The Bacchae

 The Bacchae 

The Bacchae displays Euripides as the first postmodernist.   The play operates as a metatragedy as it attempts what a lyrical tragedy itself could not; that is, to explain the logic and object,  the purposes and benefits of tragedy.   From this perspective it is significant that Euripides, it is generally conceded, was an "intellectual."  As Bernard Knox points out in his essay, "Euripides: The Poet as Prophet," 

 

in fact Euripides is the first European to whom the modern term "intellectual" could with some exactness be applied.  We know for example that he had a private library (perhaps the first in European history); he read many books and this was rare in fifth-century Athens, where literature and even philosophy were an oral, rather than a written, affair; . . . . 49 

Nietzsche castigates Euripides for the intellectual optimism which he brought to bear on tragedy--an imposition which Nietzsche calls the death of tragedy. 

 To separate this original and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to reconstruct tragedy purely on the basis of an un-Dionysian art, morality, and world view--this is the tendency of Euripides as it now reveals itself to us in clear illumination.”50  

Euripides' motives, Nietzsche contends, were based on the fact that "the understanding was for him the real root of all enjoyment and creation." 51 

The idea that Euripides'  Bacchae is motivated by the pursuit of understanding and governed by a high degree of intellectual control seems to require a rather stunning intellectual leap.  Not only does Euripides give the stage over to Dionysus, the god of wine and madness and fertility, but the play is replete with magic, episodes of sudden madness, ritual murder and enough erotic imagery to bring out the voyeur in even an apparently stalwart young man like Pentheus.  However, as with all highly stylized symbolic dramas, because it makes little sense on a realistic or conventional level, we are forced to interpret the play to an extreme degree and therefore to adopt a markedly intellectual stance vis-à-vis the codes being presented to us.  The mere fact that we repeatedly find ourselves forced into this perspective is the first indication that we are dealing with a text which counters the aesthetics of  lyrical tragedy.  In The Libation Bearers we occasionally find ourselves called upon to remove ourselves from the action in order to read the codes that are being presented to us, as in the example of the "Recognition  Scene."  In Antigone we must step back from the drama in order to appreciate the irony of the "Ode to Man."  However, the Bacchae reverses the priorities and process of these tragedies; whereas in the lyrical tragedies we find passion interrupted by reason (ours, the playwright's and the characters'), in the Bacchae we sense the continuous domination of reason, and passion seems an interruption.  In considering the Bacchae we eventually come to realize that we are dealing with a play which not only is a tragedy but is an attempt to discover and present some understanding of what a tragedy is. 

The play opens with a prologue by Dionysus, who thus establishes himself not only as antagonist but as chorus/narrator of the action.  The Chorus, though spectacular, is then made superfluous to the drama.  The audience is thereby placed at a distance from which it can view the action as it affects Pentheus, Agave and Cadmus from a broad perspective.  As Nietzsche describes the opening: 

The Euripidean prologue may serve as an example of the productivity of this rationalistic method.  Nothing could be more uncongenial to the technique of our own stage than the prologue in the drama of Euripides.  For a single person to appear at the outset of the play, telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what has happened so far, even what will happen in the course of the play, would be condemned by a modern playwright as a willful, inexcusable abandonment of the effect of suspense. 52 

We are conscious, since Brecht, of the alienating/distancing effect of this use of chorus/narrator.  Nietzsche, however, contends that Euripides' use of this forewarning was to insure that the audience was not distracted  by concerns of plot or character during key scenes of pathos.  Whichever rationale we accept, the overall effect of such a technique in the course and structure of the drama remains consistent. 

From a distance there is little difference between a Pentheus and an Orestes, or a Creon, or a Macbeth, or a Hedda Gabler.  Pentheus is an archetype of our tragic hero but we see him but briefly; we see him, not from an attached perspective, but from beyond the point of view of his antagonist, and finally we see his destiny not as a conclusion but as a minor interruption or upheaval in the overall reality of the play.  William Arrowsmith, in his introduction to the play confirms that at the center of the play is Pentheus's lack of sophia, of self-knowledge, of  "an acceptance of those necessities that compose the limits of human fate," and it is his consequent "ungovernable ignorance of himself" which makes him prone to "violence, harshness and brutality." 53  The conflict between Pentheus and Dionysus, as Arrowsmith describes it, is "a life and death struggle between rival shapes of sophia in the course of which each claimant betrays the thing he stands for." 54 

    The reality, the wisdom, the worldview or sophia which survives in the play is the worldview which brought the rival sophias into confrontation, the rational, impassive worldview from which the play is written and from where we observe the action.   As Nietzsche has argued, the indestructibility of reality is inherent to the form of Euripidean drama. 

