MODERN THEATER
259
paradox: old men act like children, Zeus gives birth from a "man's
womb," women behave like men and men dress as women, the gods dis–
guise
themselves as mortals and mortals are possessed by gods, civilization
turns
wild, the wilderness tame, sane men go mad, madmen invoke logic,
girls route soldiers, and, most prominently, a mother destroys what she
has created. To a participant, however, all these things are symptoms of
paradise, proof of that unity of human and nonhuman, mind and body,
sacred and profane, to which the ritual is dedicated. Without hierarchy
there is no disorder, no reversal if all things are one.
The only trouble with this harmony is that it is hermetic, closed as
the canopy that covered medieval hemispheres. Any intrusion suggests
that there is, after all, an outsider and an other; any interruption means
that there is a different way of telling time. Thus Pentheus - skepti–
cal, rational, repressive, a huntsman and jailor - is to the Bacchantes
what Copernicus was to a roomful of theologians. His conversion (he
exits
calling for armor and enters in drag, his life upended, a self–
parody, more feminine than Dionysus, madder than the Maenads) and
subsequent victimization, while not technically a sparagmos (because
he is not eaten), is clearly meant to stand for one:
One tore off an arm, another a foot still warm in its shoe. His
ribs were clawed clean of flesh and every hand was smeared with
blood as they played ball with scraps of Pentheus' body.
He
is incorporated into a universe whose established rhythms (a game,
in
which he is the ball; a hunt, of which he is the trophy) are
tri–
umphantly reaffirmed. All is one. The ritual ends. But the play goes
on, and the rest of
The Bacchae
is a wakening. Agave, the chorus,
Cadmus, Tiresias - all shake off the trance and face the horror, and
a&rume the burden, of what they have done. Euripides is clearly asking
US
to
compare the effects of theatrical illusion with those of ritual hal–
lucination. For those bewitched there is no calm, no ease of reconcilia–
tion, only a dulling guilt, the aftertaste of pollution - "You are un–
clean."
In the theater, however, the dreamer's soul wisks back
to
the
dreamer. Pentheus stands for Dionysus; but because he is a voyeur, an
observer, he also represents the audience, viewing from afar but not
participating in the action. As a god he ends jigsawed on a stretcher;
as a spectator he leaves the theater whole.
When
The Bacchae
is performed now (and that is often; as one
might expect, the play is replacing
Oedipus
in the classical repertory,
much
as
Lear
has replaced
Hamlet
in the Shakespearean), there is no
IIIch
awakening. In Tavel's
Gorilla Queen,
the Pentheus figure, Clyde
