… Prometheus Unbound, a drama on so heroic a scale that his lack of dramatic competence does not matter, for this is not theatre but huge/metaphysical grand-opera, where the scenery can creak if the singing is good enough.
The preponderant cliché of naturalism in contemporary British theatre makes anything even a little different unwelcome, but there are salutory reminders from an Indian scholar whose traditions of non-European drama give him a sympathy for Shelley’s play greater than any expressed in Shelley’s native land:
It clearly represents a rejection of the literary theatre as known to the Western World. But all theatre is not the property of the relatively small continent of Europe. Shelley’s thought and art in his singular iridescent poem seem in luminous fashion to look beyond the confines of Western usage and tradition to the more imaginative dramas of other civilisations, to the theatre of the dance, with its accompanying music, or to the theatre of the dancing shadow puppets of the Far East. His imagination deliberately and resoundingly defies our more temporal stages as developed for our human actors in flesh and blood. Curiously enough, on the contrary, it even invites Indian play of shadows, or puppet shows based on the epics.
And H. H. Anniah Gowda, the Professor of English at the University of Mysore, goes on to say something that confirms my despair of most contemporary theatre and that gave me, in what I’ve italicised, a nudge in the direction of my own Prometheus:
It is easy to conceive Shelley’s infinite choreographic work as a chant for a dance not as yet created, a libretto for a musical drama not as yet composed, a poetic companion to some future revelation in the imaginative film … Prometheus Unbound can be a dramatic reality only when the theatre itself is unbound from innumerable restrictions now confining it so firmly that this liberation remains for the less daring and imaginative minds an unthinkable change … The student of practicable drama at the present does ill to overlook even so apparently anti-theatrical a text as Shelley’s drama-poem. In such unlikely sources may lie concealed the seeds of a future burgeoning. Now that the winter has come to the theatre, even a new Prometheus Unbound may not be far behind.
I have always thought that Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound had ‘seeds of a future burgeoning’, though the snow still lies deep on most of our stages and the footsteps poets have made on them have disappeared under new chill flurries. I can only echo Ibsen when, in the face of hostility to his Peer Gynt, he asserted that ‘My book is poetry; and if it isn’t, it will become such’. Shelley’s play, unfortunately, is still in the process of becoming. And I have to say that my Prometheus is a film; and if it isn’t, it will become such!
IV
Shelley’s reaction to the idea of writing a parallel trilogy to that of Aeschylus, with détente finally achieved between the punisher and the punished, was that he wanted absolutely no reconciliation. ‘I was averse’, Shelley writes in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, ‘from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind.’ No détente. As we do not possess the other two plays of the Prometheia, Aeschylus’ Promethean trilogy, then we are left with undiluted defiance and enduring tyranny.
Karl Marx is said to have observed that he regretted that Shelley died at the age of twenty-nine, ‘for Shelley was a thorough revolutionary and would have remained in the van of socialism all his life’. Marx’s disputed remark was at the expense of Byron, who Marx is said to have prophesied would have become a ‘reactionary bourgeois’. Paul Foot takes up this speculation in his Red Shelley (1984) and imagines Byron supporting the Reform Bill of 1832, which enfranchised only property owners, and Shelley supporting the extension of the bill and the Chartist movement. These speculations are, according to the former leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, extremely unfair on Byron (The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron, 1988). After Byron’s death in Greece, Michael Foot points out that Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) actually identifies Byron with Prometheus himself: ‘He defied miserable men and still more miserable gods like Prometheus.’ And the same identification was made all over Europe. Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Poland’s national bard, wrote that Byron ‘had cursed and fumed like Prometheus, the Titan, whose shade he loved to evoke so often’. And in Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), the great soul of the Risorgimento, honoured the dead poet in these words: ‘never did the “eternal spirit of the chainless mind” make a brighter apparition amongst us. He seems at times a transformation of that immortal Prometheus, of whom he has written so nobly, whose cry of agony, yet of futurity, sounded above the cradle of the European world.’
