by C K Williams
The confusions in Pentheus’s mind and character that Dionysus plays on, so that Pentheus regresses from imagining himself being carried as a hero on his return from his confrontation with the Bacchae to his being carried instead as a small child in his mother’s arms, are terrifying. The lapse Pentheus allows himself seems so slight, so nearly innocent, such a tiny part of his ego lets its guard down, that the punishment he receives appears terribly extreme. Dionysus can be perceived to have acted, as Pentheus’s grandfather Cadmus will put it, “With justice, but with too much severity.” But in terms of the greater issues of the play, in the conflict between the social and the personal, between family and the larger society, Pentheus’s fate is perfectly coherent.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that whatever can be said about Pentheus’s character, about how young he is, how stubborn, how lacking in wisdom, his social role is firm: he is a king, the symbolic embodiment of his society, the one in that society, we might say, whose task and responsibility is to direct what I have called its moral energies. From this point of view, Pentheus’s error, his flaw, doesn’t have anything to do with his youth or his impetuousness. It involves, rather, his refusal to realize that the authority he possesses to direct the energies of the community also entails ethical reflection. Pentheus’s responsibility to his community lies exactly in this kind of reflection because otherwise the social conscience of that community will be infected with a disorder like Pentheus’s own. Dionysus accuses Pentheus of just this: “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he says, “You don’t even know who you are.” When Pentheus is confronted with Dionysus, he unreflectively defines him as the other, the enemy, and will accept no evidence to support any other perception. When Pentheus feels the data he has been given aren’t adequate to the intensity of the instinctive animus he feels, he fantasizes more evidence and offers these fantasies as reality, as justification for his brashness. There’s something sadly familiar in the way Pentheus characterizes Dionysus. He sees him as wildly, almost impossibly, sexually potent. Dionysus, Pentheus says, seduces women out of their normal, protected, nonlibidinal environment and leads them into the dark unknown, where he drugs them with alcohol, inducing them to be negligent—irresponsible to their social duties—just as he is irresponsible, obsessed only by sex and intoxication. Dionysus is even physically suspect; although he claims to be a relative of Pentheus, Pentheus finds him to be the wrong color: he is too light, his cheeks too rosy. I won’t be so anachronistic to come out and say that Pentheus is a racist, but, just as racism in our own society has often caused our moral energies to go askew, so Pentheus, by his limited vision of the one who is like but unlike him, the stranger, the other, has driven the moral energies of Thebes out of their healthy trajectory and into a system in which the only alternatives to order are violence and exclusion.
The philosopher Karl Jaspers developed the notion of what he calls transition as the zone in which tragedy occurs. Jaspers points out that “prevailing patterns of action and thought . . . do not replace each other suddenly. The old is still alive while the new unfolds itself. The mighty breakthrough of the new is bound at first to fail against the staying power and coherence of the old way of life not yet exhausted.” Jaspers uses historical figures, Socrates and Julius Caesar, to show how the “victorious protagonist” becomes “the victim at the border of the two eras.” But in the tragedies, the divisions of the transitional zones are even more acute because they are more primal. For the Greeks, the issues that divided zones were not philosophical or political but involved basic questions of civilization, of the separation of the civilized from the barbaric, of the world of morality and law from that of savagery and violence, and, as in the Bacchae, of the mythic and the human. For the Greeks, the world of savage barbarism was not far away in either time or space. They were acutely aware that their world abutted boundaries with peoples who did not adhere to the social concords that made Hellenic civilization possible. The centaurs carved on the metopes of the Parthenon, who try to carry off the women and young boys from of the wedding feast of their neighbors the Lapithae, certainly represent in a vividly graphic form the violent, impulsive tendencies that still beset the world of the Greeks. In the Women of Trachis, the great hero, Herakles (another son of Zeus, incidentally), lived in two worlds, the human and the mythic. His task was to cleanse the human world of the lethal relics of that mythic world, all the various monsters that still infested the nearly civilized earth, but, as Sophocles depicts him, he is finally destroyed because he cannot commit himself totally to the human world and instead violates, by his actions, the order and decorum that have been imposed on the world by human aspiration and will.
In the Bacchae, the division is more complicated. Dionysus, who incarnates so many of the forces that characterize the epoch previous to civilization, is presented as a “new” god: he has just arrived in the world; his ultimate glory, as the chorus says, will be in the future, when “all Greece” will honor him. There has been much speculation on what Euripides was trying to do in this, his last play. Had he become more conservative as he aged? In his earlier plays, he seems to the very embodiment of Greek rationality—sometimes his characters become irritatingly reasonable, as in the Hippolytus, when, after finding out that his stepmother Phaedra has killed herself and left a note accusing him of responsibility for her death, Hippolytus, to his father Theseus’s rage, engages in a logical, maddeningly reasonable defense of himself. The Bacchae, on the contrary, is charged with what at first glance seems unexamined and uncritical irrationality. Unreason, the unreason of a god, triumphs absolutely; at the end, there seems to be nothing left of any representative of the orderly, progressive culture on which the Greeks so prided themselves.
