258
LES LI E EPSTEIN
The most obvious difference between the dance of the Bacchae and
The Bacchae
is that one has only participants, the other an audience,
which is another way of pointing out that the ritual is an action and
the drama an illusion, a representation, shadows. Here magic, there a
trick. But the activity of the corybantes and the passivity of the spec·
tator
is
not as crucial a distinction as it might seem. In the first place,
it
is not that much harder to provoke an audience to action than
to
move it to tears. The theater riot was once as common as the theater
party, and ever since the fainting and miscarriages at the first perform.
ance of
Hippolytus,
smart managers have kept a doctor in the house.
Furthermore, sitting in one's seat by no means precludes, almost certainly
it enhances, terrific psychic activity as one's mind struggles to join the
M:ene. What really distinguishes art from ritual is that art comes to an
end. It is true that inasmuch as a spectator identifies with a character,
inasmuch as he succumbs to illusion, he undergoes a little ecstasy. But
identification and illusion are quite different from incorporation and
hallucination; because a drama finishes, it necessarily separates the
audience from fantasy and returns each member to himself and
to
reali·
ty. The Bacchante, however, walks away with the god in her bowels.
Nothing can touch her, least of all doubt. Reality recedes. Ritual is a
series of beginnings, but every play is built around its end.
The Bacchae
is usually misinterpreted as a vindication of Dionysus
and his ritual, or at any rate as a rebuke to whomever would withstand •
the magic of his wand. "Accept, accept," sing the chorus, and genera·
tions have fallen into line, most especially our contemporaries, who use
the song to wrench the play into the Theater of Cruelty, a dramatization
of "higher determinism," the instincts' necessity. Indeed, much
the
greater part of
The Bacchae
does seem like an oceanic state, where
every boundary has been obliterated in the sweep of the tide. Animals
are suckled at the corybantes' breasts, gazelles and young wolves are
nestled in their arms, and in return the earth gives up water, wine,
milk, honey. The hills around Thebes are a peaceable kingdom, in which
man and nature and god thrill to each other, sympathetically atuned:
"0 lachus! Son of Zeus!" "0 Bromius!" they cried until the beasts
and
all
the mountain seemed wild with divinity. And when
they
ran, everything ran with them.
Because there is no distinction here between conscious and uncon·
scious, wish and fulfillment, because, in short, repression does not
exist,
the play
is
full of what to an outsider's eye must seem images of
in·
version and perversion, a general sense of misdirected energy, reversal,
