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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
For the Bacchae Lévi-Strauss' view of myth as concerned with the mediation of fundamental polarities is both fruitful and fruitfully inadequate. The conflicts between Pentheus and Dionysus clearly involve an opposition of city and wild, culture and nature, rationality and emotion, male and female. Further in the background stands another series of antitheses: mortal and immortal, man and beast, Greek and barbarian, heavens and earth, fire and water. Like much of Greek literature, the Bacchae is founded on the proportion, mortal: immortal :: beast : man. That proportion, in turn, is part of an encompassing cosmic order which distinguishes the three basic categories of animate beings: god, man, and beast. What is unique and disturbing about this play is the thoroughness and violence of the reversals which take place in a situation in which god fuses with beast and beast with man.
1. For a concise introduction to Lévi-Strauss’ thought see Leach, Edmund, Claude Lévi-Strauss (London 1970Google Scholar), and now his Culture and Communication (Cambridge 1976Google Scholar). For a useful bibliography see Peradotto, John, Classical Mythology, An Annotated Bibliographical Survey (Urbana, 111. 1973) 40–47Google Scholar. For some applications see Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs 2 (Paris 1969, reissued in 2 vols, by Maspero, Paris, 1974Google Scholar) and Mythe et societé en Grèce ancienne (Paris 1974), especially 226–50Google Scholar; Vernant, and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris 1972Google Scholar); Detienne, Marcel, Les jardins d’Adonis (Paris 1972CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Segal, Charles, ‘The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: A Structuralist Approach,’ CW 67 (1973-74) 205–212Google Scholar and ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Greek Literature: Structure, Values, Metaphor,’ CJ 69 (1973/74) 289–308Google Scholar. For a critique see also Pucci, Pietro, ‘Lévi-Strauss and Classical Culture,’ Arethusa 4 (1971) 103–117Google Scholar; Kirk, G. S., Myth, Its Meaning and function (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1970Google Scholar), chap. 4; Vickers, Brian, Towards Greek Tragedy (London 1973Google Scholar), chap. 4; Cullers, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics (London 1975) 40–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jameson, Frederic, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton 1972) 111–20, 186ff., 196ff., 206ffGoogle ScholarPubMed.
2. Girard, René, La violence et le sacrè (Paris 1972) 181ffGoogle Scholar.
3. See Otto, Walter F., Dionysus, Myth and Cult (1933), trans. R. B. Palmer Bloomington, Ind. 1965) HOff. and 120ff.Google Scholar; Winnington-Ingram, R. P., Euripides and Dionysus (Cambridge 1948) 176–177Google Scholar; Gernet, L.REG 66 (1953) 392–393Google Scholar; Vicaire, P., ‘Place et figure de Dionysus dans la tragédie de Sophocle,’ REG 81 (1968) 355–356Google Scholar.
4. Cf. Otto (above, note 3), chap. 6 and pp. 209–210; also Girard (above, note 2), 232–234, especially 234: ‘The mask is situated at the equivocal frontier between human and divine, between the differentiated order about to disintegrate and its undifferentiated “beyond” which is also the reservoir of all difference, the monstrous totality from which a renewed order will emerge.’
5. As in the legends of Lycurgus, the daughters of Minyas, and the daughters of Proetus: see Otto (above, note 3), 71ff. and Jeanmaire, Hendi, Dionysus (Paris 1951), 139ff., 201ffGoogle Scholar.
6. Compare Soph., Antig. 152–154 with 1146–1154.
7. See Turner, Victor, ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,’ in The Forest of Symbols, Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y. and London 1967), chap. 4Google Scholar, and ‘Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,’ Rice Univ. Studies 60 (1974) 53–92Google Scholar. See also Girard (above, note 2) 172ff.
8. For a lucid example of the method see Lévi-Strauss, Claude, ‘The Story of Asdiwal’ (1958/9) in Leach, Edmund, ed., The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, A.S.A. Monographs 5 (London 1967) 1–47Google Scholar; also the work of Vernant, Detienne, Vidal-Naquet cited above, note 1.
