Roman Comedy against the Subject is about ‘itness’, a radical elaboration on the so-called material turn which posits a ‘becoming-object’ and therefore questions the human as a category per se. Mario Telò argues that human-thing entanglement (‘interobjectivity’) can erase the boundaries between subject (human) and object (thing), and in so doing destabilize subjectivity itself. For Telò, however, this objectification is ultimately liberating, a renunciation of “the normative and intrinsically exclusionary subjecthood of ‘he’, ‘she,’ or even ‘they'” which the author calls “markers of privilege that can be dehumanizing of others burdened by the ‘violence of humanization'” (pp.2-3). For given their indifference, and the nonexclusive forms of detachment this indifference entails (couches will snuggle anyone—Telò’s major example), objects invite us to inhabit ‘relational counterimaginaries’, i.e. alternative ways of thinking and living that challenge normative assumptions about ‘enfamilyment’ and gender but also sociality. The author claims that Roman comedy engages in counterimaginary contemplation via the depiction of interobjectivity in plays named after objects. Four chapters explore how Cistellaria (Chapter 1: “The Basket and the Bond”), Aulularia (Chapter 2: “The Autistic P(l)ot”), Rudens (Chapter 3: “Comedy on the Ropes”) and Eunuchus (Chapter 4: “Untitled”) feature people and objects (including the texts themselves) melting into one another, thereby opening up spaces for neuroqueer modes of being. To make his case, Telò combines close readings with dizzyingly complex theoretical argumentation. The lenses deployed include disability theory, queer and trans theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, object-oriented ontology and Black critical theory. Caveat lector: such dense theory makes for very demanding reading, and Roman Comedy against the Subject is not for the faint of heart. But even those sympathetic to deep theory may nevertheless remain unconvinced of interpretations that are occasionally pushed too far, and question the author’s “polycontextual” approach by which ancient and modern conceptual worlds are made to coexist without any sustained account of the conditions which render them commensurate.
Chapter 1, focused on authorship, reads the basket after which Cistellaria is entitled as a polyvalent object, with interobjectivity at work both inside and outside the play. Telò nicely argues that cistella = puella: the girl and the basket which contains proof of her freeborn identity become almost indistinguishable. Thus the cistella‘s discovery by Lampadio which leads to Selenium’s recognition is read as a queer birth, and the slave himself enables a counterimaginary by transforming into a maternal figure who detaches mothering from biological motherhood. But the basket also embodies the ‘with-ness’ that is this comedy’s telos: composed of different strands (a texture convincingly read by Telò as a reification of the play’s temporal stratification), baskets hold people together. In this way, the cistella materializes Cistellaria‘s opening scene of female support which itself ‘makes’ the play/basket: Telò suggests that the women conferencing about the plot’s crux resemble a female collective such as those which in many cultures actually weave baskets. The product of a commons, the titular object is framed as an anonymous object, like (according to the author) Cistellaria itself: ingeniously reading the opening scene of Plautus’ play—a retrospective of Menander’s title scene—as synecdochic for the relationship between model and translation, Telò goes on to make a case about distributed authorship and deterritorialized authoriality that is much less convincing, since throughout the corpus (e.g. Asin.10-12) Plautus deliberately marks out his authorship from that of the Greek playwrights whose plays he translates.
Character in general, and Aulularia‘s miser in particular, are at centre stage in Chapter 2. Telò well shows us that interobjectivity produces Euclio’s character, for the senex‘s subjectivity emerges through his entanglement with the aula he covets, and the two become almost inextricable. That is, Euclio is assimilated to his precious aula, becoming closed and retentive but also a literal vessel: Telò reads the old man’s excessive care for the aula as a couvade, an interpretation built around that pivotal moment when Euclio hides the pot under his cloak. More queering of motherhood, then, and a fantasy of non-normative models of parenthood. But that’s not all. Euclio’s “object-oriented psychology” (p.93) whereby the old man acts through and even with the aula qua extension of himself, is claimed to be expressive of neurodiverse aesthetics, as is his obsessively repetitive behaviour and speech. In fact, Telò perceives an “autism poetics” in Plautine comedy tout court, suggesting that “we recognize in Plautus’s ebulliently homophonic aesthetics…the stylistic and affective markers of autistic echolalia” (p.99).
Chapter 3 takes on genre via a discussion of Rudens. Drawing on Hitchcock’s Rope and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Telò makes a complicated argument about how this play’s titular object runs through the plot materially linking an assemblage of objects, people, events and social relations that together constitute Rudens. The rope (a figure of interobjectivity as well as an actant of the same) thereby exposes the genre’s ‘traumic’ (trauma + comedy) nature: comedy’s happily-ever-afters always feature violence and subordination. Thus the ‘happy’ restoration of Palaestra to her freeborn identity and parents nevertheless involves Gripus’ continued enslavement. So, too, is the familial reconstitution at Rudens‘ conclusion clouded over by its materiality. The reunion’s reliance on objects (the anagnorsis happens through recognition tokens recovered in a basket contained in a trunk at the end of a rope…) is taken to open up a counterimaginary of enfamilyment whereby the family (held together by the titular object!) is presented as a horizontal assemblage rather than a vertical reproductive hierarchy.
