The myth of Dionysos (6)
And we reach the last part of the second article about Dionysos! If you haven't caught up, the first part of the second article is here ; and if you want to go even further back check the first part of the first article here.
III) Modern approaches to Dionysos: Theater and drunkenness
Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy
We evoked before how during the Lenaia , Dionysos assisted to the preparation of the wine in the shape of a mask. When it comes to theater, it is by the magic of the god that the mask âcomes to lifeâ. The Greek theater was born of the invocations of Dionysos: it was to him that the chorists of the dithyrambic contests addressed their salutations ; it was him who was supposed to inspire the poets of the dramatic contests, during the rustic Dionysia (December-January), the Lenaia, ad especially during the Great Dionysia (March-April). On the benches of the theater, just like in the thiasis, the genders and the social classes were mixed together (at least, in theory) ; and on the stage, madness ruled as the imagination triumphed over the reality. But the genre that truly held the Dionysian spirit, more than the comedy or the satirical drama, was the tragedy.
In his The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche highlights the analogies between the tragic genre of Ancient Greece and the cult of the god. At the core of each dramatical representation, there is a metamorphosis, a form of âenchantmentâ that reminds one of the Dionysian possession. The tragic chorus, spectators and actors of the play at the same time, symbolize âthe crowd possessed by Dionysosâ ; and the tragedy brings the same forgetfulness of the past, the same deliverance and the same catharsis as the Bacchic intoxication. Taking back the idea according to which âtragedyâ comes from âtragosâ, the goat, the sacred animal of Dionysos supposedly sacrificed to the god during the dramatic contests, Nietzsche proposes an hypothesis according to which the âpassion/sufferingâ of Dionysos was the first subject of tragedies â or the first tragedy lot. Nietzsche was certain that the cruelty inherent to the tragic genre was the same that the god encouraged the Bacchants to practice: madness, murder, destruction, ripping apart, are all told or symbolized on the tragic stage as much as within Dionysosâ own myth.
Nietzsche concluded by announcing a renewal of the tragedy, that Aristotleâs influenced had suddenly made âgone astrayâ from its Dionysian role. It is this same renewal of the theater that Artaud demanded in his manifest The Theater and its Double (1938). While he does not name Dionysos, he insists that tragedy should be given back its original inspiration: cruelty. Free from its psychological deviations, once again metaphysical, the theater had to bring, just like a plague, a liberating catharsis. According to Artaud âtheater is a plague because it is the supreme balance that is only acquired with destruction. It invites the spirit to a delirium that causes the exaltation of the energies.â This last sentence recalls the Bacchic âmaniaâ, but if Artaud disdains Dionysos and prefers to reference the Balinese theater, it is because he sees in the Dionysian madness a force of anarchy rather than something planned. But still, for Artaud the theater stays a political force of subversion, that âreveals to the collectivities their dark power, their hidden sideâ. For him the action of the theater is a Dionysian one, a nocturnal, dark, dangerous power, just like a bacchanal.
Bacchic madness and contemporary poetry
The entire work of Nietzsche is placed under the invocation of Dionysos. In Thus spoke Zarathustra (1885), he glorifies a âDionysian demonâ. Beyond his numerous references to the attributes of the god in his poems (honey, wine, donkey, lion, snake), his writings glorify the two side of the Dionysism, the dance and the drunkenness, both tied by laughter. Nietzsche, however, prefers insisting on the abolition of the frontier between human and divine, allowing for the existence of âsuperior menâ, rather than on the abolition of the frontiers between humans, despite the latter being essential to the Dionysian spirit.
Before Nietzsche, Rimbaud gave a very different description of the âsaintly intoxicationâ in his MatinĂ©e dâivresse (Morning of drunkenness, in his 1872-73 Illuminations). There, he recreates the ambivalence of the Bacchic madness by having pleasure meet pain. Suffering becomes the promise of a consecration, and while Dionysos is never named, it seems that the theme of a painful intoxication leading to salvation was inspired by him. âOh, us, now worth of those tortures! Let us gather faithfully this superhuman promise [âŠ] this promise! This madness!â. The âsuperhuman promiseâ can be the one of the enthusiasm, literally the identification to the god. Just like within a bacchanal, children, slaves and maidens gather for a nocturnal ritual, for an âeveâ ; as for the âmadnessâ and the âviolenceâ regularly announced, they can be linked to the bloodthirsty cruelty of the Bacchants by the last words âHere comes the time of the Assassinsâ.
Claudel will renew the ancient image of the Maenad in the middle of a mystical delirium, by adapting her convulsive dance to the syncope-rhythm of his verse, in the first of his Five great odes (1908) âThe Musesâ: âA drunkenness like the one of the red wine and a pile of roses! Grapes under the feet that squirt, great flowers all sticky with honey! / The Maenad distraught by the drum! At the piercing scream of the fife, the Bacchant stiffens within the thundering god. / All burning, all dying, all languishing!â We can notice that the ecstasy of the Bacchant is described like the deadly one Semele knew before Zeus (the âthundering godâ), and the last verse translates the mix of the loving desire and of death. The interpretation of Claudel reminds us that it was said that Semele, when pregnant, had been overtaken by a strong desire to dance: Claudel sees in her the first of the Maenads, a victim of Dionysos before he was even born. But for Claudel the Bacchic madness, in its musical aspect, is also a symbol of poetic inspiration: âAh, I am drunk! I am offered to the god! I hear a voice in me, and the rhythm goes fasterâŠâ The poet and his text are both invaded by, possessed by the divine force.
Finally, Saint-John Perse, in Winds (1946), gives to this possession a larger scope, at the size of âthe entire world of thingsâ, and thus he sees in her and in those hosting it one of âthose great forcesâ of subversion that are erasing the wearing-out of the century: âUnpredictable Men, Men harassed by the god, Men fed with a new wine and who seem pierced with lightning / Our salvation is with us, in the wisdom and in the intemperance.â Just like with Claudel, the mania is associated with thunder, and finds back the ambiguity of the union of the opposites. âWisdomâ and âintemperanceâ are one and the same. It is the Dionysism, destruction and balance all in one: it is can lead to anarchy, it is not in itself anarchic (unlike what Artaud believed), rather it is a âmethodâ, as Rimbaud said, that corresponds to the three steps of the âorgiaâ. But balance does not mean stability, nor serenity. Not at all: Dionysism is a balance, for it is the counterweight, the counterpower needed to oppose the Apollonian order, and to make the ânormalâ world more moderate.
IV) Conclusions
In The Bacchants, Pnetheus says âWise Tiresias, do not believe the illusion of your sick mind to be wisdom.â But it is Pentheus who has an illusionary wisdom, for he refuses to accept madness. âHe who lives without madness is not as wise as he believes,â La Rochefoucauld once wrote. The paradox of the wise-madness should not let us believe that the delirium is limited to a few holidays and a few moments of disruptions. True wisdom is knowing when madness and when cruelty cannot be escaped. As for the real madness, it would be if someone tried to make this out-of-boundaries god an institution, if someone tried to make a system out of the consecration of his possessed followers â those that Nietzsche called âsuper-humansâ. It would be a dictatorship, it would be the negation of the very Bacchic freedom, it would be the death of Dionysos.
