Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Faculty of Letters
Modern/Postmodern Remakes
of
Classical Greek Theatre
Course tutor:
Associate Professor Ligia Ghiţescu Pîrvu
Table of Contents
Dionysus
The origin of the name ‘Dionysus’ is uncertain; it may be a compound noun
whose meaning is ‘the flow of light’ or it may mean ‘the son of Zeus’. The
name di-wo-nu-so-jo appeared in a Mycenian inscription, a fact which points
to the archaic, pre-Greek origin of the name of the god, an opinion shared by
both M. Eliade and W.F. Otto. The women of Elis invoked Dionysus by the
name Axié Tauré (Robert: 109) which means the ‘mighty bull’, the animal
worshipped by the Minoans.
Dionysus was the god of mystical ecstasy and of unleashed frenzy, the god
of wine, the god of paradox and excess, the god who died only to be reborn.
In the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, he is described as “a young man, his
lovely blue hair streams down around him, and over his strong shoulders he
wears a dark robe” (Wordsworth Dictionary: 74). He was often represented
with a thyrsus in his hand, in a chariot drawn by panthers and decorated with
ivy and vine or escorted by his followers, the maenads and the satyrs.
The Epicleses
Dionysus is a god of paradox and duality that are manifest in the
antitheses of ecstasy and horror, vitality and destruction, joy and madness,
sensuality and cruelty. He is the god who is born of the joining of divinity and
humanity, and he symbolizes both the frenzy of ever changing and self-
renewing life and the violence of death. Dionysus comes from the brightness
of the sky and the moisture of the earth and, as Walter Pater so poetically
explained in his Study of Dionysus, the god was born of fire and dew,
“thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody
the sentiment, the poetry, of all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or
in any sense blossom before the leaf… and his second birth is of the dew…
protected by the influence of the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father,
the sky, his second mother being, in some versions of the legend, Hyé – the
Dew” (Pater: 7-8).
Walter Otto associated Dionysus with water and moisture as well,
water being the element in which the primal mysteries of all life dwell. Like
Dionysus himself, water possesses a dual nature: a vital side and a
dangerous one.
To escape from his enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea and it is by
water that he comes to reveal his divinity in Thebes and Athens. He is first of
all known as the god of the vine and of the wine, which has within it the
power to comfort and to bring joy but also the power of madness and
destruction.
Dionysus is both life and death, the god who vanishes and reappears,
the god who dies and who is born again. A god of fertility, of life in all its
contradictions, blasting and blessing at once, Dionysus is also the Lord of the
Souls, the great hunter and the bestial deity who feeds on raw flesh; he is “a
Chtonian god, and, like all the children of the earth, has an element of
sadness; like Hades himself he is hollow and devouring, an eater of man’s
flesh” (Pater: 15). The many names by which he is known point to the
multiplicity of his forms and functions.
Dionysus Liknites is the divine child in the cradle who has just been
born, and who is surrounded by the nymphs of Nysa, his foster mothers or
his “nurses”, trophoi, who take care of him in a way which is partly maternal,
partly ecstatic. This legend became the subject of Aeschylus’s play,
Dionysus’s Nurses, of which only some fragments have remained. ‘The one
in the cradle’ is summoned to appear by women in Athens at the festival of
the Lenaea held in January which got its name from the Lenai, a chorus of
frenzied women who were followers of Dionysus. At the Anthesteria,
Dionysus’s most celebrated rituals, fourteen Athenian women, called the
gerarai, conjured up the god with the name Iakhos.
Dionysus Iakhos
Apollo
For the Greeks Apollo was, first of all, the god of the sun and of the
light, Apollo Phoibus, that is, the pure, the brightest one; this is how Homer
and the post-Homerians viewed him – the symbol of the sublime, of victory
and of brightness. Furthermore, Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis, are the
only gods whom Homer honoured with the attribute ‘agne’ which means
‘pure, holy’.
