COLLOQUY text theory critique
issue 11, may 2006
A special section on ANTIGONE
edited by Dimitris Vardoulakis
and
GENERAL ISSUE
Editorial Committee:
Geoff Berry
Genna Burrows
Jasmin Chen
Mark John Crees
Sam Everingham
Michael Fitzgerald
Rhiannyn Geeson
Leah Gerber
Barbara Ghattas
Rhonda Khatab
Jenny Kohn
Hamish Morgan
Keith Redgen
Carlo Salzani
Robert Savage
Sabina Sestigiani
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Jessica Whyte
Editorial Board:
Bill Ashcroft
Andrew Benjamin
Andriana Cavarero
Joy Damousi
Alex Düttmann
Jürgen Fohrmann
Sneja Gunew
Kevin Hart
Susan K. Martin
Steven Muecke
Paul Patton
Georg Stanitzek
Terry Threadgold
Advisory Board:
Axel Fliethmann
Rose Lucas
Alison Ross
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/issue11.pdf
ISSN: 13259490
Issue 11, May 2006
4
Editorial
ANTIGONE – ED. DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
Introduction
Dimitris Vardoulakis
6
Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
Carlo Salzani
8
Mourning the Public Body in Sophocles’ Antigone
Jennifer R. Ballengee
31
A Danish Antigone
Sabina Sestigiani
60
Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy: Hegel’s Antigone
Rhonda Khatab
76
The Precedence of Citation: On Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles
Robert Savage
99
No Longer Lost for Words: Antigone’s Afterlife
Alison Forsyth
127
Irish Antigones: Burying the Colonial Symptom
Kelly Younger
148
GENERAL ARTICLES
Imperial Therapy: Mark Twain and the Discourse of National
Consciousness in Innocents Abroad
Daniel McKay
164
“Nothing New Under the Sun”: Postsentimental Conflict in Harriet E.
Wilson’s Our Nig
Karsten H. Piep
178
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature of Time and Space in Contemporary
Installation
Victoria Baker
195
Writing the Subject: Virginia Woolf and Clothes
Carolyn Abbs
209
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/contents11.pdf
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Contents
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REVIEW ARTICLES
Liz Conor. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the
1920s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. ISBN: 0 253 21670 2
Juliette Peers. The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie. Oxford:
Berg, 2004. ISBN: 1 85973 743 9
Robyn Walton
227
REVIEWS
Elizabeth Grosz. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely.
Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2004. ISBN: 1-74114-327-6
Elizabeth Grosz. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Crows Nest:
Allen and Unwin, 2004. ISBN: 1-74114-572-4
Claire Perkins
247
Astrid Henry. Not My Mother’s Daughter: Generational Conflict and Third
Wave Feminism. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 2004. ISBN: 0253344549
Anthea Taylor
251
Avital Ronell. Test Drive. Chicago: Illinois UP, 2004. ISBN: 0-252-02950-X.
Faye Brinsmead
256
Matthew Sharpe. A Little Piece of the Real. London: Ashgate, 2003. ISBN:
0 7546 3918 5
Geoff Boucher
260
James Phillips. Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. ISBN: 0-8047-5071-8
Andrew Padgett
264
John Sellars. The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of
Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. ISBN: 0-7546-3667-4
Michael FitzGerald
268
Juliana de Nooy. Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Look
Twice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN: 1-4039-4745-7
Dimitris Vardoulakis
271
Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw (eds). Amy Lowell, American
Modern. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. ISBN: 0-8135-3356-2
Ce Rosenow
275
A.L. McCann. Subtopia. Carlton: Vulgar, 2005. ISBN: 0 9580795 6 0
Jay Thompson
278
Clare Archer-Lean. Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Writings of Thomas
King and Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo). Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press,
2006. ISBN: 0-7734-5864-6
Carlo Salzani
281
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Contents
Simon Featherstone. Postcolonial Cultures. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2005. ISBN: 0 7486 1743 4
Barbara Ghattas
285
CREATIVE WRITING
Writings from Turkey: Rıfat Ilgaz and Sunay Akın
Burcu Alkan
289
Blues for Allah
Ahmede Hussain
298
Frank Schätzing. Extract from Death and the Devil
trans. Rhiannyn Geeson
319
Fatty’s Cyclopaedia
Vanessa Russell
338
3
Editorial
Issue 11 of Colloquy: text theory critique is divided into two parts. The
first part is a collection of papers on Sophocles’ Antigone, while the second
part consists of the usual general issue articles, reviews, and creative writing. The present issue would have been impossible without the generous
contribution of the many referees who have reviewed articles prior to publication.
The following issue of Colloquy will be the proceedings of the conference Be true to the earth, which took place at Monash University on March
31-April 1, 2005 and which was co-organized by Colloquy. The collection of
papers, edited by Samantha Capon, Peter Coleman Barbara Ghattas and
Kate Rigby, will largely focus on eco-criticism and eco-philosophy, and it
will be published in November 2006.
Colloquy is presently seeking unsolicited submissions for Issue 12, a
general issue to be published in May 2007. The deadline for Issue 12 is
December 15, 2006. Academic articles, review articles, reviews, translations and creative writing will be considered.
The November 2007 issue, Issue 13, will be the proceedings of the
conference Imagining the Future: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction,
which was held at Monash on December 6-7, 2005. It will be co-edited by
Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage.
THE EDITORS
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/editorial11.pdf
ANTIGONE
Edited by
DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
Introduction to Antigone
… a body politic is always threatened more from its citizens
than from any external enemies [hostes] …
Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, VI, 6
Sophocles seems to have already reached in Antigone the same insight about the body politic which will again be expressed in the seventeenth century by Spinoza: namely, the political has as its condition of possibility the potential for being challenged from within. Sophocles’ play starts
immediately after Thebes has successfully stoved off a challenge from an
external enemy – from Argos, another city state. However, during the battle, Eteocles, the king, and his own brother, Polynices, who in fact was
heading the Argeans, both died. Thus afterwards Creon is elected ruler of
Thebes. Creon’s first act of government is to decree that Polynices’ body is
to remain unburied. If the new king thought that the worse was past him after the end of the battle, he was sorely mistaken. A challenge to his degree
from one of the citizens and his own niece, Antigone, will not only lead to
the decimation of his own family, but also to the new king being stranded
alone at the end of the play, in charge of a self-incurred desert. Antigone, a
stubborn teenage girl, is the cause of challenging the sovereign of Thebes
and hence the city’s body politic.
Antigone’s challenge to the body politic results in the distinction between politics and the political. Her rebellion is, indeed, the precondition of
the political. This insight is precisely what links Sophocles and Spinoza.
Moreover, it is an insight fiercely opposed by the tradition. Thus, Aristotle in
books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics explicates a politics based on
friendship (philia), which provides the bonds for the state to function, while
what has to be excluded is stasis or rebellion which dissolves the state.
However, a close look at the text makes the achievement of philia problematic, for instance because, as Aristotle states, if men are friends, then
they no longer need justice to mediate their relation (1155a). Inversely, if
the elimination of justice is impossible, then stasis challenges the primacy
that philia is granted in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is this ineliminability of
justice that the political affirms, and which is not commensurable with the
empirical manifestation of a state or sovereign.
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
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Introduction to Antigone
Following Aristotle, the Western tradition of political philosophy has
striven to erase this possibility of rebellion intimately connected to the justice of the city, but without success. One of the most prominent examples
of this attempt in relation to the Antigone is carried out by Hegel. The argument adumbrated in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right is
clear: there is a distinction between two legal orders, the family and the
state. It is only by privileging the latter that politics can successfully create a
community. However, as Judith Butler has recently demonstrated in Antigone’s Claim, all attempts to find a stable origin of politics – such as the
distinction between family and state – are bound to fail. Consequently, not
only are the ‘abnormal’ filiations arising from Oedipus marrying his mother
not to be expunged, but rather they point to the fundamental condition of
the political: namely, the impossibility of a stable origin and the affirmation
of a multiplicity of relations which challenge norms and normalcy as the
condition of the possibility of the community.
Indeed, as Stathis Gourgouris has noted in Does Literature Think?, the
name “Antigone,” as a compound of “anti” and “genos,” means three things:
an opposition between kinship and state, an opposition to kinship, and the
force of opposing as such. It is only by affirming all three elements together
that a just community can be conceived. Of course, this requires the inscription of opposition inside the political. In other words, rebellion as a
regulative principle is constitutive of the ontology of the political.
Due to this polyphony of meaning in the name “Antigone,” it has been
deemed appropriate to title this special section of Colloquy simply “Antigone.” The various articles presented here approach this polyvalent proper
name from different perspectives: offering close readings of the Greek text,
showing its reception in Western thought, and presenting its impact on theatrical production and playwriting. What remains invariable is the need to
talk about the political – and this is the legacy, if there is one, of Antigone.
Finally, two notes are necessary. First, the inspiration for this special
edition of Colloquy on Sophocles’ Antigone has been a fascinating series of
seminars on Sophocles’ play, conducted by Professor Andrew Benjamin at
the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, from March to May 2004. Andrew Benjamin’s breadth of knowledge
and skill in closely reading the text have been a catalyst in showing to all
those present the philosophical import of Antigone. Second, because of
technical reasons related to the production of the journal, the diacriticals
and spirits of the Greek text have been simplified to a monotonic system.
This has been necessary to ensure that the characters are read properly by
computer software.
DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
7
Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
Carlo Salzani
Premise: Incipit Tragoedia
Ω κοινόν αυτάδελφον Ισμήνης κάρα. The famous incipit of Sophocles’
Antigone presents various problems to the translator. Κοινόν is what is
“common,” “shared,” and this “sharing” is repeated and reinforced in
αυτάδελφον, “my own sister,” where αυτός evokes a link of blood and flesh,
a profound, archaic commonality of kinship. The invocation is directed to
Ισμήνης κάρα, which literally means the “head of Ismene.” As George
Steiner points out, “to claim this head to be ‘common to us both’ and as
‘shared in the totality of sisterhood,’ is to negate, radically, the most potent,
the most obvious differentiation between human presences. … Antigone’s
prolusion strives to compact, to ‘ingest,’ Ismene into herself. She demands
a ‘single-headed’ unison.” 1 This “totality of sisterhood” is reaffirmed four
times, in the terms κοινόν, αυτός, άδελφον, κάρα. The translator must work
out a periphrastic solution – like Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ “My own sister Ismene,
linked to myself” 2 – to avoid a monstrum, like Hölderlin’s Gemeinsamschwesterliches. 3
As Steiner emphasizes, “a fertile duplicity” 4 inhabits the term κοινόν.
On the one hand, κοινόν means the “ordinary,” “general,” what is “common”
to many; on the other hand – and specifically in this context – it indicates a
commonality of blood, a carnal bond, what is common within kinship. Within
the incestuous stock of Labdacus though, κοινόν takes on much darker and
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
horrifying connotations. Antigone and Ismene are at the same time sisters
and daughters of Oedipus, daughters and granddaughters of Jocasta, and
this aberrant commonality cuts them off from the accepted norms of kinship
based on the incest prohibition. This makes their sisterhood different, they
are closer than other sisters, they are almost “fused.” 5
The invocation to Ismene is thus a request and a provocation to “fuse”
in one sisterly identity, the scandal of the sanctification of an aberrant kinship against the polis. The new-born democratic experiment in the Athens
of the fifth century B.C., based on plurality and a “modern” concept of individuality, is challenged by Antigone’s archaic, perennial “collective,” by her
impulses towards human interfusion. The dialectic between mechanical individualism and psychic collectivism haunts the whole play. However, at the
same time, in the course of the theatrical action, Antigone becomes the
agent of “the most solitary, individual, anarchically egotistical” of the campaigns, 6 severing every bond except the one with the dead brother. Antigone summons Ismene into the play reminding her of a belonging, a sharing, and she herself moves through the whole play ambiguously confounding the limits and the definition of this sharing.
Figures of Commonality
Following the fil rouge of this short interpretation of Antigone’s first
line, this article will read the play through the question of commonality. Antigone’s ambiguity, in which “lies the bottomless irony and falsehood of Antigone’s fate,” 7 only exemplifies a complex and articulated topic. Tragedy
was, in the Athens of the fifth century B.C., a political tool whose purpose
was to educate the polis (πόλις) through the presentation on stage of the
dangers and problems of the life of the community; the question of commonality was thus the central topic of the tragic education or paideia
(παιδεία). Sophocles’ Antigone problematizes and deconstructs the notion
of commonality under almost every possible angle: in kinship and polis, language and communication, love and death, nature and law. In the play
every “figure of commonality” is opened up and “vivisectioned” to show its
fragility and its limits, and the dangers for the polis when the “walls” of its
democratic construction are demolished.
There are no figures of commonality in Antigone: all the figures represent the aberrations of the concept of commonality, which is displayed, underlined and invoked through the presentation of its absence. In the classical interpretation, Antigone as a figure of kinship represents the conflict between the order of the polis and the one of the family; but, as incestuous
offspring of Oedipus and with her ambiguous acts and claims, she repre-
9
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Carlo Salzani
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sents, in addition, the problematic and aberrations of kinship. At the same
time, as a woman speaking in the public space or agora (αγορά), she also
raises the question of the polis as a community based on the exclusion of
women. Creon represents the aberration of the democratic notion of “civic
friendship” and embodies a voice that silences all the other voices; but at
the same time he evokes the contradictions of a politics founded more on
the concept of enmity than of friendship, more on exclusion than inclusion.
Both Antigone and Creon are figures of the misunderstanding of the democratic meaning of law (νόμος), both negating its fundamental characteristics of deliberation and conciliation. Deliberation and conciliation which
are founded on another common trait, the sharing of a logos (λόγος), a
common language and understanding; but all the characters of the play are
segregated within a deafness which makes them figures of incommunication. Logos as the base of a “rational” politics fails because all the characters are figures of irrationality; but, at the same time, the notion of logos
raises the question of an order – called, in fact, logo-centric – based on the
exclusion of the women as deprived of logos. Antigone even fails in being a
figure of love: the only community to which she belongs is the one of the
dead. Sophocles’ Antigone presents on stage the complete failure of any
possible kind of commonality and the political dangers represented by this
failure: every character is apolis (άπολις), a figure of the negation of the political understood as a space of sharing of thoughts, words and actions.
Twenty-five centuries of history have added many interpretative layers
to the surface of Antigone’s pedagogic intentions. The political actuality of
Antigone is still present in the presentation of the multiform concept of
commonality in the democratic agora; but the modern reader must add the
analysis of topics to which an Athenian audience of the fifth century B.C.
was uninterested, such as, for example, sexual difference and discrimination, the role of women, a new definition of logos etc. The modernity of
Sophocles’ tragedy is that it offers many unintended opportunities for a
modern discussion of the concept of commonality. The following analysis
will try to compose the ancient pedagogy with new political inspirations.
Philia I
Wenn Antigone kommt, die schwesterlichste der Seelen
Goethe
The ancient Greek term philia (φιλία), when referred to the household,
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
covers the semantic area that embraces the fact of belonging to a stock, a
family, a kinship. It is what Antigone calls “my own.” 8 It presents nevertheless an important differentiation in its use: when referred to the household,
philia evokes the world of female “care”; when referred to the agora, the
public space, philia is a political, i.e., masculine virtue. The Athenian democracy was founded on the division of these two spaces: the household
constituted the prepolitical condition that enabled the existence of the polis,
as Judith Butler writes, “without ever entering into it.” 9 The liberation from
the necessities of the physical, bare life was the prepolitical condition for
the political freedom in the polis; it was the work of women and slaves that
enabled men to be free in the public arena. 10 The care of the dead was part
of women’s duty: Antigone’s claim falls thus entirely within the traditional
and prepolitical role reserved to women. Her claim’s scandal consists in the
modalities of her act, which invades the public realm. 11 Since Hegel, Antigone has been considered “not as a political figure, one whose defiant
speech has political implications, but rather as one who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics.” 12
Nevertheless, in Antigone the picture is more complex: philia refers
here not much to the realm of δόμος (house) or οικία (household), but to
the one of birth or genos (γένος), a relation of blood, the incestuous blood
of Oedipus. As Adriana Cavarero argues, the commonality of philia is here
“radicalized in the endogamic model of a generation which has as unique
source the maternal incest.” 13 In Oedipus’ family, the individual identity
seems to be only secondary to a “pre-egotical” community of blood, in
which the singularity, due to its aberrant incestuous origins, is in symbiotical immanent union with the genos. Antigone’s philia goes over the divisions of time and politics, and binds her with Oedipus and Eteocles, but
with Polynices as well. The conflict between polis and genos is the conflict
between the temporality of the human events and the atemporality of “the
womb as time of the ‘ever’ which death conserves.” 14
In this context, in spite – or maybe because – of the morbidity of the
attachment to her brother, Antigone has been often identified as “the most
sisterly of souls” (Goethe). Is that really so? Antigone seems to forget that
Ismene is now, after the death of the two brothers, her last and only kin.
Ismene is twice harshly repudiated and, in the end, Antigone rejects any
commonality with her. Even from a grammatical point of view, Antigone departs from the philia of kinship towards an egotistical solitude: from the dual
person of the first lines, after Ismene’s refusal to join in her pious act, Antigone switches to the singular, “which yells the suffering of her uprooted
solitude.” 15 Besides, as Butler points out, in the context of her incestuous
family, Antigone’s love for her brother is coloured with suspicious tones of
11
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Carlo Salzani
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obsession and madness. 16 However, the most scandalous utterance
against kinship’s philia is Antigone’s infamous declaration in the final kommos, where she affirms that she would not do for a husband or a son what
she did for her brother. 17
What kind of philia does Antigone then represent? Does she really
stand for “the sanctity of kinship”? If the ancient Athenian saw in Antigone a
figure of the conflict between the orders of kinship and the polis, for a modern reader she cannot be a figure of the commonality of kinship anymore,
but rather problematizes the same notion of philia, exposing its limits, its
conflicts, its aberrations. 18
Philia II
War [πόλεμος] is the father and ruler of all things
Heraclitus
When it is used in the agora, the term philia means “civic friendship,”
which is the principal political virtue: philia no longer intended as a commonality of blood, but as the pure social bond, which is the determinant criterion for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the polis. This criterion excludes
women from the public space, segregates them in the house and confines
them to the philia of kinship. 19 For Creon, Antigone’s sin is “insubordination” (αναρχία, 672); however, the real scandal of her claim is that she
dares to enter the political space, reserved to men, and speak the language
of politics and sovereignty. Her claim concerns “womanly” things, but she
pursues them in an “unwomanly” way. 20 Her entry into the male space is a
threat to men, who feel “unmanned.” 21
Antigone forces into the political arena a pre-political – for the phallogocentric idea of politics – issue. As Arendt emphasizes, “the human capacity for political organization is not only different from, but stands in direct
opposition to, that natural association whose centre is the home (οικία) and
the family.” 22 This opposition is confirmed by Creon: “and him who rates a
dear one higher than his native land, him I put nowhere” (182-3). Civic
philia needs the destruction of the family bond, of the blood relation, of the
feminine philia. The philia Antigone tries to force into the public space is a
prepolitical commonality of blood; civic philia persists in an excluding opposition to it. The two spaces present opposite features: the household is the
space of force and violence, where the head of the family governs through
discipline, and freedom does not exist. 23 The role of women is to obey, and
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
there is no worse insult for Creon than to be compared to a woman. 24 Erroneously Creon thinks he can apply the discipline, which reigns in the family,
to the public space, which is the space of freedom. 25 The public space is a
space shared by “equals,” and discipline cannot be a political means.
Thus, Creon misunderstands the democratic articulation of civic philia
and uses it exclusively as criterion of inclusion/exclusion for the polis. The
dialectic friend/enemy is for Creon, as for Carl Schimtt, the political category par excellance 26 : friend is Eteocles, “who died fighting for this city”
(194-5); Polynices,
who came back from exile meaning to burn to the ground his native
city and the gods of his race, and meaning to drink the people’s
blood and to enslave its people, (198-203)
is the enemy, the stranger, the Other, “something different and alien,” 27 capable of “drinking the people’s blood.” Not even death can overcome his
otherness and exclusion. 28 The emphasis here is much more on Polynices
than on Eteocles. For Creon, then – as for a great part of patriarchal political theory – what defines the inclusion in the community is what is excluded: in the dialectic friend/enemy the stress is always on the second
term, and war becomes the activity which ultimately defines the identity of
the community. 29 In Greece, “warrior and citizen coincide in a sole and homogeneous concept – and the meaning of ‘friend’ ends up taking in the
system an entirely secondary place.” 30
However, the inclusion/exclusion criteria of friend/enemy do not work
for Antigone. She is not “the other,” the one who comes from outside to
conquer the city. She is an insider, the internal enemy. That is why, unlike
Polynices, she does not fit into the category of πολέμιος, the public enemy. 31 The Greek language presents a difference between εχθρός and
πολέμιος, preserved in the Latin inimicus and hostis, the internal enemy
and external enemy. Antigone is the “apolitical,” “prepolitical” internal dissident. And when the opposition is internal, among “citizens” and not against
“the Other,” the conflict is more dramatic, “more tragic”: the opposition
φίλος/εχθρός in Antigone emphasizes, as Cavarero writes, “the sense of a
horizon of incestuous blood. A horizon which confers to the concept of
εχθρός all that was radically corporeal in the concept of φίλος, and makes
so the enemy consanguineous, as it wanted the friend of consanguineous
origin.” 32
In Antigone’s Thebes, no social bond keeps the citizens together: civic
philia is misrepresented and problematized in every character’s rejection of
the basic political sense of commonality. At the same time, Antigone confounds and deconstructs the notion of this philia, based on exclusion much
13
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more than inclusion, on enmity and opposition much more than commonality.
Nomos
The people [δήμος] must fight for its law as for its walls.
Heraclitus
Antigone is a tragedy about the law: Antigone’s unwritten laws
(άγραπτα νόμιμα, 454-45) are opposed to Creon’s edict (κήρυγμα, 8). Or:
primordial, natural laws are opposed to the human and temporal norm. For
Hegel the conflict of the “universal” public law and the divine (unwritten) law
is “a conflict of self-conscious Spirit with what is unconscious.” 33 Butler
notes that the unwritten law “appears only by way of an active trace” 34 : it is
a law with no traceable origin, no form, no communicability and no translatability into written language. It is not fully knowable, but, “as the unconscious of public law, it is that which public law cannot do without, which it
must, in fact, oppose and retain with a certain necessary hostility.” 35 Besides, this is a law with “but one instance of application” 36 : it would not apply to a husband or a son, but it does to the brother because he is “irreproducible.” This means that “the conditions under which the law becomes applicable are not reproducible.” 37 This law, therefore, is not conceptualizable
as law; it undermines the universality of public law and “destroys the basis
of justice in community.” 38
It should be noted that Antigone uses the term nomima (νόμιμα), customs, ordinances, and not nomos, which was always a human creation
(ποίησις) and therefore opposite to nature or physis (φύσις). The real
meaning of the term nomos is “convention,” “human rule,” something absolutely human and independent from the nature of things. 39 Law was considered as equivalent to the wall around the polis, the limit and the condition of possibility of the political space: there can be no community without
the wall-like law, and law is the prepolitical founding instrument of the political community. 40 Constitutively emendable and correctable, the law was reformulated and negotiated through deliberation, like the boundary line.
Deliberation is precisely what is lacking in Antigone. Hegel already had
noted how Antigone and Creon exclude and oppose one another, becoming in the end mirror-images. 41 No composition is ever possible between
their opposed fanaticisms. Exposing this lack, the tragedy exposes the sin
and the danger that undermines any human community: “devotion to one’s
own personal sense of justice” and “mutually exclusive commitments to
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
righteousness.” 42 Only through deliberation and conciliation can a community survive: “this,” writes Zak, “is a collective responsibility and wisdom
Creon and Antigone will not heed or consider. … In the isolated, selfrestricted, and finally self satisfied kingdom of the spirit each insist on
commanding, both rule their respective deserts beautifully alone.” 43 Many
commentators have underlined how the real sin of both Antigone and
Creon is to “declare themselves autonomos, a law unto themselves” 44 : on
the one hand, Antigone, in her autistic exile, excludes herself from the
community; on the other, Creon transforms his claim for a general justice in
a rule of force and violence. Outside the democratic system of conciliation,
the sovereignty of the law becomes indistinct from violence. 45
As Stathis Gourgouris points out, in ancient Athens law had a constitutive differential and agonic character, “encompassing a range of significations from the explicitly religious (say, the justice of Zeus) to the most historically institutional, from the widest possible meaning of sacred dike to the
most brutal defiance of the law in the name of responsibility to justice.” 46 In
Antigone the term is used with opposite connotations by the different characters and almost all the possible meanings are presented. However, each
and every position remains segregated in its ivory tower, the laws of the polis do not interweave with divine justice, no real community is ever created
and sustained by these mutually excluding laws.
