1My directed readings with Suzanne were the highlight of my y years as a graduate student at Columbia University. Virtually every semester I would meet with her once a week to read a text we had agreed on. One semester we were reading Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and, in the course of a discussion about men, women, and animals, Suzanne reproduced, from memory, Aristotle’s account of how to tell the difference between a male and female octopus in the History of Animals. No doubt every contributor to this volume has their own story of an occasion when Suzanne appeared to know everything there was to know about a topic they were working on, but this is my favorite : it just seemed impossible to me that anyone could know what Aristotle thought about the sexual lives of octopuses, let alone see its relevance to Sophocles.

2Now that I have an academic position of my own, my appreciation of Suzanne’s teaching has deepened. I now understand what the hours she spent with me meant for her own time. As the octopus story reveals, one of the lessons she taught me was not to overlook any piece of evidence when trying to understand a work of literature, no matter how irrelevant it might seem at first sight. I will never rival Suzanne’s erudition, but I hope she will enjoy the claim I am making here that Aristotle’s zoological works can deepen our understanding of one of the masterpieces of Greek theater.

ARISTOTLE’S BIRDS

3Aristotle’s account of human society in the Politics views its achievements against the horizon of zoological life as a whole, and his famous assertion that the human being is « by nature a political animal » is best understood by comparing his account of what is distinctive about human society with his descriptions of the kinds of sociality exhibited by other animals. In the History of Animals, Aristotle asserts that there are other animals that are political in addition to human beings-his examples are bees, wasps, ants, and cranes-since among them too « one activity is common to all » (History of Animals, I, 1, 488a8-13). Gregarious animals, like cows and fish, live together in large groups, but all the members of the group pursue the same activity at the same time. Among political animals, by contrast, there is division of labor, so that the common goals of the group to which they belong may be advanced more effectively. As a result of the various ways that groups can organize themselves towards this end, differences in political organization exist among the other political animals, just as they do among human beings: cranes and bees live under a single ruler, for example, whereas ants and many others get along without one.

4As Aristotle sees it, the reason that the social formations of other political animals have not attained the degree of organization and specialization exhibited by human beings is that their means of communicating with one are too rudimentary to allow further development. Human beings possess reasoning speech, λόγος, whereas the other animals have only voice, φωνή. They can signify their sensations of pleasure and pain to one another, but only reasoning speech can make clear what is beneficial and harmful, and what is just and unjust, and so allow the ongoing elaboration of forms of sociality that are consciously developed by those who participate in them. It is with reasoning speech, Aristotle argues, that human beings advanced from the forms of social behavior exhibited by other animals to the household and then the city (Politics, I, 2, 1253a1-18)1.

5Given its importance in the zoological grounding of his political thought, it is not surprising that Aristotle offers a detailed account of the difference between human speech and the utterance of other animals in his biological works. He differentiates between sound, ψόφος, voice, φωνή, and articulate utterance, διάλεκτος, and claims that the ability to produce each of them depends upon the possession of particular somatic features. So, while crustaceans and most kinds of fish are silent, some insects, like the cicada, are able to make a sound by moving a part of their body. Likewise, while frogs, dolphins, and most viviparous animals are able to emit a voice, because they have lungs and a windpipe, they do not have a fully flexible tongue, and so are incapable of articulate utterance. This is a sequence of individualized sounds that have been divided up by the action of the tongue, and which differs as such from the roar of a lion, or the trumpeting of an elephant, which are indivisible vocal emissions. Apart from human beings, only certain kinds of birds have such a tongue, and they are therefore the only other animals capable of articulate utterance, although they produce less of it than human beings do (History of Animals, II, 12, 504b1-3 ; IV, 9, 535a28-536a22)2.

6As an observable phenomenon, the articulate utterance of birds resembles that of human beings in a number of ways : it shows regional variation, like the dialects of human speech, and in some kinds of birds its elements are demonstrably learned and not innate (536b11-18)3. What remains cryptic, however, is what birds do with it, the extent to which their use of articulate utterance resembles human conversation.