Chapter 4 is on the title of Terence’s Eunuchus but also on Terence himself—or more, precisely, his Blackness as a critical-theoretical problem. Telò contends that this play’s title is the functional equivalent of “Untitled”: Dorus’ itness—i.e. his instrumentality (Telò makes much of the literal meaning of εὐνοῦχος, “bed holder”, which reduces the eunuch to his function, as well as this character’s name which points to his status as a δῶρον) and his literal ungendering dehumanize him and efface his individuality, transforming him into an object. Combined with the eunuch’s racialization in late (!) antiquity, Telò argues that this figure is ” a manifestation of the negative ontology of Blackness” (196) and therefore a “privileged site for recovery of hermeneutic potentialities of Terence’s Blackness” (192). That is, Terence’s own authorial persona is implicated in the same kind of itness as that of the eunuch. On this basis Telò argues that the title Eunuchus is a sphragis of sorts, “an inscription of an authorial ‘I’ into a double structure of itness” (p.192).
These four chapters are rounded off by an epilogue which reflects on close reading as another manifestation of interobjectivity whereby the critic and the text he engages with come to mutually constitute each other, thereby delivering the former (Telò himself; this epilogue is written in the first person) from the burden of subjecthood. Such “too-close philology” (p.21) is this book’s highlight. So, for instance, where the author brilliantly argues that the repetition of cum in a passage of Cistellaria puns on the title of the play’s model, Συν-αριστῶσαι, or his observation that the slave’s discovery of the treasure in Aulularia recreates the plot’s inception, and, further, that the pot’s new location in arca signals this rebeginning through a bilingual pun on ἐν ἀρχῇ. I learned a lot from Telò’s linear readings even if they do not always substantiate the book’s ambitious theoretical claims which themselves vary in their persuasiveness. So while the linear analysis in Chapter 2 (this book’s most accessible) nicely illuminates Aulularia, some claims strain the bounds of credibility. To give only one example, Telò argues the following of Aul. 449-50 (hoc quidem hercle, quoquo ibo, mecum erit, mecum feram,/neque isti id in tantis periclis umquam committam ut siet): “The neuter pronoun (hoc/id), placed in the subject’s grammatical position, afforded ontological essence (hoc….erit; id…siet), formally obscures the ‘I’ (the ego)” (pp.91-2). But is that really the case? Plautus often puts the object in first position; it is so (e.g.) in the second sentence of this same play (Aul. 3-5: hanc domum iam multos annos est cum possideo et colo patri avoque iam huius qui nunc hic habet). And Chapter 3’s argument about the breakdown of the family into a horizontal assemblage in Rudens is complex to the point of unintelligibility. This book is also missing discussion of interobjectivity’s applicability, and the distinctiveness of Telò’s chosen corpus. Is itness detectable across Roman comedy or is it exclusive only to those plays called after objects? In this vein, one may ask why Telò focuses on the objects in object-title plays rather than on the many objects in other comedies, like the all-important ring in Curculio that makes the play, or the cloak in Menaechmi around which the brothers’ identity confusion revolves. What exactly does the title do that sets these four plays apart as studies in interobjectivity?
Readers may also be troubled by the fact that Roman Comedy against the Subject discusses the plays unmoored from their social and historical context. Particularly problematic is Telò’s disregard for the titles’ historicity, a problem he claims to be “relevant only to a strictly intentionalist and historicist approach” (p.49 n.42). But I am probably more invested in that issue than most.[1] In any case, such objections are forestalled by Telò’s declaration that the book assumes an “open-ended, polycontextual perspective” which “does not hierarchically attribute an axiological primacy to the ‘original’ context of composition and production, but rather avails itself of the rich interpretive possibilities of entanglement and mutual deterritorialization between an interpreter’s and an artwork’s ever-shifting frames of reference” (p.11). And yet titles are paratexts that do something for the audience and the critic alike (as evidenced by Telò’s very monograph!) and comedy is not (just) a repository of conceptual experiments; it is a historically situated genre written for performance before Roman audiences whose expectations about sociality and gender roles shaped both the plays and their objects. As it turns out, not even Telò can completely dispense of the plays’ context: Chapter 4 relies on both historical context and the title’s authoriality in arguing that “Eunuchus” functions as an expression of Terence’s African ancestry.
In sum: Roman Comedy against the Subject is a difficult read with which not everyone will entirely agree. But it is precisely the sort of ambitious, deeply learned, and intellectually provocative work that classical scholarship benefits not from dismissing, but from debating.
Notes
[1] I discuss the author-ity of comic titles in an article that was probably published too late for inclusion in Telò’s book: Barbiero, E.A. “What’s in a Name? Through Comic Titles to Caecilius Statius,” JRS 114 (2024): 1-25.