However, the etymology of the name ‘Apollo’ is also uncertain; the
name may be a derivation of the Indo-European apel which means ‘to be
strong’ or of the Hitite Appulunas, derived in turn from abullu, ‘gate’, and
which could explain the Greek name thyraios, from tyra, gate, given to
Apollo sometimes. The Thesalian dialect calls the god aploun which means
‘simple’.
There are at least two paradoxical aspects concerning Apollo’s nature; the
first refers to the fact that the god who perfectly embodies the Greek ideal of
perfection, both physically and intellectually, has a name of uncertain origin
and the second points to Apollo’s best known exploits which conspicuously
do not show those virtues that were to be known later as Apollonian –
serenity, lucidity, respect for the divine laws as well as love for order and
harmony. However, the god’s weaknesses such as envy, thirst for revenge
and even hatred will gradually lose their anthropomorphic character and
Apollo will illustrate best the infinite distance between mortals and immortals.
In Istoria credinţelor religioase Mircea Eliade explains that the brutality and
agressivity of the first records about Apollo may reflect the history of the
penetration of Apollo’s cult in Greece, a cult, which eventually replaced the
worship of older deities such as Ptoos in Beotia, Ismenios in Thebes,
Python in Delphi. Eliade upholds the theory of Apollo’s Asian origin since his
most important temples were first located in Asia: Patara in Lycia, Didymos in
Caria and Claros in Ionia where Apollo was worshipped as Apollo Clarios.
Apollo is sometimes called Lykeios or, as Homer says, Lykegēnes, a name
which, in some scholars’ opinions, Fernand Robert included, means born in
Lycia, the ’Lycian’, but other opinions (cf. Bonnard: 166) are that the name
means ’the slayer of wolves’, and therefore points to the fact that Apollo is
the protector of the herds, the divine shepherd.
In Greek mythology, literature and art Apollo was represented as dazzling,
handsome, strong, a god of ever-renewed youth, the archetype of virile
beauty and at the same time of masculine qualities, the protector of the
kouroi, that is, ’the young men’. He was called Chrysocomes – ’of the
golden locks’ and Xantus, ’the fair’ and the legend says that his long curls
had never been cut; a traditional rite asked that young men made an offering
of the hair they had cut for the first time as a symbol of their entrance into
manhood. As the god of manhood and paternity, Apollo was called Apollo
Patroios.
Apollo the Olympian was the son of Zeus and of Leto, the daughter of the
Titan Coeus and of Phoebe. The legend says that the time came for Leto to
give birth to her twins, by Hera’s command, no piece of land allowed her to
The Epicleses
The first attributes of the god, the lyre, the bow, the art of divination and the
gold, point to Apollo’s various roles within the framework of pre-Homeric and
Homeric mythology. The gold, which initially links Apollo to the sun (his
arrows also symbolize the sun’s rays) will later be transferred to another
function, that of healing.
The epicleses, i.e., the names given to the god Apollo are closely related to
his functions or roles, therefore he is known as Apollo Pythian, Apollo
Delphic, Apollo the Archer God, Apollo Alexicacos or Apotropaios,
Apollo Musagetas, Apollo Soter – ’the saviour’, Boedromios - ’who helps
when called’, Arhegetes – ’the guide’.
Apollo Saurohtonos / Apollo Pythian is the dragon-slayer who delivered
the island of Delphi from the ravages of the Python, a chtonic deity who was
also the guardian of the oracle. After killing the serpent, Apollo becomes
Apollo Delphic, i.e., ’the seer’; he consecrates the shrine at Delphi with
Pythia his priestess and deliverer of oracles and then ”in case the passage of
time should blot out the memory of his glorious deed, the god establishes
sacred games which he called Pythian after the serpent he had vanquished”
(Ovid: 41). In Religia greaca Fernand Robert says that Plutarch in Aítia
hellenica mentions the Septérion, a celebration of Apollo which took place
every three years and which re-enacted the killing of the Python; a young
man, an amphithalés, that is, a man whose parents were still alive and
therefore had not been touched by impurity (death), played the role of Apollo
(Robert: 48).