Logos I
In the “Ode to Man” the chorus establishes the foundation of political
commonality: men learned (and thus share) speech and thought, which are
the conditions and the components which rule cities. 47 The sharing of the
same language is what makes possible the constitution of a community:
“speech and wind-swift thought” enable men to distinguish good and bad,
right and wrong, a community is based on shared moral perceptions and on
the capacity of judgement (κρίσις). 48 What differentiates the political animal
(ζώον πολιτικόν) from the other animals is the fact of sharing a capacity to
communicate and decide together; Aristotle’s famous definition acquires its
full meaning only when completed with his other definition of the “human”:
ζώον λόγον έχον, a living being capable of speech. 49 Antigone adds an important feature. She cries to Ismene: “Tell them all! I shall hate you far
more if you remain silent, and do not proclaim this to all” (86-7). Action
needs to be publicized in order to have political valence, and public speech
is the real political action. 50 Aristotle’s βίος πολιτικός (the political) consisted of πράξις (action) and λέξις (speech): the Athenian polis was the
space where words and speeches acted as the political medium. Politics is
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not force, not violence, but speech, understanding, confrontation and
agreement. 51
Creon’s will to command rather than persuade, his incapacity to listen
to the other, represents the opposition to, and the negation of, this conception of the political. Creon transfers into the political space the prepolitical
ways of violence and force characteristic to the household. He insists on
the necessity of discipline and obedience (πειθαρχία, 676), and on the
dangers of insubordination (αναρχία, 672), contradicting the very notion of
discursive politics itself. 52 Creon’s discourse is appropriate to an army, not
to the polis: he refuses to listen to the others’ opinions 53 and, writes Euben,
relegates the others’ voices to “whispers (the people of Thebes) or caves
and houses (Antigone and Ismene).” 54
However, it is not just Creon who represents the negation of the political. Rather, as it has been noted, in Antigone language is paradoxically
what divides and separates: every character retires into a code not understandable to the others; they use the same words, but confer to these
words different connotations, so that what they enact is “a dialogue des
sourds. No meaningful communication takes place. Creon’s questions and
Antigone’s answers are so inward to the two speakers, so absolute to their
respective semantic codes and visions of reality, that there is no exchange.” 55 This is what George Steiner calls the paradox of “divisive facsimile”: “the discovery that living beings using the ‘same language’ can
mean entirely different, indeed irreconcilable, things.” 56 This paradox is a
problem of the language in general and “is present in all speech and
speech-acts,” 57 but in Sophocles’ Antigone it is taken to such extremes that
forbid any kind of communication, in any kind of dialogue. Euben thus concludes: “the exchange between Creon and Haemon suggests that sameness and interchangeability can mask different features … more specifically, that repetition of terms can obscure incompatible principles and interests. What seems to be or should be a firm basis for deliberation, shared
language and culture, turns out to be divisive.” 58
Logos II
“Good sense [φρονείν] is by far the chief part of happiness” (1348-9).
With these words the chorus concludes the tragedy, emphasizing that
“good sense,” φρονείν, is precisely what is lacking in the play. There is
much talking about reasoning, knowledge, deliberation, but every character
is guided by the irrational: the voice of reason conceals always a passion.
Especially Creon insists on the rightfulness of his reasoning, whereas the
others are supposed to be mad, irrational, without sense or judgement:
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
άνους. In the end, every character is dominated by the conviction to be
“right” and that the others are “wrong”; none of the characters is ready to
acknowledge his or her mistake. Reason is questioned and problematized. 59
Thus, reason fails in the play. However, reason does not fail merely in
its “correct use”; it fails also in its pretension of universality. When Creon
insults Haemon calling him a “contemptible character, inferior to a woman!”
(746), he is implicitly calling him άνους, irrational, lacking of correct reasoning. Φρονείν, the “right thinking,” as well as “thinking” in general, have in
fact traditionally been male attributes: women, emotional and passional, are
not fit for the “reasonable” public space and are to be sequestered and silenced in the darkness of the household. Creon’s exasperated misogyny in
this respect only mirrors the situation of women in ancient Athens.
Women are considered not “reasonable” because they are deeply
rooted in the carnality and materiality of the body, and cannot rise to the
heights of reason. As Cavarero writes, body and corporeity are considered
as the “mere material support of the human faculties of speech and
thought,” 60 thus distinct and separated from them. The political order built
on this distinction and exclusion has been called logocentric and phallocratic, and thus phallogocentric: it is based on the exclusion from the
higher political realm, on the one hand, of the corporeal, and, on the other,
of women as inevitably rooted in this corporality. 61 Logos is what separates
and redeems men from the animal condition; but at the same time, it separates the “human” from its corporality and relegates women into it.
By raising her voice, Antigone confuses and violates the “logical” order, which relegates her to silence. She speaks in public, and to do so she
has no other means than to utilize that same logical order which wants her
silent. Antigone speaks in that language which is not “hers,” the language
of a hyper-masculinized logos that wants her silent, the language of politics
and sovereignty that sequesters her in the house. This is the “only” language, the sharing of which is what constitutes her as “human,” but that at
the same time excludes her as not fully so. 62 Antigone as a woman is excluded from the realm of logos, politics and higher “humanity”; she lacks a
“reason” and a language of her own, and must make her political claim using the logocentric tools that exclude her. On the other hand, her claim is
considered non-political because she inhabits a region outside the realm of
logos. The failure of reason is thus complete: reason fails because every
one in the play lacks reason (is άνους), and even “reasonable” actions are
prompted by passions; but reason fails also as the founding element of
identity for the animal rationale, because it becomes a pretext for exclusion
and reclusion.
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Eros
Deny thy father and refuse thy name,
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Women, expelled from the (public) space of logos, are relegated within
the realm of passion: eros (έρως). In the Athenian polis, though, eros had
an institutionalized status: it was simultaneously the pedagogic tool of the
paideia, and, in the symposia (συμπόσιον) and the gymnasia (γυμνάσιον),
the glue which reinforced the social bonds. It was thus a constructive and
civil force. Nevertheless, that was an exclusively masculine and homosexual eros; the Eros, “invincible in battle,” 63 of whom Antigone’s chorus
speaks, is a maddening force opposed to logos and to the polis. It is therefore a feminine force. As Claude Calame writes, “tragedy leads the reader
away from masculine love and back to the Eros who assails women.” 64
The chorus’ ode to eros follows the clash between Creon and Haemon
and illustrates the latter’s “mad” behaviour. Eros has “stirred up this quarrel
between men of the same blood” and has broken the family bond; eros
wrenches “just men’s mind aside from justice, doing them violence.” Its irresistible force severs the individual from the community and throws him or
her back into a pre-communal wilderness. Love’s folly is a jump out of the
realm of logos and out of the polis: love’s power unsettles any social relationship, in order to build an improbable “community of lovers,” it breaks all
their other links to justice, logos, and society. In the end, the community of
lovers is a new, different community opposed to the polis; eros is not just
an a-social force, but rather an anti-social one, one that dangerously undermines the structures of society itself.
As Steiner notes, the presence of Eros evokes an archaic, a-logical, or
better, pre-logical world, a world that precedes logos and polis: an archaic,
pre-Olympian, omnipotent force, which masters over humans and immortals as well. 65 The hypothesis therefore seems plausible that the maddening force the chorus’ ode evokes is not Eros, or the “irresistible” goddess
Aphrodite, but Dionysus; and that the ode to love and the invocation to
Dionysus at the tragedy’s acme are strongly connected. It must be remembered that the tragic representation used to take place on occasion of the
Dionysia, celebrations in honour of Dionysus, and one of the functions of
the tragedy was to “represent … the extremes of madness into which the
onslaught of erotic desires drives us, along with all its dire consequences.” 66
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
The feminine eros thus is destructive and dangerous for the polis: it
stands in opposition to it and as such is primarily tragic. It is strange, then,
that the figure that represents Eros in the play is not a woman, but Haemon. Women in Antigone are victims of passions, but not of eros; Antigone,
who should be Haemon’s counterpart in the representation of love, is instead lost in the passion for her brother: Steiner remarks that “if Antigone
loves anyone, then it is her brother.” 67 Again roles, limits and boundaries
are confused. The tragic topos forbids the constitution of a “community of
lovers” and interweaves love and death; Antigone’s bridal chamber is a
tomb and Haemon enacts the bloody wedding and a symbolic defloration at
the threshold of death. 68
Thanatos
Even before her suicide and the bloody nuptial rites with Haemon, Antigone dwells in a sort of limbo between life and death: “my life has long
been dead, so as to help the dead” (559-60). Almost every member of her
family is now in Hades, with the exception of Creon, her enemy, and Ismene, who lets her down. The familial bonds drag her into a commonality
with the dead that conditions her life. Antigone’s “own” is in death, no
longer in the polis and in the community of citizens: “it’s honourable for me
to do this and die. I am his own and I shall lie with him who is my own” (724). Antigone’s “love for the impossible” is a love for the dead and for death;
as Creon maintains his enmity even with the dead, 69 so does Antigone with
her love.
With her whole family in Hades, Ismene wants to join Antigone in her
punishment and share her destiny of death. However, Antigone contemptuously rejects her, at the same time rejecting any commonality and severing any link with the living, and reaffirming her belonging to the dead. 70 Antigone in the kommos laments her death “without the bridal that was my
due”; she will be “the bride of Acheron” (810-6). The bridal with Acheron,
the marriage with death, is nevertheless the completion of a life lived “neither among the shades, neither with the living nor with the dead!” (850-2).
She is going to join “her own” in Hades: “to them I go, to live with them, accursed, unmarried!” (866-9). The famous invocation to the tomb as bridal
chamber evokes the final reunion with her family. 71
“Those below” are anyhow an inescapable presence throughout the
whole play: almost every character evokes their presence, only Creon
boasts indifference toward “things in Hades.” However, his sin is not only
his boasting: Creon’s unforgivable impiety consists in his disrespect for the
limits and boundaries between the world “below” and the world “here.” He
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denies burial to a corpse and buries a living being 72 and his impiety sets in
motion Dike’s nemesis – the just or divinely ordained justice – that will reestablish the balance of life and death. As Hegel already recognized, “the
dead, whose right is denied, knows therefore how to find instruments of
vengeance, which are equally effective and powerful as the power which
has injured it.” 73 Contrary to Creon’s initial belief, the dead exercise a constant influence on the action of the play. The dead, the gods (but they are
always the gods “below”), “prompt” the actions of the humans, as recognized by the Chorus: “King, my anxious thought has long been advising me
that this action may have been prompted by the gods” (278-9). The dead
stations at the border of Hades and hangs over the living guiding their
movements. Steiner recognizes that “hardly any notable utterance or action
by the living does not occur under pressure of the dead. … Starting with
Antigone’s first speech, the dead are made animate both in their place of
darkness and at the uncertain frontiers of life.” 74 Death conquers this way
the world of humans in its “tidal advance … on the dissolving society of the
living.” 75
Polis
Man has learned “how to escape the exposure of the inhospitable hills
and the sharp arrows of the rain, all resourceful” (356-60). The “exposure”
is the fact that man is “thrown out” into the world, and at the same time is
separated from it. It is a distance from the natural world that constitutes
human essence. Man is all-resourceful (παντοπόρος, 360): the one who
has many ways, many routes, and thus many resources. For Heidegger,
the polis is the crossroads of all these routes, the place of human historicity, the “where” and the “how” of human distancing from nature and beingin-the-world. 76 However, what defines this “crossroads” as a political space,
as a polis, is less the exclusion of the natural world than the inclusion of the
conditions for freedom. This freedom is guaranteed by plurality, by the fact
that no one rules over the others: the common space of the polis is the
space of appearance where people share words and deeds. Polis, properly
speaking, is therefore not so much a physical location, a “crossroads,” but
rather, argues Arendt, “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.” 77 This space is constituted by “words and
deeds” and so “it does not survive the actuality of the movement which
brought it into being.” 78 The polis is actualized each and every time words
and deeds are “political,” that is, “where words are not empty and deeds
not brutal, where words are not used to violate and destroy but to establish
relations and create new realities.” 79
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
That is why in Antigone there is no polis. There is no sense of what
Gourgouris calls “differential autonomous plurality”; 80 there is no plurality at
all because Creon’s rage silences any other voice. 81 “There is no city that
belongs to a single man,” cries Heamon to Creon; and: “you would be a
fine ruler over a deserted city!” Antigone’s Thebes is that “deserted city”
over which the tyrant rules: where no sharing of words and deeds creates
the political space there is no polis, but a political desert. 82 However, as
Zak points out, it is not just Creon’s folly that erases politics from Thebes;
but a diffuse individualism stops the very emerging of the political. Warning
us against the apolis, the enemy of the polis, the chorus seems to forget
that the enemy is an insider (Antigone); the treason is from within. And for
Zak this treason is general: “all the Thebans but Teiresias and Ismene have
determined to ‘make their own way’ apart from one another.” 83 Thebans
are excluded from the polis and the political by their own individualism.
From this point of view, it is interesting to consider Froma Zeitlin’s hypothesis that Thebes “provides the negative model to Athens’s manifest image of
itself with regard to its notion of the proper management of city, society and
self.” 84 Thebes is an image used to represent in dramatic form the conflicts
of the polis at their extremes: its definition, its essence, and the limits and
risks of its existence. Thebes is in the theatre the anti-Athens, the “other”
place, where Athens acts out questions crucial to the polis: there, the primal question of the polis, the one regarding the sense and the existence of
the community, is problematized in the representation of its absence.
Apolis
The notion of apolis (άπολις) is thus the central issue of Antigone.
Nevertheless, the concept has multiple and even potentially contradictory
meanings: “outcast from the city” is the law-breaker and the evildoer, but
also the one who is refused and excluded by the city, or who excludes himor herself. Therefore, the question about the identity of that apolis the chorus is talking about cannot have a single answer.
Apolis is bound with the notion of “perversion.” And the possibility of
perversion is constitutive of the human being, as the chorus acknowledges:
man “advances sometimes to evil, and other times to good” (367). The
possibility of being apolis, outside the community, is intrinsic to the notion
of humanity itself. This is because, unlike other creatures, human beings
are unnatural: being human signifies a rupture with the natural world, the
violent and exclusively human act of creating a polis, an artificial space.
This violence constitutes the “human.” In Heidegger’s interpretation this is
why man is το δεινότατον, “the most terrible,” “the strangest,” or – in his
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translation – “the uncanniest,” “the most unhomely” of the living beings.
Man is constitutively apolis, not at home in the homely. 85
The tragic hero is always alone, beyond established limits, separated
from the community, apolis. Antigone is the mask of solitude and her isolation is so absolute that she proclaims herself the sole surviving offspring of
the Labdacidae, “the last of the royal house” (941), forgetting and annulling
Ismene. Antigone, however, is apolis not only because she opposes
Creon’s edict, thereby placing herself outside the city and in opposition to it.
But, as a woman, she is apolis “by definition.” 86 As noted above, the distancing from the natural word, which constitutes the political figure of and
for “humanity,” is a male paradigm: Antigone as a woman is not fully a citizen of the polis, not a political subject, and thus not fully human. In the coincidence of “human” and “political” is inscribed the figure of the exclusion
of women, linked to the body and thus to the “natural” and unpolitical.
Nevertheless, Antigone’s solitude is mirrored in Thebes by everyone
else’s individualism: everyone is apolis, deprived of the community. Gourgouris emphasizes that being apolis means not only to be excluded from
the walls of the city; it means primarily to be “singular, deprived of plurality,
of communal action, unintegrated (hence, partial): alone and deprived of
the city’s mind (monos phronein) – in essence, deprived of politics.” 87 In
Antigone’s Thebes, everyone is victim of an individualism which is the real
plague infesting the city. This plague, “the negation of the political,” 88 is
what Gourgouris calls monos phronein, the incapacity of sharing a space of
words and thoughts that is the essence of the political. Apolis is whoever
thinks and acts alone. 89 Antigone is in love with the impossible, cries Ismene (αμηκάνων εράς, 90): being in love with the impossible is being in
love with one’s own “self-willed passion” (αυτόγνωτος οργά, 875), which
excludes one from the political space. That is why, in the political context of
the polis, “it is wrong to hunt for what is impossible” (92). Like Antigone, all
other characters are lost within the impossibility of their “self-willed passion,” and are thus apolis.
Coda: Antigone’s Community
Tragedy was part of the political pedagogy of the polis: its task was to
dramatize conflicts, divisions, oppositions, limits and boundaries. The spectators watched the dramatic presentation of the dangers that undermine the
basis of the community, in a tension between “proximity and distance” 90
which should awake – through pity and fear, or maybe through compassion, reflection, thought – their political consciousness. There are, therefore, no figures for commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone. The notion of
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
commonality is problematized under almost every possible angle, and its
aberrations are laid open in front of the audience. Antigone’s “community”
is made up, instead, of figures of conflict: conflict within the family, between
the family and the state, between states, between the sexes and the generations, between law and justice, within language, speech, action. And the
modern reader may add to the traditional reading further conflicts proper to
our time.
There are no figures of philia in Antigone. The notion of philia intended
as the belonging to a stock, a birth relation or genos, is deconstructed by
the tragedy of Oedipus’ incestuous family; Antigone’s mad – since the
question of whether it is incestuous endures – love for her brother makes
her renounce any commonality of philia. Nor are there any figures of a civic
philia in Antigone’s Thebes, where Creon erases any space of freedom
with his claims for a military discipline. Besides, the patriarchal notion of
civic friendship as the basis of the political is shown to be founded more on
the concept of the enemy rather than the friend, more on exclusion that inclusion. In Antigone there are no figures of nomos, the law based on negotiation and deliberation that constituted the foundation of the Athenian democracy: every character declares him- or herself auto-nomos, a law unto
themselves, erasing the prime condition of a democratic community. There
are no figures of logos, no commonality based on a shared language and
understanding, nor a common “rationality” as base of a presumed humanity. There is no freedom of speech under Creon’s tyranny; furthermore, the
shared language in the tragedy is not a means of communication but an
obstacle and a vehicle of misunderstanding. As for “rationality,” everyone in
the play acts irrationally; but reason itself fails in its pretension of universality because, in a phallogocentric horizon, it is a male prerogative and a pretext for women’s exclusion and reclusion. Even eros cannot build a community in the tragedy: the feminine eros is a destructive and antisocial
force, opposed to the polis; but not even a community of lovers takes place
in Antigone, as Antigone’s only love is for her brother and her nuptials with
Haemon are enacted with his suicide. The only commonality in the tragedy
seems to be the one of Antigone with the dead: she refuses any link with
life and polis and embraces her destiny of death. Death as the only possible commonality devours every community in the play. Thus there is no polis in Antigone, no sense of community, of plurality, of democracy: everyone
is apolis, secluded from the polis for their individualism, egoism or gender.
Antigone’s community is a figure of absence.
Sophocles’ Antigone gives no answer and proposes no solution to the
problems of the community. Tragedy’s “message” in general, writes Castoriadis, was a “constant remainder of self-limitation”; 91 and Antigone’s
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“message” in particular may be “the demonstration that contrary reasons
can coexist … and that it is not in obstinately persisting in one’s own reasons (monos phronein) that it becomes possible to solve the grave problems that may be encountered in collective life.” 92 However, there is no
resolution of the dilemma of the community, no answer to the questions of
commonality. As Gourgouris puts it: “Unlike philosophy (and certainly,
unlike theology), tragedy is a techne of espousing, not resolving, the differential equations of the law – in the last instance, a techne wrought of
enigma and contradiction for the sake of contradiction and selfinterrogation.” 93
Monash University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend has Endured in Western
Literature, Art, and Thought (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), p. 209.
2
In the following discussion I will always refer to Hugh Lloyd-Jones Antigone’s edition and translation in Sophocles, Antigone, The Women of Thrachis, Philoctetes,
Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
1994). All references are given parenthetically by line number.
3
Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente, ed. D.E. Sattler,
Bremer Augabe, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004), 10: 162.
4
Steiner, Antigones, p. 208.
5
See Steiner, Antigones, pp. 208-9.
6
Steiner, Antigones, p. 213.
7
Steiner, Antigones, p. 213.
8
In the first dialogue with Ismene, Antigone insists on using the possessive τόν
εμόν, “my own”: “I will bury my [εμόν] brother, and yours [σόν], if you will not” (45);
“But he has no right to keep me from my own! [τών εμών]” (48). As Paul Ludwig
notes, “of etymological importance is the fact that in earlier Greek the adjective
form, φίλος, also denoted ‘one’s own.’” Paul W. Ludwig, Eros and Polis: Desire
and Community in Greek Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp.
212-3.
9
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), p. 2.
10
For a clear presentation of this theory on the historical situation see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998).
11
See J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture,
and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), p. 167.
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12
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 2.
13
Adriana Cavarero, Corpo in Figure: Filosofia E Politica Della Corporeitá (Milano:
Feltrinelli, 1995), p. 32.
14
Cavarero, Corpo in Figure, p. 57.
15
Cavarero, Corpo in Figure p. 35.
16
For a discussion on the taboo about Antigone’s possible incestuous love for her
brother see Butler, Antigone’s Claim. The incest taboo constitutes, even before
psychoanalysis or Lévi-Strauss, the condition of social intelligibility. For Hegel the
stability of kinship is based on blood relations, which make desire impossible.
These conditions here are confused in an unstable incestuous web of blood and
desire.
17
Antigone says: “for never, had children of whom I was the mother or had my husband perished and been mouldering there, would I have taken on myself this task,
in defiance of the citizens. In virtue of what law do I say this? If my husband had
died, I could have had another, and a child from another man, if I had lost the first,
but with my mother and my father in Hades below, I could never have another
brother” (904-12).
18
For a discussion of this point see Butler, Antigone’s Claim.
19
Cavarero notes: “So Creon and Polynices … although enemies, stay on the same
side of that patriarchal symbolic order which assign women to domestic circle and
men to a humanly progressive and higher political sphere,” Corpo in Figure, p. 50.
20
See Euben, Corrupting Youth, p. 166.
21
Like Creon, who in fact cries: “indeed, now I am no man, but she is a man, if she
is to enjoy such power as this with impunity” (484-9).
22
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 24.
23
This is Arendt’s position. Using Plato and Aristotle, Ludwig gives a different interpretation of civic philia as extension to the city of the philia that reigned in the family. See Ludwig, Eros and Polis, p. 340.
24
He says: “in this way we have to protect discipline, and we must never allow a
woman to vanquish us. If we must perish, it is better to do so by the hand of a
man, and then we cannot be called inferior to women” (677-80). And to Haemon
he cries: “Contemptible character, inferior to a woman!” (746).
25
Creon says: “if those of my own family whom I keep are to show no discipline,
how much more will those outside my family! The man who acts rightly in family
matters will be seen to be righteous in the city also” (659-62).
26
See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New
Brunswik, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1976).
27
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 26-7.
28
As Creon says, “an enemy is never a friend, even when he is dead” (522).
29
Schmitt writes: “War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility
which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy,”
The Concept of the Political, p. 35.
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30
Cavarero, Corpo in Figure, p. 52. Cavarero – together with a good part of feminist
critique – attacks the binary paradigm of friend/enemy which is the basis of patriarchal political theory and which emphasizes uniquely the category of enemy. In
opposition to this, Antigone releases philia from its contrary, from enmity: ούτοι
συνέχθειν, αλλά συμφιλείν έφυν (523), “I have no enemies by birth, but I have
friends by birth,” or “I wasn’t born to share enmity, but to share love.” Antigone
represents “an unpolitical philia, inscribed in maternal generation, which doesn’t
contemplate and doesn’t know its contrary,” Cavarero, Corpo in Figure, p. 52.
