Apollo, Dionysus and Camille

Faithful fellow-blogger Darko Vader seeks to exploit my current idleness by suggesting I post something about my UArts colleague
Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae and other light classics. While I can't claim I've successfully digested everything between the covers of her ambitious and provocative tome, I find her chapter about Apollo and Dionysus to be an especially provocative one. As with all her writings, the chapter shows her gift for mingling penetrating insights on classical scholarship (better brush up on your Greek before visiting) with vivid contemporary and personal imagery, creating a rich and resonant essay that explores both the highways and the byways of meaning of these icons of classical antiquity.

Here's a sample:

Art reflects and resolves the eternal human dilemma of order versus energy. In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysys in the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus a vandal. Every excess breeds its counterreaction. So western culture swings from point to point on its complex cycle, pouring forth its lavish tributes of art, word and deed. We have littered the world with grandiose achievements. Our story is vast, lurid, and unending. (Sexual Personae, pp. 96-7)

What makes this struggle particularly meaningful for me is that Apollo is the god of Music, while Dionysus is the god of Theater, and the Musical Theater is an artform where one can see this conflict played out both in composition and performance. Any good song must embody both energy and order, Dionysian fire and Apollonian algebra, and any valid performance of a song will have both ingredients as well. As a songwriter, I tend to favor the Tin Pan Alley tradition of the well-made song, with phrases laid out neatly and concisely and rhyme and repetition carefully deployed to promote clarity and comprehension. The innovations of rock and rap have done much to diminish the importance of these dimensions of songcraft, and listeners have grown intoxicated on the Dionysian brew of rant and rave; in the punk world, lyric writing is reduced in many cases to a shout and melody and prosody are swept aside in a roar of primal energy. In the musical theater, however, formal elegance and careful articulation of detail still have their place; Apollo is still in the house, even as Dionysus goads on the revelers at the orgy.