Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy not only to discuss the origin of tragic drama in Greece, but also to elucidate a form of madness, the madness of limited vision in the German culture of his day.... Peter Shaffer, like Nietzsche, is a student of psychology as well as culture, and he is very much interested in the idea of madness, certainly not in praising it ... but rather in illustrating dramatically a particular strain of madness: the madness personified in Equus by the psychiatrist Martin Dysart. Everyone familiar with Equus understands that Alan Strang is mad. The challenge of the play—to those among us who are “normal” and “sane”—is to see what may be our own madness, a modern malady which has become so commonplace that we may fail to recognize it.
Speaking of Equus, Shaffer made the following comments:
There is in me a continuous tension between what I suppose I could loosely call the Apollonian and the Dionysiac sides of interpreting life, between, say, Dysart and Alan Strang.
It immediately begins to sound high falutin', when one talks about it oneself—I don't really see it in those dry intellectual terms. I just feel in myself that there is a constant debate going on between the violence of instinct on the one hand and the desire in my mind for order and restraint. Between the secular side of me the fact that I have never actually been able to buy anything of official religion—and the inescapable fact that to me a life without a sense of the divine is perfectly meaningless.
The reading offered in this essay will run the risk of sounding “high falutin'” when it proceeds from a strict, rather than loose, definition of “those dry intellectual terms” Apollinian and Dionysian as they are used by Nietzsche inThe Birth of Tragedy. And because the terms will be used in the Nietzschean sense, this reading will take the liberty of departing from the idea that Dysart schematically represents the Apollinian and Alan the Dionysian. Although Shaffer uses the terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysiac,” he admits to using them “loosely.” Consequently, Shaffer's remarks are too tenuous to prove a direct influence of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy on Equus. However, the affinities between these two works do exist, and The Birth of Tragedy can be used to provide a framework for an approach to Equus which will illustrate a concern common to both men: health. (pp. 314–15)
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche provides a critique of what he believed to be the unhealthy German culture of his day; he writes of a “new opposition”: the Dionysian vs. the Socratic, theoretical man. By comparing the case of Alan Strang (the Dionysian man) with the extreme case of Martin Dysart (the Socratic, theoretical man), one can illuminate the two characters around whom Shaffer's play is structured.
Alan Strang is the product of a mother who has—with the best of intentions—taken him through the paces of myth with her Christianity. Alan is also the product of a father who has—with noble intentions—encouraged his son to gain “Further Education.” The father has done so by discouraging Alan from watching television (because it is a “swiz”; it takes away one's intelligence and concentration) and by discouraging Alan's orientation toward the Christian myth through his own atheism.
But Mrs. Strang is correct when she informs Dysart that Alan is much more than merely a product of his parents. She may have oversimplified the case by blaming what Alan has come to on the Devil; nevertheless, Alan has become possessed by a spirit—it just happens to be one of his own creation. Nietzsche writes that it was out of “a most profound need” “that the Greeks had to create ... gods.” Tutored enough to have a taste for myth and unlettered enough not to have to fight his way out of a web of abstractions (the modern malady), Alan moves instinctively to create his own myth surrounding the horse. By following his father's wishes, the boy would lose myth and become entangled in abstractions and optimism like a modern-day Laocoön. By following his mother's wishes, Alan would succumb to the naysaying of traditional Christianity that negates the will to power. In Christianity, Nietzsche sees “[h]atred of `the world,' condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, ...”
Why does Alan's father pull him from the horse? Is it merely because the stranger who offered the ride might harm him, or because the boy might be hurt unintentionally? Or is it that the parents fear passion, fear beauty and sensuality? Is it a fear of these concepts, or is it a lack of appreciation for them, that has caused a rift between Alan's parents in their sex life? It may be that fear of these concepts led Alan's father to offer an excuse for being at a skinflick. Would Mr. Strang be embarrassed because a movie is a swiz, or because this particular kind of movie illustrates his unacknowledged desire for passion? Alan, on the other hand, creates a myth that allows for passionate worship. And if his myth is an abomination, at least it is an active abomination rather than a passive one. At least it is a myth that says yes to the present rather than placing its hope in a time to come, as the mother's Christianity and the father's socialism trust.