31
As Schmitt emphasizes, “an enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one
fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely
the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity
of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship. The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense; πολέμιος, not
εχθρός,” The Concept of the Political, p. 28.
32
Cavarero, Corpo in Figure, p. 56.
33
For Hegel, as unconscious of the public law, the unwritten law is “the law of
weakness and darkness” and it is where the universality of the public law is
rooted: “The publicly manifest Spirit has the root of its power in the nether world.”
Public law has to “consume” and “absorb” into itself and its universality the unconscious power of the unwritten law. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), p. 286-7.
34
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 38.
35
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 38.
36
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 10.
37
Butler notes that “this is a law of the instant and, hence, a law with no generality
and no transposability, one mired in the very circumstances to which it is applied,
a law formulated precisely through the singular instance of its application and,
therefore, no law at all in any ordinary, generalizable sense,” Antigone’s Claim, p.
10.
38
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 52.
39
Castoriadis writes: “Φύσις: the push, the endogenous and spontaneous growth of
things that nevertheless is also generative of an order. Νόμος: the word, usually
translated as ‘law,’ originally signified the law of sharing [la loi du partage], therefore institution, therefore usage (ways and customs), therefore a convention, and,
at the limit, convention pure and simple. That something pertains to νόμος and not
to φύσις signified, for the ancient Greeks, that that something depends on human
conventions and not on the nature of beings. … Νόμος is our creative imaginary
institution by means of which we make ourselves qua human beings.” Cornelius
Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis,
and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), pp.
331-2.
40
Arendt writes: “The laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action
but products of making. Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the
space being the public realm of the πόλις and its structure the law; legislator and
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
architect belonged to the same category. But these tangible entities themselves
were not the content of politics (not Athens, but the Athenians, were the πόλις),”
The Human Condition, pp. 194-5.
41
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 280.
42
William F. Zak, The Polis and the Divine Order: The Oresteia, Sophocles, and the
Defence of Democracy (London: Associated UP, 1995), p. 90.
43
Zak, The Polis and the Divine Order, p. 90.
44
Zak, The Polis and the Divine Order, p. 113. Zak proposes the hypothesis of a
fundamental death-drive contained in and sustaining this autonomist folly, and
transposes to Antigone and Creon the term Ismene uses to describe Eteocles and
Polynices: αυτοκτονούντε (56), “an ambiguous term at once denoting mutual destruction and self-slaughter. … Refusing all conciliatory communication with one
another, they turn their fury upon themselves when they find the blows they would
deliver to their enemies fail of their intended mark,” The Polis and the Divine Order, p. 113.
45
For a discussion about law, violence and sovereignty, see the section Nomos
Basileus in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
46
Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), p. 126.
47
“And he has learned speech (φθέγμα) and wind-swift thought (φρόνημα) and the
temper that rules cities” (354-6). Steiner notes that “lines 354-5 … entail almost a
political theory of speech,” Antigones, p. 254.
48
See David Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 36ff.
49
For a discussion on the centrality of speech in the polis see Arendt, The Human
Condition.
50
Arendt writes: “Without the accompaniment of speech … action would not only
lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject.
… Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be
an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same
time the speaker of words,” The Human Condition, p. 178-9.
51
As Arendt remarks, the polis “not without justification has been called the most
talkative of all bodies politic,” The Human Condition, p. 26.
52
Creon cries: “But there is no worse evil than insubordination! This it is that ruins
cities, this it is that destroys houses, this it is that shatters and puts to flight the
warriors on its own side! But what saves the lives of most of those that go straight
is obedience! In this way we have to protect discipline and we must never allow a
woman to vanquish us” (672-8).
53
Haemon reproaches him: “Do you wish to speak but not to listen to him you speak
to?” (757).
54
Euben, Corrupting Youth, p. 160.
55
Steiner, Antigones, p. 247.
27
28
Carlo Salzani
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56
Steiner, Antigones, p. 234.
57
Steiner, Antigones, p. 234.
58
Euben, Corrupting Youth, p. 162.
59
Euben formulates it this way: “does Antigone provide us with a view of reason as
defective, or does it provide us with a case of pride and stubbornness ‘masquerading’ as and perverting reason? Is what we see not ‘true’ reason but a ‘semblance’ of it? Or do the very terms of this distinction beg the question?”, Corrupting
Youth, p. 148.
60
Cavarero, Corpo in Figure, p. 20.
61
Cavarero illustrates this clash between polis and (female) body, using Sophocles’
Antigone as an extremely representative example and, at the same time, as an
atypical case where the body is loaded with an unusual importance for the centrality of the corpse and of an incestuous sexuality. See Cavarero, Corpo in Figure.
62
Judith Butler evidences this paradox in Antigone’s claim: “Her words, understood
as deeds, are chiasmically related to the vernacular of sovereign power, speaking
in and against it, delivering and defying imperatives at the same time, inhabiting
the language of sovereignty at the very moment in which she opposes sovereign
power and is excluded from its terms,” Antigone’s Claim, p. 28.
63
The chorus invocation is full of awe: “None among the immortals can escape you,
nor any among mortal men, and he who has you is mad. You wrench just men’s
mind aside from justice, doing them violence; it is you who have stirred up this
quarrel between men of the same blood. Victory goes to the visible desire that
comes from the eyes of the beautiful bride, desire that has its throne beside those
of the mighty laws; for irresistible in her sporting is the goddess Aphrodite” (781805).
64
Claude Calame, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), p. 141.
65
See Steiner, Antigones, p. 256ff.
66
Calame, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, pp. 149-50.
67
Steiner, Antigones, p. 158.
68
The description of the macabre nuptial rites reads: “Still living, he clasped the
maiden in the bend of his feeble arm, and pouring forth a sharp jet of blood, he
stained her white cheek. He lay, a corpse holding a corpse, having achieved his
marriage rites, poor fellow, in the house of Hades” (1238-43).
69
Creon says: “An enemy is never a friend, even when is dead” (522).
70
Antigone says to Ismene: “Do not try to share my death, and do not claim as your
own something you never put a hand to! My death will be enough!” (534-47). Ismene replies: “Ah me, am I to miss sharing your death? Antigone: Yes, you chose
life, I chose death” (554-5).
71
The invocation reads: “O tomb, O bridal chamber, O deep-dug home, to be
guarded for ever, where I go to join those who are my own, of whom Persephassa
has already received a great number, dead, among the shades! Of these I am the
last and my descent will be the saddest of all, before the term of my life has come.
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Figures of Commonality in Sophocles’ Antigone
But when I come there I am confident that I shall come dear to my father, dear to
you, my mother, and dear to you, my own brother” (891-9).
72
In the words of Tiresias: “in return for having hurled below one of those above,
blasphemously lodging a living person in a tomb, and you have kept here something belonging to the gods below, a corpse deprived, unburied, unholy. Neither
you nor the gods above have any part in this, but you have inflicted it upon them!”
(1068-73).
73
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 287.
74
Steiner, Antigones, p. 263.
75
Steiner, Antigones, p. 265.
76
See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Gregory Fried and Richard
Polt (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), pp. 156 ff.
77
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198.
78
Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 199-200.
79
Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 199-200.
80
Gourgouris, Does Literature Think?, p. 141.
81
The dialogue (des sourdes) between Haemon and Creon, accelerated and made
so more dramatic, effective and captivating in the stichomythia, expresses exemplarily the anti-political situation of Thebes:
HAEMON: This people of Thebes that shares our city does not say so.
CREON: Is the city to tell me what orders I shall give? …
CREON: Must I rule this land for another and not for myself?
HAEMON: Yes, there is no city that belongs to a single man.
CREON: Is not the city thought to belong to its ruler?
HAEMON: You would be a fine ruler over a deserted city! (733-9)
82
Tyranny, Arendt explains, means isolation: “isolation of the tyrant from his subjects and the isolation of the subjects from each other through mutual fear and
suspicion – and hence … tyranny was not one form of government among others
but contradicted the essential human condition of plurality, the acting and speaking together, which is the condition of all forms of political organization,” The Human Condition, p. 202.
83
Zak, The Polis and the Divine Order, p. 127
84
Froma Zeitlin, “Thebes, Theatre of the Self and Society in Athenian Drama”, in
Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkley: U of California
P, 1986), p. 102. It is, of course, a very old interpretation to see Antigone as pitting
Athens against Thebes, although the terms of contrast may differ. Cf. Richard
Jebb, Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments: Part III, Antigone (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1900, pp. ix-x.
85
See Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 159.
86
Cavarero, Corpo in Figure, p. 44.
87
Gourgouris, Does Literature Think?, pp. 141-2.
88
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 70.
29
30
Carlo Salzani
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89
As Haemon asserts: “For whoever think that they themselves alone have sense,
or have a power of speech or an intelligence that no other has, these people when
they are laid open are found to be empty” (707-9). Thus Gourgouris concludes:
“The two sides of the law (human/divine, State/family, etc.) are not as mutually exclusive as they appear at first glance since they can be interwoven, and it is precisely in the sense that Kreon and Antigone resist this interweaving (pareirein) and
pursue each other to destruction by following the law of monos phronein that they
become apoleis. To think and act alone in a democratic polis is plainly selfdestructive, as well as an affront to the polis,” Does Literature Think?, pp. 140-1.
90
Euben writes: “Proximity because what the audience saw and heard on stage
resonated with recognizable contemporary events, characters, and situations; distance because, though elements of the excesses on stage were present in Athenian life, they did not define it,” Corrupting Youth, p. 176.
91
Castoriadis, World in Fragments, pp. 93-4.
92
Castoriadis, World in Fragments, pp. 93-4.
93
Gourgouris, Does Literature Think?, p. 155.
Mourning the Public Body in Sophocles’ Antigone
Jennifer R. Ballengee
At the close of Oedipus at Colonus (c. 401 BC), the last extant play of
Sophocles and his final treatment of the myth of Oedipus’ accursed family,
a strange dramatic event occurs. As the thunder of Zeus peals overhead,
Oedipus’ body, located somewhere offstage, disappears forever, simultaneously bestowing a remarkable power upon the site where he departs
from earthly life. Perhaps stranger still, for the form of the drama, are the
responses that Theseus and Antigone have to the catastrophe. According
to the messenger who reports the details of Oedipus’ death to the chorus
(and the watching audience), the epic hero who alone among humans has
permission to witness Oedipus’ passing actually fails to see the singular
event:
And when we had departed, after a short time we turned around,
and could see that the man [Oedipus] was no longer present, and
the king [Theseus] was shading his eyes, holding his hand against
his head, as though some terrible, terrifying thing, unbearable to
see, had been presented.
ως δ’ απήλθομεν,
χρόνω βραχεί στραφέντες, εξαπείδομεν
τον άνδρα τον μεν ουδαμού παρόντ’ έτι,
άνακτα δ’αυτόν ομμάτων επίσκιον
χείρ’ αντέχοντα κρατός, ως δεινού τινος
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/ballengee.pdf
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Jennifer Ballengee
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φόβου φανέντος ουδ’ ανασχετού βλέπειν. (1647-52) 1
In an odd twist of dramatic performance, Sophocles represents the catastrophe 2 of Oedipus’ death by means of a messenger who is forbidden to
see the occurrence. Thus the messenger must report upon what he saw of
the only one who was allowed to see, Theseus – who himself fails to see
because the sight presented is too terrible for seeing. In lieu of representation, then, in the place of what cannot be staged, the audience must turn to
narrative language to gain knowledge of this event.
Such a pointedly linguistic presentation seems counter to the drama’s
theatricality. As Aristotle indicates in the Poetics, tragedy, which belongs to
the arts of mimesis or representation, remains distinct from other mimetic
arts such as epic poetry, dithyramb, or music in that it utilizes actors on a
stage along with verse and rhythm in order to convey its meaning. As his
well-known formula describes:
Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has
magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used]
separately in the [various] parts [of the play]; [represented] by people
acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.
έστιν ουν τραγωδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας και τελείας μέγεθος
εχούσης, ηδυσμένωι λόγωι, χωρίς εκάστωι των ειδών εν τοις
μορίοις, δρώντων και ου δι’ απαγγελίας, δι’ ελέου και φόβου
περαίνουσα την των τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν. (1449b24-28) 3
The body of the actor corresponds to the meaning of language; gestures
have the potential to be both mimetic and deictic. In tragedy, this passage
suggests, the “doing” (δρώντων) of actors takes the place of the reporting
(απαγγέλων) of narrative language. Tragedy represents its meaning upon a
stage before an audience by means of bodily actions supplemented by
spoken words.
The speech of the messenger (that is, the reporter, the άγγελος)
quoted above, however, suggests a more complicated relation between
mimesis and language in tragedy. In fact, later in the Poetics, it seems that
poetic language, apart from the bodily gestures that correspond to it, comprises an integral part of the function of the drama. The purpose of the performance of speech, Aristotle suggests, would disappear if the thoughts
spoken by the actor were not essential: “For what would be the task of the
speaker, if the necessary elements were apparent even without speech? [τι
γαρ αν είη του λέγοντος έργον, ει φαινοιτο η δέοι και μη δια τον λόγον]”
(1456b7-8, my trans.). Lucas’s commentary suggests two possible mean-
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Mourning the Public Body
ings: “Either A. is asking what would be the function of speech in drama if
the necessary emotions could be aroused by pantomime, or, more likely,
what would be the role of rhetoric in drama if the emotions could be
aroused by the action.” 4 With an emphasis on the way in which language
itself conveys meaning, Aristotle introduces a discussion of lexis, diction,
the manner of speaking the thought of the tragedy. 5 Diction provides, he
explains, the means by which rhetoric will be effected in the drama. Derrida, in his essay “White Mythology,” likewise suggests that this passage
emphasizes the function of rhetoric in tragedy: “If there were no difference
between dianoia and lexis, there would be no space for tragedy. … This difference is not only due to the fact that the personage must be able to say
something other than what he thinks. He exists and acts within tragedy only
on the condition that he speaks.” 6 For Derrida, the need for lexis, the rhetorical presentation of the thought of the work, indicates a significant difference – between speech and thought – that creates the space for tragedy.
In tragedy, the thought of the work can be expressed in speech that does
not refer to it directly; conversely, words in tragedy may, by means of their
rhetorical potential, pose a number of possible meanings. Rhetorical
speech, then, is an essential aspect of tragedy; without speech, the thought
of the play remains unspoken.
Yet what happens when speech fails? To return to Oedipus at
Colonus, in the speech of Antigone that follows the messenger’s report
(quoted above), Sophocles presents another barrier to understanding:
Alas, alack! It is for us, it is for us to lament in all fullness for the accursed blood from our father that is in us, unhappy pair; our father
for whom we endured continual pain, and at the last we shall carry
away from him things beyond reason that we have seen and suffered.
αιαί, φευ. έστιν εστι νων δη
ου το μεν, άλλο δε μη, πατρός έμφυτον
άλαστον αίμα δυσμόροιν στενάζειν,
ώτινι τον πολύν
άλλοτε μεν πόνον έμπεδον είχομεν,
εν πυμάτω δ’ αλόγιστα παροίσομεν,
ιδόντε και παθούσα. (1670-6)
For Antigone and Ismene, what is left at the end of Oedipus’ life, which it is
their continual curse to mourn, surpasses reason (it is αλόγιστος), remaining for them in the experience of sight and suffering. What eludes speech
can nevertheless be seen and felt. It seems, then, that speech works in
conjunction with physical performance in the tragedy; for, in drama, “dis-
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Jennifer Ballengee
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course itself is on display.” 7
These two responses to Oedipus’ death present two divergent hurdles
to communication. On the one hand, the event of Oedipus’ death is not
seen by any individual, even the epic hero designated to witness it. Nevertheless, the death is reported by the witness in terms of its not having been
seen; the messenger’s words, delivered to the audience of Theban elders
and the audience of spectators, take the place of the actual event. Yet this
narrative account, failing to correspond entirely to the catastrophic moment
of Oedipus’ death, cannot entirely convey the thought or meaning of his
death. This difference arises again in the second passage. For, as Antigone laments, the meaning of Oedipus’ death – that is, what the mourning
of his passing, and therefore of his past, would convey – stands beyond
reason, it cannot be reasonably communicated to others, but remains to
the daughters only in what they themselves have seen and suffered because of their father’s life. This failure in language returns us to the difference between speech and thought. Bridging the difference between lexis
and dianoia, the tragic actor performs upon the stage not only before his
audience, but for his audience. The terms of this performance are echoed
in Antigone’s troubled lament. The necessity of the mourning that Antigone
finds impossible shifts the impact of Oedipus’ death from his daughters’ individual experience of the event to the manner in which they may (or may
not) communicate his death, by means of his life, to the polis. The transference of mourning from an individual ritual to a communal demonstration
and process raises the problem of communicating the act of mourning to a
large body of people. What does the corpse of the one who has died mean
for the polis? What is the meaning of the loss of the individual for the city?
In Oedipus at Colonus, the meaning of Oedipus’ passing, and his past
life, for the city, is embodied in his crimes: his past achieves significance in
its pollution of the polis. For the city, the meaning of his passing must
somehow indicate the nature of that pollution – that is, the extent of his
transgression – in order to measure its loss or resolution in death. While
the individual mourns in ritual the passing of an other individual, the meaning of mourning for the city is construed in terms of a larger ideal that reflects the position of that individual in relation to the city. 8 In the case of
Oedipus, mourning becomes an exploration of justice, in which the body
becomes evidence or proof that will indicate justice effected. Thus, the individual body stands in as evidence for the meaning – the thought – of Oedipus’ life. Antigone’s method of communicating the meaning of his death –
by means of her own body’s suffering – suggests this potential of communicating, from the individual to the masses, by means of the body.
While Oedipus at Colonus offers a demonstration of the political fate of
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Mourning the Public Body
Oedipus’ body, whose public significance has already been made horrifyingly clear, 9 Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, in its essential concern with burial, traces the role of the body in its shift from individual to political mourning. Describing events that occur after Oedipus’ criminal investigation, selfconviction, and death in exile, 10 this play demonstrates a preoccupation
with crime and justice that reflects a fifth-century Athenian interest in the
democratic mode of judgment – the formal trial. As a result, the body in Antigone functions not only as a representation of an action, but ultimately as
a potential body of evidence – the evidence of meaning – whose suffering
provides the legitimacy of proof to a witnessing audience. While the corpse,
in its persistence on stage, 11 reminds the audience of a potential meaning
which it indicates, the body acquires this potency by having suffered pain.
How does suffering enable the body to mean more than itself? How does
the symbolic potential of the body relate to its position at the juncture of individual and polis? In this article, I will suggest that in the conjunction of
tragedy and trial (both aspects of the polis), 12 the sense of the body as evidence expands the function of mimesis – through the rhetorical concepts of
evidence, proof, and punishment – beyond determinable meaning, surpassing the temporal and spatial limits of language to refer directly to the
conception of divine justice at the location of the tortured, dead body.
The unforgettable corpse
Of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, Antigone (c. 442 BC) provides, in
the motivating corpse of Polynices, the clearest example of the status of
the material body for the polis. Taking place after a war between opposing
forces led by Antigone’s two brothers, the play opens in the wake of an
army of bodies killed in battle – corpses among which those of the brothers
occupy a position of marked importance, due to the political significance
with which they are invested. Yet it is Polynices’ corpse, denied burial by
Creon as punishment for his insurrection against Thebes and his brother
Eteocles, which poses the ethical dilemma of the play. While Antigone expresses a passionate loyalty to her brother, repeatedly attempting to give
Polynices a proper burial, Creon opposes her efforts with a staunch and
unbending loyalty to the city-state, condemning her actions as traitorously
criminal.
Polynices’ unburied corpse introduces an ethical dilemma into the play
from the very first, when Antigone proposes to her sister Ismene the plan to
bury it, raising the problem of Creon’s edict against such an action. What
seems to strike Antigone first about the situation is the inequality with which
her brothers are being treated: while Eteocles is honored with burial,
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Jennifer Ballengee
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Polynices is not. Yet the manner in which she relates Creon’s proclamation
to Ismene reveals that the matter is not merely about a simple burial: “But
as for the unhappy corpse of Polynices, they say it has been proclaimed to
the citizens that none shall conceal it in a grave or lament for it, but that
they should leave it unwept for, unburied, a rich treasure house for birds as
they look out for food [τον δ’ αθλίως θανόντα Πολυνείκους νέκυν / αστοίσί
φασιν εκκεκηρύχθαι το μη / τάφω καλύψαι μηδέ κωκύσαί τινα, / εάν δ’
άκλαυτον, άταφον, οιωνοίς γλυκύν / θησαυρόν εισορώσι προς χάριν
βοράς]” (26-30). While the practice of leaving traitors unburied is not uncommon in fifth century Greece (and therefore would not have been especially shocking to Sophocles’ audience), Antigone’s emphasis upon the results of such treatment – that the body as carrion would provide food for
scavengers – emphasizes the particularly shameful quality of the corpse
denied burial. 13 In addition, Creon’s edict specifies that the body not be
covered in a grave (μη τάφω καλύψαι); the corpse thus remains in view, as
a reminder to citizens of the fate of a traitor, but also as a nagging reminder
to Antigone of the dishonour directed toward her brother. Thus the dramatic
stichomythia between the sisters that opens the play revolves around the
ethical dilemma posed by the presence (above ground) of the dead body:
while Ismene protests that in burying Polynices Antigone would commit an
act forbidden to the city (απόρρητον πόλει [44]), Antigone asserts that to be
caught not burying him would be a betrayal to her brother (ου γαρ δη
προδούσ’ αλώσομαι [46]), one of her own (των εμών [48]). Arguing that her
crime is a hallowed one (όσια πανουργήσασ’ [74]) that the gods would
honour, Antigone claims that it would be especially honourable to die doing
such a deed. When Ismene suggests that her sister is seeking to accomplish an impossible thing, Antigone retorts: “If you say that, you will be
hated by me, and you will justly incur the hatred of the dead man [ει ταύτα
λέξεις, εχθαρή μεν εξ εμού, / εχθρά δε τω θανόντι προσκείση δίκη]” (93-4).
Thus, Antigone asserts that the honour of the gods protects her in burying
Polynices, even if she should die, whereas the just hatred of the dead condemns Ismene’s refusal to act. In her passionate conviction, however, Antigone urges Ismene not to maintain a protective silence about her transgression, but rather to proclaim her crime to all, a request that Ismene responds to with clear misgiving.
Creon’s entrance, in which he takes up the thread of Ismene’s argument, is directly preceded by the parodos describing, as Mark Griffith’s
commentary points out, “what Polynices had represented while he lived – a
hideous threat to his whole community.” 14 That a chorus made up of
Theban elders, leading citizens of the city of Thebes, delivers this warning
re-emphasizes the political nature of the problem of Polynices’ corpse. The
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Mourning the Public Body
chorus’ concern with the polis thus sets the stage for Creon’s claim, following this chorus, that he enacts his laws for the good of the city. In his first
speech (162-210), Creon describes the needs of the city as his first priority,
clearly establishing that this takes precedence even over the ties of a loved
one, since such dear attachments, he argues, can only be formed in the
luxury of a well-run city. The greatness of Thebes, he continues, can be attributed to the effectiveness of the laws (nomoi, 191) of this hierarchy, laws
that privilege the city over personal feelings.
Creon’s emphasis upon the priority of the city over the personal makes
his laws, of course, radically incommensurable with Antigone’s emphatic
assertion that her ties to her brother precede any other consideration, even
concern for her own life. Creon proposes that his civic laws take precedence over Antigone’s individual ties to her family, raising an ethical conflict
that seems to present an opposition between societal structures, such as
the law and the city, and the desires of the individual, such as home and
family. Thus, the play has become for many commentators a paradigm of
the ethical dilemma of the individual in society. 15 Critics find expressed in
Antigone a tension between a range of dialectical oppositions, including the
law of the polis and the law of the oikos, the law of men and the law of the
gods, civil law and natural law, techne and nature – with Antigone’s revolt
associated with family, nature, the worship of the divine. Feminist critics
find in Antigone a distinctly feminine heroine, overturning the patriarchy in a
passionate subversion of the order of the law; in these readings, Antigone’s
desires cause disruptions that can break apart the regimes of Creon, Aristotle, and all of dialectical philosophy. Yet what is this nature, this passion,
this desire, that would be incorporated into a conception of ethics, specifically the ethical conflict at the heart of Antigone? In these ethical readings
of the play, Antigone is seen to personify or enact limits which are particularly human aspects of existence in opposition to the societal construction
of the polis and the laws that correspond to it. At the heart of these terms of
conflict, however, lies the compulsion that initially provides the catalyst for
their production. While the dialectical approaches noted here appropriately
draw out possible terms of conflict within the play, none address the persistent and haunting figure that prompts these oppositions: the corpse of
Polynices, a representation of the human at its most extremely inhuman.