7In the Politics, Aristotle claims that the voice of animals is merely a sign ; they can indicate their affective states to one another with it, but cannot discuss their causes. This position is consistent with the biological works, where we are told that male frogs, for example, call upon females with their croak at breeding time, and that all animals that possess a voice emit distinctive sounds for the purposes of association and sexual intercourse (536b9- 16). In these animals, the voice is merely a signal that contains a single item of information at a time. The animal emits a specific sound in response to a specific affective event, and, when it does so, it aims at a specific behavior on the part of its recipient (the sound may of course be repeated sound until this outcome is achieved).

8Birds, on the other hand, have more than voice, and there is therefore room for doubt about what their articulate utterance enacts, and, especially whether, like the articulate utterance of human beings, it is reciprocal and so amounts to a genuine conversational exchange. Aristotle hints at this possibility in the History of Animals. In his discussion of local variation, he claims that the articulate utterance of birds is a capacity, « which one might call a kind of speech », ήν αν τις ώσπερ διάλεκτον ε'ίπειεν (536b9-13). A passage from The Parts of Animals reiterates the claim more forcefully (II, 17, 660a35-b3) :

All birds make use of their tongue to communicate with one another, προς ερμήνείάν άλλήλοις, and some very much more so than others, so that with some there does indeed seem to be an exchange of knowledge among them, ώστ' έπ' ένίων και μάθησιν είναι δοκείν παρ' αλλήλων.

9Aristotle concludes the passage with a reference to the earlier work, and it looks very much as if he intended to give a definitive answer here to the question raised by his first treatment of the topic by asserting a closer approximation to human speech in the articulate utterance of birds than he had previously been willing to allow.

10When considered in terms of its physiological production, its material constitution, its learned acquisition, and its apparent social function, the articulate utterance of birds cannot be distinguished from that of human beings. In order to do so, non-observable features have to be invoked. In the Nicomachean Ethics (X, 7, 8, 1177b27-1178a2), Aristotle claims that mind, nou’", is the contemplative faculty that separates human beings from all other animals, and allows them to approach the divine. Mind is incorporeal, but its presence in human speech must be understood if human speech is to be distinguished from the utterance of birds. The biological works are unable to make this distinction on the basis of observation alone4.

11Suppose, however, that we were not to take the escape route offered by incorporeal minds, and stuck to observable phenomena instead : where would this path take us if we were pursue it further ? It is a fundamental principle of Aristotle’s zoology that animals have the bodies they have because they are realizations of their distinctive natures5. It is in the Parts of Animals and the Generation of Animals that this philosophical claim meets biological reality « head-on », as these works offer reasons for the variety of animal bodies documented in the History of Animals6. So, for example, while the History of Animals catalogs the variety of birds’feet, the Parts of Animals argues that this variety allows each kind of bird to pursue the life appropriate to it (694b6, 648a16). If certain kinds of birds have a distinctive kind of tongue, and they use this tongue to produce articulate utterance indistinguishable from that of human beings, we ought therefore to ask how this tongue and the utterance it enables contribute to their realization of a distinctive way of life. In particular, if speech is what has allowed human beings to realize their distinctive forms of political society, it seems obvious to wonder what forms of sociality have been enabled by the articulate utterance of birds, and whether they resemble the forms of human society as closely as the two forms of articulate utterance resemble one another.

12The problem with birds is that, for Aristotle, extensive observation of their social lives would have been considerably more difficult than in the case of the smaller political animals. Aristotle’s willingness to cite the testimony of those who worked closely with animals in their professional lives-beekeepers, fishermen, eel farmers, and such like-has frequently been remarked7. In both accounts of bird utterance, however, the emphasis is upon what is suggested to the mind by what sounds like autopsy of wild birds from a distance :

The articulated voice of birds, which one might call a kind of speech, differs in various animals and also within the same kind of animal according to location.
All birds makes use of their tongue in order to communicate with one another, and some very much more so than others, so that in certain ones there does indeed seem to be an exchange of knowledge among them.