So he put the prologue even before the exposition, and placed it in the mouth of a person who could be trusted:  often some deity had to guarantee the plot of the tragedy to the public, to remove every doubt as to the reality of the myth--somewhat as Descartes could prove the reality of the empirical world by appealing to the truthfulness of God and his inability to utter falsehood.  Euripides makes use of this same divine truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to reassure the public as to the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina .  Between this epic preview and epic prospect lies the dramatic-lyric present, the "drama" proper. 55 

 

In the Bacchae  Dionysus delivers the prologue as described.  Pentheus is destroyed--a lyric moment in a larger epic structure--but the reality of the play is not Pentheus' reality and therefore the dominant worldview of the drama remains intact.  However, the play cannot be interpreted as a victory of Dionysian reality.  Nor, is the play a victory of Apollonian values--Pentheus, the Apollonian figure, is destroyed.  Though we may sense the Apollonian domination of Euripides' exercise of Dionysian aesthetic, the contradictions of the drama are never comfortably resolved in a fully synthesized dialectic.  As Charles Segal observes in Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae : 

This tension between the extremes of reason and emotion is one of the most characteristic features of Euripides' art and one of the most difficult to grasp fully.  It takes many forms.  The scientific and rationalistic procedures associated with the Sophists, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Thucydides contrast with the violence and instability of the passions that blaze forth on nearly every page of Euripides' works.  Debates of logical exactitude are juxtaposed with lyrics of wistful longing; nostalgia for an orderly world of just gods with relentless undercutting of the traditional Olympian theology; delicate romanticism with unsparing realism;  intense patriotism with bitter disillusion about contemporary politics.  In no ancient poet are the contradictions both so marked and so central to the art itself. 56

What distinguishes the Bacchae from lyrical tragedy is not Euripides' dogmatism or rigid intellectualism, but the perspectives he adopts in dealing with the contradictions and incongruities of tragedy.  Whereas, in lyrical tragedy,  the playwright operates largely within the enclosure of the tragic hero's reality and demonstrates how boundaries are reached and broken and Dionysian frenzy comes to rule; in the Bacchae , Dionysus himself is the antagonist and therefore comes under the control of the playwright, and the play is not simply the display of an individual reaching his or her limits so much as it is concerned with the whole business of the dissolution of boundaries--the boundaries, as Segal notes, "between divinity and bestiality in man, reality and imagination, reason and madness, self and other, art and life . .  . ." 57 

This tendency in the Bacchae may, at least in part, be--as Segal implies--historically determined.  Segal notes: 

The Bacchae was composed at such a transitional moment--an historical moment not unlike our own.  Both geographically and spiritually exiled, the poet looks back from the fringes of the Hellenic world to the collapse of the Athenian Empire whose power and confidence fostered the development of tragedy.  Writing at the end of this great age of tragedy, he also reflects, indirectly, on the inner logic and spirit of tragic form, . . . . 58 

  

  Thus, Segal argues, "It is probably not coincidental that the play that comes at the end of the grand tradition of dramatic performances in the fifth century brings on the stage the god of those performances." 59 It seems a logical conclusion that Euripides' fin-de-siècle awareness of tragedy would induce him to write an ironic, metatragedy; however, we should note that this intellectualizing tendency seems fairly consistent in Euripides' work. Our present purpose is simply to recognize the features of this tendency as they exist in the Bacchae and thereby demonstrate the consistent presence--though here mitigated and distant--of the negation of reality in tragedy.

Segal describes the Bacchae as metatragedy because it shows the dramatist's self-conscious reflection "on the theatricality and illusion-inducing power of his own work, on the range and limits of the truth that dramatic fiction can convey." 60   What we find in The Bacchae , which makes it from our present perspective, an ironical, metatragedy, is that the process and significance  of the negation of reality no longer fill and overflow the drama, that madness is no longer the final or ultimate moment of the play, and that between the madness of the individual and the perception of the audience there lies a deep buffer of rational discussion or portraiture of madness and illusion, of narrative structure and plot which is denouement and aftermath of madness, and a turning of events which necessarily puts the madness of the individual in perspective. 

In the Bacchae , once Dionysus has announced the plot and the Chorus of Bacchantes has celebrated his divinity, Cadmus and Teiresias enter to set the drama in motion.  It is of course a shocking scene:  the ancient king and the elderly, noble seer looking incongruous and pathetic, tricked out in the fawn skin and ivy of bacchantes. The old men are not mad, they are simply being expedient.  Yet their appearance certainly gives a paradoxical twist to their accusations that Pentheus is mad. 

