SOPHOCLES Another friend of mine disagrees with me about Sophocles. I didn't get all that much about enduring human suffering, he writes in connection with my citing the latter s plays as examples of poetry felicitously at work. To me, much of what he was writing could be summed up in one line from Antigone Stubbornness and stupidity are twins. It seems to me that he keeps returning to this idea: the real sin is not ignorance, but willful, stubborn ignorance. Reading this, I ask myself what is edifying about stubborn ignorance? In the characters of Oedipus, Ajax, Antigone, and Creon, Sophocles arguably brings that sort of ignorance to life on a theater stage. Is the audience edified by the sight? Hardly. Is it edified by how well Sophocles does all this? I doubt it: that would come close to being awed by someone s skill in cooking a terrible tasting dinner on purpose. Is it edified, then, by the superiority of its own wisdom to that of the characters? That too seems hard to maintain, considering that the audience s superior wisdom is largely illusory. What does Sophocles repeatedly show if not that? Who in Oedipus position, for example, would not behave as he does? If even good poetry does not necessarily edify its audience about the sort of beings they are, then what is the point of trying to export the idea of poetic accomplishment to other areas of human endeavor in the name of edification? There s an easy fix here. I could allow that my friend may be right about Sophocles, but then write off the latter as a poor example of what I called good love poetry. But I greatly admire Sophocles, as is probably apparent from my frequent references to him in other contexts. It therefore occurs to me that this might be as good a time as any to explain that admiration. In the process, I might even succeed in shedding some light on what it means for poetry to edify. I ll limit myself to Antigone, which I think is Sophocles best work, and, in the interest of brevity, only to some aspects of it. Let s start with a take on the play that has the virtue of being interestingly implausible.
In Antigone, Creon desecrates the corpse of his nephew and enemy Polyneices. The gods apparently disapprove of that behavior. Through the seer Teiresias, they send Creon a message to desist. Because he distrusts seers, Creon delays complying. He complies eventually, but in the brief interval the gods destroy his family: his wife, his son, and his niece all commit suicide. He himself ends up pitiful and disgraced. If you are an Athenian watching this in 440 B.C, you know your Homer. Virtually everyone did. The most famous corpse-desecrator in all of Greek literature was Achilles in the Iliad. The gods also disliked his behavior. They let him know that too. But the messenger in that instance was Achilles own mother, a minor goddess herself, whom her son had every reason to trust. Hence Achilles complies without hesitating. No price is exacted from him for his earlier inhumanity. Indeed, Achilles remains a celebrated hero. In other words, an Athenian would recognize the analogy and wonder about it. Now add to the picture that the reasons why Achilles desecrates Hector s corpse are, first, that Hector killed Patroclus whom Achilles loved, and, second, that Achilles blames himself for Patroclus having gone into a battle that was Achilles own to fight. He was sulking in his tent while Patroclus, having borrowed his armor, went out to confront Hector in his stead. Back in Antigone, it seems that in the battle that Polyneices brought down on the city, and that just ended, Creon lost his son Megareus. In addition, he apparently has some reason to blame himself for that death. We learn that before she takes her own life, Creon s wife Eurydice blames her husband for the death of both her sons Haemon, the suicide, and Megareus, the battle casualty. It is not clear why. Perhaps, as she sees it, Creon should not have allowed Megareus to go into battle, but gone himself. See all that and the analogy between Creon and Achilles becomes more compelling, but also more troubling. All of this divine mayhem because of a moment s hesitation, a hesitation, moreover, that is entirely comprehensible? If you are that Athenian, do you now sit in that audience saying to yourself, Ah, well yes, those are the ways of the gods. Creon should have listened when he had a chance? Or do you feel outraged by the injustice and inhumanity of it all? If it were me sitting there, I would say to myself that while there is nothing I can do to defy the workings of so-called cosmic