After Shelley and Byron, Prometheus’ ‘cry of agony, yet of futurity’ gradually began to be identified with the struggle for socialism. Eight years after the death of Byron, Thomas Kibble Hervey (1799–1859) published an eighty-three-line poem, ‘Prometheus’ (1832), which places the chained Titan, with contemporary geographical accuracy, in the frozen plains of Russia, with its oppressed serfs taking inspiration from their manacled champion:
Amid this land of frozen plains and souls
Are beating hearts that wake long weary nights,
Unseen, to listen to thy far-off sigh;
And stealthily the serf, amid his toils,
Looks up to see thy form against the sky.
He writes of kings as ‘the petty Joves of earth’ and has a vision of freedom and deliverance, with the masses, inspired by the American example of monarchless democracy, coming to liberate Prometheus:
And thou shalt rise – the vulture and the chain
Shall both be conquered by thine own stern will!
Hark! o’er the far Atlantic comes a sound
Of falling fetters, and a wild, glad cry
Of myriad voices in a hymn to thee!
Hail to that music! To its tune sublime
Shall march the legions of the world of mind,
On to thy rescue, o’er each land and sea.
John Goodwyn Barmby (1820–81), a Christian Socialist who is credited with the invention of the word ‘communism’, published a monthly magazine in the 1840s called The Promethean or Communist Apostle. The second step towards Prometheus becoming a patron saint of socialism was probably the association of the Titan Fire-Giver with the heavy industries and technologies dependent on fire in one form or another. ‘Thanks to fire … man has attained domination over the world,’ writes Paul Ginestier in The Poet and the Machine (1961). In the heartland of German industry in the nineteenth century, the title of the magazine that kept its readers abreast with new industrial technology seemed almost inevitable: Prometheus: Illustrierte Wochenschrift über die Fortschritte in Gewerbe, Industrie und Wissenschaft (Illustrated Weekly on Developments in Trade, Industry and Science, Leipzig, 1899–1921). Prometheus becomes the patron of technology and the smokestacks of the industry of the Rhine, the Ruhr and the north of England, where I myself grew up, inhaling the sulphurous fumes of the Promethean gift: ‘The Iron Kingdom where his Majesty Fire reigns’, as Guy de Maupassant puts it. This identification with industry transformed Prometheus from being, in the words of Timothy Richard Wutrich, in his study on Prometheus and Faust (1995), the ‘primordial figure in the history of the concept of hope’, to being what the Marxist classical scholar George Thomson, making the concept of hope more specifically political, calls Prometheus in Aeschylus and Athens (1941): ‘the patron saint of the proletariat’. Karl Marx himself, who referred to Prometheus as ‘the first saint and martyr of the philosopher’s calendar’, was, during his editorship of the Rhineland Gazette, depicted in cartoons as Prometheus bound to a printing press, with the Prussian eagle gnawing his liver. At his feet, like the chorus of the Oceanides, the Daughters of Ocean represented the cities of the Rhineland pleading for freedom.
*
When the English poet and magazine editor John Lehmann wrote a book on the Caucasus in 1937, he called it Prometheus and the Bolsheviks – ‘because Prometheus is the oldest symbol of the Caucasus, and can at the same time
be considered as the oldest symbol of what the Bolsheviks have had as their aim: the deliverance of man from tyranny and barbarism by the seizure of material power’. On a Sovtorgflot boat on the Black Sea, heading for Sukhum in Georgia, Lehmann has a dream of meeting Prometheus, who says to him: ‘I find myself passionately on the side of the Bolsheviks when I hear accounts of the Civil War struggles. It reminds me of my own struggles with Jove over the fire business [my italics].’ Prometheus then announces that he has made a momentous decision: ‘I have decided’, says Prometheus, ‘to join the Party!’ Then Lehmann wakes from his dream, and the boat docks in Sukhum.