Mourning and Burial
The guard who arrives to report the initial transgression of Creon’s
edict – the discovery that someone has buried Polynices’ corpse – states
his case nervously and briefly, afraid that he will suffer blame for delivering
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the bad news. Significantly, in his initial statement of the problem, he casts
the burial itself in metaphorical terms: “Someone has just gone off after
burying the body, sprinkling its flesh with thirsty dust and performing the
necessary rites [τον νεκρό τις αρτίως / θάψας βέβηκε καπί χρωτί διψίαν /
κόνιν παλύνας καφαγιστεύσας α χρη]” (245-7). While the guard’s reference
to the proper rites of burial conveys a sense of the significant act accomplished, he expresses the physical action in terms of a metaphor: “thirsty
dust [κόνιν παλύνας].” Though the correspondence of these terms seems
almost clichéd – when the ground is dry and dusty, it needs water or is
“thirsty,” – Griffith suggests in his commentary that the reference to water
also may indicate the burial ground’s need for the tears of lament. 16 Indeed, as the description of the guard goes on to indicate, Antigone’s scattering of dust over the body, accompanied with the necessary ritual mourning rites, seems to have sufficed to protect Polynices’ body just as well as a
fully underground burial would. In fact, as Carol Jacobs has pointed out, the
slightness of Antigone’s interaction with the physical earth echoes the lightness of the dust on Polynices’ body: both are so light as to seem hardly existent at all. Thus, the guard marvels at how the earth about the body remains unmarked, and at how the body has vanished despite the fact that it
is only covered with a light dust: like the scattering of dust, the metaphor
suggests, rather than explicitly demonstrates, the burial of the corpse under
the earth. Significantly, also, the guard notes that the layer of dust has
somehow protected the body from being mauled by animals or birds (a fact
bearing the potential to especially irritate Creon, whose edict had emphasized such a fate for the corpse).
Antigone’s ritual burial, slight as it manifests itself physically, subverts
the prohibition that Creon has placed on the body. In doing so, she follows
a customary rite of mourning that mediates between the dead mortal and
the gods, as Bernard Knox points out:
Antigone’s appeal is not general but specific. She is not opposing a
whole set of unwritten laws to the written laws of the polis, nor is she
pleading the force of individual conscience or universal and natural
law. She is claiming that the age-old customary rites of mourning
and burial for the dead, which are unwritten because they existed
even before the alphabet was invented or the polis organized, have
the force of law, unwritten but unfailing, which stems from the gods
and which the gods enforce. 17
Antigone herself, of course, claims that she performs the ritual of “burying”
Polynices in the service of the laws of the gods. Yet the dusted corpse remains in view for the guard to discover; thus the ritual Antigone performs
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affects the city, as well. When the guard brings her before Creon, charging
her with the burial, the chorus exclaims as she approaches, “Surely they do
not lead you captive for disobedience to the king’s laws…? [ου δη που σε γ’
απιστούσαν / τοις βασιλείοις απάγουσι νόμοις...;]” (381-2). Providing the
conclusion to their choral song that has addressed the dangerous potential
of man, the choral reference to the nomoi that Antigone has broken as
kingly (τοις βασιλείοις νόμοις) distinguishes these prohibitions as another
man-made thing, a product of techné, and thus good or bad only to the extent to which they carry out the justice of the gods (see especially lines
365-71). Antigone reiterates this distinction shortly thereafter; when Creon
clarifies with astonishment that she has dared to break his law, she replies
with a justification that places her squarely on the side of the gods:
Yes, for it was not Zeus who made this proclamation, nor was it Justice who lives with the gods below that established such laws among
men, nor did I think your proclamations strong enough to have
power to overrule, mortal as they were, the unwritten and unfailing
ordinances of the gods.
ου γαρ τι μοι Ζευς ην ο κηρύξας τάδε,
ουδ’ η ξύνοικος των κάτω θεών Δίκη
τοιούσδ’ εν ανθρώποισιν ώρισεν νόμους.
ουδέ σθένειν τοσούτον ωόμην τα σα
κηρύγμαθ’ ώστ’ άγραπτα κασφαλή θεών
νόμιμα δύνασθαι θνητά γ’ όνθ’ υπερδραμείν. (450-5)
Excluding Creon’s laws from the divinely ordained laws, Antigone aligns
herself with rights proclaimed by either Zeus or divine Justice – which she
significantly locates as residing with the gods below, that is, the chthonic
gods, among whom Hades would be included. 18 In either case, Zeus or
Justice, these divinely ordained laws seem to gain their validity in her assessment because of their immortal nature: they are unwritten (άγραπτα),
unlike the laws of men, which in their material (written) presence may ultimately be subject to temporal decay (thus her designation of them as mortal [θνητά]). The mourning that Antigone seeks to accomplish, then, echoes
the divine laws she claims to follow, inasmuch as mourning seeks to immortalize, or make present in memory, the one who has passed away.
Yet the effects of this memorial ritual extend beyond Antigone’s relation to the gods; the importance of Polynices’ unburied body to the city determines that her actions must resonate in a public sense as well. In response to Antigone’s claims, Creon emphasizes again his devotion to the
laws of the city, arguing their importance in terms of what lies at stake in
their being obeyed or transgressed:
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But there is no worse evil than insubordination! This it is that ruins
cities, this it is that destroys houses, this it is that shatters and puts
to flight the warriors on its own side! But what saves the lives of
most of those that go straight is obedience! In this way we have to
protect discipline.
αναρχίας δε μείζον ουκ έστιν κακόν.
αύτη πόλεις όλλυσιν, ήδ’ αναστάτους
οίκους τίθησιν, ήδε συμμάχου δορός
τροπάς καταρρήγνυσι· των δ’ ορθουμένων
σώζει τα πολλά σώμαθ’ η πειθαρχία. (672-6)
For Creon, then, the laws of the city must be obeyed because they save
the citizens at all levels: in government, home and military life. In the face
of such high stakes, obedience becomes unequivocal and unquestioning;
he therefore categorizes any deviance from the straight path of the law as
anarchy (αναρχίας, not subordinate to the ruler or αρχή). The choice here
stands framed as the stark difference between disorder and order, a distinction at the heart of much of Sophocles’ work. 19 Creon’s fear, expressed
here, of a continuous threat to the fragile hold of absolute order manifests
itself in his extreme treatment of Polynices’ body (i.e., his emphatic desire
that the body be exposed as carrion for mutilation by animals) and his later
obsessive attempts to oppress Antigone. Such a fear gives a tenuous quality to his rule, as if it could be subverted by the slightest deviance, the expression of any loss of faith. Thus he declares in his decree (or so Antigone
reports it) that the one burying Polynices will be subject to death by stoning.
Such a death might serve as a public demonstration of the results of betraying the rule of Creon. 20 Even the demonstration of force and control
that a public execution might provide, however, seems too weak an enforcement for Creon. In a later exchange with Antigone, he extends this desire to control not only the lives but also the deaths of those who usurp his
authority. When she asks, “Do you wish for anything more than to take me
and kill me? [θέλεις τι μείζον ή κατακτείναι μ’ ελών]” (497), he replies, “Not
I! When I have that, I have everything [εγώ μεν ουδέν, τουτ’ έχων άπαντ’
έχω]” (498). Indeed, if he had Antigone’s death, he would have everything,
for being in possession of another’s death would give him a quality similar
to the gods who have a hand in fate. With this threat, Creon conflates his
own potential with that of the gods.
Yet for Creon, as he demonstrates with the public spectacle of stoning
he first proposes with his edict, his power depends upon his ability to persuade his subjects, the citizens, to invest him with it. This becomes clear as
he begins to lose the empathy of the chorus. Once Haemon appears on-
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stage and tries to convince his father to change his mind, the chorus seems
to waver in their support of Creon’s execution of Antigone, his son’s fiancée. Thus, after Haemon exits, the chorus asks Creon if he still intends to
kill her; when he replies in the affirmative, they ask how he will do it, giving
him the opportunity to change his method of execution from the formerly
expressed public stoning to a less dramatic option of burying her alive in a
tomb, out of sight of the city (775). Creon therefore struggles to maintain
his present power, seeking to prevent any disorder 21 in the city that might
lead to a loss of authority, by modifying his plans.
The execution he therefore proposes, death by burial alive, though
less dramatic and painful (presumably) than the first option, presents its
own set of worries to Antigone. From loudly proclaiming her part in mourning her brother, she turns to nagging worries about the chances that she
herself will be mourned by others, if she is to die alone, hidden, and possibly forgotten in a cave: “No longer may I, poor creature, look upon the sacred eye of the shining sun; and my fate, unwept for, is lamented by no
friend [ουκέτι μοι τόδε λαμπάδος ιερόν / όμμα θέμις οράν ταλαίνα. / τον δ’
εμόν πότμον αδάκρυτον / ουδείς φίλων στενάζει]” (879-82). With this complaint, Antigone shifts her focus from the consideration of her (and her
brother’s) individual relation to the gods to anxiety about her position in the
public at her death; in other words, she worries that her memory, her reputation, will die with her. Creon responds to this concern by reaffirming her
worries; although he rhetorically suggests at first that she will be mourned
as a matter of course, he goes on to emphasize the isolated nature of her
living tomb, and its complete removal from those living above ground. By
removing her body from view, Creon suggests that he will veil the sign that
would inspire the mourning of Antigone – her corpse.
With this gesture, Creon plans a similar fate for Antigone as he has
designated for her brother: by consigning her to a death removed (effectively) from the city, he buries the disorder of her anarchy along with her –
just as he excludes the body of Polynices, who has brought disorder into
the city as a result of his uprising. 22 In each case, Creon physically removes the disorder from the sphere of city life or action. By burying Antigone alive, Creon also hopes to remove the pollution of further disorder by
avoiding the guilt of having killed her directly. Yet, in doing so, he subjects
Antigone to suffer a fate in death also similar to Polynices’: an unmourned
death. However, in eliding the space for burial, Creon continues the cycle
of disorder, thus failing to impose the order he hopes. 23
The potential for disorder inherent in Creon’s treatment of corpses is
realized in Teiresias’ warning of a plague on the city resulting from Creon’s
treatment of Polynices: “And it is your will that has put this plague upon the
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city; for our altars and our braziers, one and all, are filled with carrion
brought by birds and dogs from the unhappy son of Oedipus who fell [και
ταύτα της σης εκ φρενός νοσεί πόλις. / βωμοί γαρ ημίν εσχάραι τε
παντελείς / πλήρεις υπ’ οιωνών τε και κυνών βοράς / του δυσμόρου
πεπτώτος Οιδίπου γόνου]” (1015-18). In this case, the pollution of the
plague on the city manifests a symptom of the problem that Creon is causing: the disruption of a custom in which women mourned for the dead, recalling their life as a memory that allowed the passing of the dead. It is this
“law,” of course, to which Antigone refers in her claims to be doing the just
thing in burying Polynices.
Prohibiting the memorializing ritual of mourning that Antigone would
perform, Creon causes a disruption that then manifests itself on the living
body, in the form of a plague. In his rage at Antigone’s subversion, Creon
disrupts the divine order of things, which leads to a disturbance in the order
of the polis, as well. The chorus addresses the problem of such violent anger in their fourth song, which revolves around a discussion of the dangerous threat to order that passion poses:
You [Eros, passion] wrench just men’s minds aside from justice, doing them violence; it is you who have stirred up this quarrel between
men of the same blood. Victory goes to the visible desire that comes
from the eyes of the beautiful bride, desire that has its throne in sovereignty beside those of the mighty laws.
συ και δικαίων αδίκους
φρένας παρασπάς επί λώβα.
συ και τόδε νείκος ανδρών
ξύναιμον έχεις ταράξας.
νικά δ’ εναργής βλεφάρων
ίμερος ευλέκτρου
νύμφας, των μεγάλων πάρεδρος εν αρχαίς
θεσμών. (791-9)
Avoiding a direct condemnation of either Creon’s or Antigone’s violence,
the chorus uses the violent conflict between Polynices and Eteocles as an
example of the damage that passion can cause, diverting men from justice
to injustice. As an example of right action, however, they provide the image
of the desire emanating from the eyes of a bride, who in occupying the customary position for the female in society therefore follows the “mighty laws”
(θεσμών), that is, those that are established. Having confirmed this precept, the chorus can then accuse Antigone on the grounds of the hubristic
folly to which her passion has led her, as well as for the established laws
that her father broke before her: “Advancing to the extreme of daring, you
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stumbled against the lofty altar of Justice, my child! And you are paying
some torment [inherited] from your father [προβάσ’ επ’ άσχατον θράσους /
υψηλόν ες Δίκας βάθρον / προσέπεσες, ω τέκνον, ποδί. / πατρώον δ’
εκτίνεις τιν’ άθλον]” (853-6). 24 Not only has Antigone gone too far in pursuit
of her own desires, the chorus argues, but she also suffers in repayment,
as a pay off or vengeance, for her father’s crime. The chorus here accuses
Antigone of acting against divine justice, as a result of her own passion and
her father’s incest. Antigone takes up only the second of the accusations
against her (one of which, ironically, her father might also be accused),
seeing her own predicament as punishment for the fate cursed upon her by
Oedipus:
You have touched on a thought most painful for me, the fate of my
father, thrice renewed, and the whole of our destiny, that of the famous Labdacids. Ah, the disaster of marriage with his mother, and
my father’s incestuous couplings with his ill-fated mother! From what
parents was I born, miserable one! To them I go, to live with them,
accursed, unmarried! Ah, brother who made a disastrous marriage,
in your death you have destroyed my life!
έψαυσας αλγεινοτάτας εμοί μερίμνας,
πατρός τριπολίστου οίιτου
του τε πρόπαντος
αμετέρου πότμου
κλεινοίς Λαβδακίδαισιν.
ιώ ματρώαι λέκτρων άται κοιμήματά τ’ αυτογάννητ’ εμώ πατρί δυσμόρου ματρός·
οίων εγώ ποθ’ α ταλαίφρων έφυν·
προς ους αραίος άγαμος άδ’
εγώ μέτοικος έρχομαι.
ιώ δυσπότμων κασίγνητε γάμων κυρήσας,
θανών έτ’ ούσαν κατήναρές με. (857-71)
Providing the fullest reference in the play to her father’s crime, Antigone
specifically describes Oedipus’ transgressions of established law: not only
did he marry his own mother, but he had children from this incestuous coupling. By leaving out the other aspect of Oedipus’ crime, his murder of his
father (i.e., the shedding of kindred blood that Creon is trying to avoid by
burying Antigone alive), Antigone’s speech depicts Oedipus’ crime as one
of pollution: by committing incest and bearing children who are also his sib-
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lings, Oedipus has prevented, in a sense, the passage of time, the movement forward of generations. Thus Oedipus’ offence against the laws of the
gods and society is here raised in terms of temporal disorder – a corruption
of time, a failure to pass on, that makes the memorializing of mourning impossible. 25 These are the transgressions for which the gods will make Antigone suffer, as both the chorus and Antigone suggest, providing a demonstration of Antigone’s suffering as a lesson about breaking established laws
and creating divine disorder (or stumbling against the altar of Justice), just
as Creon sought to make a demonstration of his own order by means of his
punishment of both Polynices’ and Antigone’s bodies. Such a reading is
corroborated by the language the chorus uses above to refer to the debt of
suffering that Antigone owes: coupled with the idea of paying a penalty, 26
άθλος acquires the sense of not only a struggle or contest, but even a torment or ordeal. Through suffering some torment or punishment, the chorus
and Antigone’s response imply, the debt owed for causing such disorder
might be paid and order be restored. The punishment of Antigone will provide a meaning or value for Oedipus’ past life, a painful labour whose significance exceeds the limits of her corpse.
Punishment and Spectacle
Elaborating upon the significance of suffering punishments, the fifth song of
the chorus (944-87) describes a series of punishments: the tomblike imprisonment of Danae, 27 the rocky imprisonment of Lycurgus, 28 and the
blinding of the sons of Phineus. 29 Avoiding a consideration of responsibility
or guilt, the chorus focuses on the process of suffering punishment, concluding with the notion that inescapable Fate manifests itself in each of
these examples. In this sense, the punishments stand as evidence of both
the ineluctable nature of the difficulties Fate imposes, but also of the power
of Fate, in its ability to punish without mercy.
In a more immediate sense, Teiresias prophecies a similar case of the
punishing payment of vengeance when he warns Creon of the exchange of
corpses that his hubristic actions will provoke:
Then know well that you shall not accomplish many racing courses
of the sun, and in that lapse of time you shall give in exchange for
corpses the corpse of one from your own loins, in return for having
hurled below one of those above, blasphemously lodging a living
person in a tomb, and you have kept here something belonging to
the gods below, a corpse deprived, unburied, unholy. Neither you
nor the gods above have any part in this, but you have inflicted it
upon them! On account of this there lie in wait for you the doers of
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outrage who in the end destroy, the Erinyes of Hades and the gods,
so that you will be caught up in these same evils.
αλλ’ ευ γε τοι κάτισθι μη πολλούς έτι
τρόχους αμιλλητήρας ηλίου τελών,
εν οίσι των σων αυτός εκ σπλάγχνων ένα
νέκυν νεκρών αμοιβόν αντιδούς έση,
ανθ’ ων έχεις μεν των άνω βαλών κάτω,
ψυχήν γ’ ατίμως εν τάφω κατοικίσας,
έχεις δε των κάτωθεν ενθάδ’ αυ θεών
άμοιρον, ακτέριστον, ανόσιον νέκυν.
ων ούτε σοι μέτεστιν ούτε τοις άνω
θεοίσιν, αλλ’ εκ σου βιάζονται τάαδε.
τούτων σε λωβητήρες υστεροφθόροι
λοχώσιν Άιδου και θεών Ερινύες,
εν τοίσιν αυτοίς τοίσδε ληφθήναι κακοίς. (1064-76)
Teiresias’ warning raises the future curse of Creon in terms of antidote
(from the verb αντιδίδωμι [1067] derives the noun αντίδοτος, something
given in remedy, an antidote): the corpse that the gods will demand from
Creon will be given in payment for the disorder he has created by the mismanagement of corpses (not only has he refused to bury a dead body, but
he also gives a living body burial). In this way, then, Creon will provide an
antidote to the plague caused by unburied corpses from which the city suffers. Referring to this plague on the city again on lines 1081-3, Teiresias
emphasizes how the cosmic disorder that Creon has caused resulted in a
disorder manifested in the city. With this, Creon assumes the position in
which he has placed Antigone, the cause of disorder in the polis; the spectacle of punishment with which he has threatened her hence becomes a
spectacle of punishment under which he must suffer.
Creon finally responds to this final warning of Teiresias, and exits the
stage intending to bury the corpse and then release Antigone. Nevertheless, less than one hundred lines later, a messenger arrives to announce
the payment of the antidote, the death of Creon’s only son Haemon, who,
he announces, has died by his own hand, “in anger against his father for
the murder he committed [αυτός προς αυτού, πατρί μηνίσας φόνου]”
(1177). He describes to the chorus how he, along with several of Creon’s
other attendants, heard a cry issue from the cave as they followed Creon
toward it, intending to release Antigone. Worried at its portent, Creon urged
his attendants forward to see whether he feared correctly that the voice issued from his son Haemon. At their master’s orders, the messenger describes, he and his peers looked in on a tragic scene of loss: Antigone
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hanging by the neck and Haemon clinging to her waist, lamenting her death
caused by his father. When Creon finally approached, the messenger continues, Haemon lunged at him with the sword, missed and then drove it into
himself, finally achieving a sort of union with Antigone in his death throes:
Still living, he clasped the maiden in the bend of his feeble arm, and
pouring forth a sharp jet of blood, he stained her white cheek. He
lay, a corpse holding a corpse, having achieved his marriage rites,
poor fellow, in the house of Hades, having shown by how much the
worst evil among mortals is bad counsel.
ες δ’ υγρόν
αγκών’ έτ’ έμφρων παρθένω προσπτύσσεται
και φυσιών οξείαν εκβάλλει ροήν
λευκή παρειά ποινίου σταλάγματος·
κείται δε νεκρός περί νεκρώ, τα νυμφικά
τέλη λαχών δείλαιος εν γ’ Άιδου δόμοις,
δείξας εν ανθρώποισι την αβουλίαν
όσω μέγιστον ανδρίι πρόσκειται κακόν. (1236-43)
In death, Haemon and Antigone rejoin society through their achievement of
the marriage rites (τα νυμφικά τέλη λαχών), resolving the passion-induced
mistakes described by the chorus in lines 791-4 (and, even in dying, realigning their desire within socially and divinely approved parameters, as
does the bride described by the chorus in lines 795-9, quoted above). In
addition, though, the scene of Haemon’s dying provides a lesson, as well: it
“shows” or displays (δείκνυμι) to the witnessing phalanx of guards (and, via
the witness’s report, the chorus of Theban citizens and the audience, too)
the extent to which “bad counsel” is the worst of human evils.
The paradigmatic and gruesome suffering of Haemon’s death throes
resonates in his dead body when Creon appears later, bearing it onstage.
The chorus responds to his entrance: “Here comes the king himself, bearing in his arms a conspicuous memorial; if we may say so, his ruin came
not from others, but from his own failing [και μην όδ’ άναξ αυτός εφήκει /
μνήμ’ επίσημον δια χειρός έχων, / ει θέμις ειπείν, ουκ αλλοτρίαν / άτην, αλλ’
αυτός αμαρτών]” (1257-60). 30 Thus, the chorus provides a narrative description of Creon’s appearance on stage, explaining the deictic significance of Haemon’s corpse: it functions as a distinguishing mark
(επίσημος), a mimetic sign or reminder (μνήμη) of being guilty (αμαρτάνω).
Not only does the body Creon carries bear a lesson for himself, however;
the reminder, displayed in his arms onstage (in front of the palace doors
that would have been depicted at the back of the stage), 31 speaks to the
city as well. As Segal explains, “The term ‘conspicuous memorial’ … refers
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specifically to the commemorative ceremonies of the public funeral and the
entombment of warriors who have fallen in behalf of the city.” 32 Thus, the
corpse of Haemon, exhibited in the arms of his father the king, bears along
with it the meaning of his life in death: the mourning prohibited by Creon’s
edict returned to the city in a public mark of mourning.
Creon’s antidote has yet to take effect, however: the exchange of
corpses continues only a few lines later, with the messenger’s announcement of the suicide of the queen, Eurydice. 33 Enhancing the exhibition of
Haemon’s body in Creon’s arms, the corpse of Eurydice also appears displayed prominently on the stage, as the chorus indicates in their exclamation:, “You can see it! It is no longer hidden indoors [οράν πάρεστιν. ου γαρ
εν μυχοίς έτι]” (1293). Most commentators agree that this scene would
have been staged with Eurydice’s body then appearing onstage on the ekkuklema, a mechanized wheeled platform that would have been pushed
onto the centre of the stage, probably through the opening of the palace
doors at the back. 34 The corpse thus presents a dramatic spectacle over
which the messenger describes the manner of her death as Creon laments
his fate.
As in the case of Haemon, the messenger describes the details of Eurydice’s death: hurling curses upon her husband, the killer of her son, Eurydice copied the method of Haemon’s death, “so that she experienced the
suffering of her son [όπως / παιδός τόδ’ ήσθετ’ οξυκώκυτον πάθος]” (13156). With this double death, Creon finally recognizes his culpability in the
downfall of his family, his ineluctable guilt: “Ah me, this can never be transferred to any other mortal, acquitting me! For it was I that killed you, unhappy one, I, I speak the truth! [ώμοι μοι, τάδ’ ουκ επ’ άλλον βροτών / εμάς
αρμόσει ποτ’ εξ αιτίας. / εγώ γαρ σ’, εγώ σ’ έκανον, ω μέλεος, / εγώ, φάμ’
έτυμον]” (1317-20). Creon’s formulation of this lament in terms of an accusation or charge (αιτία) that he can never escape echoes the accusation
that the messenger utters upon announcing the death of Eurydice: “You
were reproached by the dead as guilty of those deaths and these [ως αιτίαν
γε τώνδε κακείνων έχων / προς της θανούσης τήσδ’ επεσκήπτου μόρων]”
(1312-3). Thus, the description that follows of Eurydice’s death, coupled
with the display of her corpse alongside Haemon’s onstage, calls an accusation upon Creon. It is this guilt that Creon then assumes when he recognizes his actions as cause of Eurydice’s and Haemon’s deaths.