13In both passages, Aristotle contrasts observation with what can legitimately be concluded from observation, and, as he does so, acknowledges the way in which one is tempted, on the basis of observation, to go beyond what can be truly known from it. When you see birds singing, you cannot help but think they are talking to one another ; that’s just how it looks. Acknowledging the direction an observer is likely to take in expanding on the way things look is an understated announcement of how imagination enters the scene, but it points the way to comic fantasy. In comedy, the ordinary observer’s instinctive flights of fancy become a fully fledged imaginative reality.

ARISTOPHANES’BIRDS

14Fantasy is at the heart of the comic invention of Old Comedy, the genre to which Aristophanes’ Birds belongs, and one frequent type of comic fantasy is the discovery of another world that lies, undiscovered or unacknowledged, above, below, or alongside the everyday world in which we go about our daily tasks ; in Pherecrates’ Miners, for example, two workers in the Athenian silver mines dig their way through to the underworld and discover a world of gravy rivers and pre-roasted birds that fly unsummoned into the mouths of the hungry8. One sub-group of these heterotopian fantasies that seems to have been particularly popular is the staging of an encounter between human beings and animals ; we know of plays with the titles Goats, Wild Animals, and Fishes, for example, and, as far as can be discerned from the meager fragments that remain, they explored various kinds of anxious and nostalgic response to the non-human world, from the traumas associated with sacrifice and meat eating, to escapist flirtations with a life outside human culture9.

15Aristophanes’ Birds belongs to this comic tradition, but it suspends any easy understanding of how the site of the comic fantasy is positioned in relationship to everyday reality. Normally, the first action of the first character to appear on stage is to state his name, place, and business, and so allow the audience to grasp the fictional situation10. Instead, the heroes of Birds, Peisetairus and Euelpides, wander back and forth on stage with a jackdaw and a crow that are supposed to be their guides, but whose instructions they are unable to understand. They have no idea where the rocky wilderness in which they are wandering is located, or if they can find their way back home again from it (v. 11-12). The declaration of no-topia is followed by a list of reasons why Athens no longer feels like home : illegal immigrants, interminable legal procedures, and endless foreign wars (v. 27-48). Athens is a place one cannot reach from the Athenian stage11.

16Peisetairus’hopes for a better life rest on his plan to find Tereus, the tragic hero who was turned into a hoopoe for his crimes against humanity, and who now haunts the empty spaces between human habitations. Peisetairus hopes that in his travels Tereus may have spotted a city where he can live his life with minimal interference from other people. From an ornithological perspective, however, Peisetairus is himself the hoopoe that he seeks. Aristotle, in his discussion of the lifestyles of birds in the History of Animals, cites a long passage he says is from Aeschylus, in which the hoopoe, έποψ, is described as « the overseer, έπόπτην, of his own evils ». Aeschylus describes the bird as a shape shifter that leaves its spring haunts full of hatred, and « sets off to relocate, αποικίσει, in deserted woods and cliffs12 ». As Aeschylus tells it, Tereus, transformed into a hoopoe after the grisly events at home, haunts the margins of human society as an exile from it, drawn back periodically, but unable to stomach it for long. He no longer loathes just his own family, but all human beings, and has become a perpetual colonist, forever striking out in search of terra incognita13.

17The behavior of the hoopoe itself is the common denominator of a way of life both Tereus and Peisetairus instantiate, and we may wonder already how two such misanthropic characters will be able to share the stage when they do meet. The moment of truth approaches. The crow and the jackdaw having been trying to point out something to their handlers for some time, and they finally do get the message : Euelpides bangs on a rock to summon the other birds they now realize must be inside. As he does so, he shouts « Boy, boy, παι, παι, » as if he were calling a house slave to answer the door, but Peisetairus suggests that when summoning a hoopoe, έποπα, one ought rather to shout « oh hoopoe », έποποι (v. 56-60), a sound that is both the vocative form of the noun hoopoe, and a curtailed version of the nonsemantic exclamations of a tragic hero in pain, which is, of course, what Tereus had been before his transformation into a bird.