9. For this view of sacrifice see Detienne (above, note 1) 71–113; Segal, Charles, ‘Mariage et sacrifice dans les Trachiniennes de Sophocle,’ AC 44 (1975) 37–40Google Scholar and ‘The Raw and the Cooked’ (above, note 1) 305–7, with the further literature there cited.
10. See Turner, Forest of Symbols (above, note 7) 95ff.; also ‘Liminal to Liminoid’ (above, note 7) 58–59: ‘Hence, in many societies the liminal initiands are often considered to be dark, invisible, like a planet in eclipse or the moon between phases; they are stripped of names and clothing, smeared with the common earth, rendered indistinguishable from animals. They are also associated with life and death, male and female, food and excrement, simultaneously, since they are at once dying from or dead to their former status and life, and being born and growing into new ones. Sharp symbolic inversion of social attributes may characterize separation; blurring and merging of distinctions may characterize liminality. Thus, the ritual subjects in these rites undergo a ‘leveling’ process in which signs of their preliminal status are destroyed and signs of their liminal non-status are applied.’
11. Among the more recent psychological approaches to the play are Devereux, George, ‘The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides’ Bacchae,’ JHS 90 (1970) 35–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, Patrick, ‘Euripides: The Dionysiac Experience,’ in Euripide, Les Bacchantes (Paris 1970, 1972) 1.43ff.Google Scholar; Sale, William, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Pentheus in the Bacchae of Euripides,’ YCS 22 (1972) 63–82Google Scholar; Seidensticker, Bernd, ‘Pentheus,’ Poetica 5 (1971) 35–63Google Scholar, especially 51–52, 57–63.
12. See Girard (above, note 2) 220ff., especially 225–227.
13. For the transitional and ambivalent position of the ephebe in Greek society see Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, ‘The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian Ephebia,’ PCPS n.s. 14 (1968) 49–64Google Scholar. Pentheus’ failed rite de passage from adolescence to manhood is just the opposite of that of Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes. The latter moves successfully from the ‘liminal’ point of his ephebe status to the heroic action of the adult warrior. Whereas Pentheus moves from the male world of his subordinates into the power of women and back into the total power of the mother over the infant, leaving his remote father, Echion, even further in the background, Neoptolemus, initially fatherless, recovers a truly heroic father in Philoctetes and rejects the false, or at least less heroic, father figure of Odysseus. For a view of the play in terms of this ephebic status of Neoptolemus see Vidal-Naquet in Mythe et tragédie (above, note 1) 161–184.
14. There are several reasons for using the structuralist term ‘code’ instead of a more general term like ‘area’ or ‘domain.’ First, ‘code’ emphasizes that the phenomena in question are part of a system of signs which have a particular semantic structure within the work. Second, it implies the homology among similar structures in both the literary work and the culture as a whole. Each code can be regarded as a single strand, whether of the sign-system or the cultural system, which, taken together with the related strands or ‘codes,’ comprises the total ‘bundle’ that forms the total semantic or social structure. The relation between the literary work and the code or codes which it contains and utilizes is, of course, complex. Saussure’s familiar distinction between langue and parole provides a useful means of formulating it. In ‘normal’ discourse, parole actualizes and individualizes the potential of langue; the ‘message’ depends on and realizes the ‘code’ and is implicit or inherent in the code, just as parole is implicit in langue. In tragedy, however, as to some extent in all literature, the message can actually distort or destroy the code, only to recreate it in a new context and with a new value.
15. It would be equally possible to approach these problems through an analysis of other elements like earth or water, but for clarity and simplicity I have restricted the present discussion to fire only. I hope to deal with the other elements in a fuller study of the play elsewhere.
16. See Eur., Phoen. 657ff., 93 If. with the schol. ad. loc. See also Fontenrose, Joseph, Python (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1959) 306–20Google Scholar, especially 307ff. and 311, and also 547–548; Vian, Francis, Les origines de Thèbes: Cadmos et les Spartes (Paris 1963) 94–113Google Scholar, especially 105–109.