justice, I would surely try to defy it if I could. It might then dawn on me that I am suddenly speaking Antigone s language, this after understanding the play up to that point as an indictment of her rebelliousness and, possibly, sympathizing with that indictment. Now one can argue that the reference to Megareus in the play is brief and somewhat obscure, its meaning retroactively complicated by Euripides The Phoenician Women, a later play dealing with the same events. In it, Creon s other son is named, not Megareus, but Menoeceus. He is not slain in the battle itself, but kills himself while it goes on so as to save the city from an ancient curse. But in 440 B.C., that play had not yet been written. Another one had, namely Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes, remembrance of which Sophocles promiscuously invokes in the first choral ode in Antigone. In Aeschylus play, which every Athenian had also seen or read, there, plain as daylight, went Creon s son Megareus, sent into battle by Eteocles with an unmistakable hint that he will die in it. Perhaps, watching Antigone and hearing Creon speak as though he had more than one son, you have wondered what happened to that son. Now you know. One may rightly insist that there was more to the mythic tradition than is revealed in these plays and that some of that more is probably lost to us. But is there any reason to insist on it in this particular context except to keep Antigone from being understood as this brief sketch suggests that it was? Moreover, if what found its way into Euripides play was a bit of mythic tradition now lost to us, the upshot is the same: Creon lost a son in connection with the events that Polyneices brought down on Thebes. And one might add that in Euripides play Creon bears some responsibility for that loss. Was that too part of the mythic tradition, or was it Euripides taking liberties with it? It seems to me, in other words, that the troubling analogy between Creon and Achilles is alive and well in Antigone, obviously there to be seen if one wants to see it. Some scholars have argued, though not on these grounds, that most Athenians understood Antigone as the tragedy of Creon. I am not interested in defending that position. There are some good reasons for taking it seriously but also for doubting that Sophocles intended his play to be understood that way. I am just raising the question why one would want or not want -- to recognize the presence of the analogy described. As I see it,
that is not scholarly issue at all, but a poetic one. It involves asking oneself what happens in the theatre as the drama and the poetry unroll onstage, one line at a time. Look at the first thirty-eight lines. Two women outside the palace in the early morning hours are having a conversation. They are the daughters of Oedipus who have had a hard life as their own brother s offspring with his own mother, who is both their mother and their grand-mother. She hanged herself, their father took out his own eyes, and their brothers recently killed each other in battle. At first, Sophocles language is relatively abstract. No details are spelled out. They have suffered pain, affliction, outrage, shame, Antigone says. The playwright does not invite or encourage his audience to focus specifically on the nature of that suffering or shame by imagining, for example, how it might feel to confront the world as one own brother s daughter. The sisters remain objects of conventional pity, not especially lively or painful -- the sort that one feels for unfortunate people when one does not focus on the concrete details of their misfortunes. But then, suddenly, the language turns brutally concrete. By virtue of their uncle s decree, their brother s dead body is to be left unburied, tombless, a treasure for birds of prey who will catch a scent of it from afar and swoop down upon it for a meal. It s an old Homeric image of what may have been an ancient reality. Even in the first few lines of the Iliad, Homer talks of the dead bodies of warriors finding burial in the jaws of dogs and the beaks of birds. Sophocles puts a new edge on that image, inviting the sight and smell of a corpse from the perspective of those birds. And in this case, it is not some anonymous corpse, but that of the women s own brother. If the audience is listening, their response will be both revulsion and a sharper pity. Antigone s next line, focusing on Creon, their own uncle and author of the decree, invites them to transfer that revulsion to him. Moreover, she goes on, anyone defying the decree will be stoned to death. Who is likely to defy it except the women on stage before the audience s eyes? So here s another concrete image taking shape, or threatening to take shape, in the audience s mind, namely of the bodies of those two battered to death in a hail of stones.
