Sophocles’ Antigone is a Rorschach test. People see in it whatever they are thinking. To the self-professed and much married communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Antigone is a “bitch,” though she may also be an admirable figure in her zealous and determined striving against her government. Or perhaps, Žižek suggests alternately, she is a troublemaker creating havoc within an otherwise healthy, well-organized state. In recent versions of the play that he has published with differing endings, Žižek has put forward both points of view. More common interpretations, however, see Antigone not as a rebel but as a self-obsessed martyr and a fanatic.
With anti-democratic regimes on the march and democracies prohibiting citizens from meeting their religious and familial obligations during COVID, is Antigone a hero for our time?
Are her actions even political? That is a further point of dispute. More than a few critics have noted that Antigone shows little concern with what will become of her home city, Thebes, after her death. She is indifferent to the ultimate interests of the city-state, the polis, in which she lives. Hence, one can argue that she is not political at all; she is apolitical.
There is also the question of whether she is even the play’s protagonist. The role of the city’s autocrat, her uncle Creon, is as large as her own, and the story concludes with a focus upon his misfortunes. That has prompted many critics, directors, and actors to conclude that she is the antagonist in the story and that Creon is the real protagonist. This may explain in part a curious fact: While it is continually adapted and commented upon, until recently Antigone was not so often performed as were less famous classical tragedies such as Medea, The Bacchae, and even Philoctetes.
Nonetheless, throughout the 20th century Antigone served as source material for a great many highbrow playwrights, poets, and opera composers. Among these were Carl Orff, Arthur Honegger, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean Anouilh. Of these, only Anouilh’s take on it ever managed to win favor with the public. I think that’s understandable, as the play—and its various operatic and theatrical versions—are hampered by a number of flaws that are readily evident in Sophocles’ original text. Unlike Oedipus, Medea, and The Bacchae, Antigone is largely void of spectacle. Antigone’s aunt Eurydice, her intended husband, Haemon, and she herself all die offstage. Moreover, Antigone changes not at all during the course of the drama, and we get only a brief glimpse, at the play’s denouement, of how its body count may have affected Creon. There is also some clumsy exposition and on-the-nose dialogue at a number of vital moments. The artless explanations weaken Antigone’s early scenes as we listen to detailed accounts of the backstory: How Polynices is Antigone’s brother, that he died during an invasion that aimed to restore him to Thebes’ throne, that her other brother Eteocles also passed away in the conflict, and that Creon has called for the death of whomever might arrange a burial for Polynices. And that despite this royal decree, Antigone intends to meet her familial and religious obligations to her stricken brother.
Unyielding and Impractical
The want of subtlety regarding the characters’ motives turns up most glaringly with the appearance of the guard sent to tell Creon that someone has sprinkled ashes upon Polynices’ corpse. The watchman is fearful of the leader’s wrath, as Creon has made it known that the carcass is to serve as carrion for scavengers. When Antigone is revealed to be the one who transgressed against this injunction, the guard abruptly announces:
She denied nothing—at once to my joy and my pain. To have escaped from ills [punishment] oneself is a great joy; but it is painful to bring friends to ill. Nevertheless, all such things are of less account to me than my own safety.
Sophocles was capable of remarkably nuanced psychological presentation, depiction that depends upon what is implicit. This is not an instance of that.
Unyielding and impractical, she makes no secret of the fact that her intention is to act in such a manner as to bring about her death. More complex is Creon.
The lack of refinement in characterization extends to Antigone herself, as she is not possessed of shading. Unyielding and impractical, she makes no secret of the fact that her intention is to act in such a manner as to bring about her death. More complex is Creon. His harshness and dogmatism hint at the insecurity of someone unsure of his status and authority. Sophocles further indicates this through Creon’s repeated claim that if he yields to Antigone’s desire for a proper burial for her brother—his own nephew—that he will be proven to be effeminate and that she will now be the man and he the woman in their relationship. Likewise, Creon’s repeated habit of suggesting that those who disagree with him are motivated by bribes tells us that he is unduly concerned with money.
