reconstructors have made him out to be.) Aristotle's
Poetics
is in any case a sleight of mind, a brilliant trick. At one stroke he got the West for over two thousand years to discuss tragedy and drama as humanistic matters alone, subject to the rational criteria of
belles lettres
. Aristotle ignored (astonishingly) the nature and purpose of the
dionysia,
the religious ceremonies at which Athenian plays were presented. The religious, celebratory, and sacrificial nature of the Greek plays, and the drumbeat of blood, flesh, and need behind them were superbly snubbed by Aristotle, whose own act of
hubris,
when one comes to think of it, has few equals. It took Nietzsche to restore the balance and put Dionysius (his Dionysius, at all events) in the picture. Fay Weldon does not believe in regularized Aristotelian tragedy, and all her works might be called Dionysian. She dislikes religion, almost as much as Nietzsche, disapproving both Jewish and Christian, her references to Christianity being more caustic and detailed in the aggregate than those to Judaism. Yet she is often at her best, her most witty, when pondering or playing with some piece of Scripture: "If thine eye offend me take a good look at yourself. If thine I offend thee, change it" (
Cloning,
p. 324).
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At times Weldon seems to be trying to invent or interpret a religion of Darwinism; although she speaks negatively of Hardy's
Tess
in
Letters to Alice,
there are moments of approximation of a Hardyesque cosmology, but without any tragedies or Presidents of the Immortals. Weldon is not trying to do without religion altogether; the religion summoned up in the novels is less rational Epicurean than a mythical or mythological relative of Wicca, even though one can sense the author trying to keep the lid on this.
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At one point in
Puffball
(1980), the narrative voice remonstrates against personifying blind forces:
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 | | Not that "nature" can reasonably be personified in this wayfor what is nature, after all, for living creatures, but the sum of the chance genetic events which have led us down one evolutionary path or another. And although what seem to be its intentions may, in a bungled and muddled way, work well enough to keep this species or that propagating, they cannot be said always to be desirable for the individual. [P. 14]
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No, perhaps nature cannot
reasonably
be personified, but what excites Weldon is not reason but the great Life Force, the biological drive which generates life.
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Having repudiated personification, Weldon brings it back:
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| | We no longer see Nature as blind, although she is. Her name is imbued with a sense of purpose, as the name of God used to be.... if we can not in all
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