Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources Notes to Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872, 1886) Chapter 8 Glossary to Birth of Tragedy

ch. 7, p. 38 The satyr, the Dionysiac chorist, lives in a world granted existence under the religious sanction of myth and ritual.

problem: chorus for modern audiences: we're inclined to skip over, ignore on behalf of drama of actors

Nietzsche insistently refocuses on chorus as birth of tragedy, womb from which tragic drama emerges

[draw picture of chorus and Dionysus; actors as Apolline; Dio-chorus as ecstatic worship, Apolline as dream, figures, epic]

Background introduction: Tragedy appears at great moments in history

Tragedy / drama begins in religious ceremonies.

ancient Greece: ceremonies associated with Dionysus

Medieval / Renaissance Europe: liturgical enactments, "miracle plays," and "mystery plays" establish Renaissance drama of Shakespeare, etc.

(liturgical enactments: at altar area in churches at Easter, women disciples visit tomb of Jesus, find it empty, and are spoken to by an angel: "Why seek ye the living among the dead?")

mystery plays enact Bible stories in churches. also performed in city areas, like "pageants."

These religious plays were prototypes or evolved into secular drama of Elizabethan theater (Shakespeare, etc.).

Point: religious ceremony evolves into drama.

example: priest or minister distributing communion bread and wine enacts story of Christ at Last Supper

Nietzsche: tragedy re-enacts ancient myths and rituals

Chorus as worshippers (with whom audience identifies)

Actor as suffering hero-god (possibly compare to passion plays with disciples observing Christ's crucifixion)

Nietzsche grows up in Christian Europe but is generally critical of Christianity as a "slave religion."

Nietzsche repeatedly prefers more heroic, primal religious expressions of primitive cultures.

Notes from chapter 8: 

40 satyr = longing for primal and natural . . . how firmly and fearlessly did the Greeks hold on to this man of the woods . . .

satyr cartoon from Playboy magazine, 20c

40 Nature, still unaffected by knowledge => satyr  (compare to ch. 7, pp. 39-40, where knowledge paralyzes, as when Hamlet understands complexity of situation too much to know how to act on it, as with Prince Hamlet.)

Satyr = archetype of man, highest and most intense emotions, enraptured by closeness of god (i.e. Dionysus as original hero-character and suffering god of Greek tragedy)

satyr as sympathetic companion to whose god’s suffering is repeated

symbol of nature’s sexual omnipotence (that is, nature is fertile, and humans by dancing and partying participate in this fertility)

satyr something divine and sublime

illusion of culture erased (culture associated with knowledge and order, the Apolline, while Dionysiac reverts to primal forces and instincts of nature]

41 the true man revealed himself, the bearded satyr celebrating his god.

Schiller right: chorus as living wall (see below: 41-2)

satyr chorus depicts existence more truly, more authentically, more completely than the man of culture, who sees himself as sole reality [Apolline separation, differentiation, detachment from wildness of nature]

tragedy: unadorned expression of truth

Tragedy: eternal life at core of things + constant destruction of phenomena (as usual, the appeal of tragedy appears in paradoxes, in which two contradictory ideas or forces co-exist in dialogue or dialectic

thing in itself (nature) and world of appearances (culture, art, mimesis)

The Dionysiac Greek wanted truth and nature at the summit of their power—and saw himself transformed into a satyr.

Dionysiac votaries imagine themselves as reconstituted geniuses of nature, as satyrs

41 reconstituted geniuses of nature, as satyrs: “geniuses” here means spirits or embodiments;

later constitution of tragic chorus is artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon, which required a separation b/w Dionysiac spectators and Dionysiac votaries who are under the god's spell.

audience of the Attic tragedy discovered itself in the chorus of the orchestra . . . no fundamental opposition b/w chorus and audience

thanks to http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/LX/GreekTheater.html

The chorus is the "ideal spectator" in so far as it is the only viewer, the viewer of the visionary world on the stage.

41-2 audience imagine themselves members of chorus

(watching a tragedy, the audience through the chorus sees the actor as though he were in fact a suffering hero-god)

42 chorus as reflection of Dionysiac man for his own contemplation

satyr chorus is primarily a vision of the Dionysiac mass

stage architecture, audience as satyrs swarming down mountain to witness image of Dionysus

[the audience sitting up in the seats of the amphitheater could imagine themselves as satyrs or maenads who might run down the mountain and join the chorus in worshipping Dionysus, or in the case of tragedy, beholding the suffering hero from the perspective of the chorus]

the poet becomes a poet only by seeing himself surrounded by characters living and acting before him, and allowing him to see into their innermost natures

for true poet, metaphor not a rhetorical figure but representative image in place of a concept

character a person living insistently before his eyes

Talk of poetry abstractly b/c bad poets

see a living play, to live constantly surrounded by hordes of spirits > become a poet

[poets, artists aren't just good crafts-people but actually see and experience world more intensely than normal people do; normal people imitate this experience when they witness meaningful art, worship a god with intense devotion, or drink alcohol or take other mind-alltering drugs]

[eidetic imagination]

eidetic imagery: An eidetic image is a type of vivid mental image, not necessarily derived from an actual external event or memory. It was identified in the early twentieth century as a distinct phenomenon by psychologists

42-3 If one feels the desire to transform oneself and to speak from other bodies and souls, one is a dramatist. [mimesis?]