But as Prometheus gathers his supporters, so does the tyrant Zeus, whose parallel manifestations take on historically terrifying forms. As Shelley wrote, humanity is ‘heaven-oppressed’ (Prometheus Unbound, 1.674). The ministers of Jupiter trample down the ‘beloved race’ of Prometheus. These ministers are ‘thought-executing’. The brain of Jove is ‘all-miscreative’ (1.448). All monolithic ideologies, religious and political, are ‘miscreative’. Zeus (or Jupiter, or Jove) is the image of recurrent tyranny and he wants to destroy mankind through human agents like Hitler and Stalin; and though Prometheus foiled his destruction of mankind once by stealing fire, perhaps he now plays into the tyrant’s hands by giving men the freedom to use fire as they will. And because Prometheus, in his socialist avatar, is the champion of the industrial worker, the miner, the steelworker, Zeus particularly glories in fiery destruction and smoky pollution, and mankind’s slower death by poisoning the earth with factories fuelled by Promethean power.
The hasty and massive industrialisation of the socialist countries in the 1950s took little heed of the ecological consequences, and guidebooks to places like Romania glorified the industrial sites in a way that suggests they were conducting Prometheans around the sacred temples of their Titanic champion. ‘The town of Bicaz is already an important tourist centre,’ we read in Romania: A Guide Book (Bucharest, 1967). And why? ‘In this region beside the hydro-power station of Stejarul we find … the new mines of non-ferrous metals at Lesul Ursului and of barites at Obcina Voronetului, the cement mill at Bicaz, the timber-processing factory at Vaduri, the refinery at Darmesti – all of them industrial units built by socialism in its forward march.’ The prose is straining to become a Promethean poetry, and the cumulative roll call with its chemical and geographical names could in the hands of an Aeschylus or a Milton have epic scale. The writer is always relieved to leave natural scenic surroundings for the lyrical nomenclature of the chemical industries:
Presently, however, this charming natural scenery will have to give way to a monumental achievement of man’s hand. We are nearing the big industrial aggregate of Gheorghiu Georghiu-Dej Town [with its] huge tanks, cylindrical towers, silvery pipes, black pipes, white pipes curling gracefully … It supplies coke for electrodes, propane propylene for phenol, and butane-butylene for synthetic rubber.
Copşa Mică, once the most polluted town in Romania and maybe the world, whose carbon-black factory that blackened everything around it – houses, hills, people, sheep – and which is now derelict and its workers jobless and hopeless, gets this Promethean puff:
We continue to travel along the Tirnava Valley and after ten km we reach Copşa Mică, one of the important centres of the Romanian chemical industry, nicknamed the ‘retort’ town. We shall be struck by the bizarre outline of the carbon-black works looking like a dark castle – and our attention will be arrested by the installations of the sulphuric acid works and of the first Romanian works for polyvinyl chloride …
In my film, Hermes takes the golden statue of Prometheus to have it daubed and desecrated with carbon black thrown by the redundant workers of Copşa Mică. It took the whole crew days to get clean, and for weeks carbon black soiled everything we had. When we crossed the border into Bulgaria, the border guards asked our interpreter if British people were always so dirty.
The pattern of rapid Promethean industrialisation was replicated all over the former socialist world. The steel works of Nowa Huta, where I also filmed, were hurriedly constructed on a site where there was neither iron ore nor coal to create a proletarian workforce ten kilometres east of the ancient university town of Krakow, with its long-standing traditions of culture and religion. The idea of a bright future based on industrialisation and five-year plans created vast, technically out-of-date temples to Prometheus which are now, since 1989, rapidly becoming derelict ‘rustbelts’ with thousands out of work. The same fate has happened to the most ‘Promethean’ industries in Great Britain, coal and steel. Nick Danziger, in Danziger’s Britain, uses the expression ‘industrial genocide’ to describe this end to heroic industry, and paints a frightening picture of its aftermath of unemployment, vandalised inner cities, children without hope turning to drugs and then to crime to maintain their habit.
One of the visions sent to torment Shelley’s chained Prometheus is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and urban industrialisation:
Look! where round the wide horizon
Many a million-peopled city
Vomits smoke in the bright air.
