Dionysus,
a god of death and rebirth, died at the hands of post-pagan Rome, and
only crept back into the European psyche in the nineteenth century.
There he peeked his head through the lines of Goethe and Byron and
grinned darkly over Schopenhauer's shoulder. But only in 1872 did
Nietzsche introduce the god of the thresholds by name, and
thenceforth Dionysus became a fixture of Western thought. Why
Nietzsche, and why 1872? How could Dionysus, of all gods, make his
entry into the European mind through the pen of a German scholar in
the staid late-nineteenth century? This was, after all, the age of
Victoria. Its popular oracles were Bentham and Mills, whose gospel of
cheery conformity and strict rationalism had no room for the wine-god
and his maenads; the heavy handed militarism of Prussia, and the
imperial projects of Britain and her competitors, certainly afforded
no more.
The
truth was that Europe, thundering forward in its industrial and
technological development, obsessed with progress, constantly
decreasing the size of the world and increasing the size of world
markets, felt haunted by a sense of decay. Progress had dehumanized
Europe. The money that fattened its middle classes had been wrung
from the flesh of colonial labor; the huge, gray metropolises that
supplanted traditional ways of living left people physically feeble
and spiritually ill; the obsession with linear progress that Weber
documented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
had sucked dry the creative spirit. Each nation's drive to empire
threatened its neighbors. The specter of war hung over the Continent,
bringing to fruition its nightmare promises in the meaningless
slaughter of 1914. The working classes, in the thankless misery of
their labor, began to listen to the voices of change and the prophets
of armed revolution. Europe faced a political crisis; and moreover,
it faced a human crisis.
The
last time Dionysus had appeared in a major work of literature was in
the sixth century before Christ: in the Bacchae of Euripides,
written in the long shadow of Athenian social decay. Athens, the
great empire and long the pinnacle of Greek culture, had lost the
Pelopensian War. The Spartans stripped Athens of its colonies, its
city walls, and its relevance as a superpower. Euripides himself,
shortly after composing the Bacchae, left in exile for the
barbarous kingdom of Macedon, which within very few years would
conquer all of Greece in one sweep. But certainly we cannot attribute
the fall of Athens to exterior forces, the armies of Sparta and
Macedon, and exclude the probability of interior decline, a decay of
order and power. Or at least, Euripides did not. For the incarnation
of (implicitly Athenian) social order in the Bacchae is
Pentheus, Pentheus the rigid, the obsessive and obstinate upholder of
rational authority. Euripides' audience knew very well that the
empire had failed, and that the spouting of its hyperrational
apologists had no meaning. Dionysus, as a character in the drama,
knows that just as well. Only Pentheus cannot see it, and in the end
the sick society that he has tried to hold together with his high
words, the very society that he has helped create, tears him to
pieces.
By
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the sick society was
back. Pentheus sat stiff necked and smug in the pulpits and
parliaments of Europe. And following him, naturally, came Dionysus,
the Dionysus of the age of imperialism, of monopoly capitalism, of
middle classes who could sit content and turn a blind eye to the
slavery and murder that bloodied their hands. The Belgians had
brought hell to Earth in the Congo, and justified the slavery, the
mutilations, the murder of their schemes with the high pretences of
bringing civilization and Christianity to a benighted race. And at
home, the Europeans who bought the ivory and rubber of the Congo, who
wore the clothing sewn by child laborers, struggled and agonized to
keep themselves in line with the moral ideology of the time – the
school of thought that held that homosexuality was a mental illness,
that there is a difference between pure love and physical love; that
there are highs and lows in the human spectrum, the lows belonging to
the animals and lower races, and the highs being proper to the higher
races and classes. These two boiling contradictions, these crimes
against the human spirit wrapped in the robes of righteousness, were
inseparable. They were two symptoms of the same sickness, the same
illness, the same decay of society.
Of
the literature of the time, there are perhaps no two better texts
that describe this twofold decay than Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
published in 1900, and Mann's Death in Venice, from 1912. Both
of these short novels speak directly to their era. Heart of
Darkness addresses the darkness of empire, and Death in Venice
the human darkness weakly repressed by culture. They both have a
Pentheus figure: Conrad has Kurtz, Mann has Aschenbach. And both show
Europe at the fin-de-siecle in the world of Dionysus, far from
rational order, giving way to chaos and its own repressed humanity.
The
similarities between the two novellas are striking. In terms of plot
structure, both take place on the border of ultracivilized empire and
the primitive colony. Both are set in a place where the security of
land meets the wild fluidity of water. Both involve a man who, having
borne the banner of civilization to the fullest of his ability, comes
to the colony and is swallowed up by its human wildness. This
conversion is not a change but a continuation: the colony brings
civilization to its ultimate conclusion. This conclusion has
historical, cultural, and erotic implications. Both men realize this
reversion to the savage, and attempt to overcome it by making it
exterior, making the world around them into a kind of perverted
symbology. And both men succumb to tropical illness, Kurtz having
finally opened his eyes to the “horror” of his own Dionysian
self, and Aschenbach having resisted resolutely any breach of his
pure consciousness.