18Puns are of course a typical comic intervention in human language. They work by showing a surprising coincidence of sound in two words that have different senses. Here, however, one of the components of the pun is not a word at all, but merely a sequence of sounds that functions as a signal of feeling in a particular cultural discourse. The pun heralds the investigation of continuities between human speech and bird song later in the play, and also points to the bestialization of tragic heroes who lose the power of reasoning speech because of their suffering. It is part of comedy’s job to show that situations of emotional intensity reveal what human beings have in common with animals. So, when the hoopoe’s house slave does finally open the door, Peisetairus and Euelpides are so afraid they shit themselves. The typical comic manifestation of fear does not simply point to an awkward biological fact about human beings, it makes the comic heroes into birds. Peisetairus becomes a « fearbelow, a Libyan bird » and Euelpides a « shaton, from Phasis ».

19Once the heroes’ continuity with bird life has been established, they are able to approach the doorman on equal terms. Peisetairus asks him : « What kind of bird are you ? » and, when the doorman replies that he is a « slave bird », Peisetairus assumes he must have lost to a superior bird in a cockfight, resulting in his enslavement (v. 65-71). At this point, then, we have a set of resemblances between human beings and birds that embraces their affective responses, the bodily functions these induce, and the social structures in which weakness and strength are encoded as the submission of the servile to the noble14. This looks like a workable basis for mutual understanding, and the crow and jackdaw disappear now that communication between the two societies has been established.

20Peisetairus calls Euelpides « a cowardly beast », θηρίον, for being afraid of the doorman (v. 87-88), and, when Tereus makes his appearance a few lines later, he exclaims : « What beast, qhrivon, is this ? » (v. 92). Imagined continuities between human and non-human life are clearly stated in the play, but how are they shown on stage ? Birds is one of only two comedies we know of in which the chorus members were individually costumed. In this play they represent different kinds of birds, in the Cities of Eupolis they represented specific cities15. The actors, however, comment upon their own lackluster appearance. When Peisetairus notes Tereus’feathers and triple crest, Euelpides remarks that « the twelve gods seem to have messed you up ». His feathers are shabby and disheveled, and Peisetairus and Euelpides later complain that their transformation into birds is poorly represented by their costume (v. 802-808)16.

21Perhaps we should imagine a contrast between the half-hearted portrayal of Peisetairus, Euelpides, and Tereus, who are transformed human beings, and the chorus, who are birds and nothing but birds. In any case, if comic costume occasionally draws attention to its own inadequacies in order to remind us of « another character beneath the incongruous disguise17 », this typical feature, like the others we have mentioned, has a special resonance in this play, because it focuses our attention not upon one human being’s ability to impersonate another more or less successfully, but upon the differences in physical appearance between two kinds of animal life whose similarities of feeling and social organization are explored thematically.

22Tereus gives two explanations for his wretched looks : Sophocles injured him by giving him a beak in his tragedy, and his plumage is shabby because birds moult in winter (v. 100-107). For Tereus, his metamorphosis is an imposition ; he has to endure the body and life cycle of a bird as punishments that originate in his tragic myth. Peisetairus revalues his transformation. He claims that, having lived as a human being, Tereus has adopted the lifestyle and nature of a bird, and has « a mind that can think all that a human being thinks and all that a bird thinks » (v. 117-119). For Peisetairus, Tereus is not an impaired human being but a double life form. He is one of the animals Aristotle calls « dualizers », because they participate in the life of two kinds of animal at once, as seals, for example, live partly on land and partly in the ocean18.