Creon reemphasizes the losses he has suffered as he leaves the
stage at the end of the play, though his words begin to turn responsibility
for his suffering away from himself and onto fate. While his speech marks
the presence of the corpses next to him, his lament also indicates that
there is something more that is unrecognizable to him:
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Lead me out of the way, useless man that I am, who killed you, my
son, not by my own will, and you here too, ah, miserable one; I do
not know which to look on, which way to lean; for all that is in my
hands has gone awry, and fate hard to deal with has leapt upon my
head.
άγοιτ’ αν μάταιον άνδρ’ εκποδών,
ος, ω παι, σε τ’ ουχ εκών κατέκανον
σε τ’ αυ τάνδ’, ώμοι μέλεος, ουδ’ έχω
προς πότερον ίδω, πα κλιθώ. πάντα γαρ
λέχρια ταν χεροίν, τα δ’ επί κρατί μοι
πότμος δυσκόμιστος εισήλατο. (1339-46)
As Griffith points out, Creon’s speech suggests a contrast between what is
visible (the dead bodies of Haemon and Eurydice) and what is invisible (the
mysterious but inescapable hand of fate). Creon’s struggle with seeing
such a spectacle also puts an emphasis upon his pain in witnessing the results of his folly; thus Creon assumes the position of witness that the
guards, chorus, and audience have previously occupied (and continue to
perform in this scene). The spectacle of dead bodies before him forces him
to bear witness to what they represent – in this case, his complicity in their
death. The accusation against Creon, then, is something that he witnesses
alongside the others: embodied in the corpses of Haemon and Eurydice
are the signs of his guilt.
Yet, as Antigone points out previously in the play, a dead body, being
dead, cannot bear witness (“The dead body will not bear witness to that [ου
μαρτυρήσει ταύθ’ ο κατθανών νέκυς]” [515]). How, then, can a corpse deliver an accusation of guilt against another? For the corpse of Antigone, as
well as that of Haemon, Eurydice, and Polynices, it is the narrative surrounding the corpse that communicates the meaning of it. In other words,
the corpse alone does not convey the meaning, but something more embodied in it does so. The sight of the dead body makes present a past life;
the end of a life provides a frame for considering that life’s significance (a
significance that is worked through in mourning). However, as long as life
remains, as long as life continues to unfold, the ultimate fate or significance
of that life remains unknown. Ruing the fate of Creon, the messenger refers to this temporal distinction just before announcing Haemon’s death:
“there is no state of human life that I would praise or blame as though it had
come to a stop; for fortune makes straight and fortune brings down the fortunate or the unfortunate man at all times [ουκ έσθ’ οποίον στάντ’ αν
ανθρώπου βίον / ούτ’ αινέσαιμ’ αν ούτε μεμψαίμην ποτέ. / τύχη γαρ ορθοί
και τύχη καταρρέπει / τον ευτυχούντα τον τε δυστυχούντ’ αεί]” (1156-9).
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The meaning of a life unravels as it passes; the only unchanging life is a
dead one. Thus the synthesis of the passing events of life can only be
made after death: for example, in the interpretation of mourning – or, likewise, in the narrative accounts of the messenger.
The messenger’s speech above suggests that a difference between
mortal and immortal is in the subjection of mortals to a mysterious fate that
always surprises man with fortune or failure – that works upon man’s life, in
other words, outside of his control. For this reason, the only way to escape
change or fate in life is death. Once death has occurred, mourning or a narrative might take up the death, and the past life that it marks, and give it
meaning. In seeking to control the deaths of others, Creon might thus impose his own meaning upon them. The effective potential in the display or
spectacle of corpses has already been suggested in connection with
Creon’s treatment of the corpse of Polynices. Creon raises the possibility
that such a display could be directed against another person when he angrily threatens his son with witnessing the death of his fiancée: “Bring the
hateful creature, so that she may die at once close at hand, in the sight of
her bridegroom! [άγετε το μίσος, ως κατ’ όμματ’ αυτίκα / παρόντι θνήσκη
πλησία τω νυμφίω]” (760-1). Perceiving that he has lost the support of even
his own son, Creon furiously proposes to punish him for his betrayal by
murdering his beloved right in front of his eyes. This seems to be a case,
then, in which a corpse is meant to provide retribution; by means of his ability to take life away, Creon will suggest the necessity of supporting the authority of the king, “paying back” Haemon for his hint of insubordination.
Thus, Creon’s threat to Haemon involves more than the simple presentation of Antigone’s dead corpse for him to witness, but the action of her
being killed in front of him. It is in the process of being deprived of life that
Antigone’s death will gain meaning for Haemon – a punishing meaning,
Creon hopes. In this sense, the tormented struggle in payment for justice of
which the chorus warns Antigone (in lines 853-6, quoted above) becomes
the meaning of her death, which evolves, as suffering, in the process of
mourning.
Torture, punishment, and control
The significance of the threatened torture of Antigone echoes a more
sweeping warning that Creon delivers before the guard and the chorus of
elderly Theban citizens only a few lines before this exchange. Convinced
that the criminal burying of Polynices manifests a money-driven conspiracy
against him, Creon asserts his authority by issuing a general threat of punishment to all present. Since, in this case, Creon expresses the terms of
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the conspiracy as monetary, the sense of this imminent punishment as
“payment” appears clearly: “But those who to earn their fee have contrived
to do this thing have ensured that in time they will pay the penalty [οσοι δε
μισθαρνουντες ηνυσαν ταδε, / χρονω ποτ’ εξεπραξαν ως δουναι δικην]”
(302-3). In this exchange, Creon suggests that justice will necessarily be
effected upon the conspirators; the threat of punishment that immediately
follows links this retribution directly to the torture that those will suffer who
choose the profits of conspiracy over bending to the king’s authority. As he
exclaims in threatening fury to the citizen chorus and the guard, “If you do
not find the author of this burial and reveal him to my eyes, a single Hades
shall not suffice for you, before all have been strung up alive to expose this
insolence [ει μη τον αυτόχειρα τούδε του τάφου / ευρόντες εκφανείτ’ ες
οφθαλμούς εμούς, / ουχ υμίν Άιδης μούνος αρκέσει, πριν αν / ζώντες
κρεμαστοί τήνδε δηλώσηθ’ ύβριν]” (306-9). Here, not only does Creon
threaten his subjects with torture, 35 but he marks the method of torture as a
public display of their crimes. Those not complying with his edict will manifest or exhibit (δηλόω) the extent of their hubris (i.e., the folly of usurping
Creon’s authority) by means of their public spectacle of their torture (being
hung out alive [ζώντες κρεμαστοί] and, presumably, suffering the corresponding punishments). Thus, Creon proposes to bring before the polis a
visual reminder of the results of breaking his laws.
In addition to the public spectacle of torture as retribution for subverting his authority, Creon also implies with this threat that he will control the
manner of their dying (i.e., they will not merely suffer a simple trip to Hades). With this claim, Creon assumes a position that supersedes the limits
of the mortal; for, as the chorus that follows this scene indicates in its “ode
to man,” death presents the most clearly insurpassable limit to mankind,
despite all of his skill in thought and tekhne: “only from Hades shall he apply no means of flight [Άιδα μόνον / φεύξιν ουκ επάξεται.]” (361-2). This
limitation of mortals occurs in the midst of a song glorifying man’s great potential of creation. Thus, the subjection to death appears as a limit point for
mankind; despite their cleverness with laws and technology, mortals remain
inescapably subject to death. With his suggestion that he might control the
working of death upon others through subjecting men to his laws – in the
most extreme sense, by means of punishing torture and a tormented death
– Creon raises himself beyond the bounds of mortals, toward the immortals.
For the divinities, in their eternal existence, remain exempt from the
death that stands at the limit of mortal life. The third choral song emphasizes this immortal timelessness, in regard to Zeus and his laws:
Zeus, what arrogance of men could restrict your power? Neither
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sleep the all-conquering nor the unwearying months of the gods defeats it, but as a ruler time cannot age, you occupy the dazzling
glare of Olympus. For present, future, and past this law shall suffice:
to none among mortals shall great wealth come without disaster.
τεάν, Ζεύ, δύνασιν τις ανδρών υπερβασία κατάσχοι;
ταν ούθ’ ύπνος αίρει ποθ’ ο παντογήρως
ούτ’ ακάματοι θεών
μήνες, αγήρως δε χρόνω δυνάστας
κατέχεις Ολύμπου
μαρμαρόεσσαν αίγλαν.
το τ’ έπειτα και το μέλλον
και το πριν επαρκέσει
νόμος όδ’. ουδέν έρπει
θνατών βίοτος πάμπολυς εκτός άτας. (604-14)
The chorus suggests that the law of Zeus remains, along with the god, infinitely, beyond temporal limitations or the efforts of gods or man to defeat it.
Recalling Creon’s hubristic nomoi with this remark, the chorus then goes
further to specify the nature of this eternal law of Zeus, foreshadowing
Creon’s own defeat. For the essence of Zeus’ law, the song indicates, emphasizes change: if a mortal holds wealth, inevitably he will lose it. The divine law thus demonstrates its unique superiority in precisely what it portends for mortals: eternal and unchanging, divine law specifies that mortals
must always be subject to change.
Not only are mortals consigned to change, however, but, as the song
goes on to describe, they are subject to being ignorant of when or how that
change will occur: “For widely wandering hope brings profit to many men,
but to many the deception of thoughtless longings; and a man knows nothing when it comes upon him, until he scalds his foot in blazing fire [α γαρ δη
πολύπλαγκτος ελ- / πίς πολλοις μεν όνησις ανδρών, / πολλοίς δ’ απάτα
κουφονόων ερώτων· / ειδότι δ’ ουδέν έρπει, / πριν πυρί θερμώ πόδα τις
προσαύση]” (615-9). Thus, the inevitability of change in human life raises
the necessity for reminders. As the exposed corpse of Polynices might
serve to remind Theban citizens of both Polynices’ crimes against the city
and of Creon’s authority as ruler, the suffering of Antigone and Creon – a
suffering made material by the spectacle of the corpses that surround them
– serves as evidence of their “crimes.” While the dead bodies, in their
insistent presence, bear witness to the Theban citizens and the audience of
the tension between the laws of gods and of men, the suffering of Creon
and Antigone recalls the persistent limit of mortal life, which unfolds as it
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passes away.
While the presence of the corpse persistently reminds those who witness it to mourn publicly, the living body that suffers unto death evokes an
even greater meaning: the irresolution of that mourning. With the torture he
inflicts, Creon addresses the transgressive thought or idea by means of the
body; he inscribes punishment, vengeance, or, in other words, justice, in
visible marks which will endure, along with the body, even after death. The
physical presence of the body seems to lend the certainty of its physical
permanence to the intangible idea inscribed upon it. Used in this way, the
material body is set apart from itself, objectified; its physical elements,
which, in their presence seem unchanging, offer themselves as materials
upon which the invisible workings of a permanent spiritual antidote might
be demonstrated.
The pain of a punishment meant to evoke justice suggests a complicated interrelation between the body and the spirit; the messenger alludes
to their peculiar bearing on each other in his evocation of the survival of an
unhappy life: “For when a man’s pleasures have abandoned him, I do not
consider him a living being, but an animated corpse [και γαρ ηδοναί / όταν
προδώσιν ανδρός, ου τίθημ’ εγώ / ζην τούτον, αλλ’ έμψυχον ηγούμαι
νεκρόν]” (1165-7). Not only is the unchanging man a dead man, but the
man without pleasure is dead, as well. This sentiment adds to the mysterious element of fate in mortal life an invisible quality that animates the body:
without it, the body becomes devoid of meaning or intention, merely an
animated corpse.
Such a possibility implies a gap in the living mortal between the body
and the spirit – that which feels pleasure or bends to fate – hidden within. 36
Sophocles raises the consideration of a difference between the body and
the mind or heart – that is, an “inner” sense – in the first angry exchange
between Creon and the guard who brings news of Polynices’ burial:
Creon: Do you not know even now how your words pain me?
Guard: Is it your ears or your soul that feels the pain?
Creon: Why do you try to measure where my pain is?
Guard: The doer pains your heart, but I your ears.
Creon: Ah, you are a chatterer by nature, it is clear! (trans. mod.)
ΚΡΕΩΝ. ουκ οίσθα και νυν ως ανιαρώς λέγεις?
ΦΥΛΑΞ. εν τοίσιν ώσιν ή ’πι τη ψυχή δάκνη?
ΚΡΕΩΝ. τι δε ρυθμίζεις την εμήν λύπην όπου?
ΦΥΛΑΞ. ο δρων σ’ ανιά τας φρένας, τα δ’ ώτ’ εγώ.
ΚΡΕΩΝ. οίμ’ ως λάλημα, δήλον, εκπεφυκός ει. (316-20)
Acknowledging that he causes Creon discomfort with his words, the guard
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attempts to distinguish the sort of pain he causes; while Creon resists the
attempt to locate it, the guard insists on differentiating between the bodily
pain that he inflicts on Creon’s ears and a different sort of pain caused by
the one doing the crime he has reported. This other pain attacks, the guard
insists initially, the psychē (ψυχή) – the soul, spirit, or mind – or, as he next
proposes, the “heart” or phrēn (φρην). Although Creon responds by disregarding this distinction, the guard’s protestation implies a difference between two types of pain – bodily pain and that which is less easily measured or located: pain to the psychē, heart, mind, understanding, phrēn. His
attempt to locate Creon’s pain thus appears clearly as an attempt to claim
himself as inflicting the lesser of the two sorts of pain: bodily. Yet this defense of himself also suggests that Creon (mistakenly) treats him as if he
were imposing the more serious sort of pain, to the psychē or phrēn.
Creon’s last comment before exiting the stage confirms this fear, as he
threatens the guard, once again, with torture: “But if you do not reveal the
doers to me, you shall testify that low desire for profit is the cause of pain
[ει δε ταύτα μη / φανείτε μοι τους δρώντας, εξερείθ’ ότι / τα δειλά κέρδη
πημονάς εργάζεται]” (324-6). Coupled with the pain that Creon threatens to
inflict, what the guard utters (εξερέω) will bear witness to what his maneuverings have accomplished: that pain (πήμα) he suffers. The pain in this
exchange functions both as a demonstration of punishment for the guard’s
crimes and as a verification of the crimes themselves. With this threat,
Creon aims bodily torment at the aspect of the guard that exceeds his
body, his psyche, which (Creon hopes) will remember his crimes as his
body suffers for them. In inflicting the torture which will compel the guard to
testify to his guilt before witnesses, Creon will exert his authority over both
the guard and those to whom the guard, by means of his pain, will confess
to his guilt – that is, in Creon’s terms, his transgressions against the city.
In Antigone, Creon’s hubristic pursuit of power, which emphasizes the
problem of establishing and maintaining the law in the city-state, manifests
a tension between the individual and the public citizen of the polis.
Christian Meier sees in Creon’s tyrannical actions a comment by Sophocles
on a potential problem in democratic, fifth-century Athens: “justice had now
become a matter of free-willed … decision-making.” 37 In his use of the
body, both living and dead, Creon creates the impression of certain
authority by playing uncertain ideas out upon the physical presence of the
body. Expressing a similar concern, yet in less specifically political terms,
Lesky also suggests that a central concern of this play remains this
problem of certainty, “a tension that must have been felt in a time that saw
both the completion of the Parthenon and the beginning of Sophism.” 38
Indeed, in its spectacle of suffering and death, the tragedy itself also
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imposes its own meaning upon these bodies placed upon the stage; as
Segal suggests, “Tragic art enables the polis to confront the contradictions
which man’s place in nature poses.” 39
Tragedy expresses the failure in communication of such contradictions
by bridging them over with a correspondence of language and gesture. As
we have seen, the tension between nature and technē, between the
individual and the city, arises from an excess that resists containment in
either category: the body. In both cases, the conflation between a torment
and death whose outcome is meant to indicate justice depends upon the
inescapable persistence of the changeable body, enduring suffering to the
end and remaining after death. The perseverence of the body, in other
words, determines its value as antidote or demonstrative proof, enabling it
to function not only as a reminder of what has passed but as an apparent
“proof” of what is present. With mourning, the unique physicality of the
corpse integrates the span of the passing of an individual, mortal life into
the enduring presence of the collective public, of the polis.
Towson University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Translation modified. Greek texts of all plays by Sophocles cited in this essay are
from the Oxford Classical Texts edition, edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and N.G.
Wilson (Oxford U P, 1990). English translations of the Oedipus at Colonus and
Antigone are quoted from the Loeb editions, ed. and tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1994).
2
When he arrives in the grove of the Furies at the beginning of the play, Oedipus
himself refers to the conclusion of his life as literally a “καταστροφήν” (103).
3
Passages in English from Aristotle’s Poetics are from the translation of Richard
Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Greek text is from the Oxford edition, ed.
D.W. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).
4
Poetics, D. W. Lucas, ed. and commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).
5
Though, as Lucas and others point out, the text of this passage is uncertain and
spurious, the turn that Aristotle makes here remains, regardless, an emphasis
upon language and rhetoric in tragedy.
6
Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), pp. 232-3.
7
Lowell Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at
Colonus (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), p. 3.
8
William Blake Tyrell and Larry J. Bennett provide a helpful study of the results of
the transference of funeral rituals from individual and family custom to a public rite
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(Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone [Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield,
1998]); see especially pp. 5-15.
9
According to the myth, the significance of Oedipus’ political crimes is made clear in
the previous public "outing" of them, when he discovers he is married to his
mother (as depicted by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex).
10
Though written, of course, years before Sophocles’ plays that describe these
events.
11
The chorus’ laments on lines 1257-60 and 1293, as well as Creon’s speech, line
1299 and lines 1341-6, deictically and verbally indicate the visible presence of the
corpse onstage. Mark Griffiths also suggests this in his commentary (Sophocles.
Antigone, Mark Griffiths, ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999]:
354).
12
Simon Goldhill’s discussion of rhetorical display and the polis, and the corresponding association of vision and knowledge, has been a great help to me in
considering the spectacle of punishment in these plays (“Programme notes,” Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, eds. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999], pp. 1-29).
13
A very prominent example of this fear, of course, appears at the beginning of the
Iliad (I.1-5), as well as at the end, with the provocation for Priam to recover Hector’s body (in Book XXIV).
14
Sophocles, Antigone, ed. and trans. Mark Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1999), p. 139.
15
Simon Goldhill has noted the opposition of polis (the city) and oikos (home and
family), arguing that for Antigone philos is an appeal to the oikos. Reading her
loyalty to the oikos as a manifestation of independence, power, and authority,
Goldhill notes that such an assertion would have been perceived as particularly
problematic for a woman, because of her inevitable participation in, and dependence upon, a network of relations in the family and polis. This raises, he suggests,
an important challenge to Antigone, one to which we will return later: “For in democratic Athens, an essential demand of the ideology of city life is the mutual interdependence of citizens” (Reading Greek Tragedy [Cambridge: Cambridge U P,
1986], p. 91). The opposition raised by the conflict between Antigone and Creon,
in other words, forces a consideration of the conflicts of interest between the oikos
and the polis.
Identifying Creon with the city, as well, Albin Lesky (Greek Tragic Poetry,
trans. Matthew Dillon [New Haven: Yale U P, 1983]) shifts the stakes of the opposition by emphasizing Antigone’s claims to be doing the will of the gods by burying
her brother. Lesky points out that Creon’s assessment of the city’s primary importance overturns even the traditional primacy of the gods: “When [Creon] says of
the polis (189): ηδ’ έστιν η σώζουσα (it is she who saves us), this signifies a secularization that no longer recognizes any absolute value higher than the state”
(135). Thus, Lesky sees in the play a struggle between man (Creon) and the gods
(Antigone). While Creon stubbornly enforces his man-made laws, Antigone bears
witness to the “unwritten laws” of the gods (141). In her attachment to the corpse
of her brother, Lesky sees Antigone as actually ascribing to immortal, unearthly,
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divine laws.
Such a dialectic suggests the ethical struggle that Hegel sees enacted in the
tragedy of Antigone: as a result of action, the unspoken, unknown law is broken,
giving rise to the ethical conflict. Of course, Antigone, for her part, is aware of the
civil law that she breaks, but she transgresses the law because she perceives it to
be violent and wrong. Nevertheless, by knowingly breaking the law, her action becomes for Hegel more inexcusable, her guilt more severe; it is for this reason,
Hegel argues with a quote from the play, that she must suffer: “Because we suffer
we acknowledge we have erred” (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977], p. 284 [quoted from Antigone, l. 926]). In this sense, Antigone’s suffering demonstrates her individual guilt in the ethical order. In her opposition to the laws of Creon, Antigone thus appears as aligned with the natural laws
(as opposed to the sort of man-made laws that the second choral song, the first
stasimon, the “Ode to Man,” describes [332-75]), or with nature, in general.
Hence, Charles Segal explains, “In the great fifth-century debate between nature
and convention, physis [nature or the natural qualities, form] and nomos [law, usage, custom], Antigone stands on the side of nature. She defends those relations
and aspects of life that man possesses by the given conditions of his birth against
those which he creates by strength and force” (Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981], p. 155). In her individual opposition to Creon’s political laws, Antigone thus appears as a natural
force whose struggle results from an encounter with the techne of society.
In this sense, Antigone as representative of the natural laws is sometimes
seen as a feminine force, rebelling against the laws of the patriarchal society. This
is the Carol Jacobs’ reading; she finds in Antigone a revolutionary female figure,
following and critiquing Hegel’s reading of her character. Jacobs describes the
terms of the dialectic which Hegel finds manifested in the play as those of gender:
“The stakes for Hegel … are sexual difference, the relation between family and
state, and the movement from matriarchy to patriarchy in the pagan world” (“Dusting Antigone”, MLN 111.5 [1996], p. 889). For Jacobs, Antigone reflects both her
female status and her (related) connection to nature or natural law in her approach
to the earth – that is, by the manner in which she buries Polynices. Although
Creon excuses his intention to execute his son’s fiancée by asserting that there
are other fields to plow (569), Antigone, Jacobs points out, works the earth differently, by not breaking it, or marking it as hers, but rather by just dusting Polynices’
body with it. In this reading, then, Antigone poses a threat to the male system,
making the mark that cannot be located, in a strange sort of écriture féminine
transferred to the fifth-century ritual of burial. Jacobs contends, in other words,
that the unintelligibility of Antigone’s action, its refusal to fit into any given tradition
or law, provides it with the ability to subvert not only the male system but the concept of opposed poles of conflict, in general: “Antigone, indeed, changes and
transforms the concept of ethics; it perverts the universal and its promise of property: it perverts as well any fixed concept of revolution against patriarchy” (911).
Antigone, seen as allied with nature, not only subverts the nomoi of the dominant
system (that is, Thebes under Creon), but in doing so disrupts the limits of each of
the terms of opposition as well.
