arrowsmith 19

Pozzi 1986, and Kolb 1984. (I thank T. Hubbard for the latter reference.)
The erotic language of Birds has attracted much attention (see especia
Arrowsmith 1973), and stands in stark contrast to the play's failure to expla
Peisetairos' and Euelpides' enigmatic quest, for 'έρως in various nominal and verb
forms see: 135, 136, 143, 324, 412, 574, 592, 696, 699, 703, 704, 706, 1279, 13
1343b, 1635, 1660, 1737.

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 211

(νεφέλη, or gauze-net) in which fools (κόκκυγες) become hopelessly

entwined.

Stalking the Birds

A suitable point of departure in a study of Birds is Hypothesis

II4 as the earliest extant critical attempt to set forth the play's general
meaning. This text appears to "report a controversy between phi
lologists in antiquity (without our being able to distinguish the
participants) over the methods of Aristophanic plot-construction"
(Hofmann 1976.79):

' Εν δέ τοΐς'Όρνισι καί μέγα τι διανενόηται, ... ώς γαρ

άδιόρθωτον ήδη υόσον της ττολιτείας νοσούσης . . . ,
άλλην τινά ττολιτείαν αίνίττεται. . . . Ού μόνον δέ
τούτο, άλλα καΐ τό σχήμα δλον καΐ την φύσιν, ει δέοι,
συμβουλεύει μετατίθεσθαι ττρός το ήρεμαίως βιοΰν.
ΚαΙ ή μέν άττότασις αΰτη. Τά δέ κατά θεών
βλάσφημα έττιτηδείως ώκονόμηται. . . . Άλλ' ό μέν
καθόλου σκοττός τοιοΰτος.'Έκαστον δέ των κατά μέρος
ούκ εική, άλλ' άντικρυς 'Αθηναίων . . . έλέγχει τήν
φαύλην διάθεσιν.. . .
. . . Τινές δέ φασι τον ττοιητήν τάς έν ταίς τραγ
ωδίαις τερατολογίας έν μέν άλλοις διελέγχειν, έν δέ
τοίς νυν τήν τής γιγαντομαχίας συμττλοκήν έωλον
άττοφαίνων ορνισιν εδωκε διαφέρεσθαι ττρός θεούς
ττερί τής άρχής.

In Birds also something rather grand is intended, . . .

As his city-state is afflicted with an incurable illness .
.. [Aristophanes] intimates another city He suggests,
moreover, a complete metamorphosis in form and nature,
if necessary, in order to secure a life of peace. This is his

I am following Coulon and Van Daele 1928 (the translations are mine). L.
Radermacher regarded Hypothesis II as a borrowing from a rather astute critical
biography of Aristophanes (see Coulon 1925.173). On the subject of the Hypotheses
to Aristophanes, T. Hubbard has brought Grobl 1889/90 to my attention.

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 212 Gregory Dobrov

intention. The blasphemy aga

handled. . . . The general aim,
openly expose the Athenians to
foolish attitudes rather than r
individually. . ..
... Some say that, whereas in o
had ridiculed the tales of marve
play he reveals the theme of
trite by having the birds cha
authority.

A salient feature of this brief commentary is an awareness of

Birds as markedly different from other Aristophanic plays: 1) in the
elusiveness of its main idea or intention which, nevertheless, appears to
be "something grand"; 2) in its departure from a sustained series of
jokes ad hominem towards a sort of critical generality; 3) in its relation
to, and criticism of, other texts. The Hypothesis concludes with a
discussion of chronology that quotes w. 145-147 as a cryptic allusion to
Alcibiades — recalling an earlier allusion to some restriction on
κωμική άδεια, 'comic indemnity.'5
A simple and, in my opinion, misleading approach to take in
explaining the uniqueness of Birds is to conclude from the scholion on
1297 that a certain Syrakosios had somehow succeeded in legislating a
restriction on όνομαστί κωμωδείυ.6 First of all, Birds, despite its
striking departure from the style of a play such as Knights, does
mention thirty-one contemporary Athenians by name including
Syrakosios himself. Moreover, we have six more oblique references:

Και fcv μέν άλλοις δράμασι δια τής κωμικής άδειας ήλεγχεν 'Αριστοφάνης τους
κακώς πολιτευο μένους < φανερώς. > ' Εν δέ τοίς "Ορνισι και μέγα τι διανενόηται,
φανερώς μέν ουδαμώς, ού γαρ 'έτι τούτου ήν έξουσία, λεληθότως δέ, δσον
άνήκεν άπο κωμωδίας προσκρούειν. So Coulon 1925 and 1928, improving upon the
rather confused mss.
I cite the text of White 1914.234: ούτος γαρ τών περί τό βήμα, καί Εύ'πολις ώς
λάλον έν ΓΤόλεσι διασύρει' "Συρακόσιος δ' 'έοικεν, ήνίκ' ίίν λέγη, / τοΊς κυνιδίοισι
τοΐσιν έπί τών τειχίων / άναβάς γάρ έπί τό βήμ' ύλακτεί περιτρέχων." δοκεΐ δέ καί
ψήφισμα τεθηκέναι μή κωμωδείσύαι όνομαστί τινα, ώς Φρύνιχος έν Μονοτρόπω
φησί' "Φώ^ έχοι Συρακόσιον. / έπιφανές γάρ αύτώ καί μέγα τύχοι- / άφείλετο γαρ
κωμωδείν οΰς έπεθύμουν." διό πικρότερο ν αύτώ προσφέρονται, ώς λάλω δέ τήν
'κίτταν παρέθηκεν.

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Aristonhanes' Birds and the Metaohor of Deferral 213

three patronymics and three nicknames.7 Second, as S. Halliwell notes

(1984.85, 87), we need to beware of the "general tendency of ancie
interpreters" to "draw unsound or unnecessary inferences" out of
"eagerness to re-create the assumed factual background of A
tophanic jokes." Σ 1297 has been especially influential since
canonization as fact by nineteenth-century German scholars8 w
succumbed to the "temptation to suppose that the scholia posse
independent information" (Halliwell 1984.85). This temptation is t
fold and somewhat contradictory: first, by claiming to reveal a
interesting moment in the tumultuous years 415-414, the scholio
accounts for the reticence of Birds with respect to contemporary peop
and events. Second, in so doing, it has afforded some scholars t
comfort of re-associating the play with its socio-political context and
interpreting it in the light of this association.
I must agree with Halliwell's suspicion (1984.87) that the entire
statement in Σ 1297 concerning the "decree of Syrakosios" is an
invention.9 The simple fact that the scholiast introduces the commen
with δοκεΐ, 'it seems,' is warning enough against trusting him. T
point to emphasize here is that we must not allow ourselves, by
historicizing an unreliable guess supported by a corrupt fragment (fr
207 Kock), to underestimate or distort the design of Birds. Althou
the "doctrine of Syrakosios" has been revived intermittently since th
appearance of Droysen's article in 1836, it returns each time, for
nately, with less and less force. The most recent effort by a believer
is entirely dedicated to saving the historicity of the alleged decree by
modifying it to the point where all that remains for the interpreter
Birds is a weak excuse for Aristophanes' failure to use Alcibiade
name in the play.
A well-known, nineteenth-century discussion oiBirds, J. Siivern
"Essay" (1827), attempted to ground the elusive text in historical fact

See 17, 31, 126, 712 (and 1491), 766, 1292. Sec Sommeistein 1986.102.
Halliwell 1984.87 n. 22 cites examples from the writings of A. Meinecke, F. Leo, T
Bergk and others.
"If I am right about the general tendency of ancient interpreters to draw unjustif
inferences from comic texts, then an agnostic attitude to Syracosios' decree wou
be wise. If this decree was an invention, the motivation may well have come from
the knowledge of the one decree of thiskind which ... may reasonably be regarde
as genuine — the one attested in Σ Ach.61."
Sommerstein 1986.

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 214 Gregory Dobrov

by uncovering an intricate and

strategy capable of reconcilin
conviction that it must, neve
concerned with specific indivi
A. W. Schlegel (1809), who he
buffoonery or farce, touching
deeply into any, like a fanciful
and detailed reading by mean
failure of scholars to detect it is itself oroof of the alleeorv's "fine

construction and masterly perfection" (Siivern 1827.2). Attempting to

refine the simplistic analysis of Hypothesis II, he detects an "intricate
confusion" that has "thrown a veil over the fundamental idea of the
poem, and has led to the opinion, that the author had merely in view
a general satire, on the notions and relations of man, though with a
special reference to the Athenian people" (Siivern 1827.12). This
"confusion" turns out to be simply the resistance of Birds to Siivern's
allegorical trap. Thus, while the gods represent the Spartans and the
Hoopoe is Lamachus, the Athenians are represented sometimes by
birds and sometimes by "real" men. Peisetairos seems to be a com
posite portrait of Alcibiades and Gorgias, whereas Euelpides comprises
the gullible Athenians and Gorgias' pupil Polos. The cumbersome
structure ultimately founders and, in its failure to persuade posterity,
remains a warning against eagerness to credit the play with an explicit
political design.
At the other end of the spectrum is the scholarly tradition that
regards Birds as pure escapist fantasy involving only a general criticism
of human nature. This approach can be traced from Schlegel's well
-1 \ *1 L L
M1UW1I CUIU UIIV/II-^UUIV/U JUUgWUlCUl ^VllVU UUUTWy tuivu^u uswvu
··« 11 \Ί ·
scholarshi
most pro
"Anatom
(1964.79)
Impostor,
Absurd," w