This must have been doubly shocking, for not only were the Greeks aware of their culture as essentially different from the less civilized peoples of their world, but they were also conscious of their own social organization in a way that was entirely new in the world. They were the first society to consider history as an objective fact, which had its own necessities and its own truth; it was not, as in the other societies of the Near East, a panegyric to be rewritten to glorify whatever king or dynasty happened to control the social resources of any given moment. Theirs also seemed to have been the first community to be aware of itself as being in process, to have the sense that their society was developing, and was therefore capable of improvement. For the Greeks, society was formed not merely by the interests of powerful individuals or factions, but by the self-conscious imposition of ideas and ideals as well. Plato’s Republic, of course, codified this tendency into the first utopian vision of society, but I believe that this vision of social organization being capable of evolution was also the source from which much of the Greek tragic experience found its substance. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Orestes, hounded by the punishing Furies for having killed his mother to revenge her murder of his father, flees to Athens in the hope of finding justice and a solution to the intricate moral dilemmas of his act. In one of the most amazing moments in literature, what Orestes does, in effect, is to flee across the border from mythic to historical time. The Athens he comes to is Athens at the beginning of Greek history, not of its mythic history but of the history that human beings have affected for themselves, and when he arrives there, Athena, the tutelary goddess of the city, does indeed offer him justice by inventing and implementing the jury system that was such an essential part of the democratic system of Athens.
Euripides, too, would surely have had, as a part of his moral agenda, the fact that Athens was a society in history—and in process. Euripides takes the action of his drama back to a time when the god Dionysus was still living the span of what would have been his human life but, as we have seen, with an awareness of his eternal definition as well. This mix—of the eternal and the transitory, of the divine and the human, of the new and the old—are put into an equation in which it is difficult to attach any kind of reflexive ethical evaluation. When Plato bani
shed the poets from his ideal polis, because of their propensity towards the ecstatic, towards inadequately rational inspiration, what he was suggesting was a policy of exclusion, an attempt to separate from society and consciousness, any disruptive influences.
Euripides, in contrast, brought to the Bacchae a restatement, a reminder, as it were, of the often conflicting elements of which any society is necessarily constituted. We don’t have to be reminded that Euripides would not have believed that all of these elements are particularly admirable or productive, but it is also clear he believed that the attempt to deny their existence is fatal to the self-reflection that is necessary to the survival of a self-conscious society. To attempt to “deny our mortal nature,” as the chorus puts it, is a disaster for both the individual and the community. On the individual level, in which character is crucial, Pentheus’s unreflecting attempt to exclude Dionysus and the forces he represents is catastrophic. On the social level, Agave and her sisters, because of their contempt for the god, are forced to abandon their own city; its walls, whose purpose was to keep evil things out, are inadequate for keeping good things in, and the misery Agave and her sisters bring upon Thebes by their recalcitrance toward the forces Dionysus represents is appalling. There can be no question that Euripides is meditating here on the way a society defines and identifies its virtues and its problems. It can seem strange to us that the doings of a king and of a god should have such force for our own social considerations, but they surely can, mainly because Euripides assumes in his tragedy that all humans participate in our own destiny.
Democracy demands that the individual take an active part in the social mechanism and that the citizen reflect on his society. Even if a society is going through a phase of conservative political reaction, as Euripides’s was when he wrote the Bacchae, this vision of participation is still in effect because once it comes to consciousness, it defines consciousness, both the individual’s and the group’s; it cannot be repudiated, except with dreadful consequences, as we have seen too well in our own century. In democracy, the individual possesses the ideas and the means of social cohesion, rather than being subjected to powers that require only acquiescence and repression. This sense of Athens possessing itself, rather than the details of its too brief and imperfect democracy, is surely what we find most inspiring in the moral image we have of ancient Athens.
Tragedy embodies for us complexities of experience and emotion that touch on our most profound needs and fears. If it deals with zones of transition, some of the most compelling of those zones are those within us, between our emotional and intellectual existence, and our spiritual and our social aspirations. The use to which the art is dedicated in a democratic universe is the individual’s spiritual reality and the reality of the compound individual which is the society. Martin Buber defines a miracle not as the mythic event—the parting of a sea or a moral revelation—that may or may not have happened in a people’s past but as the fact that the incident remains a source of inspiration and revelation through eons of history. The miracle of Greek tragedy is the compelling connection it still makes for us between death and life, violence and order, the individual and the community, and, finally, between the tragic urgencies of the world of our emotions and our meditations on our common destiny.
Letter to a Workshop
Over the last few decades, a really daunting amount of commentary has been produced by poets for poets and for poet-teachers on the question of how to generate competent or more than just competent poems. Much of this material has come out of writing programs or summer workshops—craft lectures, essays, interviews with “professional” poets—and there seem to be countless manuals, with exercises for gathering material for poems and for developing systematic procedures of revision that, dutifully pursued, will presumably allow the neophyte or frustrated poet to raise his or her level of skill, even to discover as yet unfulfilled genius.
