Dionysus in the Fin-de-Siecle

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.