Vogelin 185
complete ov
Van Leeuwen

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AristoDhanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 215

metaphors into facts." Birds, he claims, is a fantastic representation of

absurdity or "nothingness" since "the nothing that people talk is the
reality which they possess":

The word is all, it creates consciousness, and its enormous

vitality stubbornly resists fact. A word becomes image or
metaphor, and the image or metaphor lives in the mind,
independent of reason and far more compelling. . . .
Images and metaphors are dream substance and make
dream worlds, and every world is an absurdity, a verbal
nothing. All this is beyond satire, as handled in the Birds·,
it is a poetic weft comically adumbrating the world in
which we live, the world where there can be no tragic
reversal or recognition, the world of poneria and the self, 11

where the persuasive and manipulable word is king

This approach transcends that of Whitman's prede

regarded Nephelokokkugia as either a simple escapist
idealized Utopia. Identifying language as the source of Bir
or "nothingness," Whitman made an exegetical advance
placing textuality in the focus of his discussion.14
Naturally, much work falls between the historicizing
poles. This middle ground is occupied largely by attempts
integrate the two extremes.15 Thus, W. Arrowsmith
reconnect Birds with politics by reading the play as a
and satire of Athenian τιλεονεξία. Whitman, who "is dra
to ... his wrong-headed conclusion, that words here ar
has failed to see the "real subject of the play" is politics "
disease of the human spirit, a spirit represented, incar
Athenian imperial city" (Arrowsmith 1973.146). Although
offers valuable insight into the erotic thematics of the p
himself unproductively at variance with Whitman and ot
in order to dwell on how Aristophanic comedy "copes

" Whitman 1964.172.

^ See also Kôlb 1984.

For nineteenth-century bibliography see Behaghel 1878.18-21 who li
works occupying the Mittelstellung between a Speziell-politisch
Tendenzlosigkeit.

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 216 Gregory Dobrov

nybns by selî-recogmtion in the audience (1973.155). He seems,

however, to agree with his linguistically-oriented adversary in the same
paragraph when he notes that "comedy reveals the inherent contradic
tion and the doomed absurdity of it all."
Newiger 1957 and Alink 1983 articulate milder Mittelstellungen.
In Alink's reading, the play, "a clear presentation of the sort of thing
that happens whenever Athenians deal with politics" (1983.325), finds
Aristophanes playing gentle tricks on his audience by luring them away
from the earth and subjecting them to a performance in which, by
praising "birds," he praises himself (1983.324). Newiger's book makes
a theoretical contribution by clarifying why, for all their figurality and
personification, the early Aristophanic plays (including Birds) are
clearly not allegories(1957.102):

Es darf abschlieBend festgestellt werden, daB auch die

Chorpersonifikationen sich uns nicht als allegorische
Figuren dargestellt haben. Ihre Rolle in den einzelnen
Komodien ist verschieden, auch die angewandte Technik
der Darstellung, wie wir sahen; aber das Wesentliche ist
Wolken, Wespen und Vogeln gemeinsam: sie bedeuten
nicht durchgânig etwas anderes, als sie sind, sondern nur
gelegentlich. Sie werden durch Wortspiel, Metapher,
Vergleich zu einem anderen in Beziehung gezetzt, aber
nicht a priori geglichen, es wird auf sie nicht Zug um Zug
des Gemeinten ubertragen, sondern die Ùbertragungen
gehen hin und her. Wir sind nur zeitweise "im Bilde." Ein
im ganzen einheitliches Bild hatten wir nur in den
"Vogeln," aber da war wieder kein deutlich und stàndig
Gemeintes feststellbar.

Most studies of Birds from Siivern to Alink have entered the

fray with some ritual meta-criticism in which the problem is delineated,
allegiances declared, and opponents confronted. The historicist/utopian
dialectic will doubtless engage yet many more students of Birds as the
play continues to demonstrate an uncanny ability to generate writing by
polarizing its scholarly audience.16 My strategy, however, involves an

^ Among recent studies that explore other aspects of Birds are Hofmann 1976 and

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 217

attempt to break the venerable holding-pattern to investigate the

properties responsible for the text's elusiveness: how does an apparent
anomaly in the Aristophanic oeuvre that is "regarded as the poet's
masterpiece" (Whitman 1964.168) continue to oscillate in critical
opinion between playful nonsense and urgent, structured meaning? To
seek an answer we need to step outside the closed critical circle
outlined above and take a bird's-eye view of Aristophanes' Birds.