Nietzsche provides a definition of “the mystery doctrine of tragedy”: it is “the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness.” Alan seeks this union in his worship, that is, in the night rides he takes on his god—a horse—which culminate in sexual orgasm. Alan shouts “Make us One Person!” to “Equus,” or Nugget, one of the horses from the stable. This attempt to create oneness, as Nietzsche explains, is sacrilege: “In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.” However, this very sacrilege is necessary in order to gain “[t]he best and highest possession mankind can acquire”: it “must be paid for with consequences that involve the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended divinities have to afflict the nobly aspiring race of men.” Nietzsche claims that the sacrilege has “dignity.”Because of the sacrilege he has committed, the Dionysian man “feels himself a god.” And Nietzsche claims that, consequently, the Dionysian man “is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: ...” That Alan becomes a work of art through sacrilege and suffering means that he is something instead of nothing. He is creator become creation. And as Nietzsche asserts: “... it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified....” This is to say that Alan justifies his suffering in the world as an individual by creating a myth which unifies the totality of his existence in the world, and consequently, provides a place for himself inside that myth.
Alan's sacrilege is not the blinding of the horses. That is the crime he commits which almost sends him to prison rather than to the care of a psychiatrist. Alan's sacrilege is his destruction, momentarily through his artistic worship, of the division between individuation and oneness. This aspect of Alan's story links him to the Dionysian myth. This one aspect emphasizes the myth itself more than Alan. The passion involved emphasizes a pure passion. (pp. 315–17)
In the “un-Dionysian myth-opposing spirit” of tragedy since Sophocles, Nietzsche sees more attention to the individual and less attention to the myth, a “victory of the phenomenon over the universal.” Yet for all the peculiar details which make Alan more than the “usual unusual” for Dysart, Alan's sexual episodes with the horse appear more as religious rites than attempts to reach sexual satisfaction. It is helpful at this point to visualize the nonhorse aspect of the actor playing the horse; that is, an idea—the idea of passion and its link to worship—is being communicated, not a vision. These very facts point to the conclusion that Alan represents much more than a young man whose sexual inclinations lean toward bestiality.
Such a view also makes it apparent that an intelligent and “normal” man such as Dysart could find himself attracted to some vital quality of spirit in a young man who has committed the horrific crime of stabbing the sight from the eyes of six horses. Clearly, Alan is not unequivocally the positive pole in the play. There can be no doubt in the spectator's mind that Alan Strang is a tortured soul who is unbalanced and dangerous; consequently, we, along with Hesther Salomon, hope that the doctor will be able to end Alan's suffering. Our first reaction may be similar to that of the stable owner, Harry Dalton: “In my opinion the boy should be in prison. Not in a hospital at the tax-payers' expense.” However, it is just as clear that such initial responses of repulsion and fear will not do justice to the depth of Shaffer's play. Dalton can understand Alan's problem only as an isolated phenomenon; Dysart sees beyond the isolated phenomenon and understands Alan's problem as the absence of passion, worship, myth, and art in the modern world. Alan blinds six horses, and Dysart begins his struggle with new vision. The spectator of Equus must accept the paradox that a repulsive, horrific crime committed against innocent horses ignites a positive, poetic, spiritual fire within the deadened, timid soul of Dysart. It is, as Dysart says on more than one occasion, the “extremity” of Alan's case, one might say the Dionysian excess, which has started the struggle which Dysart faces.
Nietzsche writes that “the noblest opposition to the tragic world-conception—and by this I mean science” has “its ancestor Socrates at its head.” The Socratic man is the man of logic rather than instinct. He has “the optimism of science.” Nietzsche longs “for a rebirth of tragedy” and claims it will come about “only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the evidence of these limits....”
Not quite eight decades after Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy, twelve men of letters who were affiliated with the American South published [I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition], a volume of essays that takes as its main subject the following dichotomy: “Agrarian versus Industrial.” Their introduction states that “... the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude.” One essay in the collection, “Remarks on the Southern Religion” by Allen Tate, contains a few paragraphs which will help to illustrate more clearly how Nietzsche's comments on the culture of his day can illuminate Dysart and his growing realization of not only the value of myth, but also the danger of the theoretical approach and its manifestations in the modern world:
The reader must here be entreated to follow some pages of abstraction conducted in the interest of my religion, but partaking of that religion not an ounce. For abstraction is the death of religion no less than the death of anything else. Religion, when it directs its attention to the horse cropping the blue-grass on the lawn, is concerned with the whole horse, and not with (1) that part of him which he has in common with other horses, or that more general part which he shares with other quadrupeds or with the more general vertebrates; and not with (2) that power of the horse which he shares with horse-power in general, of pushing or pulling another object. Religion pretends to place before us the horse as he is.
