Blooms Literary Themes - THE GROTESQUE.pdf - ymerleksi - home

The Bacchae31this captured lion’s head up on the wall, so all the world of the poliscan see the prize she has taken in the hunt.The last step is the worst. Agave awakes from her madness.Cadmus comes with the bier on which the severed portions ofPentheus’s body have been laid and covered with a black cloth. Theraving mother, still radiant, approaches it with the head still on herstaff. Now all the cast, even the chorus, falls back from her. She realizeswhat she has done. Agave is annihilated. So this is the reward forsubmission to the god, the gratitude of the god. Cadmus whispers thatDionysus has destroyed them.A gap follows this passage in the surviving manuscripts of theplay, but we do have some clues as to how the plot developed. Agavespeaks a long lament. She counts over the limbs of the son she boreand murdered. How can she bear to live on after this? Then Dionysusappears ex machina. Some of the god’s prophecy has been preserved.All of them—Cadmus, Agave, and her sisters—must leave Thebesand go abroad. In vain Cadmus prays to their ancestor for forgiveness,pleading that angry gods should not act as vindictively as mortals do.The victims, weeping, draw away, taking sad farewell of their country,their noble lineage.The Bacchae is not like the medieval mystery plays because twomortals rise up against the sacred rituals. The first of them is Pentheus,with his claim for the self-created order of men. Then Agave accusesthe gods for punishing minor sins—like the defaming remarks thesisters made about Dionysus’s mother, Semele—beyond all measureand with cruel craftiness.What, then, is The Bacchae? It is the tragedy of tragedies. It bringsout into the open and examines the old myths that were the stuff ofthe theater in older times, using the archaic arena, the costumes andforms that were familiar. Gilbert Murray said that it is bound moretightly by form than any Hellenic play we know. It brings togethereverything the models of previous tragedy contributed and distills outof them what remained relevant to its own day. It is the essence of thehuman condition as Euripides saw it in 406 BC, after looking backover a long lifetime.Its myth is interpreted as a representation of the contradictionsapparent in every era. Dionysus is not the anti-Apollo that Nietzscheconsidered him to be. He is in the center between the opposite poles,not the god of metamorphoses, but the god of dichotomy. He is in the