23Peisetairus reimagines tragic bestialization as comic opportunity. The behavior of the hoopoe suggests a resemblance between Peisetairus and Tereus as human types, but Peisetairus moves beyond such local analogies by seeing Tereus as the common denominator between human beings and birds as kinds of animals. He conceives a dramatic change of plan. Instead of looking for a city where he can live in peace, he will make one for himself by transforming the loose social agglomerations in which the birds currently live from a mere place in the sky, a polus, as he calls it, to a city as such, a polis (v. 179-186). He has understood already that the emotions and social systems of human beings and birds are similar. All that is required is the reduction of the multiple forms of avian sociality to a single form of human society. Peisetairus chooses the one he knows best. Becoming a city means building fortifications, and these fortifications will allow the birds to rule over human beings as they currently rule over insects, and to starve the gods into submission by cutting off the flow of sacrificial smoke, as the Athenians reduced the island of Melos by blockading it19.

24In the scenes that follow, the audience is given an extensive lyrical evocation of the diverse forms of bird life it is Peisetairus’ intention to replace. Tereus promises to summon the birds so that he can explain Peisetairus’ plan to them, which he is able to do because he has taught them to understand the human voice, φωνήν ; they are no longer barbarians who require an interpreter to understand Greek (v. 199-200). As he calls them, he describes their varied habitats and feeding behaviors, from seed gatherers in sown fields, to meadow dwelling insect eaters, and exotic oceanic kingfishers. He rounds out each summons with strings of syllables that weave together the articulate sounds of bird song with human words that resemble them. Vocalizations that begin as a sequence of pure sound - ito, ito, ito ito, ito, ito, ίτω ίτω ίτω ίτω ίτω ίτω — turn into its homophone, the imperative « come », ίτω, then turn back into in the pure materiality of sound : torotorotorotorotinx, kikkabow, kikkabow 2020.

25As many commentators have noted, this song is the pinnacle of Aristophanes’ achievement as a lyric poet and musician21. It is answered by the arrival of the chorus, who instantiate the diversity it describes. The birds arrive in silence, and remain silent in response to the clownish comments on their appearance by Peisetairus and Euelpides22. A variety of reasons for this silence might be imagined and actualized on stage : the birds’ fear of, or hostility towards, the men who have intruded into their world ; suspense as to whether they can talk, like their half-human summoner, or whether they will utter only the non-human sounds of which his song is partially made up23 ; the contrast between a splendid portrayal of natural wonders and the inane chatter that greets it. In any case, twenty-four kinds of bird eventually appear that show the full spectrum of avian life, both domestic and foreign : flamingo, cockerel, another hoopoe, partridge, francolin, widgeon, kingfisher, owl, jay, turtle dove, lark, reed warbler, thyme finch, rock dove, vulture, hawk, ring dove, cuckoo, redshank, shrike, gallinule, kestrel, grebe, bunting, lammergeier, woodpecker24.

26Regardless of costuming issues, the chorus is a striking parade of biodiversity in keeping with the celebration of material abundance in the work of Aristophanes and Old Comedy as a whole25. Birds, more than other animals, were the subjects of aetiological stories that gave reasons for the abundant variety of their forms26, and it seems reasonable to conclude that birds were the animals in which such variety presented itself most forcefully as a source of wonder for inhabitants of the Attic peninsula. What I want to consider, then, is the loss of this diversity as Peisetairus reduces the various forms of avian sociality to a single form of human society, and whether pathos surrounding this loss gives a somber tonality to the comic hero’s use of others to achieve his own ends, especially given that the birds themselves are not the cause of his initial predicament.

27Tereus overcomes the birds’ hostility to Peisetairus and Euelpides as human beings, and hence age old enemies and hunters of birds (v. 328- 386), by convincing them that, while men in general may be enemies to them « by nature, » ην φύσιν, these particular men are friends by virtue of their minds, τόν voûv (v. 371). The slightly awkward contrast between « enemies by nature » and « friends by mind » points to a double meaning in nous, which may be either the rational mind as such, or the calculations that are its outcome. The men are not friends to the birds just because they have overcome their natural inclinations by thinking rationally, but because they have a plan that involves them. The deliberative power that, for Aristotle, distinguishes human beings from other animals is identified here with the capacity to envisage others as instruments that can be made to serve one’s own goals.

