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DIONYSIAN LITERATURE The erotic impulse has been a lively and vital force in literature since the beginning of recorded history. As soon as man began to write things down, he wrote about the awesome role of sexuality in his life. These writings can be traced back as far as the Sumerian civilization, to love songs chanted at the symbolic marriage of the king to a priestess of Inanna, goddess of love and reproduction. For thousands of years eros had an honored place in the official writings of civilization after civilization. But these were simple love songs. It isn't until we turn to the legends of ancient Greece that sexuality enters literature as a disruptive, demonic force. At the beginning of the last millennium B.C., Thracians brought the cult of the wine god Dionysus to Greece. Dionysus was the best-loved son of Zeus. He was torn to pieces by jealous gods and eaten, but his heart was saved, and from it his father was able to resurrect him. The cult of Dionysus was an ecstatic, sexual religion of wide popularity. Its most famous adherents were Greek women who left their homes in the spring to roam the mountains. There, for days at a time, they danced, made love, and drank until they had worked themselves into such a frenzied state they were able to make a live sacrifice of an animal, a child, or a man. Tearing it limb from limb as Dionysus had been torn, they drank its blood and ate its flesh in the belief that thereby they were communing with their god. The mortal incarnation of Dionysus dressed in animal skins, smeared his face with wine dregs, and wore a large artificial phallus as the symbol of his godhood. (Dionysus' son was Priapus, god of procreation, whose symbol was an erect penis.) The women who followed him were called either maenads-mad women-or Bacchoi. They dressed in fawn skins, and were possessed of a fierce strength able to overcome any human resistance, an insatiable sexuality, and an ability to commune directly with wild things. The rites they practiced would be proscribed if they occurred anywhere in the modem world, but they are recalled in two branches of literature: the drama and erotic writing. The wine-smeared visage of Dionysus still leers up at us from the pages of the contemporary erotic novel. The connection between eros and poetry to which I will refer often in these pages begins with Dionysus. The two share like a radiant nimbus the sense of ecstatic celebration of the Dionysian festivals. They first illuminate in the light of joy before they begin to frighten us. We will return to this connection, but now let us follow the Dionysian influence where it leads us in literature. Starting out on foot in the clear Greek light with Dionysus as our guide dancing somewhere ahead of us, we come upon a white stone amphitheater where Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae is being recited. The Bacchae draws upon the legend of Dionysus for its plot only so that Euripides may warn against the dangers of religious mania, but the hymns he writes to Dionysus recreate the passionate emotions of Dionysian festivals. The Bacchae is the first well-known instance of the Dionysian influence on literature, but that influence is also found throughout Greek tragedy and comedy. It becomes specifically sexual in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, with its story of wives withholding sex until their warrior husbands make peace, and there are sexual overtones in a number of other classical plays. The Dionysian influence is also seen in Greek lyric poetry, particularly the songs of Sappho of Lesbos. Although her work has survived only in evocative fragments, in each Sapphic fragment we can still hear the husky voice of a celebrant of eros. Her lyrics were equaled by those collected in the Greek Anthology, and one of the poets whose work is found there, Diogenes Laertius, even speaks of the "forecasting brute with the long slimy tongue," a prophetic reference to Dionysus. When Dionysus crossed the Mediterranean to Italy, the Romans changed his name to Bacchus, but his influence shows no sign of diminishment in the work of Ovid, Petronius, Martial, Juvenal, and Catullus. In Amores, or the Art of Love, we find Ovid giving advice to the man who wants to win a mistress on how to get and hold her, and to the mistress on how to satisfy her lover. Even in that relatively tolerant age Ovid found himself exiled for his boldness of speech, although his lines are mild compared to the frankly erotic language of Petronius Arbiter. The series of fragments which make up his Satyricon are filled with stories about homosexuals, cheating lovers, and husbands who double as pimps. Catullus, except for Propertius the greatest of Roman love poets, wrote lyrics which reveal a frankness about fellatio and anal sex-among the other courses of love-as uncompromising as any fiction we read today. Martial and Juvenal, cynical spectators of the excesses of first-century Rome, described in biting, satirical verse their pungent reactions to it. Their lines are still capable of arousing the censor's wrath when translated into modern idioms. This is a catamite in Juvenal's Satires: "Penetration from the rear/is only part of my unfortunate story." Or Martial, in one of his mocking sexual epigrams: "When you hear clapping from the