Ostensibly the old men are mad--Pentheus certainly describes them as such--but they speak rationally, even pragmatically, of the benefits of the worship of Dionysus, noting even that "His worshippers, /  like madmen, are endowed with mantic powers" (299). 5861  It is they who caution Pentheus ("do not mistake/ for wisdom the fantasies of your sick mind" (311) ) and accuse him:   “You are mad, grievously mad, beyond the power / of any drugs to cure, for you are drugged / with madness” (326-7).   Later, Cadmus advises Pentheus:  "Your mind is distracted now,/ and what you think is sheer delirium" (332).  Pentheus reacts to his entreaties by responding:  "Go worship your Bacchus,/ but do not wipe your madness off on me" (344).  And when Pentheus announces his intention to arrest Dionysus, Teiresias explodes in a tirade:  "You talked madness before, but this is raving lunacy!" (359). 

Tragedies frequently include accusations and counter accusations of madness, yet here the question commands our attention to such an extent that intellectual curiosity becomes the dominant suspense of the drama.  Teiresias and Cadmus appear mad, but as Pentheus is the one opposing a god, he should be the one who is truly mad.  As we focus upon questions of who is mad and what is madness we are dissuaded from an affective association with Pentheus.   

The Chorus offers its answer to these questions of madness and in the process distances us still further from Pentheus and  his life in the play: 

Far in the air of heaven, 

the sons of heaven live. 

But they watch the lives of men.   

And what passes for wisdom is not; 

unwise are those who aspire, 

who outrange the limits of man. 

Briefly, we live.  Briefly, 

then die.  Wherefore, I say, 

he who hunts a glory, he who tracks 

some boundless, superhuman dream, 

may lose his harvest here and now 

and garner death.  Such men are mad, 

  their counsels evil. (394-401) 

The Chorus defines madness, and defines it in such a way as to warn us away from Pentheus.  Moreover, in harkening us to the perspective of the gods in this matter, they counsel an ironic perspective on the drama which we anticipate is about to unfold.   

Though Pentheus is a powerful king, young, strong, courageous and unbending,  we see him not as the one who stands out among many, but as the stereotype, as one of many tragic heroes.  He adheres to the Greek formula of tragedy, he refuses to know his place and challenges a god.  He fits our present version of this same formula:   he does not know himself and this lack of self awareness makes him susceptible to the entrapment of internal contradiction which can develop undetected and then reveal itself at a point when there is no possible escape.   

When Pentheus attempts to bind Dionysus, the god tells him:   “You do not know / the limits of your strength.  You do not know / what you do.  You do not know who you are”  (505-8).   Pentheus can only respond:  "I am Pentheus, the son of Echion and Agave"(509).  This discrepancy between Dionysus who speaks explicitly of the features of  tragedy and Pentheus's total innocence of his meaning underlines the ironic nature of play.  The scene demands psychoanalytic exegesis and the obvious interpretation is that as Pentheus attempts to repress the Dionysian aspect of his own nature, he does not know himself and that lack of knowledge will prove fatal.   We should keep in mind that the difference between this scene and similar scenes in other tragedies is the call to rational faculties, the absolute and unavoidable demand made upon the audience to interpret the scene.   

We do not know why, from Pentheus's perspective, Pentheus goes mad.   We know that he has defied and even imprisoned the god, and has been punished with illusions.  The actual scene in which Pentheus is convinced by Dionysus to dress in women's clothing to spy on the Bacchantes is not convincing.  In fact, it would seem deliberately unconvincing.  This lack of verisimilitude underlines that Dionysus is using his magical power to make Pentheus mad.  But why should Euripides go to the trouble of underlining what was after all a commonplace of Greek thought on madness?  The myth that the gods drive men who defy them mad did not need Euripides' promulgation.  Clearly the tenor of the scene insists that the audience intellectualize and interpret what is being presented. 