During the many years I’ve taught workshops—first mostly in graduate programs, lately undergraduate—I myself have probably expended many thousands of words of counsel to my students. But still, when I remember my own first apprenticeship (I seem to have gone through many, each time I attached to a great poet, but I mean here the very first) I suspect that just the hint of such an intimidating set of suggestions would surely have stopped me cold.
Such well-meant advice might be useful in helping both aspiring poets and those who happen to compose some satisfying verse and would like to figure out how they did it so as to do it again. However, it seems to me that one important issue is never quite articulated, which is not so much how one goes about thinking about the creation of poems but, rather, when you’re trying to write a poem, what do you think with and how?
Robert Frost said the poet picks up bits of knowledge here and there, like burrs, and this is probably the case. But it might be useful to have some sense of the mind to which such stickers would attach. This in turn might bring up a number of interesting but probably irresolvable problems, such as how to determine the particular cultural and social issues that should involve poets as much as they do anyone else in the making of a satisfactory self. That’s another, surely even more complicated, question, so I’ll just pass on here what Isaac Babel’s mother said to him: “You must know everything”—the most apt advice I know for an aspiring writer.
Ideally the poet should strive for the curiosity of the ethnographer, the precision of the philosopher, the moral flexibility of the social theorist, the scrupulousness of the scientist, plus . . . Plus what? is the question. What are the qualities of the mind of the poet that might ultimately enable all those virtuous identities yet help to prepare the poet for the very particular and very peculiar act of poetic composition?
I suppose I’m thinking back to that time when I was struggling to get started in poetry, when I’d have liked to know not only how to write poems but also how to think about myself as a poet and, more specifically, how to conceive my mind as a poet’s mind. I might in fact be talking to the uncertain self I was in those days, who thrashed about in so many unknowables, not the least of which was how to think about that self and what to ask of it because so much was asked that seemed off the point and had nothing to do with anything except the host of dull imperatives with which it had been conditioned by its very disorganized education. We’re inflicted with many lessons about ourselves in the course of growing up, but most such teachings turn out to be not only generally useless but possibly detrimental to any sort of artistic creation. Much of our education teaches us to do things and to think about things in order to do them, but poets soon enough come to realize that we can’t compel ourselves to be who we’re not and do what we can’t. Otherwise, we could just read Shakespeare or Milton and say to ourselves: Do that.
I’d like to try to clear a way through at least some of these thickets to consider what we might call the poetic consciousness and some of the ways it functions, as well as some of the methods such a mind might use to enact whatever it is that brings forth poems. Much of what I’m saying here has surely been articulated by other poets in other contexts, and all of it is of course terrifically subjective. Still, I don’t think I have to apologize: all of what I’ll discuss here is what I’ve noticed the times I’ve tried to understand what I’ve been doing when I write poems, and how I’ve done it, mostly so I can then go on to try to write others. Finally, much of what I’m able to analyze about composing poems seems to have to do with all the constraints my character has imposed on the activity and with how I’ve wiggled or tunneled ways around or through the impediments that can make writing a poem not only an unlikely but also an apparently outright impossible task. In some odd way, it feels as though the most abiding element of all this has something to do with having from time to time given myself and the very problematic mind that is my mind permission to make a poem.
I’ve never tried before to begin to make a systematic list of how I’ve gone about this, and I won’t now. What I’ll offer instead are som
e observations I’ve made about my own procedures, and I thought I’d offer these observations as rights, or opportunities, younger poets might incorporate in their dealings with themselves and their writing. I present them as rights because I know that one of the most persistent, almost appalling problems of being a young poet is confidence, or the lack of it. I once heard Galway Kinnell tell some students after a reading that confidence is 95 percent of composing poetry, and though his number might have been a bit elevated, I’ve come to agree with his sentiment, so this compendium of rights might be a way of convincing young poets that their work doesn’t consist entirely of discipline and duty. While I’m about it, though, I’ll also intrude along with these rights some obligations and imperatives it might be useful to consider as well. I certainly wouldn’t want any of these observations to be taken as a set of rules or prescriptions—they’re thoughts I’ve had about the poet’s task, or plight. I’ve heard several poets use the expression “having to get out of your own way” when you’re writing a poem: if nothing else, maybe what I’m exploring here is what to get out of the way of.
So, the first right I’d like to propose sounds odd: it’s the right not to know what you’re doing, even to not know what you’ve done. This seems absurd on the face of it: isn’t our education, and not only, as I say, our formal education but the self-making, poet-making, that is our life’s project, devoted precisely to teaching us that we should know how to do what we set out to? Yet the fact is that much of the best work produced by artists (and maybe everyone else) is accomplished by small or larger leaps into the obscurity out past our intentions; much of what we come to value most in our own work are evidences of that unfathomable phenomenon we call inspiration.