Apollo, the supreme god of prophetic utterance had shrines at Argos, at
Didyna and at Claros as well, but the most sacred and the most frequented
was the one at Delphi, ’the omphalos’, i.e., ’the navel’, the spiritual centre of
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I. From Apollo and Dionysus to Apollonian and Dionysian
all Greece. Here the voice of the divinity gave solace, hope or spiritual
guidance to countless suppliants, Persian, Egyptian and Greek alike since
the oracle was not confined to national or ethnic frontiers and the voice of
Apollo was universal. Delphi was an oracular site long before Apollo’s arrival.
Whatever the etymology of the place may be, the Greeks linked the name to
the word ’delphys’ which means ’matrix’, but it was better known as the
Omphalos; according to the legend, it was the place where Zeus’s two
eagles met again after having been set free at the two opposite ends of the
world.
His earthly counterpart, the priestess Pythia, was seated on a tripod and she
inhaled the hypnotic fumes which made her go into a trance; in this frenzied
state she spoke in panting gasps and broken sentences delivering the
prophecy of the god in ambivalent words. Then an attendant priest
interpreted Pythia’s oracles for the supplicants, offering a meaningful
sequence which nevertheless had cryptic undertones. As a god of prophecy
Apollo also reigns over the world of dreams, premonitions and appearances,
and he is sometimes called Loxias, i.e., ’the obscure’.
Pythia was inspired by Apollo but her pythic delirium was different from the
mad possessions of the Dionysian type. Her enthousiasmos was the result of
Apollo’s presence which filled Pythia’s visions with premonitions of the future.
Apollo’s enthousiasmos did not imply the communion with the god as in the
Dionysian rituals; goats were sacrificed at Delphi but no source tells of their
dismemberment or of omophagia.
Besides Pythia, there were the oneiros, the interpreters of dreams;
dreams were divided into: the symbolic dream, like a sort of riddle which
needed interpretation, the horama or vision, a pre-enactment of a future
event, the chrematismos or oracle, and the admonitio, a warning or advice
given by a priest, a parent or a god.
The temple at Delphi was highly ornamental and on the entrance walls
texts were inscribed. Apollo’s famous command Sophrosyne, i.e., ’know
thyself’ was carved on the pediment of the temple; metron ariston, ’the right
measure’, and medèn agan, ’nothing in excess’, both represent Apollo’s
creed as a god of self-restraint whose supreme values are law and order. In
fact, Apollo acts and judges in the name of Zeus, the supreme authority;
Apollo himself stands for law and order and he represents ’the legal aspect of
religion’, which made Plato call him patrios exegetes (Eliade: 268).
In The Greeks and the Irrational, E.R.Dodds argues that the image of Apollo
as ”the vicar on earth of the heavenly Father”, helped the Greek society
overcome its terrors and fears, the dread of divine phthonos (the jealousy of
the gods) and of miasma (pollution, impurity). ”The crushing sense of human
ignorance and human insecurity... would have been unendurable without the
assurance which such an omniscient divine counsellor could give, the
assurance that behind the seeming chaos there was knowledge and
purpose... Out of his divine knowledge, Apollo would tell you what to do when
you felt anxious or frightened; he knew the rules of the complicated game
that the gods play with humanity; he was the supreme Alexicacos, ’Averter
of Evil’ ” (Dodds: 75).
Apollo Hecatebolos, ’The Far Darting’ / Apollo Argirotoxos, ’With the
Silver Bow’.
Apollo is the Archer God whose symbol is the silver bow he always
carries with him. The arrows are deadly weapons which can either kill beasts
or inflict death upon the mortals who have defied the god. With all the
positive attributes, Apollo’s nature has also a darker, even terrifying side.