Metaphor, Différance, and the Comic Truth

I argue elsewhere (Dobrov 1988) that the "synthetic myth" (plot

or λόγος) of comedy differs from its "authentic" tragic counterpart in
being, among other things, inextricable from its text. Thus, while the
story of Orestes is variously represented in a number of tragedies, the
ascent to Olympus on a dung beetle to retrieve Peace or the poetic
mission to Hades are unique to their respective texts. In the case of
tragedy it may appear useful to distinguish the interpretation of myth
from the interpretation of a text though, as W. Burkert (1979.56) notes,
"both may evolve in a hermeneutic circle and remain mutually depen
dent on each other." The comic "myth," however, being identical with
its form is a text, i.e., a system structured by the properties of language
as archi-écriture. Old Comedy, moreover, exhibits an awareness of itself
as a text17 and by involvement with its own textuality sets itself apart
from other genres. In its reflection of these aspects of comic discourse
Birds has arguably the purest and most powerful "myth" / plot in that
it derives its problem-and-solution (υόσος-μηχανή σωτηρίας) from a
single textual figure: the man-as-bird metaphor which is deconstruc
tively conflated with its inversion (bird-as-man). Reversing the Homeric
ë-πεα τττερόεντα, 'winged words,' Aristophanes hatches a world of

Pozzi 1986, which contrast with the historicizing approach of studies such as Gomme
1938 and Katz 1976 and Stark 1982. Zannini-Quirini 1987 sees Birds (especially the
latter half of the play), as an ominous return to a "pre-Olympian" religion that is
as horrific as it is comical.
17
Note, especially, its ability to refer to other texts; to consciously refer to, and
control its own text in a variety of punning strategies; and in the self-referentiality
of parabatic discourse. This intertextual quality of Old Comedy is explored in Rau
1967, among other works.

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 218 Gregory Dobrov

preposterous "graphic birds" (c

goose' of 805) from the fertile ne
Birds, then, is different from
import most of their material fr
literary. The plots of Acharnions
their"problems" and "solution
elements, in their explicit and i
domestic and political life, the
citizens, intellectual trends, conte
elements into the periphery, A
projection of the central metapho
defined, first and foremost, by
levels by an aporetic logic and
suspends us between sense and no
of resolution. In distinction from
figures as a more or less impor
essentially dependent on the co
even its most general "meaning
/^oforrol c\f fUo !m7r\1\7om ont in lb t* crinm-nAlitiral rnnfpvt

continues to encourage readers to seek external causes

called decree of Syrakosios or internal causes such
cynicism on the part of the playwright.
In identifying metaphor as the source of Birds I
speaking of a metaphorical complex structured as a p
abstract to concrete: 1) the potential, at the heart of lang
sign to replace or suppress another; 2) the lyric topos "I w
bird"; 3) the character (presence-on-stage) of Tereus (
the subsequent multiple conflations of the human and
glance an extended example of what one critic calls
Hauptformen des Aristophanischen Scherzes, eine Met
lich zu nehmen,"19 this series, in fact, transcends simple

It is impossible to tell from testimony such as Knights 520-22 (Μά

καΐ τπ-Ερυγίίων) or the entry under "Krates of Athens" in th
Magnes' or Krates' Birds bore any similarity to the Aristophanic
name since no fragments of either survive. Meinecke 1839 (Vol.
Krates (either of the two) wrote a Birds and suggests that the refer
is to a recension of Magnes' play.
A. W. Schlegel in H. Newiger 1957.181.

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 219

to involve Birds in a bi-directional movement which upsets the sub

ject/predicate (tenor/vehicle) hierarchy in metaphor to allow fully
reciprocal intersubstitution of signs (as "bird" replaces "man" and vice
versa) in a single figure.
Aristophanes' complex ornithic myth, therefore, can be analyzed
on a number of levels:

1) As a rather abstract μεταφορά or translatio of two men,

motivated only by generalized ερως ("desire" or "lack"), from the
familiar into an invented Other.