Cynthia Willett, in her own reading of Hegel’s reading of Antigone, also ascribes a wide-ranging disruption to the manner in which Antigone, or her actions,
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resists the terms of the dominant model. For Willett, however, the laws that Antigone subverts through her actions in the play are both the laws of Hegel’s dialectic
and the rules of tragedy Aristotle prescribes in his Poetics. Tragic drama, she suggests, with its reversals and discoveries, parallels the dialectic form of Hegel. Following this scheme, then, dialectic depends upon a cathartic moment like tragedy:
“dialectic demands the catharsis, or purging, of emotion from educated spirit”
(“Hegel, Antigone, and the Possibility of Ecstatic Dialogue” [Philosophy and Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press) 1990: 14], p. 268). Yet, she argues, catharsis proposes a purging of desire that is no more possible in dialectic
than in tragedy. Because of this, Willett seeks to find in her exploration of Antigone
a reconception of tragedy “that is not cathartic but ecstatic” (268). Willett demarcates clearly the relation between suffering and ethics as Hegel conceives of it:
Tragedy ends in the incipient reconciliation of the ethical powers which come
into conflict. … Tragic pathos, or suffering, brings each hero to recognize the opposing ethical vision which concludes a play. As the choruses of Sophocles’ plays
proclaim, tragedy engenders learning through suffering. (271)
Thus suffering brings about the self-knowledge that enables the ethical selfconsciousness that Hegel finds in tragedy. In taking up the agon or conflict and
suffering through it, the tragic hero suffers a reversal of what appears to be true;
the resolution of the tragedy conveys the recognition of this lesson. In dialectical
terms, then, catharsis is “the systematic expulsion of what cannot be taken up into
pure thought” (273). Given this, Willett argues that dialectic proceeds at each
stage by a forgetting (that is, a purging out) of what remains incommensurate with
the absolute totality of thought. Willett identifies this forgotten element as desire.
While Hegel will argue that, “The relationship between the brother and sister alone
satisfies the requirement that ethical duty to the family is pure of the vagaries or
accidental attractions of natural desire” (273), Willett points to events in the play
that indicate that Antigone’s passionate feelings for her brother transgress Hegel’s
claim by stemming from love. In addition, Willett argues, Antigone’s “worship of
death” carries erotic overtones and at several moments in the play she manifests
a maternal instinct. These factors enable Willett to claim that “The agony of Antigone intimates that the righteous defense of ethical duty originates not purely in a
sense of duty but in a subjective passion that determines the performance of duty”
(275). Such an assertion, she insists, appears clearly in Creon’s own inability to
avoid passion; he himself becomes enraged, or passionate, in his attempts to
quell Antigone’s passion. For this reason, Willett proposes to reread the tragedy
Antigone and Hegel’s dialectic, allowing both to retain desire, in an ecstatic rather
than cathartic pursuit of knowledge. In doing so, she hopes to “refigure a women’s
dialectic” that allows for an ecstatic conception of tragedy, an excess of desire in
the dialectical relation of tragedy (and philosophy): “Antigone’s dialectic mediates
the engagement of wife and mother within an ethics that no longer expunges subjective feeling from duty” (282). For Willett, then, the possibility of including desire
in the function of tragedy or philosophy becomes aligned with the feminine; in her
feminine, maternal desire, Antigone suggests the possibility for an ecstatic pursuit
of truth that includes “subjective feeling” or desire in its scheme and thereby obviates forgetting. Willett’s reading draws a parallel between the “rules” of dialectic,
the form of tragedy, and Creon’s laws, as well. By emphasizing the limitations
which Creon’s laws impose on Antigone’s “desire” – laws that Creon himself, she
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notes, cannot help but transgress – Willett suggests that the play describes a conflict between individual desire and the order of the polis (as well as between individual desire and the order of philosophy).
In a slightly different perception of an opposition between reason and passion
in Antigone, Mary Whitlock Blundell sees the conflict personified in Creon, who
undermines his own rational principles with a passionate pursuit of power. For
Blundell, too, Creon’s submission to passion re-emphasizes the driving force of
passion for Antigone. In this manner, she sees the tragedy as manifesting the interplay of reason and passion: “Thus passion as well as mortality sets limits to the
power of human reason” (Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in
Sophocles and Greek Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989], p. 143).
16
Griffith, Antigone, pp. 167-8.
17
Bernard Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley: U
of California P, 1964), p. 97.
18
On line 519, she claims that Hades demands the laws she follows.
19
For Sophocles’ concern with order, rhythm, balance, and the problem of disorder,
see especially H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (N.Y.: Doubleday and
Company, 1954), pp. 148-55; and Charles Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), especially pp. 142-3.
20
Antigone, in her recounting of the edict (35-6) stresses the public nature of the
execution, ending the phrase and line with εν πόλει. Griffith feels that her language here echoes the formal language of an actual edict, except for in the use of
φονόω, which typically designates a more violent death such as murder, rather
than judicial execution (see Griffith’s commentary on lines 35-6).
21
Segal considers this need to avoid disorder as part of the impetus behind Creon’s
prohibition against mourning Polynices: “Women’s lament helps the dead make
the proper transition from the realm of the living to the other world but is also perceived as a source of emotional violence and disorder. It is associated with a
maenadlike (sic) release of uncontrollable and disturbing emotions; and in its call
for vengeance it can also lead to an unpredictable and uncontrollable cycle of
vendettas” (Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 119).
22
Creon accuses Antigone of being disorderly (άκοσμος) in his conversation with
Haemon (730). Much earlier, on line 172, Creon refers to the violence of the
brothers against each other as a “pollution” (μίασμα).
23
Tyrell and Bennett suggest that the public appropriation of funeral rites created a
tension between government and family: “The public funeral exacerbated the antagonism of the dêmos and the family over funeral celebrations by separating the
dead from their families” (Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone, p. 9). In this sense,
Creon may be seen as creating additional tension or disorder by removing the
right to burial from Antigone and taking it on for himself.
24
Translation modified (following Griffith).
25
The temporal disorder of incest makes the mourning of Oedipus seem impossible,
as Antigone complains in Oedipus at Colonus, quoted at the beginning. The symptom of Oedipus’ crime, a plague on Thebes, recalls the plague that Teiresias
warns Creon against causing. The symptoms of the plague or pollution in each
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case are the same – the stagnation of time, the cessation of reproduction, the inability to move forward. Thus the plagues that correspond to Oedipus’ and Creon’s
crimes suggest in their nature the inability to mourn, the inability to remember, the
failure to pass into history.
26
Griffith: “εκτινω δικην / τισιν = ‘pay the penalty’” (272).
27
Danae is unjustly imprisoned by her father.
28
Lycurgus is punished with imprisonment (and perhaps a madness that drove him
to kill his own children) for attacking Dionysos.
29
The sons of Phineus are blinded by their stepmother, Eidothea, who stabbed their
eyes out in vengeance against their mother, Phineus’ first wife, Kleopatra.
30
Translation modified, incorporating Segal’s interpretation of μνήμ’ επίσημον as
“conspicuous memorial” (see infra, n. 31).
31
For staging of this scene, see Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theater (London and
N.Y.: Routledge, 1992), especially p. 37; and Tyrell and Bennett, Recapturing
Sophocles’ Antigone, especially pp. 148-51.
32
Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 120.
33
Segal suggests that Eurydice’s suicide is her way of mourning Haemon; thus, he
suggests, this reverses “Creon’s victory over Antigone [i.e., his prevention of her
mourning Polynices] in the first half of the play” (Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 121).
Conversely, Tyrell and Bennett argue that in her suicide, “Eurydice has silenced
herself; she will not mourn his [Creon’s] son for him. This is the dikê, the penalty,
that Eurydice extracts from Creon … Eurydice gives Creon the woman he wanted,
a silenced woman who refuses to mourn a philos, and gains for Antigone the
vengeance she prayed for, a silent funeral for Creon” (Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone, p. 151). Though a very dramatic interpretation, Tyrell and Bennett’s reading fails to account, as Segal’s does, for the performative aspects of the play,
which contradict the idea of such a “silent funeral.” In either case, Eurydice’s suicide gains significance in its relation to mourning.
34
Griffith disagrees with this, suggesting that Eurydice’s body probably would have
simply been carried onstage and lain next to Haemon’s (p. 349-350). In either
case, at any rate, the corpses present a remarkable spectacle accompanying
Creon’s rueful speech.
35
Griffith notes of this passage: “Hanging a man from a gibbet or board, and either
leaving him to die of starvation and exposure, or beating him to death … was a
familiar mode of execution, at least for low-class criminals and traitors” (Antigone,
p.176).
36
This difference resonates with Creon’s distinction between the visible corpses of
Haemon and Eurydice and the invisible hand of fate (1339-46; see, also, discussion earlier).
37
Christian Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1993), p. 198.
38
Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, p. 143.
39
Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 206.
59
A Danish Antigone: The Legacy of Ancient Greek Consciousness
in the Fragmentation of Modern Tragedy
Sabina Sestigiani
“Stay happy, then, dear Antigone! We wish you a long
life, as meaningful as a deep sigh. May no forgetfulness rob you of anything! May the daily bitterness of
sorrow be offered to you abundantly!”
Kierkegaard, “The Unhappiest One”, Either/Or
In Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, 1 the engaging analysis of the concept of the tragic in ancient and modern dramas hinges on Kierkegaard’s
poetic invention of the figure of a new Antigone and the shift in her subjectivity. Such analysis moves from the unquestioning acceptance of fate in
Sophocles’s Antigone to the self-reflective brooding of Kierkegaard’s creation.
Kierkegaard’s illustration of the tragic derives from a mixture of the
characteristics of ancient and modern dramas. His Antigone incarnates the
peculiarities of both: necessity of action and self-subjectivity. The fictitious
author of Either/Or, Part I that goes under the name of A, the Aesthete,
reads the story of Antigone before a meeting of the Symparanekromenoi,
the “Society of the Buried Lives.” 2 A imagines himself among a group of individuals who are leading lives spiritually dead or alienated within society.
They become the discreet spectators of a most secretive representation: a
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/sestigiani.pdf
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revisited version of Antigone. This ironic parable in the romantic mode belongs to the genre that Novalis named “literary Saturnalia.” 3 It is a fragment, a shred of theatre that can be viewed with the mind’s eye but not entirely grasped because it depicts a “nebulous” 4 and most reserved modern
heroine. The story of the new Antigone and her proverbial inwardness echo
Kierkegaard’s biography and his obsession for silence and indirect discourse. How not to think of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms such as Frater Taciturnus or Johannes de Silentio, ironically alluding to a silent form of wisdom?
The puppeteer pulls his Antigone by a string of silence in a theatre of
the hereafter mirroring Antigone’s living burial in a sort of teatrum mundi.
In this article I will discuss the discrepancy between the definition of
the tragic hero in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling 5 and Either/Or. I will
argue that although both works were published in 1843, the analysis of the
tragic heroine of Antigone in Either/Or is more nuanced than that of the
tragic (ethical) hero in Fear and Trembling. The tragic heroine in Either/Or
seems projected toward an overcoming of the ethical sphere. The tragic
(ethical) hero of Fear and Trembling moves entirely in the sphere of the
ethical and the tragic results from a conflict between two ethical spheres. In
Either/Or, before introducing Antigone, A presents to the foreground two
kinds of tragic heroes: the ancient and the modern. The ancient hero is the
shadow of fate, the modern is a free willed character who defies his destiny
and moves in the sphere of the ethical. The tragic (ethical) hero of Fear and
Trembling seems close to the tragic modern hero outlined in Either/Or,
whereas he seems to have little in common with the fated hero of the ancient world, crystallized in the aesthetic sphere. The responsibilities of both
the tragic (ethical) hero of Fear and Trembling and the modern hero of Either/Or can be traced in the ethical sphere: they are the result of an act of
free will. I will analyse these two typologies of tragic heroes in the third section of the present article. In Either/Or, A proposes the model of the truly
tragic hero/heroine: his Antigone. She oscillates between the two realms of
the ancient and the modern: she is a self-reflected character who is embedded in her “substantial determinant,” 6 namely her fate. With his Antigone, A enacts a critique of the fragmentation of the modern world and of
the unauthentic modern tragedy as its paradigmatic product.
I will also argue that the coexistence of “fate” and “character” in the
narration of Antigone by A is a literary device that enables Kierkegaard to
give voice to some autobiographical events under disguise. A seems to be
aware of the impossible resurrection of the ancient Greek consciousness
as he produces a fragment of a performance for a most private audience,
the “Fellowship of the Dead.” 7
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The Ancient and the Modern World
The dissertation on the tragic in ancient and modern dramas signed by
A precedes his story of Antigone. A describes ancient tragedies as permeated with a profound feeling of sorrow in contrast to the feeling of pain that
emerges from modern tragedies. The world of ancient Greece was highly
governed by what A calls “substantial categories” 8 – namely the state, family, fatum. Sorrow is the feeling aroused in the spectator following the fall of
the hero or heroine due to the guilt inscribed in their genetic legacy. But
can one be guilty if the guilt is inherited? Society in ancient Greece was organised in such a way that every individual was born with a destiny engraved in their skin. They are embedded in their substantial categories to
the extent that they suffer their fatal destiny without questioning whether it
could have been otherwise. Sorrow is the silent acceptance of one’s destiny as the result of the guilt inscribed in one’s genetic legacy. But guilt is
not simply inherited; it is dictated by a compulsion to atone for the ancestors’ errors. It is the sense of belonging that drives the hero or heroine to filial piety. Blood binds individuals of ancient Greece in a chain of sin and
deferential atonement, where atonement is a practice of paying homage, of
bringing flowers to the father’s tomb. “There is a degree of ambiguity concerning inherited guilt for it is dependent not upon some action of later generations, but upon their attitude to their forbears.” 9 The nature of guilt in
ancient Greek tragedies is very ambiguous. It implies guilt and guiltlessness at once as it would be a contradiction in terms to be guilty by fate.
According to A, modern society’s determinants are self-consciousness
and reflexive subjectivity. Pain is the feeling that arises in the spectator following a reflection upon the suffering of the hero. In modern tragedies, the
hero falls just as in ancient tragedies, but he does so entirely on his own
deeds. He is subjectively reflected in himself and this reflection has reflected him out of every immediate relation to state, kindred, fate and even
out of his own past life. 10 The modern individual is isolated and desperate
in his own solitude. The brooding modern hero fights on his own, in isolation. Modern tragedy is about responsibility and acceptance of guilt. The
hero is not allowed to fall back into the comforting idea that his errors are
dictated by his inescapable destiny. Having cut any ties with his family, the
state and his destiny (fatum), he acts on his own, asserting his independence from his history. He performs acrobatics without a safety net. If he
falls, no family, no state and no fatum will offer him any consoling embrace.
The modern hero ethically reflects on his own deeds and takes responsibility for them. The hero becomes a character, an individual that creates his
own fate. A indicates a danger in modern society’s propensity for extreme
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A Danish Antigone
isolation and describes as comical its attempt to assert a too distinct independence from universal commonalities. 11 The comical results from the individual trying to assert one’s individuality, one’s self-subjectivity and independence from fatum: one’s attempt to be absolute, failing to admit one’s
own relativity. According to A, the authentic tragic is not to be found in
modern tragedies as “character” seems to be entirely separated from “fate:”
the tragic moves toward the comic instead.
Guilt in “Fate and Character”
The eternal question of whether “character” can govern “fate,” or, vice
versa, is tackled by Walter Benjamin in his “Fate and Character.” 12 He
speaks of the comical move of the individual who believes that his actions
are free, while acting according to substantial determinants. Therefore, believing in the prominence of his character over his fate, he comically deludes himself. Fate and character are bound together; the freedom of
movement of each is marked by one another’s position: they are destined
to revolve around one another. “The character trait ... is the sun of individuality in the colourless (anonymous) sky of man, which casts the shadow of
the comic action. (This places Cohen’s profound dictum that every tragic
action, however sublimely it strides upon its cothurnus, casts a comic
shadow, in its most appropriate context).” 13 Benjamin’s quotation is a gloss
to A’s belief that the essence of the tragic, springing from a sublation of ancient and modern tragedies, resides in a blend of sorrow and pain, of “fate”
and “character.”
The juxtaposition of “fate” and “character” implies a different concept
of guilt in the ancient and the modern tragedy. Fate is an ongoing temporality that resists any form of interruption questioning its inevitability. If events
are ruled by fate, events could not be otherwise. Regardless of what the individual does, he is undone by fate. The decision of the individual does not
matter, the event is unavoidable. Fate does not admit that it could have
been otherwise. In events dictated by fate, therefore, there is no guilt, or at
least, guilt is of a very ambiguous kind. There is the guilt in sharing a common destiny bound to lineage, or state, but no guilt is caused by a faux pas
or a decision taken by the hero. Ancient Greek tragedies – lacking selfsubjectivity and inwardness – relate to the eternal and the possible through
external and accidental means. Fate responds to the anxiety of the pagans
– it placates their fear of the possible by speaking through oracles. Thus
the ancients set their subjectivity outside of themselves. If anxiety is “dialectically defined as fate,” 14 it is impossible to arrive at the concepts of guilt
and sin as this would lead to the contradicting affirmation that one becomes
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guilty by fate. Sophocles’s Antigone is all immersed in the present and certainly her anxiety concerning her fate can be traced back to the same oracle that spoke to her father. Her subjectivity is entirely external and preordained by her descent.
If we are to accept that the hero is able to, and does make, a decision,
two different temporal structures present themselves: choice and guilt. The
chance that the action could have been different provokes the guilt. Decision is the moment which could always have been otherwise. Hence, the
hero is responsible for the action. If something could not have been otherwise, there is not a decision and no guilt. Good sense falls out of the gods.
In modern tragedies the idea of decision, and guilt that might ensue an unwise choice, is sharply delineated. The individual demonstrates a selfsubjective attitude and reveals anxiety for one’s own potential existence.
Potentiality implies the future, and in fact anxiety is about a future – not actual – event. “A person is thus anxious about ‘nothing’, ‘nothing’ as understood as the non-actual, the possible whose actualization lies in the future.
But this possibility does not belong to the external world; it is always one’s
own.” 15
A’s Antigone experiences anxiety about “nothing.” Anxiety gives her
insight into her father’s incestuous plight. Yet, the triggering object of anxiety is an intangible suspicion, and the relation of anxiety to it is nothing. A’s
Antigone loves and fears the object of her anxiety: her father’s incest. As
Kierkegaard says, “there is nothing in the world more ambiguous” 16 than
the double movement of fear and love toward the object of one’s anxiety.
By anxiously desiring what she fears to be true, Antigone becomes guilty.
“But anxiety has an added factor that makes it cling even harder to its object, for it both loves and fears it.” 17 A’s Antigone reflects on and broods
over the future. Her subjectivity is entirely inward.
Andrew Benjamin refers to Sophocles’s Antigone as a passage from
antiquity to modernity for “its elimination of the work of fate.” 18 The play
thus represents a “refusal of reference to destiny, it allows for the advent of
cosmopolitanism.” 19 In the public sphere of modern society, the disappearance of fate is the starting point for the acknowledgment of responsibilities.
Wisdom is the human contribution to the thriving of democracy. The final
lines of the Antigone’s chorus express the nature of Creon’s mistake: lack
of wisdom. Fate is not involved in Creon’s fall, the chorus suggests. His attempt to ascribe his own error to the gods is a refusal to take responsibility,
to account for his own deed. In other words, Creon clings to antiquity. He is
unwilling to abandon the unaware state typical of the ancients.
Good sense is by far the chief part of happiness; and we must not
be impious toward the gods. The great words of boasters are always
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A Danish Antigone
punished with great blows, and as they grow old teach them wisdom. 20
The very last lines of the play uttered by the chorus set Sophocles’s play in
a middle position between “fate and character,” making thus a leap towards
modernity. As A states, the tragic is an ambivalent promiscuity of both ancient and modern tragedy, where both stances co-exist, ambiguously. But
whereas Andrew Benjamin identifies the blend of antiquity and modernity in
the conflicting perspectives of Creon and the chorus, A invokes the blend of
guiltlessness and responsibility, necessity and possibility within the hero’s
consciousness to form a genuine tragic protagonist. As Mark Taylor remarks, “ancient and modern tragedies err in opposite directions. Ancient
tragedy conceives the self primarily in terms of necessity; the hero is a sufferer. Modern tragedy conceives the self fully in terms of possibility, and the
freedom to actualize possibility; the hero is an actor. As a matter of fact,
both elements, necessity and possibility, must be acknowledged in the
self’s constitution. The self is both a sufferer and an actor. To stress either
factor to the exclusion of the other is to present an unbalanced view of selfhood.” 21 A’s Antigone personifies this tragic consciousness. She attains the
perfection of tragic selfhood. But the tragic balance appears just in order to
claim its impossibility and to fracture the heroine.
The Greek Antigone:
A Tragic (Ethical) Heroine with Subjective Truth
In creating a new Antigone, A presents the difficult task of dealing with
two literary figures at the same time. A’s Antigone is a shadowy figure that
needs her illuminated alter-ego in order to become visible. The Greek Antigone gives away her life defying the king of Thebes’s edict. She buries the
dead body of her brother and is condemned to being buried alive. Creon’s
law seems unjust, leaving unburied a corpse and ordering the burial of a
living creature. But one must comply with the law and Antigone, in refusing
to do so, embraces a choice that is entirely the result of her “subjective
truth.” Hers is a passionate commitment to truth, hers is a decision for
which she is willing to live and die. 22 Kierkegaard insists on the importance
of choice as a means to acquire one’s own self. He writes in his journal: “It
is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really
wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the
idea for which I can live and die.” 23 The truth of the decision is given by the
passion one puts in what one takes up; in fact “what is important in choosing is not so much to choose the right thing as the energy, the earnestness,
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and the pathos with which one chooses.” 24 Antigone is jealous of her destiny. She clings to her choice, unwilling to share it with anyone else who, in
so doing, might diminish the uniqueness of her gesture. And she is aware
that this very choice of hers is what defines the essence of her life: “Hades
and those below know to whom the deed belongs! And I do not tolerate a
loved one who shows her love only in words ... Do not try to share my
death, and do not claim as your own something you never put a hand to!
My death will be enough.” 25
According to Kierkegaard’s definition in Fear and Trembling, the Greek
Antigone could be read as a true tragic (ethical) heroine. 26 Antigone’s act,
although scornful of Creon’s edict, can be justified within the ethical, in so
far as she is loyal to the idea of showing respect towards her own stock:
“There is no shame in showing regard for those of one’s own stock ... It
was not a slave, but my brother who had died.” 27 Her deed is an expression of the ethical life and the city of Thebes applauds Antigone’s deed. As
we hear from Haemon: “the city is lamenting for this girl, saying that no
woman ever deserved it less, but that she is to perish miserably for actions
that are glorious, she who did not allow her own brother who had fallen in
the slaughter to remain unburied or to be destroyed by savage dogs or
birds.” 28
The tragic hero/heroine takes personal responsibility into the public
sphere of language, and justification is what distinguishes this ethical
hero/heroine from the silence of A’s Antigone. Sophocles’s Antigone explains her position and the reasons behind her choice. “But when I come
there, I am confident that I shall come dear to my father, dear to you, my
mother, and dear to you, my own brother; since when you died it was I that
with my own hands washed you and adorned you and poured libations on
your graves; and now, Polynices, for burying your body I get this reward!
Yet in the eyes of the wise I did well to honour you.” 29 Antigone has the
courage to perform the sacrifice of her own life. The tragic appears from the
moment she sacrifices the aesthetic sphere of her life – namely she gives
up her life – in order to gain the ethical sphere for the whole society. 30 Renouncing her life is instrumental to honouring her brother’s memory. She
has the courage to perform the sacrifice “for the well being of the whole” 31
– that is to respect a common ideal of loyalty toward family bonds. Antigone
is ready to give up forever the finite and the particular for ethical reasons.
The tragic (ethical) heroine Antigone is not in the religious sphere, 32 she
does not conceive a dimension beyond the earthly, where she could hope
to regain what she gave up. Although it is a noble gesture, it is devoid of
spirituality. But the play has multi-layered realms of power.
If we keep bearing in mind the definition of the tragic (ethical) hero of
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Fear and Trembling, Antigone’s choice is a true and ethical decision in the
sphere of her very personal perception of reality. Antigone’s singularity
clashes with Creon when she defies his edict. What seemed just and ethical then, becomes outside the law under the light of another sphere,
namely Creon’s. Antigone claims that she is acting in the name of the gods,
in the name of some unwritten law that is other than Creon’s. She claims to
depict her choice with a religious motive although her choice is basically
the result of a conflict with Creon’s law. If we are to take literally the clash
between the commandments of the gods and the prescriptions of the city
law, Antigone somehow reminds us of Kierkegaard’s “Knight of Faith” 33 in
so far as she perpetrates a so called “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Is Antigone really doing her deed because instructed to do so by the
gods or is she using the gods to justify her choice? There is no evidence in
Sophocles’s text that Antigone has been asked to perform her brother’s
burial by the gods. It seems that she covers her deed with a divine order so
that she can be more authoritative. In fact, Antigone does not expect to receive the finite back, as a true “Knight of Faith” would. She gives it away for
good. She decides to die in order to pay homage to the memory of her
brother, in order to do justice to her ancestors.