From
this very basic sketch we see Dionysus clearly. A god of thresholds,
neither male nor female, citizen nor foreigner, patrician nor
plebeian, god nor man, Dionysus is fully at home amid the splendors
of Venice, sinking into the sea, or on the banks of the Congo, deep
in the jungle. Both Aschenbach and Kurtz have that fundamental
ambiguity in their national identity. Aschenbach is half Silesian
through his mother. He is half colonizer and half colonized, sprung
half from stoic German stock and half from the implicitly more primal
Central European races. Kurtz is part English, part French (“All
Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz”); and yet he sets
himself up as a god, a tribal leader, among the natives of his Congo
fastness. He is no longer European, but still not quite African.
The
illnesses that haunt Death in Venice and Heart of Darkness
speak directly to the Dionysian contagion that infects and maddens
whole populations. The route of the cholera from India to Italy that
Mann describes parallels the route of Dionysus to Thebes in the
Bacchae; the malaria in Heart of Darkness does not
follow such a route, but nevertheless refers back to the same.
Both
novellas explore the erotic element of the Dionysian experience in
great depth. In the Bacchae, Pentheus shows an obsessive
hatred for female sexuality, and betrays an obsessive interest in it
when Dionysus offers him the chance to see the Maenads in the throes
of their madness. He also seems to harbor a homosexual desire for the
beautiful young androgyne. Aschenbach refuses to approach eroticism,
matching Pentheus in his hubristic disdain for sex. Instead he
channels his lust into an image of platonic love and beauty, of eros
as something aesthetic, unsensual, even socially beneficial. But like
Pentheus he has hidden his sensual desires, his homosexual desires,
from sight: he too desires to see the secret object of his lust, he
too has hidden passions that for social reasons he could not afford
to betray. Kurtz's descent into the Dionysian is less overtly sexual.
The ivory he collects are still tusks, huge white phalluses born by
black slaves. The phallic imagery returns with the spears and arrows
of Kurtz's thralls, Marlowe's vision of the horned masks of the
dancers, and the heads impaled on spears that surround Kurtz's house.
The act of penetrating the thick of the Congo is itself a kind of
recreated sexual intercourse. Marlow never explains just what he
means when he recounts how Kurtz would “preside at certain midnight
dances ending with unspeakable rites” ; we infer some violation of
a serious taboo, probably erotic. And of course, Kurtz has a black
mistress, making him not only an adulterer but, much worse by his
society's standards, a willing mixer of races.
Pentheus'
own morbid repression of sensuality cannot stay hidden. Rather it
emerges, and emerges with a vengeance, in the patriarchal strictness
of his government. Order in Thebes, with correct thought and correct
behavior as universal and unchanging conditions of life, is Pentheus
himself, externalized. Likewise Aschenbach and Kurtz externalize
their own condition. With Aschenbach, we first see this
externalization in his choice to go to Italy. The text establishes a
clear dialectic between the sumptuous, sensual, “decadent” South
and the hardworking, civilized, rational North. Of course, no living
human is entirely sensual or entirely rational. Aschenbach is a
human, and has both of these characteristics. But as a good German,
as a good bourgeois, as a good artist, he cannot tolerate the sensual
in himself. High and low must be kept apart. He therefore projects
his own sexual and uncivilized energy onto Italy, onto Venice. It is
the highest kind of self-delusion, for the Venetians themselves turn
out to be sophisticated and efficient in their cynical machinations--
they manage to hide a cholera epidemic from clueless northern
tourists like Aschenbach, who succumb to the beauty of the rotting
palazzi and stinking canals. The crisis of the sensual comes to a
head when Aschenbach falls in love with Tadzio. Human love, all human
love, is sensual. Aschenbach cannot bear sensuality: he therefore
cannot bear human love. And so he transforms his human love object
into exactly that – an object. Aschenbach never considers Tadzio as
a person. He treats him as a piece of art, a plastic and unfeeling
object, and even compares him directly to a statue, that of the Boy
with the Splinter. His fantasies of being Socrates in the company of
his beautiful young pupil are nothing more than another way of
sidestepping the inevitability of sensuality. If Tadzio is a literary
character, and love a philosophical concept, and a logical concept at
that, there is no trace of perversion, of the sexuality that
Aschenbach so desperately fears and hates. Aschenbach is not a
monster, not a pederast: he is an artist, a bourgeois artist par
excellence.
Tadzio
is in effect Aschenbach's answer to Kurtz's ivory, and the Congo is
Kurtz's Venice. Kurtz's lust is less specific that Aschenbach's. It
seems to be a general animal drive, the will to destroy, to enslave,
to fornicate, to rob, to devour men without pity. In historical
hindsight this is not a particularly strange concept for us. We know
that slaves in the Belgian Congo were mutilated by soldiers for not
meeting their rubber quotas; we have read of the massacres and
depredations of colonial armies. But it is an animal instinct, this
will to destruction. It is fundamentally Dionysian; it is the drive,
the human, animal drive to tear living animals to shreds and eat
their flesh-- which is exactly what the Belgian mutilations in the
Congo meant, or the impaled heads outside of Kurtz's house. The
Dionysian, although fundamentally human, is antirational. It is
antiutilitarian. It has no explicit place in the realm of bourgeois
order, and yet it is fundamental to that system. The culture of
Europe, conservative and hinging on rational order, could not afford
to recognize the darkness at its very heart. And so empires were
forged in the name of progress; missionaries accompanied soldiers.