2) As the comic subversion of a lyric topos: Tereus, the Thracian

lingual castrator, acts as the disseminator of language in Birds and
enables men and birds to communicate. "They were mere barbarians
before," he says of the chorus in 199-200, "but I've taught them
language, having spent a long time here." Simultaneously embodying
the desiderative metaphor and mocking it, Tereus is the most vivid
example of Aristophanes' repressive strategy in the play. He raped
Philomela and cut out her tongue only to be overcome by the woman's
textum revealing his crime. Tereus was transformed into a bird at the
moment of crisis: having eaten the flesh of his son Itys he was chasing
Procne and her sister in order to kill them when Zeus decided to
suspend the entire tragedy in metamorphosis. This violently polysemous
myth is altered in Birds by the devious energy of Comedy to form a
new set of associations. In a remarkable strategy of foreclosure Tereus
becomes, in his Aristophanic context, a benign father, teacher of
language, and an endearing, comic intermediary between two worlds.20
"In modes of symbolic transformation," notes Charles Segal (1986.19),
"we operate within a chain of signifiers which convey the repressed
contents of the unconscious through metaphorical and métonymie
substitutions. Repression is itself a species of metaphor formulation
[italics mine]." The repressed contents of the unconscious, which for
Lacan had the structure of language, become visible through the
translucent barrier of language, i.e., linguistic substitution and "figu
ration." Tereus, then, to whom the men's ερως leads them, embodies

20
Tereus in his several dramatic incarnations deserves much fuller treatment and is
the subject of a study which I hope to publish shortly (tentatively entitled "The
Tragic and the Comic Tereus").

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 220 Gregory Dobrov

and triggers the grand metap

comic repression, serves marvel
and perhaps dangerous aspects o

3) Birds can also be regar

tophanes of a scenic ambiguit
birdhood, cheerfully taunt our
between "costume," "disguise,"

4) Birds is the vehicle for

cnorusj mai is ai once me oojeci οι a iransiormanon jmen sec* ιυ
become birds) and its subject (birds assimilate to the general human
sphere of language and politics while claiming to be gods).

These and many other moments, charged by an essential

equivocation, will necessarily continue to suggest widely divergent
readings. Although it may be futile to demand a traditional "theme"
from the play of signs that is Birds, Aristophanes' decision to fore
ground textuality in the play is certainly meaningful, a point I will take
up after a brief review of the metaphorical complex outlined above.
"Metaphor," writes Lacan (1966.158), "occurs at the precise
point at which sense emerges from nonsense, that is, at the frontier
which, as Freud discovered, when crossed the other way produces .. .
the signifier esprit·, it is at this frontier that we realize that man defies
his very destiny when he derides the signifier." Language into which
man is born and which "speaks man" is a systemic prison from which
jokes and metaphors can offer only the illusion of escape. In "White
Mythology" Derrida (1972b) discusses at length how "transparent"
(philosophical/scientific) discourse with its pretense of complete
control denies its incarceration and, in the words of K. Harries
11978.801 oerceives metaphors as "weapons directed against reality,
instruments to break the referentiality of language, to deliver language
from its ontological function," while jokes are capsules of nonsense
whose resolution is, at best, a pleasurable distraction.
Comic discourse thrives on rattling its linguistic fetters in a
perpetual show of escape through humor and transference. This
freedom cannot fully respect a literal/figural dichotomy since comic
discourse depends on all language (not simply metaphors and jokes)
being, at some level, "nonsense" in critical need of construal and
interpretation. "The picturesque saying that 'language is a book of

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 221

faded metaphors' is the reverse of the truth," notes L. Bloomfield

(1933.443), "for poetry is rather a blazoned book of language." What
we misleadingly call "metaphor," then, is not an anomalous substitution
of transference for reference but rather a strategy foregrounding the
• 91
transferential
Implicit in Sa
transference
variously artic
Language, bot
syntagmatic ch
complex exchan
closure, mainta
"sense") reveal
..... ... .22 ,. . ..
Cpi&lCIJLlUlUgiKU VdCUUUl ^UI U1λC45C; υΐ U<UlM<UlUil <U1U Ilicidpuui, I»

merely exchanged for another sign. Deconstructing this hierarchy P. de

Man reveals the substitutional common denominator of all these
processes structured by the chain of signification. Concerning Locke's
dismissal as "mere translation" of a well-known "definition" ("motion
is the passage from one place to another") he notes that (1978.17):

Locke's own "passage" is bound to continue this per

petual motion that never moves beyond tautology: motion
is passage and passage is a translation; translation, once
again, means motion, piles motion upon motion. It is no
mere play of words that "translate" is translated in
German as "iibersetzen" which itself translates the Greek
"meta phorein" or metaphor. Metaphor gives itself the
totality which it then claims to define, but it is in fact the
tautology of its own position. The discourse of simple

21
A. Wilden, (Lacan and Wilden 1968.220), citing F. Bresson's comment that
"languages are simultaneously doubly articulated and devoid of symbolic value,"
suggests that "metaphor as usually conceived (dependent on resemblance) is not
something developed out of an originally digital language, but rather that language
22 itself, as Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, and others believed, is originally metaphorical."
P. de Man (1978.13), speaks of Philosophy's attempt to "control figuration by
keeping it, so to speak, in its place, by delimiting the boundaries of its influence and
thus restricting the epistemological damage that it may cause."

