OLFACTION AND THE COMIC SELF

More than any other genre, comedy thrives on the representation of reality as an embodied experience involving the full spectrum of sensory perceptions and capitalizing on the synaesthetic effects entailed by their interactions. The festive dialogue between multiple corporeal functions which lies at the root of the Bakhtinian idea of the grotesque body constitutes one of the distinctive features of ancient satiric discourse in all of its manifestations and, above all, in Old Comedy. Adopting a Bakhtinian viewpoint, one could say that the plays of Aristophanes and his rivals dramatize a transgression not only of social but also of sensory hierarchies. The prominence accorded, in the surviving texts of Old Comedy, to the more sensuous and carnal senses of touch, taste and smell seems, in fact, to call into question the epistemological centrality ascribed in ancient (as well as modern) times to sight and to foster an alternative aesthetic regime that enhances the inherently visual quality of theatrical performance. In this essay, I would like to illustrate the privileged position that Aristophanes affords to smell by exploring the role of the olfactory experience in his articulation of his comic persona.

Studies on the psychology and sociology of the senses have indicated that smell functions as a favourite symbolic tool through which social actors construct the self versus other dichotomy. The main contention of this essay is that, in Knights, Aristophanes’ projection of his comic self is olfactorily coded. In particular, I maintain that, in this play, Aristophanes’ depiction of the rivalry with his older competitor Cratinus follows an olfactory trajectory and fashions the confrontation between two opposed ideas of comedy as a conflict between two incompatible odours.