Tragedy and Politics in

Sophocles’s Antigone

November 2, 2015

Antigonick, Anne Carson

1st Choral OdeEnds with a warning:

“Overstep what the city allows,Tramp down right or treat the lawWillfully, as his own word, Then let this wonder of the world remember:He’ll have put himself beyond the pale,When he comes begging we will turn our backs” (25)

• Religious law and the gods are barely present in this ode.

• The focus is on civil laws and the consequences of breaking them: exile or the condition of being state-less.

• Elsewhere Sophocles describes exile as a “living death.”

Rebel imagined as male

Antigone:

“It’s a test you’re facing, Whether you are who you are, True to your seed and breed And generation, or whether—” (8).

Creon:

“Until a man has passed this test of office And proved himself in the exercise of power, He can’t be truly known—for what he is” (16).

Ismene Chorus (Parodos)

“The doom in our blood “Glory be to brightness” comes back”

Antigone Chorus “And if death comes, “Glory be to victory” so be it” “We

overwhelmed him on the walls”

Ismene Chorus

“You don’t have a chance” “Glory be to brightness”

Antigone Thebes

night dawndeath lifeHades Dionysusmourning celebration cursed blessedremembering forgettingpast futurefamily citizenryaristocracy democracyirreplaceability replaceability

Antigone:

“I will bury him myself. And if death comes, so be it. There’ll be a glory in it. I’ll go down to the underworld Hand in hand with a brother. And I’ll go with my head held high. The gods will be proud of me” (11).

• Here she speaks in the traditional voice of classical Greek (or homeric) heroism.

The Iliad

Achilles: “Patroclus’ bodyStill lies by the ships, unmourned, unburied” (435)

Antigone

AntigoneAbout Polyneices:“He’s to be left unwept, unburied” (R. Fagles trans.)

Antigone & homeric heroism

Mourning, Replaceability, and the Polis

• tension between aristocratic and democratic mourning practices, between private and public control of mourning and burial

• ban on the “threnos” or public lament in the 6th century BCE (associated with women and elites)

• Traditionally, laments commemorated the unique individuality of the dead, emphasized the suffering of loved ones, and demanded vengeance.

The Homeric LamentThe Iliad

“Dawn spread her saffron light over earth,And they drove the horses into the cityWith great lamentation. The mules pulled the corpse…And there was not a man or woman left in the city, for an unbearable sorrowHad come upon them. They met Priam by the gatesAs he brought the body through, and in the front Hector’s dear wife and queenly mother threw themselvesOn the rolling cart and pulled out their hairAs they clasped his head amid the grieving crowd.They would have mourned Hector outside the gates All the day long until the sun went down” (489).

The Homeric Lament

Antigone

“She sees the bare corpse and lets out a screechAnd starts to curse whoever did the deed.She was like a wild bird round an empty nest.She lifted dust in her hands and let it fall.She poured the water three times from her urn,Taking care to do the whole thing right” (28).

Mourning, Replaceability, and the Polis

• graves were moved outside city limits, and city walls marked the boundary between the living and the dead

• Creon’s decree replaces family ties with citizenship.

• Martial metaphors describe good citizenship and emphasize the replaceability of the individual.

“For the patriot,Personal loyalty always must give wayTo patriotic duty.

Solidarity, friends,Is what we need. The whole crew must close ranks” (16).

• Creon defines a “public man” as “a comrade you’d depend on in a battle” (42).

• Tragedy, as a genre of the polis, replaces female mourning

Mourning, Replaceability, and the Polis

Antigone:

Not for a husband, not even for a sonWould I have broken the law.Another husband I could always findAnd have other sons by him if one were

lost.But with my father gone, and my mother

gone,Where can I find another brother, ever?The law of this same logic I obeyedWhen I disobeyed Creon. (54)

Creon regarding Haemon: “He has other fields to plough” (37).

Limits of replaceability

Parody of reason giving; exposes the violence of measuring individual replaceability.

The Offensive Apology

The Chorus

“The decisive making of meaning is something Creon considers to be his right (though of course the Chorus claims it as well). This after all is what drives him throughout: the quest to own the power of definition (who is friend, who is enemy?) and to control the dissemination of meaning” (Bonnie Honig).

The Citizen, the Outsider, and the “Inbetween Thing”

• Practices of estrangement (citizen stranger)

• Insider outsiders: “Anti-Theban Theban” (17)

• Antigone acts in Creon’s place and performs both male and female roles (the lament and the burial)

• Polyneices collapses the distance between the living and the dead (reenters the city).

• Creon’s treatment of Polyneices and Antigone confuses the realms of the living and dead. Both are left “in between.”

Adaptation, Translation(Antigone and Creon’s political afterlives)

Heaney has Creon use the language of contemporary politics. He refers to “traitors,” “subversives,” “disaffected elements,” “patriotic duty,” “our security” and “a poisonous minority.”

“Early in 2003, the situation that pertains in Sophocles’ play was being reenacted, in our own world. Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war on Iraq…Are you in favour of state security or are you not? If you don’t support the eradication of this tyrant in Iraq and the threat he poses to the free world, you are on the wrong side in ‘the war on terror.’”

-- S. Heaney

We also find Heaney’s Creon speakingspecifically in the voice of George W. Bush:

Antigone: “This is law and order In the land of good King Creon.

This is his edict for you And for me Ismene, for me!

And he’s coming to announce it. ‘I’ll flush ’em out,’ he says. Whoever isn’t for us Is against us” (7)

AntigonickAnne Carson

Illustrations:Bianca Stone

Creon: “Wild she may be / But even the wildest horses come to heel / When they’re reined and bitted right” (30).

“For I’m a strange new kind of Inbetween thing aren’t I”