Athena casts her ballot for Orestes and indirectly for Apollo but she
also gives the Erynnies their own shrines of worship and therefore they
become the Eumenides, i.e., "The Kindly Ones" of Athens, and a new order
is born. But by now, freed from his earlier excesses, Apollo has fully acquired
the most Apollonian of virtues, self-restraint, and has become the lucid,
intellectual, civilized victor of all that was dark, amorphous, irrational and
primitive, the perfect embodiment of the Olympian spirit which has survived
long after the Olympians were gone.
Dionysus was resurrected for the modern world by Nietzsche in The Birth of
Tragedy, in which he contrasted the conventional and serene Apollonian
world of ancient Greece with the dark and terrifying aspects of the Dionysian
spirit in order to argue that the very essence of Greek tragedy was the
expression of these two interacting artistic impulses. Postmodern drama and
theatre hailed Dionysus Lyaios, the Liberator, as an agent of change and
revolt against authority and abstraction. The universalizing quality of classical
Greek tragedy has prompted many postmodern playwrights all over the world
to use it as a vehicle for their own responses to contemporary social and
political issues.
In her article Mapping Dionysus in New Global Spaces,
Multiculturalism and Ancient Greek Tragedy, Marianne McDonald remarks :
“Until this century Greek tragedy was mainly a phenomenon of the West, but
it has now found its way into the East and we have, for example, Chinese,
Japanese, African and Indian re-workings of the ancient canon
“(McDonald:145 in (Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre). The fact that
Euripides’ play’ The Bacchae has known many revisions in contemporary
theatre illustrates this postmodern phenomenon and we can exemplify by
mentioning Derek Mahon’s The Bacchae, Tadashi Suzuki’s Bacchae, Caryl
Churchill’s and David Lan’s A Mouthful of Birds, Richard Schechner’s
Dionysus in 69, and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A
Communion Rite.
In order to understand better the fascination that Dionysus holds for
the postmodern stage we should go back to the ancient myth and re-discover
the beginnings of Dionysus’ voyage.
In Greek mythology, Dionysus is a god of paradox and duality born of
the joining of divinity and humanity; he belongs both to Olympus and to the
Earth and is closely associated with the Underworld. Dionysus is a god of life
and death, blasting and blessing at the same time and his rites combine
ecstasy and horror, vitality and destruction, joy and madness, sensuality and
cruelty.
Dionysus mythobiography connects the god with travel and the
trieteric festivals of his epiphany are related to the ritual of his departure and
absence.
The legend says that Hera struck Dionysus with madness and drove
him forth through Egypt, Syria, Asia and Phrygia, a wandering god who came
back to Thebes in order to reveal his divinity and conquer immortality for
himself and for his mother, Semele.
Euripides’ The Bacchae illustrates the mythical moment of the making
of a god and brings together the motifs of resistance, persecution and
triumph associated with Dionysus.
Above all Dionysus is a xenos, an outsider within the Hellenic world,
Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre
II. Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre/Myth
an itinerant god who comes from outside the community, a stranger who
brings with him the Dionysian revelry and its wild, intoxicating rituals. He has
traveled in distant countries and now he has finally reached his homeland:
This god, as Yoko Onizuka Chase says in her article Modern Poetics of
Dionysus, “had gone through the maturation process having been pursued,
escaping in disguises as a girl or an animal, dismembered and restored,
driven to madness by Hera, learning and mastering the art of casting and
purging mania, finally disseminating wine (which Teiresias calls balm), and
teaching the life-affirming rites of dance and music” (Chase: 27 in
(Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre).
Throughout his mythobiography, Dionysus is characterized by his
bisexuality, revealed in his name Dionysus Gynnis, the ‘womanly one’, or the
‘womanly stranger’, and by the fact that he is always surrounded by women.
Dionysus has also a double, a feminine projection in the young priest
Dionysus with long blond hair and feminine attire, and it is in this image that
the god enters the house of King Cadmus in Thebes.