Less often does Creon rely upon a more rational defense of his actions: that honoring Polynices with a traditional burial after he led an army that invaded Thebes will encourage further assaults against the city. In one of the play’s first scenes, Creon says of Polynices that he “came back from exile and sought to consume utterly with fire the city of his fathers and the shrines of his fathers’ gods, sought to taste of kindred blood and to lead the remnant into slavery.” One might discount this as the words of a demagogue who wishes to justify his own rule while disparaging those seeking to displace him. Yet this was the world in which the ancient Greeks lived. Competing city-states did destroy each other and then take their defeated enemies as prisoners of war. Indeed, the comment has a peculiar aspect of prophecy for Thebes. First presented at one of the Athenian drama festivals in 441 B.C., Antigone is a product of the Periclean Age. This was the time of peace and prosperity in which the Parthenon was constructed. Yet there must have been a consciousness of how infirm this period of ease and accomplishment was. Within a decade, Athens was plunged into the Peloponnesian War. That conflict lasted 27 years, and it involved nearly every city-state of Greece. At its end, Athens had been routed, and its democracy was replaced with a brutal oligarchy. Seventy years later the Athenians were conquered once more, this time by Alexander the Great. The people of their nearby city-state, the Thebans, chose to revolt against the new emperor. Alexander responded to this by burning to the ground the city in which Oedipus and Antigone are said to have lived. All the city’s temples and shrines were razed, except for one dedicated to the poet Pindar. It was spared only because Pindar had praised one of Alexander’s ancestors. Afterward, the surviving population of the city, numbering 30,000, was sold into slavery.
It is in this sense that the idea of barbarity and war being just outside the city gates, implicit within the play, explains the greatest part of the renewed interest in Antigone. At the commencement of the Iraq War, a sometime acquaintance of mine named Sharron Bower put together The Lysistrata Project. As a determined foe of the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq, she helped create an organization that sponsored thousands of readings and productions of Aristophanes’ comedy about an end to the Peloponnesian War brought by a sex strike of the women of Athens and Sparta. In 2003 a classical play about peaceful conflict resolution seemed relevant—most particularly to scores of out-of-work actors and actresses. But the great foreboding of Western intellectuals lies elsewhere now. When the U.S. and our “coalition of the willing” marched into Baghdad, the U.S. was the dominant power in the world. The sense that we are not any longer fills people with dread and fear.
New Antigones for a New Era
Most Western intellectuals continue to assume that gross violations of human rights—like slavery and genocide—are universally scorned relics of an earlier, more barbaric age. Yet the actions of tyrannical regimes like those in China and Russia are telling us unambiguously that this is not so, and that they could well return (if they have not done so already). After all, if Russia’s leaders will put forward not-so-veiled threats of using nuclear weapons and China’s will take and sell the bodily organs of living political prisoners, why should we assume they will not enslave or kill subject peoples if they think they can do so without consequence? There is a not-quite-linear relationship between the reawakening of interest in Antigone and a growing awareness that it was the fact of American hegemony that played a role in preventing such savagery.
That fascination with Antigone is manifested in Žižek’s decision to publish new versions of the play with his proposed alternate endings. But he is one of many such editors. In 2012 the acclaimed Canadian poetess Anne Carson presented her version of the drama. In 2017 two novels based on Antigone were published, along with a film adaptation. Another movie was released in 2019, followed by one more last year, and there have also been any number of new stage versions. Perhaps the best-known of these was Irish novelist Colm Tóibín’s Pale Sister. Delayed by the pandemic, it arrived in the West End last year in a production directed by former Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Sir Trevor Nunn.