The intended interpretation seems clear enough and is reinforced in the subsequent scene in which Dionysus helps Pentheus to dress himself.  Of the "robing scene," Segal concludes: "By putting on foreign garb, as the actor puts on a foreign mask, Pentheus lays bare a truth about himself hidden beneath the regal robes he wears." 62  What has been symbolically presented to us is that beneath Pentheus's facade of Stoicism another part of his nature lurks which is feminine and sensual.   As Pentheus stubbornly denies that side of his own nature he also denigrates the tradition of religious ritual which panders to the ecstatic, un-modern, irrational side of human nature, and, eventually, as a symbolic replication of his repression, Pentheus attempts to overpower and imprison the god, Dionysus.  The ease with which Dionysus seduces Pentheus into a voyeuristic reconnaissance of the women's revels in the mountains indicates Pentheus's prurience, which he has attempted to hide, not only from those around him, but from himself as well.  Pentheus is made mad by the god, but he is also made mad because this contradiction (revealed in the robing scene) exists in his nature and by denying it he has made himself less able to deal with it and incorporate it into the wholeness of his nature. 

Though the play pushes us to these conclusions we should keep in mind that we have been made aware through the intellectual process of interpreting symbolism.  We have gleaned succinct but sufficient information largely from our perspective which seems to be from "among the sons of heaven" looking down and from a distance, but we have not shared in Pentheus's experience or perception.  Pentheus goes to his death, torn apart by the frenzied revellers led by his own mother, Agave; but we are little moved by his destiny. Our sympathies quickly turn to Agave, the mother who, in the madness of  Dionysus' spell, tore her own son limb from limb and now, dancing and jubilant, carries his head back to Thebes on the end of her thyrsus under the proud delusion that she has killed a lion.    

Yet our overall image of Agave is of a woman who is remarkably sane.  She experiences Dionysian frenzy as a punishment/reward for her denial of the god, and she exercises madness to the extremity of  ‘filiacide,’  yet in the aftermath she remains whole, controlled, and clear-sighted.  The play, despite its Dionysian aesthetics, gives way to the Apollonian.  As Nietzsche observes:  “I see Apollo as the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis through which alone the redemption in illusion is truly to be obtained; while by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, . . . .” 63 

We may still wonder why Agave survives the catastrophe of having slaughtered her own son.  George Devereux, in his essay, "The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchae ," offers quite a literal response to this question, claiming that  ". . . Agave's recovery is not a stage miracle, requiring ‘suspension of disbelief.’  It is the necessary result of Cadmus'  flawless psychotherapeutic strategy." 64  The scene in question is fascinating yet interminable:  Agave stands holding the impaled head of her son, while we wait from line 1168 to 1328 for her to discover it is Pentheus-- anagnorisis in ironic, slow motion.  In Devereux's analysis--and the scene does seem to demand just such an analysis if we are to avoid finding Euripides macabre--Cadmus slowly brings her to terms with what she has done and the fact that she has been insane.  According to Devereux this latter insight is the goal of the psychotherapy. 

For Euripides the dramatist, quite as much as for the clinician reading this tragedy, this insight terminates the psychotherapy scene:  the therapeutic objective is attained.  Agave is now sane, non-amnesic, ‘reality-oriented’ and ‘self-connected’  in time; her past has, at last, become part of her present.  It only remains for her to learn to live with it. 65 

In Feder's analysis, in literary presentations of Dionysian myths of madness we see the struggle of the human mind to achieve greater integration and adaptation of both internal and external reality.  As she describes these functions:  “The integrating and controlling operations--developing ego functions--are evident in the very midst of, or immediately after, the mad and violent acts; they account for the paradox so often present in these myths, in which self-knowledge emerges through violence and destruction, reason through madness.” 66    Thus  Feder finds: “in  many of its adaptations to literary  form, the narrative and symbolic structure of Dionysiac myth retains evidence of the soundness of  mind, temperance, self-control in its most basic sense, and, with this control, a degree of self-knowledge.” 67 

The desire or tendency in literature to explicitly elaborate the therapeutic or evolutionary value of madness strikes me not as tragedy but as romance.  The romantic myth, to paraphrase Frye, being the one most attuned to the fulfilment of human desires.  Euripides clearly writes with a determination to maintain this larger, romantic perspective, and thus the success of individuation seems the inevitable conclusion of the Bacchae .  Yet, the Bacchae is not romance. 

Agave succeeds in recovering her sanity, but her son is dead, she must now be exiled and her parents will be transformed  into serpents and forced to face doom.  She is the heroine of the drama, but only from the point of view of the reductionist philosophy which the Chorus expresses to announce the madness of Pentheus. 

--Blessèd is he who escapes a storm at sea, 

who comes home to his harbor. 

--Blessèd is he who emerges from under affliction. 

--In various ways one man outraces another in the 

race for wealth and power. 

--Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. 

--A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. 