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 222 Gregory Dobrov

ideas is figurai discourse or

creates the fallacious illusion of definition.

What we call "metaphorical language," then, is marked only in

that it forces us to confront what we usually forget or choose to ignore.
"The creative spark of metaphor," says Lacan (1966.157), "flashes
between two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in
the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present through its
(métonymie) connexion with the rest of the chain." If a "metaphor" is
used with such frequency as to become cliché it ceases to be felt as
unusual, the suppressed signifier is erased, and the image "fades" or
becomes "ossified" (cf. the word just used). Although a continuum thus
extends from the most brilliant poetic metaphors to opaque etymolo
gies, "literal" language (as an antidote to figuration) is an illusion that
will always be maintained by some discourses for their own political or
ideological purposes.
In a provocative article D. Davidson argues that the debate
about the cognitive content and function of metaphor is largely
misguided (1978.46):

To suppose that [metaphor] can be effective only by

conveying a coded message is like thinking a joke or a
dream makes some statement which a clever interpreter
can restate in plain prose. Joke, or dream or metaphor
can, like a picture or a bump on the head, make us
appreciate some fact — but not by standing for, or
expressing, the fact . . . there is no limit to what a
metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are
caused to notice is not propositional in character.

23
The two rival theories implying a "cognitive content" in metaphor appeal,
respectively, to 1) "collusion" (similarity): although the vehicle is predicated of, or
suppresses, the tenor, "meaningful" metaphor is possible insofar as the two terms
share certain aspects. The semantic sphere of the vehicle is thereby extended to
make metaphor intelligible; or 2) the "collision" of two (preferably dissimilar)
terms: meaning arises in the resulting tension. Davidson's quasi-performative view
of metaphor (Davidson 1978), on the other hand, denies to it any intrinsic cognitive
content. Standard guides to research in this field are Shibles 1971 and Van Noppen
1985.

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 223

The great collision of man and bird is just such a "bump on the head"
with which Aristophanes surprises us into laughter. Delighting in the
root metaphoricity of signification, Birds offers little, indeed, for
propositional restatement by "clever interpreters."24
"One word for another: that is the formula for the metaphor,"
asserts Lacan (1966.157), "and if you are a poet you will produce for
your own delight a continuous stream, a dazzling tissue of metaphors."
He goes on to speak of comedy's perfectly convincing "demonstration
of the radical superfluousness of all signification." The following are
several general strategies Birds employs in this "demonstration" rooted
in comedy's textuality, i.e., its parasitic relation to other discourses:

1) In addition to upsetting the supplementarity of the categories

"literal" and "figurai," the non self-effacing "black discourse" of
comedy25 deconstructs the conventional supplementarity of "vehicle"
and "tenor"26 in metaphor. Any discourse which needs to control
figurality keeps potential nonsense at bay by regarding the "vehicle" as
a semantic supplement in the imaginary periphery. Thus, "that devil in
the Oval Office" may not "seriously" imply that Satan is a Republican.
In a move that includes, but is not limited to, so-called "literalization,"
Aristophanes forces two terms to recognize each other in a reciprocal
transference: e.g., the comic names κατωφαγάς (288,289),' Υττοδεδιώς
(65), Έτπ,κεχοδώς (68), which fuses the morphology of bird-names with
stock terms for gluttonous and cowardly men. By rejecting supple
mentarities enforced in other discourses and by openly admitting its
awareness of their texts and textual strategies, comedy as text and as a
genre, draws attention to (its own) textuality which must always be
parasitic. This rejection, moreover, deconstructs any future attempt,
however useful, to place it in a supplementary relation to another,
"serious" discourse (i.e., to relegate it to the "unserious" and

Let alone allegorical restatement, cf. Newiger's point (1957.102) that the birds of
the Aristophanic play succeed in "meaning" something other than they are only
incidentally.
See Barthes 1970.174 n.l, who characterizes comedy as the parasitic "black" rhetoric
that "traces with severity and precision the transgressive place where the taboos of
language and sex are lifted."
The "tenor" is the signifier suppressed or replaced, i.e., the metaphorical "subject."
The vehicle or "object" (often referred to simply as the "metaphor") is the term
predicated of, or replacing, the tenor.

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224 Greeorv Dobrov

"marked" periphery): if an
of its textuality and imp
potential of language.

2) Presentation of borr
bird expressed by the pa
metaphor (941), and the
structured by their source
altered or not). As mult
allegories of their own p
reading. The most promi
metaphor expressed in ly
yearning which becomes,
of human ambition.

