Aristophanes Fights Sweaty Catholics and Wins

A.M. Juster Contubernales 
2023; 38 pp., $9.99 (paperback)

Review of Gerytades: An Aristophanes Play, Sort Of

A couple months ago, I was lucky enough to attend the De Nicola Center’s Fall Conference, which doubled as the biennial conference on the Catholic imagination. I love these sorts of events, not only because at said venues I get to represent Dappled Things, the best Catholic literary arts magazine in the world, but because they offer an insight into all the great things that people in our microculture are up to. (Katy Carl is working on a new novel! There’s a new award-winning documentary on the life of René Girard! UST’s creative writing MFA continues to exist!)

But underneath this sweet-smelling milk and honey of the conference proceedings was a more unpleasant odor, a scent of desperation. It’s a B.O. I know very well, a thin but undeniable layer of sweat that accumulates under the armpits whenever you talk to that gal you like: the smell of doubt. It signals, on some sort of pre-conscious level, lack of confidence, a belief that you’re not good enough, a fear that this person you like isn’t going to like you back. 

So you overcorrect. Maybe you start trying too hard, which means you come off as overbearing. This is damning for Catholic writers because it often manifests as didacticism. For as much as Catholic artists have attempted to exorcise preachiness from their fiction, they haven’t been entirely successful. Some of the figureheads of the Catholic literary revival that has taken place over the last decade have written novels that borrow, in form and content, from contemporary literature’s Christ-haunted greats like David Foster Wallace (by way of Dostoyevsky) and Martin Mosebach and, to a lesser extent, George Saunders and Richard Russo and Jonathan Franzen. Although these works are celebrated within Christian spheres and well-reviewed by the kind of people who would carve out four days to attend a conference on the Catholic imagination in South Bend, Indiana, they’ve received almost no attention beyond that. 

This was discussed, frequently and sweatily, during conference panels, keynotes, and coffee breaks. Wellllllll, the problem is that people just aren’t reading books anymore; literacy is down the tubes with this generation, and did you see that piece in The Atlantic that talked about how kids are only reading excerpts of books in public schools? Wellllllll, culture is just so fragmented these days, you know? It’s hard to capture any sort of audience because now people are listening to podcasts and audiobooks and YouTube essays, so how are you supposed to establish yourself? Wellllllll, who needs New York anyway, that scene is dead as a doornail, and you know what, we’re doing pretty well gosh darn it, because we’re all reading books that people in this room have written, and reviewing books that people in this room have written, and secretly longing that if we write enough overly glowing reviews of books that people in this room have written that those people will put in a good word for us too and maybe, just maybe, our books will get published and read and well-reviewed by everyone in this room, and then in two years, we’ll be the ones on stage.

Okay, I’m being a little hyperbolic. But underneath all of this desperation is a deeper problem: why do people read authors like Saunders, Russo, or Franzen? Because those authors are cool. They’re entertaining. They’re enjoyable. They don’t feel like an obligation. They have political and aesthetic commitments, sure, but they’re at their weakest when those commitments turn into soapboxing salesmanship (see, for example, Saunders’ “Love Letter” or Russo’s Sh*tshow). Most of the time, though, they’re just fun to read. You like reading them. You look forward to reading them. (Your mileage may vary on whether this also applies to David Foster Wallace.)

This is my point. The Catholic literary revival is great. I love it. It’s doing excellent things. But when’s the last time it produced something cool? I’m not talking about something philosophically robust or technically stylish or reminiscent of Infinite Jest—all those things are fine, but I’m talking about something else. When’s the last time you had fun reading one of these books? The last time you read one to unwind, to relax, to delight? Again, the contemporary Catholic literary arts scene is great. But I worry it’s not delightful. It’s homework. It’s a sweater you slip on thinking it’s going to be comfortable only to discover it’s 10% wool—always just a little itchy. A little sweaty.

It’s not cool to do all the things that you know are being done elsewhere, better. But it is cool to be confident and to be able to back that confidence up. Do you really, truly, in fact have something neat that you just know people are going to want to see? If you have that, then you’re not going to be desperate or sweaty. You’re going to be cool. 

