Listened to this week, and with (Dionysian!) pleasure: Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 program “In Our Time”, and his conversation about Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae with Emily Wilson, Edith Hall and Rosie Wyles.
Mention of Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History from 1992, led to some moments of reflection. A few years ago after reading The Gold Finch, and remembering the hype surrounding the publication of Tartt’s first book (I guess it became a bestseller), I read The Secret History, and whilst I would have recommended it as a good enough read, I recall my expectations for literary fiction were not really fulfilled. (By the way, similarly so, my opinion of The Gold Finch.) A likeable enough but vacillating narrator and his capricious bunch of classics cohorts at an elite college, certainly sucked one into their vortex of deceits, large and small, but I had the feeling at the end of having been chewed up and spat out – unsatisfied, left cold. That the story’s murder and mayhem was created in the pursuit of Dionysian pleasure and dabbling in bacchanalian ritual, I had all but forgotten; rather, what stayed with me was the disturbing ease in which the accoutrements of privilege could be weaponised by an amoral didactic, catapulting young lives into the abyss (in the novel: both in a real sense and an allegorical).
But back to Bragg’s program…On the website there is further information – both concerning the subject matter and the guests. The text can be found here at Perseus; not as easy reading as the above discussion is to listen to, but the theatre of life rarely is – the truth being in the performance, and the borders of pleasure and tragedy fluid.
To set the stage, so to say, and to understand the context of Ancient Greek performance, I recommend Edith Hall’s Gresham Lectures of 2018, of which the following video is part.