Marlowe routinely refers to his fellow ivory prospectors as
“pilgrims,” a saintly name for the cowardly prospectors, who
shoot Africans as thoughtlessly as one would slap a mosquito. They
are worse, much worse, than the African crewmen, whom Marlowe
christens “cannibals.” The pilgrims are the real cannibals. They
act out the rites of Dionysus while pretending not to; the sparagmos
implicit in the word cannibal belongs exclusively to the whites.
Kurtz
himself came to the Congo on a moral mission. Marlowe finds a
pamphlet, written by Kurtz, at the behest of the “International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.” Marlow, reading the
pamphlet, says “It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled
by an august Benevolence.” “Exotic Immensity” is a
wonderful turn of phrase. It designates the Europeans as exotic, not
the Africans. The savage European, violating a continent, sits hidden
behind a single adjective. And “Immensity” is an appropriately
Dionysian word, as the Dionysian is a universal principle. Only
“Benevolence” does not fit. There is nothing remotely benevolent
about colonization, about the middle class values of linear logic and
stolid complacency that fed on the blood and rubber of the Congo.
Kurtz realizes this. “Exterminate all the brutes,” he scrawls on
the report's last page. And later, as he dies: “The horror! The
horror!”
Kurtz
knew; metaphorically he understood what disease was sapping his life
away. Aschenbach never faces that same reality. In fact, Aschenbach
so thoroughly isolates himself from his own humanity that he not only
cannot recognize his own sexuality, but cannot recognize himself in
the political theater of Europe. Half Silesian, his hero is Frederick
the Great, whose Prussia swept through and conquered Silesia. He
throws his lot in with the Prussian Empire, the saber-rattling
Prussian Empire, whole heartedly. He does not consider the rancor,
the suffering, the rage of empire's many victims. When Tadzio makes
faces at the Russian family, Aschenbach can only see the beauty of a
Greek statue. He cannot see the centuries of ill-will between Russian
and Pole, the clear promises of future strife and violence. His
existence is upper-middle class to the core; the working classes
hardly ever cross his mind. The gondolier that he sees as Charon
really is the ferryman of death; he senses the rumbling of the
workingmen of Europe against his own predatory middle class, but
refuses to confront that lurking anxiety. And the first premonition
of his fate – we might say the first apparition of Dionysus in the
novella, in the form of a red-haired man – takes place in a
Byzantine mausoleum. The mausoleum, which houses the dead, is clear
enough as a symbol. But the fact that its architecture is Byzantine
is in itself very telling. The Byzantium had once been a mighty
empire, the successor of Rome, a receiver of tribute from all over
the Mediterranean. And it crumbled, and collapsed. (We are
well-advised to refer to Mann's contemporary, Yeats, and his poem
“Sailing to Byzantium,” for evidence that the Byzantine Empire
and its fall was already floating in the intellectual atmosphere of
the time.) The German Empire, the British Empire, the Portuguese
Empire, the Belgian Empire, the unofficial American Empire – the
empires of steel, of rubber, of machine parts, of cotton, the markets
that spanned continents at the point of the bayonet – all these
Empires were hurtling toward the same end, the same collapse, that
Byzantium suffered. Death in Venice preceded World War I by
two years, but the buildup was well underway. The nightmare of mass
slaughter, wreathed and bannered with good middle class values, was
not an idea but a destiny.
When
reading the Bacchae, we must
bear in mind that Pentheus and Dionysus are first cousins. This is
more than an incidental plot element: their relation is symbolic.
They are ultimately part of the same person. Pentheus contains
Dionysus within him. Behind virtue lies the wine god, who escapes all
definition and will not suffer the bondage of morality. Euripides
shows a gentle Dionysus as well as a violent one, a god who besides
inciting murder and madness brings hope to bondsmen and women, feeds
his worshipers with milk, comforts them with wine, bringing peace as
well as strife. But by the fin-de-siecle, that side of Dionysus had
disappeared from view. The colonial era, where Europe repressed both
other peoples and its own humanity with the utmost violence, carried
on a Dionysian tradition without redemption, without hope. Small
wonder the Western intellectual world of the time was so obsessed
with social decadence: they had nothing left to hold onto. The great
industrial wheels and smoking furnaces of history had snuffed out the
happiness of man's animal nature, the joy of being one with a
blazing, mysterious god. The double nature of Dionysus had died; the
wine god's rebirth as a whole being, a principle as creative as it is
destructive, cannot coexist with capitalism. Perhaps it will return.
If it did it would herald the coming of a new man, happy with and
unafraid of himself, neither an Aschenbach nor a Kurtz.