Hark the outcry of despair!
The Prometheus of a hundred and eighty years later has to hearken to cries of despair from the now smokeless dereliction.
V
‘No doubt it has often been stated that the conquest of fire definitely separated man from the animal,’ writes Gaston Bachelard in La Psychoanalyse du Feu (1938), ‘but perhaps it has not been noticed that the mind in its primitive state, together with its poetry and knowledge, had been developed in meditation before a fire … the dreaming man seated before his fireplace is the man concerned with inner depths, a man in the process of development.’ And Dennis Donoghue equates the theft of fire with ‘the origin of consciousness’:
Fire enabled them to move from nature to culture, but it made culture a dangerous possession: it made tragedy possible … We have found the stolen fire identified with reason and knowledge, but it is probably better to identify it with the symbolic imagination … Above all, Prometheus made possible the imaginative enhancement of experience, the metaphorical distinction between what happens to us and what we make of the happening. That is to say, Prometheus provided men with consciousness and the transformational grammar of experience.
The fire that primitive man gazes into and that prompts him, in his flame-lit reverie, to become a poet is one thing; the fire we are forced to gaze into as we cross millennia at the end of the twentieth century is another. The poetry from this fire-gazing is hard though essential to achieve, and is almost the artist’s greatest challenge. The fire we must gaze into burns in Dresden, Hamburg, in the ovens of Auschwitz, in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, in all those places where non-combatants were burned to death; in the looted and destroyed villages of the Balkans; in the millions of Greek manuscripts and books burned in the library of Alexandria by Muslim fanatics, in Jewish and so-called ‘decadent’ books in Germany burned by Nazi fanatics; in the bonfire of the books of dissidents, including the poetry of Yannis Ritsos, in front of the Temple of Zeus in Athens under the Metaxas dictatorship; in Muslim books in the Institute for Oriental Studies of Sarajevo destroyed by rockets on 17 May 1992, with the incineration of the entire library of documents and manuscripts of Ottoman Bosnia; in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses burned by affronted Muslims in Yorkshire, England. The fire in which man discovered his poetry is used to destroy poetic endeavour. Poetry will either be tempered in that burning history or disappear. The meditative hearth now contains the Holocaust and the H-bomb. ‘The atom smashers may be regarded as the most Promethean of the Prometheans. By releasing the power latent in the nucleus of the atom they made the theft of Prometheus a very minor piece of effrontery.’
The flames that created reverie create nightmares. The flames that once created man’s capacity for dreaming are now fuelled by tragedies, and the expression we seek from their contemplation has to imagine those worst things in the dancing fires that ca
st our shadows into the next millennium. And if I say that the fire offered by the Prometheus of Aeschylus had not yet acquired the accretions of our bestial and barbaric human history, I would have to add that I think that Aeschylus gazed into what, for him in the fifth century BC, was an equivalent historical destruction, the eradication of an entire civilisation in the razing of the city of Troy. The beacons that brought the news of the fall of Troy after ten years to Argos and the torches that accompanied the procession that honours the Furies at the end of the Oresteia were lit from the annihilation of Troy. The gift of fire was already ambiguous to Aeschylus. The destructive had to give birth to the celebratory fire, and the celebratory fire, like our own VJ street bonfires in 1945, can never be a different element from the destructive flame. The images of torches in procession, the destructive element as a redemptive symbol, is paralleled in the way Jewish pilgrims to Auschwitz place Yohrzeit (Remembrance) candles in the ovens where over a million were cremated, a candle into the heart of dark, destroying flame.
VI
The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus ends with a great cry to the light that is common to all and that unites the audience with the surrounding universe and their suffering champion:
ὦ πάντων
αἰθὴρ κοινὸν φάος εἱλίσσων,
ἐσορᾷς μ᾽ ὡς ἔκδικα πάσχω. (1091–3)
O you heavens who roll around the light
that is common to everything,
you witness the injustices I suffer.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 21