3) Images set up as veh

disruptive substitutions ττ
who are said to "sit on law
and men who in their
decrees" (1288-1289).

4) Images amusing simp

tree" of 1473 f.) that pa
"linguistics of the grotesq
species and natural spher

Another textual/struct
presentation of language-a
or difference. The profo
lated" human language
(referents)28 is one of t
différance (difference-dif

On the grotesque see Bakhtin

Doubly articulated: on one lev
semantic code (digits, letters,
is constitutively arbitrary;
sentences) which combine int
Analog: there is a direct ration
what it represents (e.g., merc
negation, and the true/false d
"The a of différance indicates

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 225

of signification itself is characterized by deferral. "It is [the] implied

circularity and autonomy of language," writes Wilden (Lacan and
Wilden 1968.217), "that lead Lacan into postulating a sort of fault in
the system, a hole, a fundamental lack into which, one might say,
meaning is poured. It is this fundamental manque which allows
substitutions, the movement of language essential to signification, to
take place." Decentering the system of language by depriving it of a
transcendental signified, Derrida (1972a.26) argues that every sign
marks a place of difference:

The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and

referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense,
that a simple element is present in and of itself, referring
only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written
discourse, no element can function as a sign without
referring to another element which itself is not simply
present. This interweaving results in each "element" —
phoneme or grapheme — being constituted on the basis
of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain
or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text
produced only in the transformation of another text.
Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the
system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There
are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.

The opening of Birds is marked by a critical différance, or

suspension of meaning structured by Aristophanes as the generalized
search by two men for an absent πατρίς or Father(land). "Lacan
reconstructs Freud's primal father," writes C. Segal (1986.16-17), "not
as a living, real father but in language and as an absence, the Symboli
cal father, whose signifier is the Name of the Father, the locus of the
Law and of the demands of the social and moral order [italics mine]."
The "paradox that the very act of naming the Symbolic father represses
that for which the name stands" underlies the curious hesitancy on the
part of Peisetairos and Euelpides to name their own fatherland. The

which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of [the] opposition

[presence/absence]." (Derrida 1972a.27)

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 226 Gregory Dobrov

re-mapping of Athenian fea

comically reveals the ethereal
The underdetermination of th
a major obstacle to common-s
reference to their countrym
Euelpides fail to mention Athe
the absence of any motivat
approach is taken by Arrowsmit
as "want — the want that in G
the mortal imperfection, the hu
briefly and is always renewed
meaning, i.e., the fabulous, au
fundamental lack (£ρως)31 tha
is fp.lt as a contextual vacuum which starklv hiehliehts anvthine

suspended in it. Oppressed by the absent (deferred) signifier promised

and yet withheld by the text of his (dis)course ("I left Athens because
... I am searching for . . ."), Peisetairos is made to fasten arbitrarily
upon one transference ("bird" for "man") which structures an invented
future into which he inscribes the past. This move then opens up a
series of metaphorical substitutions which progress along the chain of
signification: man becomes bird becomes a god who is comically
supplementary to man! Lacan (1966.153) illustrates the "oppressive
ness" or "tyranny" of the signifier with a series of such sentences
interrupted before the significant term and notes that "[they] are not
without meaning, a meaning all the more oppressive in that it is
content to make us wait for it." The grand metaphor/metamorphosis
of Birds (man-bird-god) which retroactively fills the initial lack with
meaning is indeed a spectacle in which the comic hero "defies his own
destiny by deriding the signifier."
Nephelokokkugia, the winged construct that rises from the ashes
of faltering discourse, is thus revealed as a supplement,32 a comic

In 30-54 Aristophanes seems to promise a conventional comic problem that will

structure the subsequent events. This promise is notoriously violated as the
parabasis reveals an entirely unfamiliar world that springs spontaneously from the
bi-directional metaphor represented by Tereus.
The centrality of the concept of desire has been most recently and forcefully
presented by Arrowsmith 1973.130: "No other play of Aristophanes, not even
Lysistrata, is so pervaded, so saturated by the language of desire."
I invoke the well-known notion of the supplement as elaborated in Derrida's

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 227

fulfillment of man's originary lack. As a delightful fiction, however, the

grand Aristophanic supplement will tell us neither its name nor what
it completes, what it compensates for. We can view it as a substitute
for Athens with the comic implication that human politics participates
in an arc/n'-birdland with all its arbitrariness and instability. Alternative
ly, we can regard it as only an allomorph of an o/c/n-birdhood. In the
broadest possible terms we can read Birds as setting forth the sup
plementary of the terms in the Greek comic polarity; νόσος, 'disease,'
'problem' and μηχανή σωτηρίας, 'solution,' 'cure' (cf. σώς = salvus):
the νόσος, a structure of ailment and crisis, pushes man outward in
search of a "cure" which, when achieved, turns out to contain a new
crisis. Thus, although the νόσος of Athenian life (v. 31) is apparently
cured by the man-bird metamorphosis, the "new birds," Peisetairos and
FnplniHe.s infprtp.rl with metanhnr succumb to a sinhtlv different strain

of the original political virus.