17. For the darker side of Pentheus’ ancestry see Winnington-Ingram (above, note 3) 79 and 181; Arthur, Marilyn, ‘The Choral Odes of the Bacchae of Euripides,’ YCS 22 (1972) 171–175Google Scholar.
18. For the problem of the chorus’ relation to civic and moral attitudes see Arthur (above, note 17) 145–179, especially 146–148.
19. Cf. 332 and 789 (epairesthai). The metaphor recurs, though not for Pentheus, also in 304 and 1268, where being ‘lifted up’ is, ironically, an effect of Dionysus’ power to destroy civic, domestic, and psychological order. Cf. also Podlecki, A. J., ‘Individual and Group in Euripides’ Bacchae,’ AC 43 (1974) 146Google Scholar.
20. Compare 141–142, 704–711, 726–727 with 734–768. The echo between 697–698 and 767–768 establishes a closer link between the Maenads’ peaceful communion between man and nature on the one hand and their bloody violence on the other: in the first passage the Maenads gird themselves with snakes who lick their cheeks; in the second, after they have ripped apart cattle and routed warriors, the snakes lick the drops of blood from their cheeks.
21. For the Maenads’ oscillation between the blissfulness of the Golden Age and the violence of a savage and bestial state see Girard (above, note 2) 194 and Detienne, Marcel, ‘Dionysos mis à mort ou le bouilli rôti,ō Annali della Scuola Normale Sup. di Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia, Ser. 3, vol. 4 (1974) 1228–1229, 1232Google Scholar; also Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, ‘Le mythe platonicien du Politique, les ambiguïtés de l’âge d’or et de l’histoire,’ in Langue, Discours, Société, Pour Emile Benveniste, ed. Kristeva, J., Milner, J.-C., Ruwet, N. (Paris 1975) 379Google Scholar.
22. The translation is, in part, that of Dodds, E. R., Euripides, Bacchae 2 (Oxford 1960Google Scholar) ad loc.
23. E.g. Il. 8.192 and cf. 2.457–458; Od. 8.74, 9.20, 19.108, and cf. 9.264 = Il. 10.212. Contrast also the ‘shame’ which Clytaemnestra ‘poured down’ on herself and women in general in Od. 11.433f.
24. Detienne, Marcel, Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (Paris 1967; ed. 2, 1973) 18–27Google Scholar.
25. The theme of building, maintaining, or destroying houses, gates, towers, walls – all symbolizing the ordering, constructive power of civilization and the separation between the city and the wild – is of great importance in the play. For some of the architectural motifs see the interesting, though too brief, remarks of Scott, William S., ‘Two Suns Over Thebes: Imagery and Stage Effects in the Bacchae,’ TAPA 105 (1975) 339–343Google Scholar, especially 340.
26. Girard (above, note 2) 193–196, especially 195.
27. Burnett, Anne Pippin, ‘Pentheus and Dionysus: Host and Guest,’ CP 65 (1970) 28–29Google Scholar.
28. For the cruelty of Dionysus at the end see the good remarks of Winnington-Ingram (above, note 3) 178: ‘Euripides saw Dionysus clearly and whole, both in his beauty and in his great danger, and presented him as he saw him. … For if Euripides wrote a play which showed Dionysus first as beautiful and then as cruel, this was not mere subservience to a given plot or to obvious dramatic effect, but he so shaped the play as to focus attention upon the cruelty and to demonstrate the inexorable interdependence of the cruelty and the danger.’
29. A version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Classics and Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought, Princeton University, April 1976. I am grateful to the participants and especially to Professors Diskin Clay and Froma Zeitlin for helpful suggestions. I wish to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for a Fellowship in 1974–75, which enabled me to begin research for this study. I have greatly profited from discussion with M. Detienne, N. Loraux, J.-P. Vernant, and P. Vidal-Naquet, whom I thank for the opportunity to work out and present some of these ideas in my seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, VI Section, Paris, during the winter of 1975–1976.