In other words, through those forty or so lines, and in short order, Sophocles sharply escalates the emotional demands his poetry places on his audience. I imagine two alternative audience reactions to all this. One is the temptation to take the edge of one s discomfort by accepting Antigone s invitation to metamorphose one s feelings into outrage and anger at Creon. The other is to accomplish the same thing by invalidating Antigone s speech and hearing it as that of a mere woman overwrought, as women often are. For a start, she and her sister are outside before daybreak, which conservative tradition at the time forbade as behavior inappropriate for women, at least women of a certain social class. Next, of course, by line forty-three, Antigone proposes to defy the decree, which in this case means not only defying the government, but her own uncle as male head of her family. That was not done either, possibly even less cavalierly than defying the government. In other words, to a conservative Greek male sensibility always on the edge of misogyny, Antigone could come across as a woman out of control, and with that perception of her whatever she says that may justify her speech to an unbiased sensibility loses its power. It sounds like emotionally extravagant talk about birds and the smell of corpses. Her subsequent intemperate conversation with Ismene, model of female submissive uprightness, confirms them in their stance. There may a third reaction, namely to wait and see what happens next, to withhold judgment until things become a little clearer. But what happens next takes the form of continuous and relentless pushing by the poetry and the play in the direction of one or another form of partisanship. There is no other way of making sense of it. Differently put: there is no other way of taking the edge off of it. But why would one want to take the edge off of it? Because genuine compassion is painful! What is especially painful is the sight of suffering that makes no sense, suffering for which no one can be blamed. In one s own case, watching a play that hurts, what s simpler than talking one s way into understanding it so that it will hurt a little less? Is there anything harder than not doing that and, instead, finding it in oneself to suffer with grace? If I am right about this, the question is not whether the audience will break under the burdens Sophocles places upon them, but when. And I suspect that for many in the audience of Antigone, the matter gets settled in the first forty
or fifty lines of the play. Sense-making is the ultimate anesthetic, always ready at hand. You can flee from the sight of suffering into rationality and stop seeing and feeling. Or you can wallow in your pain in a kind willful hyperaesthesia that enables you to transform your feelings into outrage and anger. That, too, is ultimately anesthetic sense-making. The first is the preferred method of the heartless person. The second that of the sentimentalist -- heartlessness posturing as exquisite humanity. Creon comes across as an example of the first, Antigone of the second. Each sees the other as falling badly short. Each is in one way or another being obtuse, stubborn, stupid, if you will, or as my friend would have it. But who invites the audience to experience or to understand the play with those dimensions of assessment at the forefront of their minds? No one, certainly not Sophocles. They invite themselves through the predilections for anesthesia that they bring with them into the theater. And now, forty or fifty lines into the play, there they are, on their way with their choices in place. Sophocles is ready for them. Recalling Aeschylus imagery from Seven Against Thebes, he regales the incipient partisans of Creon with a patriotic review of the battle that the city has just fought for its survival and won. He follows it up with a long, very rational speech by Creon about just government and the respect owed one s city. The speech culminates in a justification of his decree, albeit with a touch of disagreeable relish as Creon envisages the ghastly sight of a human corpse becoming meat for dogs and carrion birds. He is talking about the corpse of his own sister s son. But when the welfare of the city is at stake, tough men have it in them to set their personal feelings aside and make hard decisions. Right, replies his conservative audience. Let s just hope that you are that tough. They already know that his own niece will defy him. He has just unwittingly committed himself to killing her. They are starting to feel and to fear for him just a little. After all, it is completely unnecessary for Creon to distinguish this brutally between the merits of Eteocles and those of Polyneices. As everyone in the audience who watched Aeschylus earlier play knows, or knows simply on the basis of the mythic tradition, Eteocles was just at much at fault as Polyneices, if not more so. The quarrel between the two brothers started when Eteocles denied Polyneices his due. But perhaps that audience also recognizes that Creon has a political problem to solve. He takes up the kingship as a member of a family that has