--But he who garners day by day the good of life, 

he is happiest. Blessèd is he. (901-11) 

Agave is blessed as a survivor, nothing more.  Her victory is simply her ability to accept her unhappy fate. 

If we focus on Pentheus and Agave, however,  we miss the play, because the play is delivered to us from a completely different venue.  Far from requiring that we focus on the drama as an individual reality, the Bacchae requires that we take the meaning of madness, the meaning of illusion and of reality under constant consideration.  Ultimately, it is the god of tragedy and tragedy itself which we are called upon to scrutinize.   

Euripides holds the contradictions of the drama in tension and rather than resolving the conflicts chooses rather to view and review them from an ever widening scope.  Our only clue to Euripides'  intentions is Agave.   Agave, as survivor, becomes the key to our understanding of what conclusions (or tentative conclusions) Euripides had reached in the Bacchae about illusion, reality, madness and tragedy. 

If, in the total equation of the drama, Pentheus represents tragedy, and Dionysus represents the creation of tragedy, then Agave represents us, the audience.  Dionysus, like the writer, wishes to be recognized and creates illusion and mad passion as a reward for those who acknowledge him and, at the same time, a punishment for those who don't. 68  Agave has denied Dionysus but not with the same resistance and hubris as her son Pentheus.   She participates in the illusions and madness of Dionysian revelry, and we the spectators participate in the illusions and madness of the tragedy.  Entranced by Dionysus she participates in the murder of her own son and revels in his dismemberment.   Mesmerized by the playwright we also sympathize with the crimes of tragedy--parricide, regicide, incest, suicide--and exalt in the disintegration of the tragic hero.  In the end Agave does not escape sadness and a hard life full of other losses and catastrophes; pathetically she tries to put the body of her lost son back together:  but she is sane and whole, and she survives.  She has taken her own madness and even the inevitability of madness under her control; she curses her fate but accepts it.  She is intact and humbler and stronger for her experience.   At the end of a tragedy the facts of our lives do not change.  Not even our ideas are likely to change in any positive sense.  It seems inevitable that we make our own pathetic attempts to put the tragic hero back together again.  This tendency to re-synthesize the tragic hero and then to project upon him the feelings of exaltation, renewal and strength which we of the audience derive from the tragedy, I believe, accounts for the tendency of various critical analyses of tragedy to adopt the wholeness of character and existential strength of the tragic hero as an a priori premise.  What we gain from tragedy is ultimately not the life or character of the tragic hero but that we have taken his tragedy and madness under our control.  We leave the theatre intact, and humbler and stronger for the  experience.  

Notes  

49.  B. Knox, "Euripides: The Poet as Prophet," Directions in Euripidean Criticism , ed. P. Burian (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1985), p. 7. 

50.  Nietzsche, p. 81.   

51.  Ibid, p. 61. 

52.  Ibid, p. 84. 

53.  W. Arrowsmith, "Introduction to The Bacchae ," in Euripides V , The Complete Greek Tragedies , ed. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago:  Phoenix Books, 1968), p. 145. 

54.  Ibid, p. 146 

55.  Ibid, p. 85. 

56.  C. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 8. 

57.  Ibid, p. 3. 

58.  Ibid, p. 3. 

59.  Ibid, p. 8. 

60.  Ibid, p. 216. 

61.  All quotations are from the Bacchae trans. W. Arrowsmith in Euripides V in The Complete Greek Tragedies , eds. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago:  Phoenix Books, 1968), pp. 141-223. 

62.   Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae , p. 223. 

63.  Nietzsche, p. 99. 

64.  G. Devereux, "The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchae ," Journal of Hellenic Studies , 1970, 90, p. 35.    

65.  Ibid, p. 47. 

66.  Feder, p. 43. 

67.  Ibid, p. 44. 

68.  One of the paradoxes of the Bacchae is that those who refuse to follow Dionysus are punished by madness but those who follow him are also driven to madness.  We can of course arbitrarily draw a line between "good" madness and "bad" madness, between pleasant and unpleasant, or perhaps between libidinal and violent.  However, it seems logical--though it may be stretching a point to attribute the idea to Euripides--that the spectator who willingly submits to or little resists the illusions and passions of the drama will enjoy a kind of positive, cathartic, self-fulfilling and self-assuring experience of madness, i.e., escape from reality (as those who worship Dionysus apparently do), whereas, those who resist the play will become angry, uncomfortable, outraged, unbalanced and, in general, driven to madness in a completely different and deleterious fashion, i.e., through the profaning of basic beliefs about the nature of existence, (as Pentheus and those who resist Dionysus are).