Since this essay is not religion, but a discussion of it, it does not pretend to put before you the complete horse. It does pretend to do the following: to show that the complete horse may be there in spite of the fact that this discussion cannot bring him forth. In other words, there is a complete and self-contained horse in spite of the now prevailing faith that there is none simply because the abstract and scientific mind cannot see him.
This modern mind sees only half of the horse—that half which may become a dynamo, or an automobile, or any other horsepowered machine. If this mind had much respect for the full-dimensioned, grass-eating horse, it would never have invented the engine which represents only half of him. The religious mind, on the other hand, has this respect; it wants the whole horse, and it will be satisfied with nothing less.
Reading Equus in light of the preceding paragraphs, one can say that Dysart has “the abstract and scientific mind,” while Alan has “the religious mind.” The modern mind has lost half the picture—and now another name, Allen Tate, is added to those of Nietzsche and Shaffer as one who is concerned with the idea of balance, not madness. In the Tate paragraphs, one can see that science is manifested in industrialism; modern man respects the half of the horse that drives cars up and down the highways. This passage provides the transition from Nietzsche's comments on science and optimistic knowledge to Equus, particularly the last speech Dysart makes: he realizes that he will replace Alan's horse with “a nice mini-scooter” and send him off “on his metal pony tamely through the concrete evening....” Dysart also questions the concept of “Normal” during this speech: is it normal, “blinking our nights away in a nonstop drench of cathoderay ...?” Motor-driven appliances—by Hoover, Philco, Remington, Pifco, Volex, Croydex, and Robex—are labeled by Alan as foes he rides against withEquus. They are, the unessential. They are the foes that separate human beings from the elemental forces of nature. Man, Nietzsche tells us, is the “lost son” of nature, and the Dionysian can bring about a “reconciliation” between man and nature.
Dysart has “the one great Cyclops eye of Socrates,” an eye “denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses.” In the last few lines of the play, Dysart states that he needs “a way of seeing in the dark.” The limited vision of the Socratic view as opposed to the tragic view leaves one in weakness:
And now the mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages, and digs and grubs for roots, even if he has to dig for them among the remotest antiquities. The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge—what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb?
We may compare the preceding passage by Nietzsche with Dysart's ironic statement to Hesther: “Such wild returns I make to the womb of civilization.” Modern man's state of weakness leaves him afraid: “It is certainly the sign of the `breach' of which everyone speaks as the fundamental malady of modern culture, that the theoretical man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his own consequences, no longer dares entrust himself to the terrible icy current of existence: he runs timidly up and down the bank.” We may compare Nietzsche's comment on weak and timid modern man to Dysart's growing knowledge of himself in the world and the admission that he makes by the end of the play: “Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that ... I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity.”
In this state of weakness, there are things which Dysart cannot do. We know that on the physical level Dysart cannot procreate; he has, by his own admission to Hesther, “[t]he lowest sperm count you could find.” ... Dysart's physical inability to reproduce or create is symptomatic of his inability to create in terms of his profession. There are two reasons for this professional impotence. The first reason is what Nietzsche calls “the delusion of being able ... to heal the eternal wound of existence,” the “delusion of limitless power.” The second reason why Dysart is struggling while trying to treat Alan is paradoxical. Dysart experiences doubts concerning his work which are so severe that he reveals the following to himself, at last, through the dream where he envisions himself as a chief priest who sacrifices children: “It's obvious to me that I'm tops as chief priest. It's this unique talent for carving that has got me where I am. The only thing is, unknown to them, I've started to feel distinctly nauseous. And with each victim, it's getting worse. My face is going green behind the mask.” Nietzsche explains this paradox of gaining knowledge and losing the ability to act:
In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no— true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.
