Equus: Shaffer, Nietzsche, and the Neuroses of Health

Equus: Shaffer, Nietzsche, and the Neuroses of Health DOYLE W. WALLS Are there perhaps - a question for psychiatrists - neuroses of health? ofthe youth and youthfulness of a people? Friedrich Nietzsche, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," his preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth ofTragedi Nietzsche wrote The Birth ofTragedy not only to discuss the origin of tragic drama in Greece, but also to elucidate a fonn of madness, the madness of limited vision in the Gennan culture of his day: Our whole modem world is entangled in the net ofAlexandrian culture. It proposes as its ideal the theoretical man equipped with the greatest forces ofknowledge, and laboring in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All our educational methods originally have this ideal in view: every other form of existence must struggle on laboriously beside it, as something tolerated, but not intended. (p. 110) 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 as one critic has suggested2 ..,.. 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 ofthe play - to those among us who are "nonnal" and "sane" - is to see what may be our own madness, a modem 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 interpretinglife, between, say, Dysart and Alan Strang. Equus: Shaffer, Nietzsche, Neuroses of Health 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.3 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 in The Birth o/Tragedy.4 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 0/ Tragedy on Equus. However, the affinities between these two works do exist, and The Birth o/Tragedy can be used to provide a framework for an approach to Equus which will illustrate a concern common to both men: health. The structural tension within Equus is not the tension between Apollinian and Dionysian forces as some critics have proposed, at least not as those terms are used by Nietzsche. In fact, such an understanding ofthe nature oftragedy as Nietzsche defined it, according to Michael Hinden, is faulty: "It is a common misunderstanding that Nietzsche's concept of tragic tension depends upon a conflict between Dionysus and Apollo, but his basic tenet is that in tragedy a Dionysian conflict (that is to say, a conflict peculiar to the Dionysian state) is rendered visible by Apollinian form."5 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 o/MartinDysart (the Socratic, theoretical man), one can illuminate the two characters around whom Shaffer's play is structured. Alan...