28Peisetairus locates the difference between human beings and birds in the birds’ possession of wings, which he views as a technology that they possess and he does not. He does not consider the birds’ wings as the outcome of their specific natures, a physiological development that allows them to pursue a life that is peculiarly their own, but as a tool with generalizable functions that he can appropriate for his own use. While Peisetairus may look ridiculous after Tereus’ magical root allows him to grow wings of his own (v. 802-808), the absurdity is continuous with his own view of them as no more than a transferable prosthesis.

29Peisetairus shows his hand in his initial fear of the birds. He alludes to the fable of the fox and the eagle in such a way that it is clear he sees their wings as a possession that makes them superior to him as things presently stand. The birds do not take the hint, however, and Tereus’ root gives Peisetairus the specific difference he wishes to acquire (v. 648-655). From this point on, he no longer shows any fear of the birds, and begins to reveal his disdain for them as instruments of his own plan. Tereus’ wife, the nightingale, who remained concealed when her husband sang her a tender erotic song earlier in the play, is now brought on stage to be pawed and ogled. The chorus of birds looks forward to the honors they can expect to receive from human beings, but such honors will not really be worship because they will not be offered to them as birds, but only as possessors of a superior technology. When human beings get wings of their own, they will not use them to be bird-like, but to pursue their own affairs more efficiently. They will fly home to escape boring tragedies, to take a shit, or to commit adultery. As Peisetairus says, there’s nothing funnier than being a bird (v. 785-805).

30The birds’ subordination to Peisetairus is evident in the intruder scenes in which a number of human interlopers try to get him to pay for their services to his new city. This sequence of lyric poet, oracle monger, geometer, inspector and decree seller (v. 903-1057) is doubled by a series of applicants for birdship in the form of a father beater, a dithyrambic poet, and an informer (v. 1337-1469), and in both cases it is Peisetairus alone who decides who is to become a member of the polis. Likewise, to the heroes and gods that solicit his favor — Iris (v. 1196-1261), Prometheus (v. 1494-1552) and the embassy that consists of Heracles, Poseidon and the inarticulate divinity of the barbarian Triballians (v. 1563-1693)-he is an absolute ruler ; only his desires are addressed in the negotiations, not those of his subjects in whose interests the city was nominally founded.

31The chorus of birds intervenes in these transactions with brief songs, but the reminders they contain of their distinctive forms of life as birds of the field and orchard (v. 1058-1071), and birds of the meadow with particular seasonal behavior (v. 1088-1101), are marginal to the main stage business by which Peisetairus realizes his plan. As the heroes and gods are reduced to submission, so the birds are denatured by the inexorable logic of the comic plot. The reduction of their diversity to instrumental value is hilariously documented in the long messenger speech that reports on the building of the city walls, which might be a parody of Aristotle’s conception of political life as the pursuit of a common goal through division of labor : thirty thousand Libyan cranes swallowed stones for the foundations, corncrakes shaped them with their beaks, ten thousand storks made bricks, curlews and other river birds served as water carriers, geese shoveled clay with their feet, herons carried hods, ducks laid the finished bricks, swallows applied plaster with their tails, and woodpeckers finished off the carpentry (v. 1133-1157).

32The speech is one of the most brilliant comic inventions in all of Aristophanes, but the real wonder is not the birds themselves, but the visionary human intelligence that has been able to see the uses of diversity and deploy it for its own purposes. As the birds confess in the marriage hymn to Peisetairus and the princess Basileia that ends the play, Peisetairus is worthy of the title « most supreme deity », master of men, gods, and birds (v. 1731-1765). The birds are complicit in their own diminishment. In their last songs, they catalog the marvels of human life they have seen in their travels (v. 1470-1493, 1553-1564, 1694-1705), and accede to their own displacement as worthy objects of human attention. The real wonder is human society, and they have become observers of its quirks and foibles.