Several of these accounts turn Polynices into a captured terrorist. The question presented to the audience is whether we should treat those who advocate for them with respect or hostility. These authors reinterpret the drama in terms of the conflict between the Western and the non-Western worlds. The much-lauded 2019 Canadian film Antigone offers a slight variation on this. Confronted by the possibility of conviction for some petty crimes, Polynices faces deportation back to the disordered village in Algeria from which he has come. In this version of the story, Antigone tries to assist him in an attempted escape from a Quebec jail. However, in trying to save him, Antigone brings about her own demise.
The play takes on a different meaning and relevance in the context of the COVID pandemic.
These updatings display a concern for the “other.” In particular, they tend to show sympathy for Islam. Yet there is still an implicit acknowledgement that the decline of American power and the appearance of non-Western minorities in Western cities will likely lead to violence and conflict. Whether or not it is their aim, these productions are conveying to us that the retreat of American armed forces from chaotic foreign lands and the appearance of immigrants from those nations is not an unmixed blessing. In addition, they provide an expanded and more dynamic view of Antigone, one in which she more clearly takes on the role of doomed protagonist. In all these visions, Antigone is a drama of unresolved conflict.
Health and Politics
The play takes on a different meaning and relevance in the context of the COVID pandemic. As we all know, lockdowns required us to stay away from people who were infected and from those whom we thought might be. This meant that people could not attend burials—just like Antigone. This rejection of our most important rituals was also a spurning of the traditions of religious faith. The response to this of the novelist Walter Kirn is typical. Prohibited from seeing his father, dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), in May 2020, he now increasingly rejects the views and claims of the liberal establishment, embittered as he is. One wishes that this had not been so common an experience. That it was serves as another explanation for the current interest in the play. For this was what Antigone underwent, and this brings us back to one of the most essential subjects that Sophocles was underscoring: proper observance of custom and due regard for faith, even when they come into conflict with the State.
Greek theater was religious drama, and the play’s premiere was at the Festival of Dionysius, a venerated holiday. Athens was the most devout city in Greece, and, judging the play from this perspective, our sense for Antigone’s character necessarily shifts as the play’s meaning goes from conflict to piety. Antigone’s claim that she must bury her brother is part of her broader claim of inheritance as an epikleros. Under Athenian law, women could not own property. But they could take possession of it as a sole surviving daughter (or sister) if they married a male relative. This functioned to keep property within the family. Antigone’s intended nuptials with Creon’s son, Haemon, may have been understood by Sophocles’ audience as offering this additional purpose, as he was her cousin. It would then have been a necessity for her to bury her brother before she made any claims upon his estate. To do otherwise would have been unseemly. That is so even if we leave aside the question of how a devout person would have regarded the act of leaving a corpse out for scavengers. Ancient Athenians were unlike other Greeks in that they cremated their dead rather than burying them. Even so, Creon’s dogged insistence that Polynices’ carcass be left for jackals would have been seen by an Athenian as an incitement, a conscious act of disrespect for the gods.
Of course, burial and cremation have another purpose: preservation of public health. This is another way in which the Athenians’ interests and experiences parallel our own. That’s because Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the end of the Periclean Age were in part a consequence of an outbreak of infectious disease. Eleven years after Antigonepremiered, Athens was struck by the plague. It’s estimated that 300,000 Greeks were killed. One-fourth of these deaths were in the highly urbanized state of Athens. Lost, too, were their leader, Pericles, and 4,000 of their hoplites: crack troops. Although these events came after Antigone was written, they did not occur before Oedipus was composed. That tragedy was presented in 429 B.C. This was right in the middle of the two years in which the plague hit Athens with greatest force. Its appearance, it seems, came in between the waves of disease. Should we then be so surprised by its subject: a city afflicted by a terrible infectious malady seeking out the cause? There may never have been so timely a drama, nor one that its audience would have perceived so directly as a commentary on its troubles. Present-day AIDS dramas on Broadway are comments on the fairly remote past. The Theban plays dealt with current events.