Both Cadmus and Teiresias, the blind seer, acknowledge Dionysus but
Pentheus, who had left his kingdom for a while, is horrified on return to find
out that the women of the city had left their houses to worship in ‘revel-rout’
this foreign god.
Teiresias warns Pentheus: “this new deity, whom thou deridest, will rise to
power I cannot say how great, throughout Hellas” (Euripides: 5).
Pentheus ignores the warning and swears to ‘hunt down’ this ‘girl-
faced stranger’, bind him and his followers in fetters of iron, and put an end to
his outrageous rites. Pentheus despises the god’s apparent femininity and
vulnerability forgetting that Dionysus’ thyrsus, although covered with leaves,
is also the sharp spear of the hunter and so, Dionysus assumes the power of
the Great Hunter Zagreus and Pentheus becomes his prey. Driven by fury
but also by curiosity, Pentheus goes to mount Cithaeron where the
Bacchanals are celebrating their rites and there he is he is hunted down and
torn to pieces by his own mother, Agave, who in her trance thinks he is a wild
boar. In Euripides’ play Dionysus has thus ended his sport with Pentheus.
Wole Soyinka’s play is a communal feast, a tumultuous celebration of
life, emphasizing cultural coincidences through which Greek/Western and
Yoruba/African mythologies are united in an attempt to bridge these
apparently disconnected worlds.
In his article Soyinka’s Bacchae, African Gods, and Postmodern Mirrors,
Mark Pizzato remarks: ” Soyinka returns to the roots of both European and
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II. Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre/Myth
African(Yoruba) theatre, combining Dionysian and Ogunian rites of
communal passage, to involve a postmodern, postcolonial audience in the
ancient sacrificial offering” (Pizzato:3).
What Soyinka’s play emphasizes is the need for a willing sacrifice and
the renewal that comes through ritual death, in which ritual is understood as
a way of freeing those oppressed by tyranny; the fact that Soyinka uses a
chorus of slaves, worshippers of Dionysus, and that the background is lined
by the bodies of crucified slaves symbolizing the past in Western myth and
the ancestral community in Yoruba myth, is relevant for the political
dimension that the playwright has added to his re-write.
Soyinka’s Black Dionysus has as his model Ogun, the god of war, iron
and fire in Yoruba mythology, whom the playwright considers being
Dionysus’ elder brother; like the ancient Greek god whose duality meant life
and death, Dionysus- Ogun brings together the ancestral community of the
dead, the community of the living and that of the unborn. However, Soyinka’s
Dionysus is more the Liberator (Lyaios) than the Hunter (Zagreus), he is the
life-affirming, nourishing god through whom we are all reborn.
Soyinka describes the essence of Dionysus-Ogun as being the will to
pass through violent fragmentation and rebirth just like Dionysus Trigonos,
the thrice born god, who dies only to be reborn as shown in the myth of
Zagreus. However, Soyinka’s Dionysus transcends the rage of Euripides’
vengeful Dionysus by embracing divine alienation and fragmentation for the
sake of communal rejuvenation.
Dionysus’ words in the beginning of the play parallel those in Euripides
in a highly poetical way and to the list of lands to which he has traveled, he
adds Ethiopia, thus bringing Europe, Asia and Africa together:
In the final twist of the play, Dionysus casts Pentheus in his own role and
then he disappears from stage:
Like in Euripides’ play, Pentheus is brutally torn apart by his mother Agave
and by the Bacchantes, but the end is entirely different because it projects
the symbolical death and rebirth of Pentheus/Dionysus. Agave triumphantly
shows Pentheus’ head impaled on a thyrsus to the crowd; from the orifices of
the head red jets spring, it is the wine of Dionysus, and all the characters
drink in a final, all embracing ‘communion rite’, as now, through the ritual, the
One/Pentheus has become the Other/Dionysus.