If the Greek Antigone is read according to the tragic (ethical) hero of
Fear and Trembling – implying that the tragic conflict of the play is of an
ethical order – this makes her close to the modern world and the vision of
the tragic typical of the modern drama analysed by A. If this is the case,
Antigone is ethically guilty, just like Creon, and fate would have only a very
marginal implication in the tragic conflict. But for Kierkegaard, this is a
modern misreading of the tragedy. Free will unbound of substantial categories unleashes pain – the feeling of modern tragedies.
Despite being published in the same year as Fear and Trembling, 34 Either/Or presents a different analysis of the tragic hero when discussing
Sophocles’s Antigone. It seems in conflict with the thesis of the former text.
Antigone’s fate is not a result of her own freely chosen deed – it does not
pertain to the ethical – but it is preordained by her place in her family, by
the fate that is her family’s fate. It is an ambiguous and inherited guilt, not
the modern guilt of ethical decision and responsibility. This is a critique of
the modern world and the vision of the tragic (ethical) hero that Kierkegaard
analyses in Fear and Trembling through the voice of one of his pseudonyms – Johannes de Silentio. As A states considering Sophocles’s Antigone: “If this is viewed as an isolated fact, as a collision between sisterly
love and piety and an arbitrary human injunction, Antigone would cease to
be a Greek tragedy; it would be an altogether modern tragic theme.” 35
Sophocles’s Antigone decides to bury her brother in defiance of the Gen-
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eral’s injunction, but in so doing she is not choosing freely, this is “not so
much a free act as a fateful necessity, which visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children.” 36 Antigone is doomed to act as she does, she is
fated. She is not subjective enough to question whether it could have been
otherwise. The dominant tone to the soul is sorrow.
A’s Antigone: A Secret Brought to the Grave
In the second part of “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the
Tragic in Modern Drama,” A addresses directly the society of the Symparanekromenoi 37 and introduces his heroine, Antigone. We are suddenly
aware that we are not the only spectators, but we are sharing the performance with a chorus – the society – that has just been disclosed by the
speaker. By uttering the name of “the Fellowship of the Dead,” he draws
the heavy curtains of the stage and admits us to a very secretive theatre
arena. The discreet chorus is a group that has refused to live within society
and has retired to a sort of a demimonde, an enclave where people are initiated to secrets otherwise unknown. The peculiarity of the society is its
love for the fragment, for “the glinting transiency.” 38 It offers a slanted
glance on the world, artificially recreating a portion of its magic without attempting to reproduce it in its entirety. This microcosm of society can only
grasp a shred, a spark of ideas. The fullness of accomplished literary works
is not the ambition of the society as it wishes to allude without entirely revealing. Unfinished works are like ruins, the society cherishes them because they convey an element of the past. Works under the guise of ruins
become thus present in the past. The story of Antigone is evoked as if by
conjuration to grasp a secret that the heroine hides within. The society is
thirsty for sharing concealed grief and secrets not confessed. It evokes
things secret by means of magic and incantations, even when death has
buried them from our view to relive them again. 39 A is fascinated with Antigone; as someone literally buried alive she echoes perfectly the spirit of the
association. We guess that the fascination is also shared by every other
single member of the society: everyone is invited to feel free to love her in
their own way. The indistinctness of her depiction allows this. But would
there be any other way to represent artistically “reflective grief”? And truly
for our Antigone “the stage is inside, not outside; it is a spiritual stage.” 40
A introduces his Antigone to the chorus. Her story deviates from the
Greek Antigone, in so far as her subjectivity shifts from external to inward.
The Danish Antigone becomes an internal and self-reflective character,
moving from fatalism to auto-determinism. Yet, she does not give up entirely her trail of Greek consciousness. In fact, she embodies the idea of the
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A Danish Antigone
tragic of both ancient and modern dramas for her experiencing both sorrow
and pain. Antigone is “the daughter of sorrow” wearing “a dowry of pain as
her outfit.” 41 She is a direct descendant of the Greek consciousness, bound
to her sorrowful fate for being Oedipus’s daughter. At the same time she
pains for her plight in a modern, self-reflective fashion.
Antigone is the only one who is aware of her father’s incestuous state.
Antigone is shrouded in her silence. She is proud of her secret and she
knows that she has been selected to save the honour of the lineage of
Oedipus. Her family bonds are tainted by her father’s error and she accepts
the consequences – to be buried alive – silently and unquestioningly. The
past is a legacy that is not conceivable to reject. The result is profound sorrow. The doubt over Oedipus’s incest instilled anxiety in Antigone. The secrecy of her condition generates a self-reflective pain that does not desire
to be seen by others. It is the modernity of this attitude that arouses pain.
A’s Antigone is modern because self-reflective, because of her silent
brooding and suffering. The modernity of A’s Antigone is also highlighted
by her interior conflict: respect for her father would require that she does
not share her secret with anyone, yet, not revealing her real essence to her
beloved Haemon would mean doing injustice to the depth of her love. Only
in death can she find peace. In A’s Antigone the conflict is thus moved from
a confrontation between Creon/Antigone to a self-reflected inner conflict
within the persona of Antigone.
Antigone is a fragment, a ruin of history and in virtue of this fact she is
present in the past – a particle of a lost whole. The tragic in modern drama
that A juxtaposes to the tragic in ancient drama is also hosted by a fragmented society that has lost its ties to history. Modernity has accentuated
the concept of the individual’s responsibility, thus his/her prominence as a
“character,” as a pure fragment of a society once whole. Both Antigones
are marked by a distinct demarcation of external and internal dimensions:
“The one (Sophocles’s) is dominated by external forces, yet remains innocently carefree within; the other (A’s) is not bound by any external actions
demanded of her, but she is utterly and painfully bound by inner anxiety.
The common element is that both are victims of the contradiction between
externality and inwardness, between the objective relations that constitute
fate for the Greek and subjective uncertainty and guilt that are the modern’s
prison.” 42
A depicts Antigone with venerating religious attributes. This mode is
not new; it suffices to think of Hegel’s tone in his Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, where he celebrates the “celestial Antigone, the most resplendent [herrlichste] figure ever to have appeared on earth.” 43 Antigone is “the
virgo mater.” 44 She is pregnant with her secret and she conceals it under
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her heart. She has swallowed her secret and it has now become part of her
corporeality. Transparency is the consistency of her sorrowful pain. Antigone is assailed by anxiety that instils doubts about her father’s incest.
Anxiety about “nothing” – understood as the non-actual, the possible – begets her secret that is imploded silence. Her secret gives life and death at
the same time in so far as it represents at once her impalpable essence
and the interior conflict that leads her to death.
Antigone’s silence is witness to a heroic gesture – the renunciation of
the joys and passions of finite existence for some “higher cause.” She renounces her life to honour her brother and guard her father’s secret. This
choice is unspeakable and must remain silent, because it is loaded with an
almost religious significance. Silence and indirect speech are distinguishing
features of the entire work of Kierkegaard. It is not surprising that Antigone’s behaviour has an affinity with the silence of the “Knight of Infinite
Resignation” heralded by Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling. 45
“Her thoughts are my thoughts”
Why does Kierkegaard need to create a new character in order to elucidate the differences between ancient and modern tragedy and thus the
essence of the tragic? Was he perhaps trying to create a character that
would help him to understand and keep at bay his own personal tragedy?
Kierkegaard creates his own Antigone as a sort of guise of his being. Antigone becomes his literary alter-ego, his literary creature that allows Kierkegaard to live his life a second time, taking the time to explain, to reveal his
pain to the spectators. Kierkegaard’s life had been deeply signed by his
abandonment of his beloved Regine Olsen for mysterious and apparently
concealed reasons. Seemingly, he also shared a “terrible” secret concerning his father. Like A’s Antigone, he could not reveal it to his beloved
Regine for fear of not being understood; like A’s Antigone, he could not
conceive of not sharing the most intimate essence of his soul with his beloved: “In the marriage ceremony I must take an oath – therefore I dare not
conceal anything. On the other hand, there are things I just cannot tell her.
The fact that the divine enters into marriage is my ruin.” 46 Allegedly, he forsook Regine in order to keep his father’s secret: “But if I were to explain
myself I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship to
father, his melancholy, the eternal night brooding deep inside me, my going
astray … and where was I to find a roof when I knew or suspected that the
only man I had admired for his strength and power wavered?” 47 Kierkegaard seems to be speaking through his Antigone: “Her thoughts are my
thoughts.” 48 He had to renounce Regine; Antigone had to forsake Haemon.
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A Danish Antigone
In his journal, in the process of working on his Antigone, Kierkegaard
wonders whether he should change Antigone for a male hero. He lingers in
a draft particularly indebted to his biography: “No doubt I could bring my
Antigone to a conclusion if I let her be a man. He forsook his beloved because he could not hold on to her along with his private agony … This
scandal outraged the family: a brother, for example, came forward as an
avenger; I would then have my hero fall in a duel.” 49 He yields to the temptation of indulging in a poetic self-explanation of his crucial choice in life. 50
He does it wearing the mask of indirect discourse. Kierkegaard protects the
truth of a decision that, because of its singularity, demands secrecy. “What
have I lost, alas, how could you know or understand? This is a subject on
which you had better stay silent.” 51 Speaking would require suspending
one’s own absolute singularity, one’s own uniqueness to share a generality
of ethics that requires justifying and accounting for one’s decisions and actions. According to Jacques Derrida, speaking equals to entering the realm
of ethics and Kierkegaard cannot resist this temptation entirely: he lets his
soul speak through Antigone’s voice. 52 She has confessed Kierkegaard her
secret; she has murmured it in a loving embrace. 53 Antigone’s story is
swathed in a veil of secret and cannot be acted on stage, because it remains unsaid. A’s version of Antigone can only be performed before the
“Society of the Buried Lives:” it is an inward theatre. Through A’s Antigone,
Kierkegaard expresses his yearning to represent his life, but he does so
from a slanted perspective: his point of view is hidden behind a ventriloquist
puppet. Antigone is the poetic invention that springs from his imploded silence. He considers silence a sign of wisdom, the shield that protects an internal storm. “I am unconditionally the most silent person in this age. Silence concealed in silence is suspect, arouses suspicion, almost as if one
were bearing witness to something, at least to the fact that one is silent. But
silence hidden is the most definitive talent for conversation – now there’s silence for you!” 54
But there is also another aspect to Kierkegaard’s Antigone. Kierkegaard is aware that the modern era has lost the Greek consciousness that
would enable us to understand properly the profound sorrow in Greek tragedy. In other words, the modern spectator has lost compassion and
Kierkegaard believes that the modern age has no great real sympathy with
the Greek tragedy: “Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family,
state, kindred ... the spectator has lost compassion, but in a subjective way
and also in an objective sense compassion is the authentic expression of
the tragic.” 55 His Antigone presents the vestiges of the ancient Greek consciousness, while at the same time engaging us in a modern self-subjective
analysis. In other words, Kierkegaard creates his Antigone to artificially re-
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produce in our society an extinct consciousness so fundamental to the
tragic. Kierkegaard has created his character for his imaginary fellowship,
the Symparanekromenoi, and we are left to speculate as to the reasons
why he decided not to produce it for the real stage: “Perhaps Kierkegaard
discovered that he had no talent for writing dialogue or drama. In any case,
in not producing the tragedy, the Aesthete is at least true to his own character – while arguing that ancient times cannot be repristinated, he succeeds in repristinating them – in aesthetic contemplation.” 56
Coda
The vicinity of the definition of the tragic (ethical) hero in Fear and
Trembling and A’s analysis of the modern tragic hero is a reflection of
Kierkegaard’s critique of the modern world and its fragmentation. The tragic
(ethical) hero of Fear and Trembling is juxtaposed to the Knights of Infinite
Resignation and of Faith, both paradigmatic of a religious dimension of existence. Like the modern tragic hero in Either/Or, he is entirely imbued with
the ethical and does not know the infinite gentleness of tragedy. 57 The true
tragic afflatus that arises from A’s dissertation – a blend of fate and character – has a somewhat religious ascendance. Although Either/Or analyses
the aesthetic and the ethical spheres of existence, A hints at the consoling
sphere of the religious as the final movement of the tragic. 58 It is the second movement of the genuine tragic hero, who embraces the consoling
idea of belonging to a universal sinfulness after having experienced the
harshness of the ethical, namely the share of responsibilities for his acts. It
is a fatherly love that all embraces “by means of continuity.” 59 This movement back to fate after having felt the ethical, is taken up by A’s Antigone.
This makes her the quintessential tragic heroine. A’s Antigone is also a poetical invention, a fragment of theatre. She enables Kierkegaard to give an
indirect voice to some episodes of his life. “The society of the Buried Lives,”
the stage where her story is performed, seems to allude to the fact that the
resurrection of her Greek consciousness can only take place in the theatre
of the half dead.
Monash University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Søren Kierkegaard, “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Mod-
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A Danish Antigone
ern Drama”, Either/Or, Part I, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), pp. 139-64.
2
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 623, n.1.
3
See George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984), p. 53.
4
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 153.
5
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1985).
6
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 143.
7
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 137.
8
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 150.
9
John A. Norris, “The Validity of A’s View of Tragedy with Particular Reference to
Ibsen’s Brand”, in ed. Robert L. Perkins International Kierkegaard Commentary Either/Or Part I (Macon: Mercer UP, 1995), p. 147.
10
See Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 143.
11
See Steiner, Antigones, p. 56: “Pure isolation is at once comical and desperate, a
formidable premonition of the Kafka-Beckett aesthetic.”
12
Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character”, Selected Writings, vol. I (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap, 1996).
13
Benjamin, “Fate and Character”, p. 206.
14
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting
Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte and
Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), p. 96.
15
Dan Magurshak, “The Concept of Anxiety: The Keystone of the KierkegaardHeidegger Relationship”, in ed. Robert L. Perkins, International Kierkegaard
Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety (Macon: Mercer UP, 1995), p. 173. See
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 41.
16
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 43.
17
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 155.
18
Andrew Benjamin, “Where Philosophy Begins: The Event of Plurality”, Philosophy’s Literature (Manchester: Clinamen, 2001), p. 37.
19
Benjamin, “Where Philosophy Begins”, p. 37.
20
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
1994), p. 127.
21
Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and
the Self (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975), p. 150, n. 49.
22
Sophocles, Antigone, p. 11: “It is honourable for me to do this and die.”
23
Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 32.
24
Søren Kierkegaard, “The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality”, Either/Or, Part II, Edited and Translated by Howard
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V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), p. 167.
25
Sophocles, Antigone, p. 53.
26
See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, pp. 86-9. Johannes de Silentio indicates
Agamemnon, Jephthah and Brutus as examples of tragic (ethical) heroes. All
three operate a sacrifice for the well being of society. They give up the aesthetic
sphere of their lives in order to gain the ethical.
27
Sophocles, Antigone, pp. 49-51.
28
Sophocles, Antigone, p. 67.
29
Sophocles, Antigone, p. 87.
30
See Kierkegaard, “The Balance between Esthetic and Ethical”, pp. 168-9.
31
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 86.
32
The tragic (ethical) hero belongs to the ethical sphere of existence. It is juxtaposed to “The Knights of Infinite Resignation and Faith.” Both knights move in the
religious sphere.
33
See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 70. Kierkegaard describes the Knight of
Faith as someone who has renounced the finite and the particular for some higher
cause. The Knight of Faith is firm in his paradoxical belief that on the strength of
the absurd he will receive the finite back, though perhaps, in some transfigured
form. The Knight of Faith “has made and is at every moment making the movement of infinity. He drains in infinite resignation the deep sorrow of existence, he
knows the bliss of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, whatever
is most precious in the world, and yet to him finitude tastes just as good as to one
who has never known anything higher ... [T]he whole earthly form he presents is a
new creation on the strength of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he makes it with such accuracy and poise that he is continually
getting finitude out of it.” The temptation in Antigone, as for Abraham – the Knight
of Faith for antonomasia – is the ethical itself which would keep Antigone from doing the gods’ will and comply with Creon’s edict.
34
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling was signed by the pseudonymous Johannes
de Silentio, and Either/Or I-II by Victor Eremita. Both were published in 1843.
35
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 156.
36
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 156.
37
See Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, pp. 153, 157.
38
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 152.
39
See Kierkegaard, “Silhouettes”, Either/Or, Part I, pp. 175-6.
40
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 157.
41
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 153.
42
Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1985), pp. 40-1.
43
Quoted in Steiner, Antigones, p. 40.
44
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 158.
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A Danish Antigone
45
According to Kierkegaard, the Knight of Infinite Resignation has a recognisably
heroic quality. This can both be recognised as requiring courage, and be judged
as ethically admirable. The spiritual inspiration of the knight’s choices renders their
voicing an almost impossible task to perform. His deeds are, therefore, marked by
a silence that is imbued with other-worldly significance, almost religious.
46
Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, p. 160.
47
Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, pp. 159-60.
48
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 153.
49
Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, p. 146.
50
See Steiner, Antigones, p. 63: “The autobiographical content, the vehemence and
concreteness of self-projection which inform Kierkegaard’s reading of ‘Antigone’,
are beyond doubt.”
51
Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, p. 140.
52
See Jacques Derrida, “Whom to Give to (knowing Not to Know)”, Kierkegaard: A
Critical Reader, eds. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), pp. 156-7. See also Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991), p. 61: “The singular being appears to other
singular beings; it is communicated to them in the singular. It is a contact, it is a
contagion: a touching, the transmission of a trembling at the edge of being, the
communication of a passion that makes us fellows, or the communication of the
passion to be fellows, to be in common.”
53
See Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 153.
54
Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, p. 603.
55
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 149.
56
Clyde Holler, “Tragedy in the Context of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or”, in International
Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or Part I, p. 140.
57
See Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 146.
58
See Søren Kierkegaard, “The Point of View for my Work as an Author”, The Point
of View, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), p.
35: “When I began Either/Or … I was potentialiter [in potentiality] as deeply influenced by the religious as I ever became. … Here lies Either/Or. It was a poetical
emptying, which did not, however, go further than the ethical. Personally, I was far
from tranquilly wanting to summon existence back to marriage, I who religiously
was already in the monastery – an idea concealed in the pseudonym VictorEremita [the Hermit] … Strictly speaking, Either/Or was written in a monastery.”
Thus, Kierkegaard’s choice for the pseudonym Victor Eremita, who signed as the
“editor” of Either/Or, a work which discusses the Aesthetic and Ethical spheres,
betrays the coexistence of a parallel point of view, namely the patently Religious.
59
Kierkegaard, “Tragic”, p. 146.
75
Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy:
Hegel’s Antigone
Rhonda Khatab
Within literary theory and philosophical discourse, Sophocles’ Antigone has been a significant source of questions pertaining to the relationship of individual and state. Indeed, the Antigone figures prominently in the
context of Hegel’s account of “The Ethical Order,” 1 which represents the
conflict between the spheres of Divine and Human Law, with reference to
the tragic as reflected within Greek ethical life. Following an interpretation
of this section on “The Ethical Order,” this paper undertakes a more engaged reading of Hegel’s account of the Antigone, in critical juxtaposition
with a re-reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. In challenging contrast to Hegel’s
account of the tragedy, this interpretation of the play gives emphasis to the
argument that the conflict presented in Antigone foreshadows that between
individual subjective will and communal right that becomes the defining
problem (both politically, and philosophically) of modernity.
In the Section on Spirituality of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, selfconsciousness endeavours to surpass an essentially particular existence,
in actively seeking to realise itself at the level of the universal. The universal becomes, for it, a law, and in adhering to this law, self-consciousness is
raised to the universal principle of individuality. We have thus entered the
domain of ethical life, wherein the formation of Spirit is underway in the dynamic between the universal as abstract law, and the individual, as its deCOLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/khatab.pdf
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Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy
terminate embodiment. Hegel will demonstrate that the dialectical structure
of identity and opposition, which underlies the whole of human consciousness, also extends to the larger sphere of ethical life. Thus, contradiction
and division are inherent within ethical life, and become manifest as a conflict between two opposing powers, through the actions of individuals. In a
chapter entitled “The Ethical Order,” 2 Hegel models this dialectic of Spirit
upon the narrative and thematic structure of Greek tragic drama. Of special
interest for Hegel, is the Sophoclean tragedy, Antigone, in which contradiction is seen to have its grounding within the spiritual differences immanent
to ethical life.
So as to set the stage upon which the tragic formation of Spirit is to be
represented, a brief reiteration of the dialectical journey of consciousness
up until the tragic moment is instigated is in order. By the end of the section
on Reason, which precedes that dedicated to the formation of Spirit within
the ethical world, man comes to the realisation that all of reality is determined by the very same principle of rationality which structures consciousness itself. By this stage in its trajectory, consciousness has endured various transitions and has now attained (principally through the transformation
achieved through the master and slave dialectic) the capacity for conceptual thought and, furthermore, recognises the transformational power of
thought itself. Man has therefore come to the realisation that “Reason is the
certainty of consciousness that it is all reality.” 3 Owing to an encounter with
otherness, man has been raised out of his particularity and is now capable,
as a universal consciousness, of universal reflection.
Despite having formed a relation with the universal by means of conceptual thought, this relation is, nevertheless, at this stage, rather rudimentary. The potential for universal self-consciousness lies dormant within the
abstraction of pure thought, which unites the individual with the universal to
the detriment of his particular existence as an individual will. 4 As will become apparent in the following Section on Spirit, action is the source of defence against the reductionism of abstract thought: it is that through which
the individual will asserts itself as a dynamic force within the universal. Universal self-consciousness is merely conceptualised through reflexive
thought, and only fully realised through action. 5
In Hegel’s studies on Spirituality, individuality experiments with several
distinct forms of consciousness in an effort to determine the true aspiration
of its work. Through its experiences, it learns that its action attains the
greatest significance at the level of the universal. 6 Following this realisation, there comes about a convergence of particular objectives into the
unity of a universal object. This transfer of aims coincides with the first positing of Spirit, which, at this incipient stage of its path of realisation, is not
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Rhonda Khatab
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yet actual self-consciousness, but is, rather, objectively and immediately
identified with the universal self in the social principle. 7
Corresponding with this is a shift in the metaphysical ontology of the
individuality which is raised from the position of a particular, self-identical,
self-immanent being limited unto itself, to a universal self engaged in relation to an external world as other. 8 This supersession has thus created the
possibility for a new mode of being: a transcendent existence sustained
within a larger social sphere constituted by the coalescence of particular
individuality immediately with the universal principle. 9 This transcendent
community whose needs are reflected in the action of its individuals constitutes the primary model of an “ethical world.” Within this sphere there takes
place the development of an “ethical consciousness” in direct relation to an
absolute authoritative principle: the laws and customs of the community,
which comprise its ethical substance. 10 Yet, self-consciousness is, at this
stage, not as yet absolute, in that its identity lies purely in objective being. 11
The ethical consciousness is as yet given by an immediate identification
with an objective principle – “the formal universality of legality or law” –
categorically taken to be its own truth. 12 This ‘fragmented’ mode of being of
individuality submerged within social substance is overcome through selfknowledge: Spirit “must advance to the consciousness of what it is immediately, must leave behind it the beauty of ethical life, and … attain to a
knowledge of itself.” 13
Thus Hegel leads us into the domain of Spirit as that in which consciousness has attained a state of self-awareness as an actuality that exists within an historical structure. At this juncture, the dialectical formation
of Spirit finds grounding in universal history, the major developments of
which are scrutinised by Hegel and upon which is modelled the dialectical
progress of consciousness towards the realisation of subjectivity. The development of Absolute Spirit divides into three phases: immediate spirit,
self-alienated spirit, and self-certain spirit, which are perceived by Hegel as
corresponding to three distinct epochs in universal history (and thus three
diverse historical forms): the ancient Greek world, the age of the Roman
Empire, and the modern world. 14
Hegel firstly analyses the structure of the Greek polis, and demonstrates why it is that this beautiful unity had, of necessity, to disintegrate.
