Tragedy and
Politics in
Sophocles’s
Antigone
November 2, 2015
Antigonick, Anne Carson
1st Choral Ode
Ends with a warning:
“Overstep what the city allows,
Tramp down right or treat the law
Willfully, as his own word,
Rebel imagined as male
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.”
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
comes back”
“Glory be to brightness”
Antigone
Chorus
“And if death comes,
so be it”
“Glory be to victory”
Ismene
Chorus
“You don’t have a chance”
“We overwhelmed him on the walls”
“Glory be to brightness”
Antigone
night
death
Hades
mourning
cursed
remembering
past
family
aristocracy
irreplaceability
Thebes
dawn
life
Dionysus
celebration
blessed
forgetting
future
citizenry
democracy
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.
Antigone & homeric heroism
The Iliad
Antigone
Achilles:
“Patroclus’ body
Still lies by the ships,
unmourned, unburied”
(435)
Antigone
About Polyneices:
“He’s to be left
unwept, unburied”
(R. Fagles trans.)
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 Lament
The Iliad
“Dawn spread her saffron light over earth,
And they drove the horses into the city
With great lamentation. The mules pulled the corpse
…
And there was not a man or woman left in the city, for an
unbearable sorrow
Had come upon them. They met Priam by the gates
As he brought the body through, and in the front
Hector’s dear wife and queenly mother threw themselves
On the rolling cart and pulled out their hair
As 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 screech
And 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.
Mourning, Replaceability, and the Polis
“For the patriot,
Personal loyalty always must give way
To 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
The Offensive Apology
Antigone:
Not for a husband, not even for a son
Would I have broken the law.
Another husband I could always find
And 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 obeyed
When 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 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 speaking
specifically 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)
Antigonick
Anne 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”