the_lady_lily | Bibliography

Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C.- A.D. 250 - John Clarke

Honestly, I can't remember why I added this to the monumental list of Things I Should Read - probably because of something to do with Priapus, I expect, and a wish to do a bit more of Material Culture. As reasonably light classical reading, I did enjoy this quite a lot, although I'm sure I'd have issues with it were I looking at it from a more professional perspective.

Clarke's main objective is to examine obscene images that were, presumably, meant to be funny when they were seen by the people who used certain spaces, and work out why they were funny. He's very good about remembering that the vast majority of Romans were not hyper-educated, and so did not engage in the kind of highly erudite intertextual readings that later scholars have done. Equally, obscenity doesn't have to be explained away by literary allusion - filthy drawings can just be filthy drawings. It's a rather good corrective to some of the material, and Clarke has a bit of a field day doing a bit of back-tracking along the scholarly history of some of the pieces he uses.

Another main argument is the use of obscene and deformed figures as totemic, having some kind of apotropaic function; he does a good analysis of the various sorts of scenes in which one finds pygmies, for example, and whether or not they are ithyphallic, and whether that means they're meant to be funny or artistic. There's also a great discussion of the Tavern of the Seven Sages at Ostia, which I had never heard of before, but is absolutely brilliant! Searching for the location, I've found an interview with Clarke himself, so I'm just going to quote his explanation on this:

I think the biggest revelation came when studying the wall painting in the Tavern of the Seven Sages at Ostia, where you have images of the Seven Sages seated on their Philosophers' chairs with ordinary men below them seated on a common latrine bench. Both have speech captions - surprising in themselves - but the Sages say silly things about digestive functions while the men say practical things about those same functions. (For instance, we read that "clever Chilon of Sparta taught how to fart without making noise.") What surprised me was how the artist inverted elite values (the Sages are supposed to say noble things like "Know Thyself" and "Nothing Too Much") even while making ordinary men into smart - or at least sensible - people. This inversion I compare to Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of carnival -the temporary world-turned-upside-down, where often the upper body (symbolized by the head/intellect) gets replaced by the lower body (symbolized by the belly and genitals).

So if that sounds like the sort of thing that you'd enjoy - go for it!