repeatedly brought the city to grief in the pursuit of private issues at the expense of the public interest. Eteocles and Polyneices are only the most recent example. Their father Oedipus had his own issues, one consequence of which was a god-sent plague. Creon needs to distance himself from that heritage. He does it by going out of his way to dismiss family relations as irrelevant to sound public decisions. Polyneices may have been his nephew, but he will leave his body as meat for dogs and birds. The sight will serve as a warning to anyone tempted to contemplate an assault on the public good. It will turn out later, of course, that Creon himself is partly driven in all of this by a private issue, namely the grief he feels at the loss of his son in the battle Polyneices brought down on Thebes with help of a foreign army. But by the time that connection is revealed to the audience, much else will have changed. The need of his partisans to understand him rationally will have been displaced by the urgency to understand him sympathetically. By then, he will have made obvious mistakes that will need forgiving lest the audience s understanding of the play collapse altogether. Meanwhile, the incipient partisans of Antigone, having also listened to the first choral ode and recalling Eteocles problematic behavior, heard its patriotic thrust as tendentious. To be sure, it is the chorus talking, but while it has its sublime moments, the chorus of Antigone comes across as somewhat confused, oddly submissive, and short on authority, the more so as the play progresses. One does not have to like what it says. As for Creon s speech, they hear a man who is a fool. In the name of grandsounding principles, he is placing himself in a position where he will have to execute his own niece. He is not likely to survive that necessity politically, yet talks in a way that will make it impossible for him to reverse himself. In addition, there is that too obvious relish at the end of the speech. Creon seems to like the image of Polyneices corpse being eaten by dogs and birds. It reminds the audience of their revulsion. But just in case that revulsion is beginning to fade, Sophocles has decided to breathe new life into it. A guard appears to reveal that someone has defied the decree, not exactly by interring the corpse, but by sprinkling it with thirsty dust. The image speaks for itself: dust absorbing the moisture of the decomposing corpse.
Creon sends the guard away with threats of death and torture unless he produces the person who did this. And then, after the great ode to human resourcefulness, the guard returns, this time with Antigone. As he tells the story, he and his fellow guards, intimidated by Creon s threats, had returned to the site, swept away the sprinkled dust and bared the clammy body. Then they sat on a nearby ridge windward of the stench and watched all night. Apparently, coming up, the sun itself could not stand the sight of the body and raised a dust storm that, even as it stripped the land, blotted out the sky. When the storm had passed, there, in front of her brother s corpse stood Antigone, wailing as she saw the body stripped and bare. If you are on her side, you see it through her eyes. If you are not, you resent the guard for his gleeful use of the occasion to turn himself into a poet. He obviously enjoys embarrassing Creon. And perhaps you say to yourself, Isn t that typical? You ask someone to do a simple job like guarding a corpse. The next thing you know is your having to listen to a long, implausible story about why they didn t do it. Except that in this instance the consequences are catastrophic. If that is your reaction, you fully understand what happens next. Creon asks Antigone if she really did this, as though the guard had lied. He desperately hopes that she will deny it. Can t she hear the desperation in his voice? Apparently not, or she doesn t care. I did it, she says. Perhaps you didn t know that I had forbidden it, he hopes. Oh, I knew, she replies; everyone knew. Then she launches herself into that famous speech about the unwritten laws of heaven, a speech that culminates in her calling him a fool. She leaves him no out. You resent her for it. Her speech about the laws of heaven has left you unmoved, as it has the chorus, the laws of heaven being a non-existent principle that she conjures up out of whole cloth. After all, you haven t heard that twenty-five centuries later people will reverently point to that speech as the first articulation of the idea of natural law. Rational person that you are, you know that Creon has brought this down upon himself when he thoughtlessly issued that decree. He had reasons for doing it, but he made a mistake. It was an understandable mistake because he did not know, as you already did at the time, that Antigone was lying in wait for him. It was a mistake all the same, and you have seen its consequences coming. But her heartless and offensive behavior enables you
to let him off the hook. In your mind, more important than that he made a mistake becomes the fact that it was her behavior that made it a mistake. She is bent on destroying him and you are starting to hate her for it. And as he goes on to make, or turns out to have made, other mistakes, the more you will hate her for them. When after he has already condemned her to death, you learn, for example, that she was to marry his son, who loves her, you do not hold it against him that he is about to kill his son s bride. You hold it against her that she has placed him in that position and cared so little about her future husband and his family. When his son consequently kills himself, you do not hold it against Creon that his behavior drove his son into self-destruction. You hold it against her that the son was besotted with her, alienated from