Antigone by Sophocles - I know / that wild and futile action makes no sense.

 ISMENE:                                               I know

 that wild and futile action makes no sense. (p. 161)

Antigone’s sister is trying to undermine the very premise of Greek drama, of literature.

Long, long ago, I read Sophocles’s Antigone (c. 441 BCE) in a class naively titled “Western Civilization,” which was required of all liberal arts undergraduates at my university.  So everybody had to read one Greek play, this one, before exiting college.  Almost everybody – not the engineers, I guess, and too bad for them.  Although I knew the Greek stories pretty well, Antigone was thus the first Greek play I ever read.

Pretty good choice for if-you-only-read-one.  Antigone, even for Sophocles, feels classical, ethically serious and dramatically balanced, the kind of play from which a literary critic will derive rules.  When I describe Euripides as a “screwball,” it is in comparison to plays like Antigone, which invite later art like William Henry Rinehart’s 1870 sculpture “Antigone Pouring a Libation over the Corpse of Her Brother Polynices,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Western Civ, we turned Antigone, and every other text assigned, into an ethical debate.  Duty to the state versus duty to – what, exactly, is Antigone serving?  Religion, higher law, family, the integrity of the self.  Jean Anouilh, in his 1944 existentialist adaptation, pushes strongly towards the self, while Seamus Heaney, partly inspired to adapt the play as a protest against the American war in Iraq, in The Burial at Thebes (2004 ) is more interested in the justness of the law, in human rights (p. 76).  Antigone at times, at her least sympathetic, comes across as a religious fanatic, guilty only of what she calls “the crime of piety” (161), although she is usually more sympathetic:

ANTIGONE:  I cannot share in hatred, but love.

CREON:  Then go down there, if you must love, and love

     the dead.  No woman rules me while I live.

Creon, as usual, has a point but goes too far.  His animus against women, specifically, is mentioned several times, as is his blinding materialism.  He seems more worried about bribery than anything else – that his guards or the prophet Teresias are against him because they have been bribed.  No wonder he has so little understanding of divine law. 

Now I am wandering.  I was surprised to see that the Guard is a legitimate clown role, much like in Shakespeare.  Jean Anouilh greatly expanded the part, but a lot of it is right there in Sophocles.  Here is the guard not clowning:

We saw the girl.  She cried the sharp and shrill

cry of a bitter bird which sees the nest

bare where the young birds lay.  (173)

I have trouble, in the Greek plays, sorting through the metaphorical language, distinguishing between the clichés and the original images.  The “ship of state,” right, that shows up constantly, including in Antigone; everyone drags in that one.  But this image of bereaved animal motherhood applied to Antigone seeing her brother’s desecrated corpse, that seemed original and interestingly ironic.  Antigone has a few of these. 

Antigone begins at dawn.  How many of the plays we have read so far begin at dawn?  Agamemnon, Ajax, etc.  I have not kept track.

All of the translations here are by Elizabeth Wyckoff.  I would likely prefer to see a performance using the Heaney translation because it is easier to understand, not necessarily a virtue while reading or looking for quotations.

As perfect as the Rinehart statue is, I was tempted by another Met-owned piece, an 1893 lithograph by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec of a performance of Antigone.  And why not include it, too.

Next week, we move to Rhesus by Euripides (probably), his earliest play (probably).  It is a good choice for if-you-only-skip-one.  I remember it as a dud.  How lucky we are to have so many Euripides plays that some of them are duds.  Well, I’ll take another look at it.