ABSTRACT

This chapter applies Text World Theory on the parody of Euripides’ Helen in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae as a contribution to the study of Aristophanes’ art and the poetics of Old Comedy. As a function-advancing project within the fictive text-world of comedy, the performance of a tragic play proves problematic. This becomes manifest in a twofold way. The internal spectator’s lack of contextual knowledge assists her to unmask the performers’ ultimate intentions, which are not aesthetic at all, but commensurable with her own practical approach. The continuous interruptions of the embedded performance by the woman who is present on stage require from the spectators a constant switching between framing structures in order to adequately process the discourse of the characters on stage, an experience which produces a particular comic effect. At the same time, spectators’ contextual knowledge allows them to identify the performance as a parody and draw attention to the fundamentally different nature of world-building in fiction. The ontological divide between the discourse-world and the text-worlds created by fiction has wide-ranging consequences: it makes attempts to treat Aristophanic as ‘serious’ when it seems to refer to real-life situations appear problematic; at the same time, it foregrounds the insufficiency of current literary theories in Aristophanes’ time which emphasized the didactic and utilitarian function of poetry. The failed project of staging Helen illustrates such an attempt at making fiction useful in practical terms. Finally, the association of differentiations in literary competencies with gender makes better sense if we assume that Athenian women were excluded from comic performances.