As Pizzato remarks in his study, “Soyinka’s revision of ancient
violence in The Bacchae offers valuable sacrificial connections, not only
between vastly different cultures, or to the past worlds of the dead within
them, but also to the Other of the living in the present theatre of communal
psyche- and to the unborn in the global village of the future” (Pizzato: 70).
My own conclusion is that since there have been so many revisions of
the myth of Dionysus so far, we may assume that Dionysus’ travel towards
multiculturalism has not ended yet, and that the post-post modern era will
probably know his whereabouts and maybe accompany him in his future
voyages.
As the play opens, Alan, “a lean boy of seventeen, in sweater and jeans,”
(Shaffer:209) is fondling a horse and the horse, in turn, is nuzzling his neck.
Dr. Martin Dysart, the narrator-protagonist of Equus, addresses the audience
in an attempt to explain the crisis he finds himself in and which has been
prompted by his highly disturbed patient. In this opening scene of Act I,
Dysart confesses that he is not troubled by the boy but by the horse and by
his own doubts and unanswerable questions. Dysart’s monologue reveals
what will be clearly stated at the end of the play, the tension he feels between
his Apollonian mind and his Dionysian spirit or, in Freudian terms, the
irreconcilable conflict between his ego and his id:
“The thing is, I’m desperate. You see, I’m wearing that horse’s head
myself. That’s the feeling. All reined up in old language and old
assumptions, straining to jump clean-footed on to a whole new track
of being I only suspect is there. I can’t see it, because my educated,
average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can’t jump because
the bit forbids it, and my own basic force-my horsepower, if you like-is
too little.” (ibid.:210)
Following the prologue, Dysart conjures past events: a few months earlier,
Hesther Salomon, a magistrate of children’s court, begged him to accept a
young boy as his patient. His shocking crime, the blinding of six horses,
made the medical community reject him and Dysart is the only hope for the
boy. Dysart reluctantly accepts to treat “one more adolescent freak, the usual
unusual,” (ibid.:213) only to realize shortly after that he is becoming more and
more fascinated by the frail and utterly confused young man.
From the very beginning, Dysart’s Apollonian characteristics are clearly
marked: he is a respected professional concerned with converting the
irrational into the rational, eloquent and self-controlled, aware of his mission
as a healer. However, Dysart begins to doubt the efficiency of the Apollonian
cure as he becomes more and more aware of the fact that Apollo
Apotropaios, the god of medicine, is also Apollo Hecatebolos, the god of
death. Furthermore, as Apollo Delphic or Apollo Loxias, the Greek god was
the omniscient divine counselor who reigned over the world of dreams and
premonitions, the cryptic character of had to be interpreted, and Dysart’s
profession is based on Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
When Dysart achieves his first breakthrough with Alan and the boy starts
talking to him, it becomes obvious that Alan’s confusion over religion and his
search for identity are related to his rejection of his parents’ contradictory
values. Caught between the stifling atmosphere of his home and the
dreariness of the Electrical and Kitchenware shop where he now works,
between his father’s “receive my meaning” and his mother’s “God sees you,
Alan,” the adolescent creates his own unconventional worship in which
Equus, the horse-god, replaces Christ.
The beginning of Act II shows Dysart aware of the fact that the boy’s
obsession has become his own. He now hears Equus’ voice calling him “out
of the black cave of the Psyche,” (ibid.:267) asking Dysart to account for him.
