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Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources
Notes to Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Chapter 10 |
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51 It is an uncontested tradition that Greek tragedy in its oldest form dealt only with the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for a long time Dionysus was the only theatrical hero. But we may claim with equal certainty that, until Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero, and that all the celebrated characters of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on—are merely masks of that original hero, Dionysus. [Preview Euripides as "death of tragedy," Euripidean tragic hero as Socrates or rational man instead of Dionysus]
A divinity behind all these masks > “ideality” *
Individuals = comic
Platonic “idea” x “idol”
52 the one real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of figures
God on stage speaks > erring, striving, suffering individual
Precision & clarity of individuation < Apollo
Hero = suffering Dionysus of the
mysteries, the god who
himself experiences the suffering of individuation
*dismemberment = transformation into air, water, earth, and
fire*
Individuation = source and origin of all suffering, thus
reprehensible
Dionysus’s dual nature: savage daemon and mild ruler
Demeter gives birth to Dionysus again
mystery doctrine of tragedy
*Art breaks spell of individuation
*presentiment of a restored oneness
Homeric myths reborn in a different form
53
Prometheus Bound:
Zeus allies with Titan
Dionysiac truth takes over the whole sphere of myth as a
symbolic expression of its own insights, and gives it voice partly in the public
cult of tragedy and partly in the secret rites of the dramatic
mysteries, but
always in the old mythic trappings.
53 What force freed Prometheus, Dionysiac wisdom?
[show Liebestod?]
Myths become supposedly historical reality
how religions die: mythic premises of a religion are systematized
One begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the
same time resisting their continuing life and growth.
Dying myth > Dionysian music > myth blossomed anew
Florescence = flowering
54 It is through tragedy that myth attains its most profound
content, its most expressive form; it rises up once more, like a wounded hero .
. . .
Sacrilegious Euripides . . . myth and music die
Euripides abandoned Dionysus; Apollo abandoned Euripides
> sophistical dialectic > only counterfeit, masked passions and
speeches
4th
century BCE representation of Demeter,
goddess of harvest and fertility of
land