 Take, for example, A.M. Juster’s Gerytades, recently published by Contubernales, a small classics press that has done exceptional Latin translations of Robinson Crusoe and Julius Caesar. Juster has published original poetry with The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, Commonweal and a million other places as well as translations for W.W. Norton, UPenn, and UToronto, among others; he’s currently the poetry editor for Plough. He’s also not, strictly speaking, real: Juster is a penname for Michael J. Astrue, the former Commissioner of Social Security under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Associate Counsel to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He’s also been a lawyer, a CEO at a biotech firm, a professor, a board and council member at several biotech companies—and, before his identity was officially confirmed in 2010, he moonlighted as one of America’s finest poets. 

Gerytades is what it looks like when a writer’s got something great on his hands, a piece of verse so stuffed full of delight and joy and fun that you will lament its only being twenty-two pages long. And it is also undeniably, scandalously, challengingly Catholic, not so much a gauntlet thrown down at other writers working to develop our Church’s literary imagination as it is a warm hand of a friend on your shoulder, inviting you out for a night out on the town. Juster works with total ease here, without a whiff of effort, the sprezzatura of a master, totally confident that you want what he’s got, and you do, because you know he’s working on something cool, and of course you want to see it.

The poem’s subtitle already lures you in. The original Gerytades was a play written by Ancient Greece’s king of comedy, Aristophanes, since lost to time and now existing only in fragmentary form. Juster uses these bits and pieces to play an extreme game of Mad Libs: using only the few lines that remain and what little we know of the completed version gleaned from descriptions by Aristophanes’ contemporaries, Juster “finishes” Gerytades not as a play but as a mock-epic poem of rhyming couplets, chock-full of gags that are not only legitimately hilarious but also capture the cadence and rhythm of ancient Greek humor for a contemporary non-expert audience (though, of course, classicists will find plenty of obscure little jokes in here to make their hearts sing).

Here’s the tale. Three ancient Greek schmucks—the tragedian Meletus, the comic poet Sannyrion, and the “dithyrambic” (by which we mean, eternally tipsy epicurean-not-Epicurean writer of drinking songs) Cinesias are told by their critics and peers to go to hell. Specifically, these critics want good poetry to make a comeback (oh, and by the way, the last two lines here are from the original Aristophanes):

In fact the critics all agree our verse

is turgid, and it keeps on getting worse.

They spit their wine on you, they puke on you,

and soon (look out!) they will be shitting too!

If good poetry is going to make its return, Athens needs more good lyres than bad liars and a hero who’ll move the literary arts into the future without looking back, and who’s better at not looking back than the legendary poet Orpheus, now trapped in the underworld? Armed with nothing but their failing wits and enormous expendability, our three heroes travel to Hades with their guide, the eponymous Gerytades, to find Orpheus, rescue him and his love Eurydice, escape from hell, and restore their culture.

Of course, things go south faster than Odysseus sailing past Scylla and Charybdis, but there’s something deeply moving about the poets’ continuous screw-ups. From the beginning, the quest is flawed—our trio ostensibly believe that the poets of their time

are no longer writing to inspire,

and we just dash off what our peers desire

so that awards and honors multiply

with every passing year to satisfy

demands for literary recognition

by poets with insatiable ambition.

However, mere moments after this declamation, the heroes fall asleep and dream of the rewards from their quest:

high praise from poetry communities,

great publication opportunities

good food, fine wine, luxurious retreats,

and funding from Athenian elites.

Such dreams don’t last.

But despite their failures, hypocrisy, and sheer incompetence (and the fact that—spoiler alert—they don’t really end up accomplishing anything), there’s something distinctly Christian, rather than ancient, about the world they occupy, a comic nature inscribed into the bones of their reality. These three are true stooges: they are laughingstocks among their peers, purposefully chosen because they won’t be missed if their Carnival Cruise on the river Styx kills them, motivated by raw ambition, more than willing to let the pleasures of the flesh distract them from their lofty quest. And yet there is something hidden deep in the background, some divine providence totally alien to the ancient fates that blinded Oedipus and left Creon childless, that transforms their failures and sins into the foundations for happier domestic lives than any of the poets’ critics could dream of.

But the closing lines of Gerytades also provide a lesson to lovers of the Catholic intellectual tradition like me who worry about and yet tend towards the itchy and the sweaty: if you want a literary revival, the first step is not to think about who’re you’re trying to have like you or what books you have to read and write or what reviews you have to churn out to get recognized. The first step is to write something fun. And maybe to get a drink with your buddies.