33From this perspective, Peisetairus’ roasting and eating, in the final scene of the play (v. 1583, 1688), of birds that have rebelled against his new state is no more than a footnote to the progressive erasure of the birds as a whole as the comic plot unfolds. Even Tereus, the half-human half-bird broker of his plan is nowhere to be seen, for he vanishes from the stage when Peisetairus threatens to strip and abuse his wife. Tereus’ last words-« let’s go inside » (v. 675)-are difficult to interpret, and might be staged many ways, but he does not come back out after speaking them, and Peisetairus negotiates with the chorus leader instead. Tereus disappears as Peisetairus assumes control, and begins to produce a society that is geared towards the satisfaction of his desires as a human being. His apotheosis as winged ruler of the universe is the opposite of the transformed state in which Tereus lived exhibiting characteristics of both human being and bird. Peisetairus simply takes what the birds have to offer him without participating in their nature.

34This, then, is the crux of the play. Its comic fantasy imagines cooperation between two kinds of political animal enabled by a dualizing character who has participated in the social life of both. However, in the city that results from it, the birds lose the distinctive ways of being in the world by which they had realized their own nature in action. How should we feel about this ?

35It has been argued that Peisetairus’ success reaffirms the values of civic society in the face of romantic escapism27. However, if the end of the play affirms the usual forms of domination and subordination that exist in human societies, it does so by ascribing unfulfilled ambition to animal life as a whole : no tears need be shed over the birds because they were complicit in a plan they were unable to realize on their own. This ascription contradicts the direct observation of bird life that gives this play its peculiar character. The birds are not merely metaphors for certain kinds of human emotion or behavior, as wasps in Wasps are a metaphor for the unrelenting quarrelsomeness of old men addicted to the law courts. They are present as birds in the earlier parts of the play, and this larger vision of zoological sociality continues to frame the human society that takes center stage at the end, if only because the costumed chorus stands as a reminder of it through out. Individual appetite held in check by power is not a model that describes all forms of animal life, and the triumph of man over bird that occurs in the course of the play should not be reproduced as if it were a statement of its meaning28.

Epilogue : The birds of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Rigadoon

36I came to Classics having studied modern literature as an undergraduate, and one of the aspects of Suzanne’s intellectual personality I appreciated the most was her interest in great writing of all periods, and her enthusiastic support for work that explored continuities between ancient and modern literature. Another was her absolute freedom from the constraints of political correctness. With these two qualities in mind, I want to point out a moment of striking resemblance between Aristophanes and Céline. I cannot claim it is a deliberate echo, but it is an echo nonetheless, and it indicates a similarity in their understanding of the human animal that might be developed at greater length.

37Rigadoon is Céline’s last novel. It is dedicated « To the Animals », and, in his introduction to Ralph Manheim’s English translation, Kurt Vonnegut draws attention to Céline’s career long effort to disclose forgotten or disavowed continuities between human beings and other animals :

Every writer is in his debt, and so is anyone else interested in discussing lives in their entirety. By being so impolite, he demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again29.

38Rigadoon recounts the flight of its author, his female companion Lili, and their cat Bébert from the Allied bombing of northern Germany at the end of the Second World War. There is no lack of bodily functions and appetitive cravings in the novel ; the passage that describes the « magma of asses, tits, arms, and hair » into which the fugitives sink as they attempt to board a crowded train is as riotous a collage of body parts and their extrusions as any to be found in Céline’s work (p. 66). However, articulating zoological existence as such involves more than just celebrating the kinds of content that are normally relegated to pornography and scatology.