Dysart admits that he has often been stared at by such unsettling images
coming from the archetypal unconscious of which Equus is the symbol. He
also knows that Equus will not go gently back into the shadows of the spirit:
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II. Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre/Myth
“when Equus leaves—if he leaves at all—it will be with your intestines in his
teeth.” (ibid.:299)
Dysart is reluctant to cure Alan and take from the boy what makes him
unique, his unconventional worship. He sees his own life as barren and
devoid of meaning and understands that his refuge into an aesthetic but
passive worship of Ancient Greece cannot compare in any way with Alan’s
passionate cult for his horse-god. He tells Hesther who firmly believes that
the boy should be restored to normalcy: “But that boy has known a passion
more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you
something: I envy it!” (ibid.:274)
Dysart knows that without worship you shrink and that he has shrunk his
own life just sitting opposite a woman he hasn’t kissed for years while
dreaming about the plains of Argos in his comfortable armchair. After having
understood Alan’s primitive, yet powerful way of worshiping, he comments
ironically and bitterly on his sterile attempt at recapturing the sense of wonder
that Greek civilization holds:
“I tell everyone Margaret’s the puritan, I’m the pagan. Three weeks in
the Peloponese, every bed booked in advance, every meal paid for
by the vouchers…Such a fantastic surrender to the primitive. And I
use that word endlessly: primitive. Oh, the primitive world! I say. What
instinctual truths were lost in it! And while I sit there…that freaky boy
tries to conjure the reality! I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling
the soil of Argos—and outside my window he is trying to become one
in a Hampshire field!” (ibid.:275)
The fact is that, while looking into the “black cave of the Psyche” and
perceiving its potentially lethal but also liberating Dionysian impulses, Dysart
begins to understand that beyond his Apollonian professional and social
doubts he craves the Dionysian experience that Alan has enjoyed. However,
he also realizes that the Dionysian way is destructive and self-destructive as
Alan’s case conspicuously proves.
In his efforts to name the beast, Dysart finds out that the beast is not always
the archetypal foe lurking in the darkness of the unconscious, it may be
hiding in the surrounding world of castrating normality that has robbed people
of their instinctual need for worship. Dysart has honestly assisted many
children, he has talked away terrors and relieved many agonies but he also
knows that
“The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes—all right. It is also the
dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills—like a God. It
is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal.”
(ibid.:257)
At the end of the play Dysart resumes his role as Apollo Apotropaios and
decides he will cure Alan, although he is aware of the price they both will pay:
“I’ll heal the rash on his body. I’ll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying
manes.”(ibid.:299) He will give Alan the Normal world, no flying manes, a
scooter will suffice, no field of “Ha Ha,” but normal places for approved
worship, in a word, everything that will turn Alan into an adult ghost with a
dead stare like himself.
On a symbolical/ mythical level, Alan’s crime is not a defiance of the
Apollonian world but a self-destructive act that leads to the disintegration of
“I have taken for you the revenge you need. This is my gift to you: the
Sacred Gift of Vengeance. I have made you the instrument of my
atonement. Be appeased. This is the blood that cures…So I give up
the Gorgon.” (ibid.;88)
Bleeding, he crawls to the edge of the lava cliff near their garden and flings
himself into the abyss.
Time Past switches to Time Present. Philip has found out everything but he
does not want to write the book anymore; Helen realizes that the book would
be her own dance of rightful stamping and she decides to forgive Edward.
The end of the play shows Helen standing downstage, her eyes closed in
relief. And yet, behind her, the figure of Edward, wearing a death mask on his
face, starts dancing his terrible dance. As his stamping becomes louder and
more savage, Helen desperately shouts at him: “I forgive! I forgive! I forgive!
... FORGIVE!” (ibid.:94)
The Apollonian and Dionysian clash of wills and values in this play is
illustrated in the debate about the morality of revenge and the role of the
theatre. Dionysian Edward believes in the punishing of transgressors beyond
the pale of pardon and, as a playwright, he wants the theatre to assume the
forms and attitudes of Greek theatre and become an arena where the
purgation of violent instincts could be effected by direct confrontation and
involvement. He also wants his plays to force the audience out of the moral
catalepsy induced by “avoidance” and repressed instincts and bring on stage
pure revenge which, in his opinion, is pure justice. Apollonian Helen rejects
the ethics of revenge because violence breeds more violence, as shown in
the myth of Agamemnon. However, the archaic call to bloodshed, which is
the Gorgon’s poisonous blood, infects Edward’s excessive self and drives
him towards self-destruction. Although tempted to have her revenge, Helen
does not succumb to the demands of retribution and irrationality and she
finally forgives her husband.