The metaphorical sparks catch and Birds is soon ablaze with
writing as Peisetairos simultaneously writes (hears-himself-speak) and
derides his own destiny. Appointing him protagonist in an ether where,
in Whitman's phrase, "the word is all," Aristophanes retraces in
Peisetairos' rhetorical creativity his own function as writer of comedy:
Peisetairos as χοροδιδάσκαλος (w. 373,438, 548-50) trains the chorus
for the spectacular parabatic performance by writing the text for their
sham "divinity," a play he populates with a series of verbal constructs,
i.e., the graphic bird exempla (τεκμήρια) of the agon. Deriving the
attendant politics from a simple pun (πόλος / ττόλις, 182-184), he
proceeds to vie with a number of other "writers" (the interloping poets,
■>λ #

oracle mon
which he h
captures th
and Alink (

reading of R
That Danger
notions "an in
essential add
Deconstructiv
signifying pr
hierarchies st
On such textual charlatans see Smith 1989.

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 228 Gregory Dobrov

the governing, textual δόλοι

superficially clever coinage tha
city of the birds (κόκκυγες, 'cu
as a persuader (rhetor/poet, cf. -
of his discourse, i.e., Nepheloko
(νεφέλη, 'subtle snare'). Neph
"written" and "directed" by a m
Revealing through the protagonis
we call "textuality," Aristophan
scenic correlate: i.e., just as the
themselves, so the playwright m
tion to itself in metatheatrical3
dramatic illusion in the parabasis
ajA/^ιαιυι a uuwui^ auu uui iuwui ιυ uuuuuuu υ y luwuiu^iug ιπυ

physical constraints of the theater with abstract limit

human condition (785-800).
Can we make the interpretive move of evaluating t
of textual stratèges outlined above? What is the "mean
tophanes' foregrounding of textuality? Why does he
tomary topicality and amplify the forces and tensions
language to release a comic play of signs in a pointed act o
and metaphor-formation? Why does he, while decons
conventional supplementarity of figurai language, ironical
trace of originary lack in language to fill it with his own
ment? "The irony of the comic hero," suggests Whitm
"from one point of view, is merely a means to a grea
inclusive alazoneia, impostorship; so that one might say th
real eiron, but only a variety of alazones, and the biggest f
the theory that it the fraud be carried far enough, into t
becomes a template of a higher truth." Aristophanic textu
is certainly as limitless as the chain of signification an
every metaphor qua nonsense is a fraud, Aristophanes
άλαζών who (to distort Shakespeare) weaves a comple
yarn" of tricks and frauds into a "web of life" that is
comic "truth." "What, then, is truth?" asked Nietzche i

34
On metatheater in a later play see Muecke 1977 and Taaffe 1987.

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Aristophanes' Birds and the Metaphor of Deferral 229

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropo

morphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which
have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poeti
cally and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to people: truths are illusions
about which one has forgotten that this is what they are;
metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power;
[italics mine] coins which have lost their pictures and now
matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Herein, I submit, is the "serious" comic motive that, as a

cultural menace, has been strategically overlooked by a sullen
positivism: to startle us into remembering through laughter. Birds,
especially, through the sensuality of its metaphor and other textual
δόλοι, stages an άναγνωρισμός in which, laughing, we recognize the
δόλος, or illusion, of truth. In a splendid act of comic Vemeinung
involving the grotesque bi-directional bird-man metaphor Aristophanes
defers a comforting and habitual "meaning" in explicit involvement
with his immediate socio-political context to expose the bare structure
of the prison of language itself. This is his "topic" or "theme" in the
exploration of which he implicitly exposes truth-in-language as a
concealer that denies its concealing (cf. άλήθεια as "unconcealed
ness"). Birds is a powerful comic jolt, a "bump on the head," which
inspires us to pretend a celebratory return to our selves-as-bodies, to
our language, to our earth thrown free of the bitter gravity of the
transcendental. It is only natural that the exodos of Birds should
celebrate the apotheosis of the comic hero who, "defying his destiny by
deriding the signifier," is established as his own comic truth.

Syracuse University

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 230 Gregory Dobrov

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