his father, and mad with grief. As the foundations of your partisanship for Creon become progressively shakier, you shore them up through an increasing and increasingly irrational -- hatred of Antigone. Chances are that in that process, your learning that Creon lost his son Megareus in the recent battle is the last straw. How could Antigone, who had to know that, be that heartless in dealing with him, she who described herself as among those who love and cannot get over her own brother s unburied body? Whether you think of Achilles or not, in your eyes Creon becomes a man victimized by circumstances, his family, and the gods in ways far beyond anything that might be warranted by the mistakes he made. And take just one more step beyond that perception, into rebelling against the injustice of it all, especially the gods, and staring you in the face will be the death of your understanding of the play. Like Oedipus life and cleverness, all your mental acrobatics to save yourself some pain will have been in vain. You might as well join Creon in his lamentations onstage, not for him, but for yourself. A partisan of Antigone will experience the play differently but end up in a similar place. He will sustain his progressively problematic partisanship for her through an increasing hatred of Creon. Sophocles seems occasionally to put the brakes on that hatred, but only to allow it to emerge renewed and invigorated. For example, Creon decides at one point that he will execute not just Antigone but Ismene as well. He knows, he says, that she is guilty, too. You know that she isn t, but as a partisan of Antigone, his decision is music
to your ears. It shows just how unjust he is, and how right, by contrast, Antigone is. But then, woe be to you, Creon reverses himself. He knows Ismene is innocent. What do you do now with that emotional check that you have already cashed? As always, Sophocles flies to your rescue. So how do you plan to kill Antigone? asks the chorus in the next moment. I will bury her alive, Creon replies in effect. In actuality, he plans to have her walled in in a tomb, and even provide her with food on a regular basis, but you do not hear that as an improvement over stoning her to death, or as a sentence that is potentially reversible when tempers cool. You hear it as cruel, inhumane, and grotesque in view of her obsession with burial. It redeems him as object of your hatred. You feel a lot better than you did just a moment earlier. And when Antigone laments her own impending death and loses her way in a plainly irrational argument about how she would never have buried a dead husband in defiance of laws, since she could always have had another husband, but had to bury her brother who, since her parents were dead, could not be replaced, you may start to wonder whether perhaps she has been confused all along, and you with her. Creon intervenes to restore your sense of perspective: he will make her guards pay for being so slow in taking her away. He won t even let her have that last moment in the sun. So when Creon, warned by Teiresias, reverses himself, and after ordering Polyneices body buried, he rushes out with men to free Antigone, you hope that they will arrive too late. Of course they will. Antigone has hanged herself and they arrive just in time to watch Haemon kill himself while cursing his father. And now all that s left is seeing justice done. You too learn that Creon lost a son besides Haemon. But just in case you miss the point, there he stands on the stage holding Haemon s dead body, an aggrieved father lamenting in pain. You don t really want to hear it, do you? Enough already! Take him away, Sophocles! Wasn t that what Creon said earlier and not just once -- when Antigone s laments got on his nerves? Insist in your heartless impatience with him, and you too will become acquainted with a side of you that you will not like. You too will confront the death of your understanding of the play. But knowing you as we do, we know you will insist. You are, after all, one of us.
One can do this sort of analysis for all the scenes and their sequence in Antigone. I have probably done enough to indicate why I do not believe that the main issue in the play is stubborn ignorance. Instead, I take that issue to be compassion and the difficulty of finding one s way to it. As for the real sin, I am not sure that there is one. Compassion is hard because it is painful and we don t like to suffer. But when I am tempted to call lacking compassion a sin, Antigone reminds me just how hard compassion can be. After all, the emotional stakes in watching or reading a theatre play are relatively trivial. If one cannot even do that without losing one s marbles and reaching for anesthesia, what hope is there in real life, where the emotional stakes are often huge? I admire the author of Antigone because he understood that and, though understanding it, he did not give up on us. He stayed on the job, compassionate and hopeful because he loved our kind despite understanding its weaknesses and frailties all too well. He also understood the strength growing out of those frailties. Antigone herself is an example. I will stand up for myself and for my brother, she says in effect, come hell or high water, even if it will cost me my life. And then has the courage to do it. There is something magnificent about that, as there is about Sophocles standing up for us even though doing so may turn out to be a waste of time. A.S. Kappler 2010