Nietzsche proposes a remedy for this impotence: “When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail—suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy.” When Dysart tells Hesther that he is jealous of Alan, he is saying that he is jealous of a passion which can create gods; he is jealous of a spiritual and artistic creativity which Alan, disturbed though he is, has illustrated. Even when Hesther mentions Alan's pain, Dysart responds: “His pain. His own. He made it.” Without such creativity, Dysart lacks the “horsepower” which would enable him “to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being....” Consequently, Dysart's one eye not only keeps him from seeing existence whole, but incapacitates him in terms of spiritual and artistic vision. Dysart has greater and greater difficulty in justifying himself. (pp. 317–20)
Socrates had “a divine voice” which spoke to him, and Nietzsche writes that the voice “always dissuades. In this utterly abnormal nature, instinctive wisdom appears only in order to hinder conscious knowledge occasionally.” The instinctive voice Socrates heard could only dissuade, “[w]hile in all productive men it is instinct that is the creative-affirmative force, ...” Similarly, Dysart cannot create and affirm anything for Alan; Dysart can only negate and deny a part of Alan's self. His only creation will be a form of desecration: “Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?” During Alan's final abreaction, Dysart rushes toward him to stop him from stabbing at his own eyes with the invisible pick. By instinct, Dysart sheds his new-found doubts and reassures the boy by repeating the line: “I'm going to make you well”; however, his new insights have taken hold, found root in the small plot of Grecian soil in his soul, and he immediately refutes his instinct and modern training by saying the following as “[t]he light brightens,” as he moves “into the centre of the square”:
I'm lying to you, Alan. He won't really go that easily. Just clop away from you like a nice old nag. Oh, no! When Equus leaves—if he leaves at all—it will be with your intestines in his teeth. And I don't stock replacements ... If you knew anything, you'd get up this minute and run from me fast as you could.
An analogy is made complete at this point in the play: if and when Equus leaves, he will take the intestines of Alan with him, that is, Alan's very being, just as Dysart's dream has told him he will, by “helping” Alan, carve out the inner Alan: “I part the flaps, sever the inner tubes, yank them out and throw them hot and steaming on to the floor.”
Dysart realizes that he will not be able to accomplish what he wants to do for Alan: to make of him “an ardent husband—a caring citizen—a worshipper of abstract and unifying God.” In fact, all he can do is replace ecstasy with “the Normal.” In Nietzschean terminology, one could say that Dysart, the Alexandrian spirit, “substitutes for a metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance.” He will try to “... confine the individual within a limited sphere of solvable problems, ...”Dysart has a “reproduction statue of Dionysus” which he can “touch ... for luck”; this detail illustrates that Dionysian power is only a force outside of Dysart, not an intoxication within.
By the end of Equus, we have Alan destroyed not because he has tried to break past individuation into the realm of oneness, but because he is finally torn between two myths: the classical, pagan one he created; and the Christian one he inherited from his mother, which saddled him with guilt and shame concerning his sexuality and its relation to an ultimate concept like God. And he is destroyed also because he is torn between the outlet his sensuality has found in horses and his burgeoning physical interest in Jill Mason, which indicates a desire for a more normal sexual relationship. Dysart should be giving birth through creation to this patient, Alan. But he finds that he is artistically and spiritually impotent because he is what Nietzsche would call the Socratic man, devoid of Dionysian passion, worship, and creativity. He realizes his delusions, and his nausea prevents action. There is a birth trying to happen within Dysart; this birth, given Dysart's background, must appear illegitimate. He had conceived the idea of the tragic world view before he met Alan, and now he cannot decide what to do. Should he abort the Dionysian wisdom growing inside him and, by so doing, “help” Alan, so that Alan can carry on as half a man, rather than as a mental case? Or should he give birth to a new world view, a tragic one, and set Alan free, leaving him the dignity of his myth and worship, yet leaving him with the corresponding pain?
Nietzsche explains “[t]he metaphysical joy in the tragic” as follows:
... the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not´ affected by his annihilation.... the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the universal will.
Whatever metaphysical joy in the tragic is apparent at the end of Equus stems from the idea that Dysart, a caretaker of people, gains some self-realization because he is faced directly with the passion of the Dionysian will. And perhaps he has been, in some sense, infused by this passion which cannot be annihilated. At the very least, he is more knowledgeable by the end of the play. And the struggle which he has begun could well be the catalyst for creation. When one considers the cultural criticisms which Shaffer makes, and the difficulty with which Dysart struggles between the tension of his modern, Socratic mind and his new-found Dionysian wisdom, one can find some joy in the fact that Shaffer, like Nietzsche, is engaging his public, so that it will realize that both science and art are necessary in our world. In Equus, Shaffer tells us that the age of the Socratic man is not over, but the idea of a healthy balance is still alive. (pp. 321–22)
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