The promethean artist: from thief, via metaphysical rebel, to cliché
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2006
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Traffic
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Melbourne Authors
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Arts: Department of English with Cultural Studies
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Journal (Paginated)
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Monaghan, P. (2006). The promethean artist: from thief, via metaphysical rebel, to cliché. Traffic, (8), 67-85.
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Open Access
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Deposited with permission of the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association
Abstract
It has become a commonplace, a cliché in fact, to call a great artist ‘Promethean’, after the Greek mythological figure that stole fire from the gods and was punished by being fastened to a rock in the wilderness. Zeus’ eagle then pecked out his (forever renewable) liver every day for thousands of years. But how did Prometheus, who in the earliest accounts in Hesiod was portrayed as a wily thief,become the symbol of creative genius with a distinctly rebellious edge? Prometheus was associated with pottery and sculpture in antiquity. Lucian of Samosata may have been the earliest to make the direct connection between Prometheus and poetry. The notion of the Promethean artist was brought to its apotheosis by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774–1832) who, at least in his younger days, saw himself as Prometheus, and was called ‘Prometheus-Goethe’ by a friend. Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ works also incorporate a strong doseof metaphysical rebellion, despite his ongoing belief in divinity. By the time we reach Nietzsche, the Promethean individual, for whom life is an aesthetic construct, embodies a ‘necessary sacrilege’ against the gods. During the twentieth century, the metaphysical and symbolic credentials of the Promethean artist empty out into a Romantic commonplace. How did we get from Hesiod, to Nietzsche, to cliché? This article traces the genealogy of this transformation from a quasicomic thief to creative genius and rebel, and argues that Nietzsche’s use of the inherently metaphysical Prometheus in The Birth of Tragedyparadoxically hastened the Titan’s fall into empty topos.
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classics, the myth of Prometheus, Nietzche