At the end of the two plays under discussion, both Apollonians and
Dionysians face defeat: Dysart remains the prisoner of his own limits while
still craving the Dionysian experience of his alter-ego Alan, Helen will carry
on the burden of her Apollonian lucidity and, in Aeschylean terms, she will
forever suffer into truth, Alan ends up a ghost and Edward reaches the
extremity of self-denial by committing suicide.
44 Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre
II. Modern/ Postmodern Remakes of Classical Greek Theatre/Myth
Dysart and Helen, who perform the roles of Apollo Apotropaios and Apollo
Arhegetes, try to help and heal their Dionysian counterparts but they both fail
because they ultimately cannot reconcile themselves with their opponents.
Alan and Edward are both destructive and self-destructive, the victims of their
own violent impulses and desires, and their wild, passionate natures point to
the darker side of Dionysus Melanaigos and Dionysus Morichos. Alan
destroys his mythical world and by doing this he condemns himself to
spiritual death. Edward Damson chooses to die in order to purge his guilt and
to regain his lost divinity, that is, the immortality of his art; by doing this he
becomes the very image of Orpheus whose head, even if dismembered,
continues to sing.
The Dionysian experience is expressive of vital needs while the Apollonian
vision ensures order and survival but if taken to extremes they are both lethal
and this is the argument of Shaffer’s dramas. Underlying this argument there
is the suggestion that, as long as duality does not become dualism, chances
are that Self and Other, like Apollo and Dionysus who made peace at Delphi
a very long time ago, can ultimately co-exist and give the Individual and the
World their total dimension.
The other symbol is the legless blue bird, “a kind of bird that don't have legs
so it can light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the
sky”(Williams:38) and who stands for Val's rootlessness, loneliness, longing
for freedom and his exile into his art. In Val's words “We're all of us
sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life”(Williams:42).
To escape loneliness Val is willing to re-integrate into a normal life, however,
for the townspeople he is a xenos, an outcast, a foreigner not to be trusted or
easily accepted. His sexuality is what first draws Carol and Lady, but both
discover that underneath lies genuine goodness and tenderness, however
the men in town feel threatened by his sexual appeal, and the pretext to
chase him is found by sheriff Talbott when he catches Val talking to his wife,
Vee. Cerberus watches well over his Hades so that no one can get in or get
out.
As Orpheus tries to bring Eurydice back to life, so does Val
symbolically resurrect dead souls. To Carol, who is described as a trapped
animal, without hope but also without fear, he gives self-confidence as he
perfectly understands what it is to be an outcast. Vee, who is trapped in her
marriage, finds her refuge in her ‘visions’ and paintings, and again Val
supports her as he understands what it is to be an artist in need of
communication and self-expression. To Lady he gives his love and his self,
as he knows what it is to be lonely and desperate. Val has journeyed for a
long time to find a home and now he is willing to put an end to his former life
of vagrant artist, however, although he feels he can be redeemed by love and
his unborn child, he cannot become one of the savage tribe that rules the
town.
In the classical myth, the gods of the underworld warn Orpheus not to
turn to see Eurydice; in Williams's play, the Sheriff orders Val to leave the
town before sunrise. Val remains....he has found out that Lady is pregnant.
But Torrance/Hades, an embodiment of death and meanness, in Williams's
words, will not let her go: he shoots her mortally and blames Val for robbing
him and killing her. Lady/Eurydice dies her second death and Val/Orpheus
runs. Carol and the black wizard appear as in the first scene, the wizard with
Val's snakeskin jacket in his hands. While agonizing cries are heard in the
distance, Carol takes the jacket and says: “Wild things leave skins behind
Bibliography
Exam Requirements
Students are required to discuss the following issues related to the course: