The Bacchae, EuripidesTragic Roots of Western Literature

Literature

Tragedy

• Must understand the Ritual context (Worship of Dionysus--nature deity, god of many names, syncretism, mystery religion, emotional, ecstatic, transcendent, connects to cycle of nature, the imminent life force)

• Must understand the Political context (Peloponnesian War--Athens attempts to extend hegemony over peninsula-->will doom Athens in victory (paradox)

Tragedy

• “Goat Song”-->sacred to Dionysus?

• Award…• Individual Will Vs.

Mystery (cyclical or cosmic)

• State Sponsored and yet Criticism of leadership

• Irony: most significant trope in Greek tragedy, source of Pathos

• Strength<-->Weakness• Empathy: imaginative

identification• Humility/Compassion

Awe

Tragedy: Aristotelian View

• Protagonist, of an elevated station

• Hubris (overweening pride or willfulness)

• Harmartia (tragic fault)

• Goal: Catharsis (cleansing of self, emotional)

What Issues?• Individual Will• Context of the War• Civilization Getting

Cut off from Roots• Rigidity Vs Flexibility• Human Will Vs Divine

Ground• Enter with one model,

leave with another...

Existential oppositions

• Pentheus: Dionysus

• Nomos:Physis

• Order:Chaos

• Polis:Nature

• Apollonian:Dionysian

• Polarized gender:androgyny

Characters

• Pentheus• Civic authority• Denies Dionysus• “Anti-effeminacy”• Tries to control

through conscious exercise of power

• Cf. Tao Te Ching

• Dionysus• Divine authority• Challenges Pentheus• Androgynous, appeals

to women (Bacchae)• Elusive,

uncontrollable, controls “from below” the conscious will

Other characters:

• (Semele) crossed over

• Tiresias (blind man who sees)– male and female

– balance/yielding

• Cadmus

• Agave: punished for denying her sister’s claim

• Chorus:– reflects community

mind (elders)– turns throughout

play– thematic device

Setting

• Thebes:Cadmean line cursed by Hera)

• Civilization Vs Wilderness, true relationship

• Asserted relationship between these places

• What ideas they represent or embody?

• How do Gender models map over this?

• positive and negative values?

• Polarities can be reversed both in gender and valuation

• look in context

• What is underlying relationship?

City: two perspectives in literature

• Order• Reason• Male/Polarized gender

model• Chastity/infertility• Will• Nomos• Apollonian• Clarity

• Decay of true values• Corruption• Decadence/Materialism• “Effeminate”

Civilization• Coercion• Rigidity/death• Darkness

Country:two perspectives

• Chaos (remember has two sides, + and -)

• Irrationality• Female/Androgyny• Sexuality/fertility• Instinct/Drive• Physis• Dionysian• Ambiguity

• True Order (cyclical)• Social harmony (as

opposed to class structure)

• Moral Order• Freedom• Life Giving• Balanced• Clarity

Archetypal Pattern

• Always a Crossing Over

• Attitude toward the Ineffable/Cosmos/mystery/ “Luminous darkness”

• Knowing via Experience vs Intellectual Ordering

Patterns• A Crossing Over, + and -

Possibilities

• Imbalance?

• Justice!

• A reckoning

• PARALLELS AUDIENCE’S “Crossing over”

• (but WE return safe, cf Marlowe and narrator of Heart of Darkness

Huh?

• THEATER IS A LIMINAL SPACE!

• Sacred to Dionysus• Essential for

Community to Confront these issues

• Growth and Renewal• Wisdom?

Key Quotes:• “I am all

conqueror/…All Asia is mine.”

• East Vs West

“I began from Lydia…Phrygia…Persia….Bactria…Media…Arabia…Asia….I came here--my first Greek City--”

Dionysus as merciful...

• He it was who turned the grape into a flowing draft/ and proffered it to mortals./ So when they fill themselves with liquid vine/ they put an end to grief.

• It gives them sleep/ which drowns the sadness of each day.

• Oh, how lovely to forget/just how old we are!

…merciful Dionysus/wrathful Dionysus

• “He gives to the rich, he gives to the poor.”

• “His wine, sweet spell against sorrow;” 420

• “Despiser of him who despises.”

• “Dionysus…To man most gentle/And most dangerous”

The Nature of Wisdom

• “ Living his days and loving his nights/ Content to the end, or wise in keeping/ Mind and heart from passing beyond/ The horizons of man…/ Whatever the many,/ The simple, allow--/ that I will follow

• cf. Tao Te Ching...

Words of Wisdom• “To the foolish ear the wise speak

foolishly”

• “There’s mystery in the dark.”

• The braggart’s unbridled tongue,/The anarchical folly of fools/ Leads to untimely demise/ But the life of the quietly wise,/unshaken abides,/ Holding the home together.

• There is no cure for madness when the cure itself is mad.

The paradox of will and intellect

• Mere cleverness is not wise./ Life, given immortal airs,/ Shortens and dies./ And a man in pursuit of mere grand desires/ Misses his time./ Oh that is the way/ of the frantically, willfully mad/ men, I surmise.

“All government is power/violence over others…”

• Do not imagine men are molded by sheer force/ or mistake your sick conceits for insights.

Unity of Human and Nature

• Some fondled young gazelles/ or untamed wolf-cubs in their arms/and fed them with their own white milk…./One of them took up her thyrsus,/struck the rock,/ and water gushed from it as fresh as dew./ Another hit her rod of fennel on the ground/and the god for her burst forth a fount of wineof wine./while from their ivy-crested rods/ sweet streams of honey dropped.

Bringer of the Golden Age

• Anyone who fancied liquid white to drink/ just scratched the soil with fingertips/ and had herself a jet of milk.

Penetrating Insight into the Obvious: Double Vision2Late

• Yes, yes: I’d say I see two suns,/ a double city Thebes,/twin sets of seven gates,

• and a bull seems to beckon me--/he walks before me./Now I’d say your head was horned…/or were you an animal all the while?/For certainly you’ve changed--/oh, into a bull.

• Cf. Blake

Dionysian Instinct Vs Apollonian Intellect

• Great Dionysus, breaker of barriers,….Capture the nights ambush the days Of the impishly stupidly clever/And those that depend on the march of the brain/ And the force of the master plan/ To alter the wages of man, and think/To know better. O Bacchus, evoe!

Opposites Unite?

• …Let every peak of Citheron ring/ With the triumph of animal holiness.

Caution to Awe • Complexity

• A product of IRONY– Verbal– Situational– Dramatic

• PARADOX– Verbal– Existential...