I saw this firsthand as I got involved with the work of providing meals to New York’s homeless in the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021. COVID had a devastating effect on efforts to feed the city’s hungry and destitute. Because people were fearful of close contact with the homeless, many shelters found that their soup kitchens were suddenly void of volunteers—and even paid workers. That left those most in need of food without regular meals right when it was most necessary. In a few short months, the greater number of those on the streets became noticeably more gaunt and haggard. Concerned by this, I began making it my business to deliver meals to homeless people in New York’s Financial District.
It was an education. Getting to know some by name and others by face, I came to realize how varied they were. Some, I learned, were neither crazy nor ignorant. Indeed, one day I found myself beside an older, wizened figure named Roman who was reading a battered paperback copy of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. In this fashion, I received a critical take on a notable work of French modernism from a street person.
While this was surely not Antigone’s experience, she is closer to the people than Creon is, and as Haemon points this out, the masses support her. If she displays a measure of self-conceit, she is plainly a foe of the elites and of elitism. That perspective gains in significance during a time of contagion as those in charge place a distance between themselves and ordinary folk. Sophocles makes his own view of this clear through the arrival in the play of the blind prophet Tiresias. Tiresias tells Creon that he is in the wrong and that the gods approve of Antigone’s actions. Without doubt, then, Sophocles was presenting a political message to his audiences, one they would have had no trouble interpreting.
This extends far beyond the matter of public health or even devotion. During the Periclean Age, a number of Athens’ rivals, seeing its success, adopted democratic forms of governments. Syracuse, for example, ended its traditional method of governance and set up a democracy that lasted 60 years. In spite of this, Athens continued to be in conflict with other states that were tyrannies or oligarchies, and the city had been forced into a bloody war with Corinth less than a generation earlier. Why is this important? Because the crowds that attended the first performances of Antigone were passionately committed to their novel form of government and its provocative notion that ordinary citizens were capable of self-rule. So the greater number in attendance would have rooted for Antigone in her battle with Creon, seeing her as a freedom fighter against his tyranny. That the play received a first prize in the city’s annual drama contest suggests that this is so. Its tale of valiant antagonism to autocracy offered audiences a quite specific message, as they would have understood that democracies are always faced by threats from states that are averse to freedom.
From Today’s Headlines
This offers us yet another interpretation of the play. Think for a moment of someone like the Russian presidential candidate Alexander Navalny, who opposes Putin, or the blind Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who fights for the rights of rural peasants in the People’s Republic. They are among the number of democratic politicians and human rights activists opposing cruel dictators with a perfect consciousness that their actions will not soon lead to the overthrow of the regimes they oppose—and that these courageous acts will more likely lead to their own deaths. Are they like Antigone? Are they seeking martyrdom? Or are they playing a long game, one by which they hope to inspire others? And was that Antigone’s unstated purpose? This is another way to read the play.
Contemporary versions of the tale offer us something else, too. They make a literal aspect of the play into a metaphor. That’s because in ancient times most cities were surrounded by walls, and the city dwellers could pull up their gates and protect their people within their solid boundaries. Thus, the Seven Gates of Thebes in the play are what Polynices and his comrades had tried to storm. Before Antigone begins, the barbarians have been at the gates. This is even another way in which the ancient drama possessed a directness of meaning and a relevance to its audience that, unfortunately, is partially lost in modern updatings.
Regardless, what is certain is that we cannot but see Antigone as a figure of particular relevance in a time of plague and war, a moment in which hostile foreign nations are forming alliances whose cooperation is based in a mutual opposition to democracy and freedom. That is what draws Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran together, and it is what we must oppose, just as we oppose any State’s undue intrusion into the rights of citizens to meet familial and religious obligations. Antigone is a symbol of this, and, shrill though she may be, she is a hero for our time.
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Note: The text I have quoted was translated by Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb in a Bantam Books paperback edition of The Complete Plays of Sophocles, edited by Moses Hadas and printed in 1967.