baths,/Maron's mighty cock is sure to be the cause." The point has been made before, by historians, scholarly writers, and translators: The great Greek and Roman poets wrote freely about the sexual activities of their times, using language which most people today would find obscene. This has hardly been a well-kept secret in this century, but it was for a thousand years to people who had no Greek or Latin and had to depend upon timid translations. For those unfamiliar with classical literature, a reminder that erotic literature doesn't begin with Fanny Hill should suffice. Erotic literature began in hymns to gods of reproduction and eros, moved from Greek drama to Roman poetry, and even makes an appearance in the Bible and medieval literature. Erotic writing, far from being the illegitimate bastard of literature, can lay claim to an illustrious ancestry. It may be argued that the intention of the Roman poets when they described sexuality was different from the intention of modern erotic writers. Obviously there are differences, of execution as well as intention. Probably the most basic difference is historical. How a work is going to be received, and by what audience, creates an attitude which may determine a writer's feeling of freedom about his work. Juvenal, for instance, is generally regarded as a moralist. He satirized the sexuality of his time because it was part of the decadence he wanted to flay in his verse. Ovid, on the other hand, wrote to amuse as well as to instruct. In the modern world morality, amusement, and instruction have not been considered sufficient justification for reading erotic writing. In the Middle Ages erotic writing suffered the neglect of literature in general. It was severely curtailed, showing up mostly in low verse, jokes, and riddles. Apparently one of the favorite targets of doggerel writers was clerical immorality; these same lascivious monks were also the caretakers of ancient literature. It is fascinating to speculate on the erotic writing lost because of these lusty hypocrites. In the fourteenth century, Christian holidays still incorporated the old pagan fertility rites, and two masterpieces--Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales--appeared, to the delight of educated, tolerant readers. Although neither book may be called erotic, they both glow with the clear sheen of sexuality. As David Loth observes in The Erotic In Literature, they are the ancestors of the modern bedroom farce. They evoke laughter at the expense of human sexual foibles more than they arouse sexual feelings. By the time of the Renaissance erotic writing began to be treated as something special and perhaps scandalous. It wasn't yet forbidden, but the influence of the predominant Judaeo-Christian code was beginning to manifest itself in widespread hypocrisy. Sexual realities didn’t change, but writing about them had to become more cautious. The Dionysian influence in literature was still strong, but masked. Yet despite the restrictive codes which affected sexual behavior, despite the strict censorship of political, scientific, and theological writing, the Dionysian spirit contributed to the lusty flavor of Elizabethan writing, notably in Shakespeare's plays. Certainly no one would claim that Shakespeare was a particularly erotic writer (except possibly Thomas Bowdler, who produced a "family Shakespeare" by cutting every sexual reference from the plays), but when he felt the situation was appropriate he wrote freely. There is a word not much used these days which defines the Dionysian influence in Renaissance writing. It is ribald, meaning obscene, irreverent, scurrilous. It has a lighter connotation than obscene, or pornographic, implying a tolerance of sex in writing if used amusingly. Most of the literature of the English Restoration, especially the plays of William Congreve, John Dryden, and William Wycherley are ribald rather than erotic. The exception was a play called Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery by John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. But before we meet Rochester, the English precursor of the Marquis de Sade, chronology requires a glance at some of the major erotic writings of France, Italy, and China. The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea by Nicolas Chorier appeared in France around 1660. It was the Joy of Sex of its time, one of the first sex manuals, although it was fiction and cast in the form of a dialogue between women. It was written to counteract the prevailing anti-sex attitude of what was permissible for ladies of the time, and in it women talk to women about the arts of love with a directness which exceeded the limits of ribaldry.
They call the extreme part of the penis, being oblong, head; if thou squeezedst it between the tips of thy fingers, far from doing it the slightest harm, thou wouldst cause the most pleasing sensation....
The dialogue form remained popular for hundreds of years; one of the most famous French erotic novels, A Lady of Quality, attributed to Crebillon Ie Fils, is set in the form of a dialogue. It is more stylistically graceful than Luisa Sigea, and less of a sex manual, comparable to Chaderlos de Laclos' epistolatory novel of jaded passion, Dangerous Acquaintances. Dionysian Literature continues... |
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