39As they continue their journey through Germany, the flat cars on which Céline and his companions are riding come to a halt somewhere outside Hamburg, which is in flames, and they see, on the train tracks, a group of mentally handicapped children who have crawled out from under the tarps in which they had been wrapped and are now wandering about among the ruins, apparently in search of food. Céline and Lili have nothing to offer them, so they show them their cat instead (p. 171) :

she takes him out of his bag… ah, now they’re interested… they laugh… I mean they screw up their noses and drool even more… they want to play with Bébert !… no !… musn’t !… but Bébert wants to play with them… so bad that he miows… and the kids cry… let’s get this over with.

40The children do not look entirely human, and Céline adopts the abbreviated speech adults use with animals and infants, less in hope that it will be effective than in response to the recognition that other forms are not. Bébert and the children, however, have no problems communicating with one another, and Céline identifies the unwillingness of adult human beings to heed forms of communication other than their own as the origin of the unending violence of dominion, one manifestation of which is the war itself (p. 171-72) :

To tell you the truth, these kids, so feebleminded, so dribbling and drooling, couldn’t ask for anything… we could only see they were trying to tell us something… there wouldn’t be any more slaughterhouses if the officials in charge took a look at the eyes of the feebleminded… naturally wars go on and on… the same brutes keep it up on both sides

41Céline claimed his novels were not fiction, but an effort to capture in the carefully worked measures of his prose, « the only reality that counts », the « secret, discreet, biological reality you can’t see and can’t hear » (p. 192). His prose rhythms are an attempt to communicate anthropological truth as somatic event30. From this perspective, his encounter with the children records a double alienation. On the one hand, both Céline and the children are exiles from the normal forms of human society ; on the other, the children are a distinctive zoological community of their own, and they exhibit a relaxed sociality with one another and with Bébert in which he cannot participate. In addition, their « slobber », « bubbles », and « bark » are the direct expression of physiological experience to which Céline aspired in his own prose, but which can only be represented indirectly in language subject to syntax and semantics.

42Céline and the children eventually part company, and he, Lili, and Bébert go on to Copenhagen. After the three of them have checked into their hotel, they take an excursion by streetcar to Hellerup Park. Céline has visited before, but, as they enter the park on foot, it begins to take on a strange and unfamiliar aspect, as if it were a wilderness at the edge of human habitation, and not a merely a green space maintained by human beings for their own recreation. They miss the path, and lose themselves in woods and bushes. Like Peisetairus and Euelpides, they do not know how to proceed, and sit down in a deserted spot where they can see the ruins of a demolished castle but « not a soul far and wide » (p. 252-255). This is the end of their journey, and from a secret compartment in their traveling bag they take the tokens of their human identity that were hidden during their flight : two passports, one marriage certificate, and a lady’s pistol. We are ready for the end of the novel, but at this point something truly astonishing happens (p. 256) :

over there in the grass, a bird… but not the usual kind of bird… « collector’s item, » I’d say, from the Jardin des Plantes… about the size of a duck, half pink, half black… and ruffled ! feathers every which way… I look further… another ! that one I know !… I saw him first !… an ibis… fancy meeting you here !… and an egret !… certainly not from Denmark ! and now a peacock… they’ve come here on purpose !… and a lyre bird… they want something to eat… it’s not a very nourishing spot, ruins, brambles, and stones… still another !… a toucan !… they’re only ten fifteen feet away… they’d make friends if we had something to give them, but we really haven’t got a thing…

43That Rigadoon ends where Aristophanes’ Birds begins is obvious enough, but what to make of this apparently fantastic encounter in the work of an author who disclaimed invention is less so31. A naturalistic answer is at hand ; the birds have escaped from their aviaries : « They must have come from down south like us, from zoos in Germany, bombed. » Like Céline, Lili, and Bébert, and like the « little cretins », the birds are a band of fugitives. They are a strange assortment from every corner of the globe, and they are doing their best to maintain a form of sociality in the face of multiple experiences of human aggression : first the zoo, and now the war. Unlike Peisetairus and Euelpides, Céline and Lili « haven’t got a thing » to offer them, but perhaps they learn something from them instead. At any rate, they get to their feet and go back to the streetcar, back « where we came from… we’ll find the way… »