Antigone Lecture Two
Week One
Spring 2008
I. Burial and funeral
practices:
What women do in ancient Greek society: give birth
and mourn the dead.
Tale of another unburied
body:
The Iliad
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20734/20734-h/images/fig143th.png)
Antigone:
“But if I had allowed /My own
mother’s son to rot, an unburied corpse—
That would have been an agony.” (ll.520-22)
She cites “unwritten
laws” as her authority for defying Creon:
“Nor did I think your edict had such force/that you, a mere mortal,
could override the gods,/the great
unwritten unshakeable traditions./They are alive, not just today or
yesterday/they live forever, from the first of time,/and no one knows when they
first saw the light”. (ll. 503-508)
Is this an ancient
superstition or do we still adhere to specific burial prescriptions as ways of
honoring the dead and ensuring their rest?
II. Sophocles’ Antigone has inspired many other Antigones,
many readings and many versions: a
cluster of Antigones around WWII and the Nazis
Remember HEGEL? Link (http://www.wpclipart.com/famous/philosophy/Georg_Hegel.png)
Dialectical thinking: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis
Aufhebung = canceling, preservation and lifting up
out of oppositions come syntheses and
enlightenment/progress
Lectures on Aesthetics (1832! Didn’t he die in 1831?),
Philosophy of Right (1821),
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
George Steiner describes Hegel’s understanding from the Phenomenonology:
The rites
of burial, wth their literal re-enclosure of the dead
in the place of the earth and in the shadow-sequence of generations which are
the foundation of the familial, are the particular task of a woman. Where this task falls upon a sister, where a man has
neither mother nor wife to bring him home to the guardian earth, burial takes
on the highest degree of holiness.
George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone
Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1984) 34.
Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion (1832)
First Hegel endorses Antigone and
determines that, as a woman, her sphere is that of the family, inner feelings, the sacred. But then he adds.
“Creon
is not a tyrant, but rather a moral power; Creon is
not wrong. He insists that the law of the state, the authority of government be
respected and that offenses against the state be punished. Each of these sides
realizes only one of the moral forces and has only that as its content; that is
one-sidedness and the point of eternal justice is that both sides be wrong because
they are one-sided, but simultaneously both sides are right. Both are
recognized as valid in the movement of moral principle; here both have their
validity but their balanced validity, It is only the one-sidedness, against
which justice rises up.”
“Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion,” Hegel on
Tragedy, ed. Anne and Henry Paolucci (New York:
Doubleday & Company, 1962) 325.
My thesis:
Hegel suggests a reading of
"Antigone" that strictly separates the
personal/familial and the political in order to oppose them to one
another. Antigone (as woman) is a
representative of the family; Creon is a
representative of the state, and as spokespersons for different value systems
they collide. Who is right? According to Hegel, they are both right
because each espouses a valid ethical system. Yet each is tragic because
each represents only part of the totality of moral life.
Thesis: The strict division of the personal as
Family and the political as State that supports Hegel's thinking on the play,
while useful, is not necessarily borne out by closer examination of the text. Creon is not purely associated with the State and Antigone is not purely associated with the family.
Evidence for the
argument:
I. Antigone
not purely associated with Family:
Heroine’s name/Title of Play:
“anti-gone” = “anti-generation,” as in someone who is against the generating of
human beings within families. She dies
w/o having “generated.”
Antigone’s coldness toward Ismene
How can someone who loves a
brother so much in death abuse a sister in life?
Antigone’s political statements: Antigone also speaks of rules and rights and justice as if she
were there to enforce law.
Her explanation of her
defiance: mysterious
lines on p.105 (995-1004)
II. Creon not purely
associated with State
He lost a loved one in this
war: Megaerus--just as Achilles lost Patroclos and avenged himself on Hector’s corpse
Creon sees household and state as a more or less seamless
continuity:
“Show me the man who rules
his household well/I’ll show you someone fit to rule the state” (94)
Changes his mind and humbles himself when Tiresias
predicts he will lose another son. The argument that
prevails with Creon is a threat to kinship.
ANOTHER
We read these articles as Non-Specialists:
Larry J. Bennett; William
Blake Tyrell: “Sophocles’ Antigone and Funeral
Oratory”
The
American Journal of Philology, Vol. 111, No. 4 (Winter,
1990), pp.441-456.
Wagons carrying the chests
formed a procession more elaborate than any family could mount. While laws
denied the family’s right to bring outsiders, slaves, strangers, and paid
mourners to its [private] funerals, anyone could join in the public ceremony.
Setting forth from the agora [open
place of assembly], the procession moved solemnly toward the Dipylon [gate]….It was perhaps escorted by hoplites in full
armor; the high-pitched keening of the women fills the air, soon to be
superseded by the orator’s sonorous words. When the dead arrive at the public
cemetery, the mourners seek renewal through an oration that replaces not only
the familial rites of fertility and purification but also the praise and
laments sung for individual heroes by poets. (444-45).
This going-public of the
family funeral was a loss for women who had previously controlled funeral rites
If this is the case, the play
is about who has control of the corpse: the state or
the family. If the family can no longer quietly bury its dead w/o public
ceremony, the state has taken control of the dead.
Under these conditions (if
they did prevail) what Antigone is doing is protesting the intrusion of
the state on the traditional rights of women.
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