[here Nietzsche transitions from imagination of creative artist-playwright to imagination of audience watching the performance]

43 seeing oneself surrounded by a host of spirits, with which profoundly united

Seeing oneself transformed, entering another body > start of the evolution of drama

rhapsodist (or single-voiced singer of lyric poetry rather than dialogue of dramatic poetry) does not fuse with images but sees them outside himself [Apolline]

Abandonment of individuality by entering another character > epidemic frequency

dithyramb: A Greek choric hymn, originally in honour of Dionysus or Bacchus, vehement and wild in character; a Bacchanalian song. (The dithyramb was an important element going into the creation of tragedy.)

the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of people transformed

civic past and social status forgotten [cf. 41 above: "thing in itself" (nature) and "world of appearances" (culture, art, mimesis)

Enchantment as precondition: sees a new vision outside himself,

in his transformation he sees a new vision outside himself, the Apolline complement of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete.

[Apolline as actors instead of Dionysiac chorus]

Dionysiac chorus, continuously discharging itself in an Apolline world of images [distinct, separate images rather than Dionysiac mass]

Choric sections = womb of dialogue, onstage world [birth metaphor]

A dream phenomenon [Apolline] + objectification of Dionysiac state

44 not Apolline redemption through illusion but rather a representation of the fragmentation of individual and unification with primal being

[tragedy breaks everything apart and puts it together again]

Thus the drama is the Apolline symbol of Dionysiac knowledge and Dionysiac effects . . . .

[epic poetry associated with Apollo only (p.45); just individual characters in society rather than Dionysiac mass absorded in nature]

This interpretation perfectly explains the chorus in Greek tragedy, the symbol of the crowd in a Dionysiac state.

Chorus more primordial and important than action (contrast Aristotle on plot, Poetics 6e)

Stage and action as a vision

sole "reality" is the chorus, which speaks of [vision] with all the symbolism of dance, sound and words

always a chorus of votaries: sees the god suffer, does not itself act; function of complete devotion to the god, the supreme Dionysiac express of nature, and therefore, like nature, it speaks under the spell of wise and oracular sayings.

sharing his suffering, it is also wise, heralding the truth from the very heart of the world [tragic equation of suffering and wisdom]

satyr as 'simple man' [primitive man?]: musician, poet, dancer and clairvoyant in a single person

At first Dionysus, the true stage hero and focus of the vision . . . only imagined to be present . . . . Later attempt to show the god as real (>drama)

45 dithyrambic chorus . . . stimulating the mood of the audience in such a Dionysiac way that when the tragic hero appears on the stage they do not see, for example, the awkwardly masked man, but rather a visionary form, born, so to speak, out of their own rapt vision

tragic hero = visionary form

emotion that the spectator felt when, in a state of Dionysiac excitement, he saw the god, with whose suffering he had already identified, walking on to the stage

Translated image of the god to masked figure, dissolved its reality into a ghostly unreality

completely separate spheres of expression in the Dionysiac lyric of the chorus and the Apolline dream world of the stage

Apolline dream state in which the daylight world is veiled and a new world, more distinct, comprehensible, and affecting than the other and yet more shadowy, is constantly reborn

Dionysiac lyric of the chorus and the Apolline dream world of the stage

clarity and solidity of the epic form speak from the stage [in the actors or characters of the tragedy as opposed to the chorus, which is not "clear and solid"]

Summary:

The chorus is Dionysiac: audience loses itself, individual loses individuality in the mass or in ecstatic devotion

The characters / actors are Apolline: individualized, distinct from each other (as Antigone and Ismene are distinct individuals)

The chorus remains the birth or womb of tragedy

But the chorus, by worshipping the god-hero representative of Dionysus, who stands apart as an individual separate from the chorus, creates the character-actor

The idea of two or more individualized characters comes from epic poetry.

Apollo is often identified as "the god of poetry," but Nietzsche species that Apollo is the god of epic poetry (e.g., the Iliad, the Odyssey) (see Genres link > formal genres)

Therefore the characters (actors) of Greek Tragedy are like the characters of epic poetry (predecessor of the novel)

Examples: Odysseus and Penelope, Achilles and Patroclos, Priam and Hector or others

Aristotle, Poetics XVIII

Oedipus the King

245 Dionysus (then Oedipus appears--god > hero)