The beautiful ethical life, of which is paradigmatic the world of ancient
Greece, was a harmony sustained by an “immanent Objective morality,” or
an ethic of immediate identification with and dependence upon the universal substantial principle of the State. 15 For Hegel, this immersion in social
substance corresponded to a form of consciousness deficient in the capacity for reflection upon the laws and customs of the society, which were ac-
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Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy
cepted without further analysis. 16
The Greek democratic city-state is for Hegel an expression of “immediate Spirit” in that it was founded upon this form of “Objective Morality,”
which found its source in the “Objective Will” of its citizens who, as such,
were unconscious of their particular interests, and thus whose actions exclusively reflected the external reality. 17 Within this historical form, consciousness of the ethical substance – the social laws and customs – is immediate, subjectivity has not yet asserted itself as the critical power of the
negative, and thus Hegel perceives the dynamic between consciousness
and substance as being undeveloped. 18 For Hegel, this phase of democratic statehood wherein the ethical order exists as a given is, for all its
beauty, a depiction of political stagnation corresponding, moreover, to a
portrait of the individual as deficient in moral reflexivity. 19
For Hegel, the paradigm of the Greek polis, the harmonious existence
of which – and, equally, its inevitable demise – was the result of an absence of reflexive subjectivity, attests to his dialectic in revealing that unity
cannot subsist without the presence of contradiction. 20 The non-reciprocal
dynamic that is, for Hegel, inherent to this ancient form of democracy
brings to the fore the ethical dilemma whose resolution becomes Hegel’s
main undertaking, as that concerning the feasibility of conciliation between
the subjective will of the individual and the collective right of the community.
Hegel demonstrates how the perfect synthesis of the Greek polis could not
withstand the self-conscious will of the subject, which inevitably had to assert itself among its citizens, and how the repressed, or as yet unrealised,
element of subjective will, when raised to consciousness, “could not manifest itself … otherwise than as a destructive element.” 21 Hegel represents
this dilemma and resulting conflict within the context of tragic drama.
In “The Ethical Order,” Hegel firstly prepares the mise-en-scène for the
impending tragic conflict, at the heart of which exists this critical divide
within ethical life between subjective and objective will, specific and generic
identity, individual and universal consciousness. This division is rearticulated in terms of the language and metaphor of tragic drama, as that between human and divine law.
With an eye to enhancing the representation of the rationale underlying this division, and of the qualitative differences of these distinct aspects
of ethical life, let us refer for the moment to this notion of ethics and its related terms in Hegelian thought. Broadly speaking, the term ethical life (Sittlichkeit) refers to the system of customary laws of a society. 22 Although the
German Sittlichkeit can convey both the sense of ethics and of morality,
nevertheless for Hegel, the distinction between these terms is essential.
Hegel thus sets up this distinction as one between the immediacy of ethical
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life whereby ethical customs and norms are accepted as given (a definition
for which he reserves the word Sittlichkeit), and individual morality, based
on one’s rationality and subjective conscience (conveyed by the word Moralität). 23 Hegel associates morality with a more advanced form of selfconsciousness than that relevant to Greek ethical life. 24 These terms do not
correspond to absolutely disparate functions within Hegel’s system, but operate as dialectical complements within his model of the modern state, in
which subjective autonomy is reconciled with objective freedom, and laws
are accepted only by virtue of their rational justifiability. 25
With these definitions in mind, we return now to the “Ethical Order,” in
which the sphere of ethics resolves itself into the duality of a law of individuality and a law of universality. The “superficial antithesis” thus emerges
as a discord between two distinct universals, or value systems: the incontrovertible, unwritten law of the gods, and the manifest ethical power of
humanity, which is the conscious sphere of action. This division between
Divine and Human Law is further developed as one between the sphere of
the family, devoted to the cultivation of the inner essence of the individual,
and the domain of the state, committed to the ideal of a common ethical
substance, and to the realisation of objective freedom among the populace.
In as much as the family is dedicated to the individual in principle, this
natural ethical community is responsible for his preservation beyond his life
as a citizen of the state. Hegel illustrates the special significance of the burial rites of the ancient Greek world in these terms. The obligatory death
rites performed by the relatives of a deceased family member had the capacity to bestow honour on the latter by imbuing his life with significance.
This conscious act on the part of the family corresponded to the salvation
of the deceased from the contingency of death as a natural event, by the
raising of this contingency to universal necessity. 26 In the ethical life of ancient Greece in particular, where subjective spirit was not recognised, the
death rites were crucial to the survival of the individual beyond his life
within the community. The symbolic power of the burial rites raised the individual from the reality of death into the self-conscious dimension of metaphor, thereby reinventing him in the form of a concept. By the symbolic
force of this gesture, death itself is recuperated, sublated into selfconscious existence, and the individual whose life is complete attains the
status of spiritual universality.
Hegel demonstrates the mutual interdependence of these two spheres
of the Human and the Divine. 27 The family provides the citizens for the defence of the state, which offers the family protection in its turn. For the harmonious functioning of this dynamic, each domain must recognise that its
own capacity is dependent upon this interchange with the opposing force,
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and subsequently acknowledge its debt to its counterpart in its law and in
deed. 28 Hegel describes a form of society in which each force is reconciled
to the other, the state of self-certain Spirit to which the dialectic advances:
“the ethical substance, as containing self-consciousness which has being
for itself and is united with its concept, is the actual spirit of a family and a
people.” 29 In tragic drama, however, these two laws are in opposition. This
dynamic of antagonism is dramatised through individual characters.
Hegel’s meticulous analyses of the figure of the tragic character elucidate his abstract formulations of the concepts of individuality, particularity,
the subject, and the will, by providing a medium through which these intangible essences are allowed to come into being. Within the ethical realm,
this figure gives voice and form to the notion of the ethical consciousness,
and is that through which the collision of universal laws is played out. In
ancient tragedy, the universal powers of the gods find their medium of active realisation in the particular and subjective totality of the individual agent
as character. 30 The tragic character, as the concrete representation of an
absolute ideal, is therefore essentially determined by a specific disposition,
which becomes manifest through his ‘firmness of decision’, and premeditated action. This inherently fixed character coincides, for Hegel, with the
ethical consciousness in so far as it is even now immediately identified with
one universal will (to the exclusion of another), and is, therefore, disposed
to a onesidedness of decision and of action. The ethical consciousness, in
the “immediate firmness of decision,” is sure of its obligation and duty, thus
decidedly adhering essentially to one of either the divine or the human
law. 31 Hegel calls attention to the unreflexive condition of this ‘decision’,
which is essentially immediately or ‘naturally’ determined and necessary,
rather than an “accident of circumstances or choice.” 32 Self-consciousness
is at this stage, undivided, and cannot as yet recognise the essentiality of
both the human and the divine law, and is given only to one. 33 “The ethical
consciousness, because it is decisively for one of the two powers, is essentially character.” 34
Self-consciousness is here entirely consumed by ethical pathos, by
which is determined character. An ethical pathos is such forasmuch as it is
in accordance with a universal law and is therefore justified. The word pathos describes a spiritual temperament free from “all accident of circumstance and particular peculiarities of personality,” and must not be confused with the erratic passions of the heart. 35 Pathos is the objective power
of a divinity transplanted into the individual, and is that which underlies his
will, and comes on the scene as a rationally justified, consciously deliberate, free-willed act. 36 In that it involves conscious deliberation and rational
judgement, it results in an overmastery of the passions. As evidenced by
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the fully expressive, intractable spirit of the figure of Antigone, her action
could not be described as one of ‘wanton’ defiance (although it appears
thus to Creon). 37 In Hegel’s eyes, hers was a conscious, wilful act, motivated by the pathos of a “holy sisterly love.” 38 Antigone knows immediately
what she must do in order to honour the bond of kinship, and Creon likewise is determined and swift in his decision.
According to Hegel, this immediacy of decision coincides with the
emergence of a purely individual self-consciousness out of a state of insignificant repose. At this moment, the situation for collision is established, as
each individual can only act in accordance with what it knows. Since each
is undivided within itself, and is an absolute totality unto itself, it is inevitable
to have conflict. With the gods of the underworld on one side, and Zeus,
the dominating power over communal life on the other, there occurs a clash
of pathei, and the protagonists are stimulated into action.
Thus far, these deliberations have mapped out the properly ethical
conditions for a collision. Ethical consciousness has, having sensed a contradiction in the sphere of ethical life, reflected back into its own law, and
now stands divided from the other. By means of action, the universal powers rise up in opposition against one another, becoming embroiled in a fateful conflict. The deed instils a moment of exclusionary difference within the
ethical structure, thereby activating the negative movement of the dialectic.
Hegel recognises that “collision has its basis in a transgression.” 39 So,
the question then arises, with regards to the Antigone, as to who was the
perpetrator of this initial causative transgression. Is there a clearly identifiable antagonist as such? To whom does the action proper belong, and to
whom the reaction? Once this problem is posed, we become embroiled in
the convolutions of a history of previous other collisions, 40 as that between
Creon and Polynices, for example. What becomes apparent to us from this
is the circularity of the relationship of cause and effect, action and reaction,
within the realm of ethics. 41 The difficulty here lies in the fact that we, who
witness the conflict from an outside position, cannot with absolute determinacy identify one protagonist as the wrongdoer. In Hegel’s eyes, they are
both culpable, however, as shall be seen, each is culpable in a purely ethical, and rational sense. From a position of Absolute ethics, two laws have
been violated, where they should have been honoured. Hegel considers
them both responsible. Antigone should have honoured the community
from which she chose instead to alienate herself, by obeying the King’s
command, and Creon should have respected the sacred bond of kinship
and not denied its observance. 42
The event of trangression in the Antigone is twofold, certainly, and yet
this is precisely why it is that the notion of wrong is not applicable. The no-
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tions of wrong and right are brought into play only if the situation is looked
at from a ‘human’ point of view, for this is the sphere of Abstract Right. In
tragic drama, as Hegel understands it, there is a transition in values from
abstract right, to morality, and from morality to a model of Absolute ethical
life. 43 The emergence of determinate and particular ethical consciousness
as individuality signals the transition from right to morality. Within the moral
sphere, there is an apparent duality of values, which becomes manifest in
the rift created between state and individual. Here, the notions of right and
wrong, as given by the universal will of the state, become meaningless to
the self-determined will of the individual. 44 Thus, from the viewpoint of morality, “the laws of the state cannot claim to extend to a person’s dispositions, for in the moral sphere, I exist [only] for myself, and force is meaningless in this context.” 45
Within the context of tragedy, the word ‘transgression’ is divorced from
the dichotomy of right and wrong, good and evil. 46 For Hegel, moreover,
the transgressive act constitutes an essential moment in the formation of
subjectivity. The individual gives expression to himself, realises himself,
through his act. 47 Thus, in Hegel, action belongs to the sphere of morality,
within the field of ethics. This is so, insofar as morality corresponds to freedom of the subjective will: “the expression of the will as subjective or moral
is action.” 48 Furthermore, the action is morally justified in so far as it corresponds to one’s purpose or object. 49
Hegel’s profound interest in the tragic character and its “firmness of
decision,” relates to his aspiration for an absolutely rational model of subjectivity, whereby subject and object are fully determined for each other.
Thus is the case with the Greek plastic figure, for which “the bond between
the subject and what he wills as his object remains indissoluble.” 50 This figure demonstrates, for Hegel, the subjective depth of personality. 51 Oedipus, with his “plasticity of consciousness,” constitutes such a figure. Although from a spectatorial perspective it is evident that his fated deed is
isolated from his will, Oedipus, lacking the capacity for self-reflection, is unable to distinguish his purely subjective self-consciousness from what his
deed objectively amounts to. 52
However, can the dauntless Antigone herself be identified with this
classic ‘plastic’ figure, which for Hegel is the archetypical character of the
tragic drama of antiquity? Let us contemplate her character in light of
Hegel’s definitions, given above. Certainly, Antigone possesses an unwavering resolve, and an “absolute firmness of decision.” Clearly, the purpose
intended by her subjective will corresponds to her act: she carries out the
deed as she had proclaimed she would – “I shall bury him.” 53 Her decision
to honour Polynices by delivering him to the hidden world of Shades is en-
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tirely rational in that it is in accordance with what she knows to be her duty
in the eyes of the universal law: the unwritten law ordained by Hades. 54
However, Hegel’s analysis of the nature of the ethical consciousness
within the medium of tragedy in “The Ethical Order” does not do justice to
the spirit of Antigone. To further explicate this claim, it is the notion of immediacy attributed to the ethical consciousness’ commitment to the law,
which seems to be discordant with the reflective, and discerning voice of
Antigone. Her decision is ‘immediate’ in the sense that it involves no vacillation whatsoever. However, it is not without reflection, nor is she merely
half-conscious of the situation at hand at the moment when she resolves to
act, hence her decision is not immediate in the properly Hegelian sense.
This is evidenced by the consciousness she has of the duality of ethical life,
demonstrated by the conscious equivocality of her words when she describes the deed she is to perform as “a crime that is holy.” 55 Antigone
deems Creon’s proclamation forbidding the burial of her brother to be without justification, the result of a capricious and coercive power: “but he has
no right to keep me from my own!” 56 The body of Polynices marks a zone
of collision, with Creon adamant that as a criminal body, it belongs to the
state, whilst Antigone believes she, by virtue of their consanguinity, should
be allowed to observe her rightful duty towards her dead brother. Despite
her knowledge of her rights and her duty, however, Antigone is not closed
to the possibility that she may, indeed, be the wrongdoer. 57 However, in
“The Ethical Order,” this moment of reflexivity attributable to Antigone is
omitted, given that Hegel presents the ethical consciousness as being utterly restricted in its capacity to recognise the validity of any other law but
its own. 58 To the contrary, Antigone is not, like the Greek plastic character,
categorically blind to the possibility that there may exist another valid law,
although she identifies with one law in particular, and experiences her will
to act in accordance with this law as a rational necessity. The Hegelian account of the ethical consciousness, however, limits the scope for such an
interpretation, and thus forgoes the means by which the Antigone transcends the context of Greek ethical life to which it has been ascribed.
Although the ontology of the ethical consciousness as described in
“The Ethical Order” does not represent the full complexity of the character
of Antigone, Hegel does, nevertheless, demonstrate in his writings on Aesthetics his appreciation of the variation of the Greek tragic character. In particular, he formulates a distinction between the figures of Antigone and
Oedipus, based on the relation of subjective will to objective consequence,
thus demonstrating by means of this comparison the complexity of the notions of transgression, and culpability, in light of the problem of intention.
Hegel’s profound interest in the figure of Antigone, in particular has to do
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with the nature of her act as pertains to her subjective purpose, and intention, as measures of responsibility.
In the case of Oedipus, his actions, which ultimately amount to the
deeds of incest and parricide, are unconscious transgressions. Oedipus
acted unknowingly, his transgressive deed does not correspond to the purpose willed through his initial act. By virtue of the principle of ‘the Right of
knowledge,’ which stipulates that “I can be made accountable for a deed
only if my will was responsible for it,” Oedipus’ transgression should not
have been imputed to him, for “I can be made responsible only for what I
knew of the circumstances.” 59 Hegel attributes Oedipus’ blinkered imputation of his transgression to himself, to the failure of the heroic selfconsciousness to reflect on the distinction between deed, as external
event, and action, as purpose and consciousness of the circumstances. 60
In contrast, Antigone acted wilfully, and with full consciousness that
her deed would transgress the law of the State: “and yet you dared to
transgress these laws? … ‘Yes’.” 61 In consideration of the principles aforementioned, Antigone is, in the eyes of the spectator, indisputably culpable.
One may, nevertheless, in her defence argue that although she is conscious of her transgression even in the act, she does not believe it to be a
violation as such of a universal law, as Creon’s proclamations, in her conviction, do not merit such a status. One may contend that Antigone acted
not out of vengeance, 62 but in defence of her rightful obligation to the law of
kinship. However, to appreciate the full significance of this drama, it is necessary to rethink Antigone’s relation to law, beyond the rigorously defined
terms of Hegel’s analysis.
For Hegel, state and individual (and equally the abstract relation of
universal and particular) do not exist as mutually exclusive entities or ideals, but are fundamentally interdependent. 63 This interaction is represented
by Hegel as conditioned by the terms of kinship, which constitutes the limit,
as a structure of both division and permeation, between the spheres of the
familial / cultural and the political. 64 This division is, for Hegel, an inherently
gendered one, the power of the feminine standing for the law of kinship, the
state and the right to citizenship corresponding to the masculine element. 65
Just as the familial law effects its substantial existence within the community, the preservation and perpetuation of the community is dependent
upon the structure of kinship. 66 This structure is consolidated, specifically,
in the relationship of brother and sister, which, for Hegel, epitomises the
structure of kinship in its most pure and equilibrious form, by virtue of its
being a relation devoid of desire. 67 This relationship constitutes the dynamic of legitimate recognition upon which community is founded. 68
Despite his acknowledgment of the mutual interdependency of the two
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spheres of ethical life, Hegel nevertheless maintains the ‘rebellious’ principle of individuality supported by kinship in a relation of subordination to the
universal principle, and to the state, as “the highest form of consciousness.” 69 For Hegel, this interdependency does not constitute a viable form
of social existence, but is, rather, rearticulated as a conflict of powers which
is inevitably resolved in the dissolution of immediate ethical life, giving way
to a new form of social substance, structured by universal unity over and
above individuality. 70 It is apparent from this line of argument, then, that
Antigone’s demise is read by Hegel as a necessary measure for the establishment of legitimate authority in the overcoming of kinship by the state. 71
Alternatively, the significance of Antigone’s transgressive act may be understood in terms of its critical role in the legitimation of state law, the tenability of which would be unsustainable in its absence. This view would reinforce a true interdependency between kinship and state as a permanent
and necessary social dynamic, and challenge the dialectical requirement
for the supersession and assimilation of the subordinate term to the dominant category (of kinship to state; of transgression to law), with the alternative possibility of the negotiability of these terms.
Judith Butler, in her most discerning reading of Antigone in Antigone’s
Claim, demonstrates the intricacy of the relation of kinship to the state, by
drawing attention to the inextricability of the language of Antigone’s assertion of her act, from the language of sovereign power. 72 Confronted with
Butler’s reading of the figure of Antigone as transgressive equally of the
boundaries of state and of kinship, Hegel’s rigorous distinction between
these categories is destabilised. 73 Antigone’s claim is spoken in the language of the state, and yet remains inassimilable to its terms; she is thus
positioned outside the law of the polis, and yet it is she without whom this
law would be unsustainable. 74 Butler’s interpretation therefore problematises Hegel’s categorical assignation of Antigone to the divine law of kinship, and furthermore, compels a rethinking of the common reading of Antigone as a prepolitical figure. 75 Indeed, in the “Ethical Order,” kinship is consigned to the realm of the unconscious, where it remains as an “inner feeling” that is “exempt from an existence in the real world,” and the power of
the feminine demoted to a merely “intuitive awareness” of what is ethical. 76
In intriguing contrast, Butler’s critique makes possible a reading of the figure of Antigone as politically significant in her paradoxical relation to law, as
engaged, without being absorbed in it, and precisely by virtue of the
equivocity of her claim, by which is challenged the very structure of limitation through which the political is defined.
As Hegel understands it in “The Ethical Order,” the Antigone does not
depict a conflict between the state and the individual per se, but is, from a
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more comprehensive outlook, a conflict of powers, represented by individuals. The conflict of powers, therefore, does not occur in the space between
two discrete elements of being, but essentially arises within the individual,
as a necessary element of the dynamic of his being in the world. Hegel’s interest in analysing the Antigone, lies not in establishing the guilt or innocence of either of the protagonists, but in revealing this underlying conflict
of powers as a necessary event in the formation of ethical life.
Without wishing to contradict this claim, it must be stated that it is precisely the motif of guilt in tragic drama, which Hegel finds to be the most
fascinating. This distinctively Hegelian notion of guilt, nevertheless, does
not in any sense correspond to the value-laden dichotomy, innocence /
guilt: “the tragic heroes are just as much innocent as guilty.” 77 For Hegel,
action, all action, gives rise to guilt: “innocence, therefore, is merely nonaction.” 78 Not even the unwitting Oedipus, though his unwilled act cannot
rightly be imputed to him, is completely exempt from responsibility for the
consequences of his action. Hegel maintains this contention in accordance
with the distinction he develops between purpose and intention in his theory of morality. The transition from purpose to intention consists in the individual gaining an awareness of the universal nature of the individual deed.
This involves the realisation that my purely individual and immediate action
necessarily results in consequences, which I may or may not have foreseen, on a universal scale. 79 The alteration effected within the external
world as a result of one’s deed, is irretrievable, undeniable, and therefore
guilt is inevitable. 80
Hegel explains the conditions giving rise to guilt in the “The Ethical Order,” in a subsection entitled “Ethical Action: Human and Divine Knowledge, Guilt and Destiny.” The ethical consciousness, by its own hand, unavoidably incurs guilt in that the act, as the manifestation and assertion of
particularity, necessarily corresponds solely to one law, to the exclusion
and desecration of the other law. To this end, Antigone’s bold act is also
tantamount to a form of “defiance of the universal,” though in a more definitive sense than that seen in the case of Oedipus. 81 Hegel does not, however, abandon to ambiguity the question of guilt as that incurred through a
conscious and wilful deed, as compared to one that was quite unconscious
on the part of the performer.
But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt more inexcusable, if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be violence and wrong, to be ethical merely
by accident, and, like Antigone, knowingly commits the crime. 82
It follows, then, that Antigone, must indeed be culpable, and in a more ulti-
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mate sense than was Oedipus, and that she must, according to Hegel, acknowledge her guilt, and thus concede to a recognition of the legitimacy of
the opposite law. 83 Without hesitation, she acknowledges her responsibility
for the deed, since it was committed by her very own knowing hand: “I say
that I did it and I do not deny it.” 84 Quite the reverse, however, being in
possession of the insight which was lacking in Oedipus, she is not prepared
to accept such guilt unconditionally. In her discerning mind, action does not
categorically amount to crime, and therefore does not necessarily incur
guilt. Her words resonate with a brazen rationality as she reflects upon
these circumstances:
What justice of the gods have I transgressed? … For by acting piously I have been convicted of impiety. Well, if this is approved
among the gods, I should forgive them for what I have suffered, since
I have done wrong; but if they are the wrongdoers, may they not suffer worse evils than those they are unjustly inflicting upon me! 85
How is it that Antigone, despite having knowingly defied an opposing ethical law, is not plagued by an unpardonable guilt, as Hegel reasons she
ought to be? It is Hegel’s own text which, far from contradicting Antigone’s
spirited reaction, casts light upon this apparent deviation. Ethical action, as
Hegel explains, is crucial to the formation of a self-conscious subject. In order to gain the capacity for self-reflection, consciousness essentially needs
to double up upon itself, according to Hegel’s dialectical theory of alterity.
Within the ethical sphere, such a schism within consciousness occurs at
the moment of acting: “the action is itself this splitting into two.” 86 The dialectic of suffering activated by the deed, painfully reshapes the individual
into a self-conscious self.
For Hegel, guilt is the manifestation of this consequential split ontology
of the conscious self. For the Greek tragedians and for Hegel, the metaphor of guilt is significant to this context. If understood as ‘self-reproach’, it
can be regarded as an instrument of self-reflexivity. 87 Indeed, prefiguring
the concept of the self-conscious individual, Hegel associates the instance
of guilt with the claim to right, albeit a claim that is not explicitly asserted,
according to Hegel, but which remains implicit in the consciousness of
guilt. 88 Remarkably, although Antigone is not beset by guilt, despite this,
she does defend her right, and quite explicitly so. Antigone, having attained
the capacity for self-reflection through her action, is concerned to question
the justness of the condemnation ordained upon her by Creon, in consideration of her rights and duties as a sister. Furthermore, she is compelled
to assess critically the rightfulness of her own action, with respect to the
law which she opposes. This reflection on her part constitutes another mo-
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ment of aberrancy in comparison to the rigorously circumscribed role to
which she is consigned by Hegel, and signifies another instance, in addition
to that identified by Butler, wherein Antigone resorts to the language and
logic of sovereign power, to gain perspective on her deed, demonstrating
yet again that the status of Antigone is not unproblematically inscribed
within the sphere of kinship. The figure of Antigone thus articulates a selfreflexive mode of being that is a more pronounced prefigurement of the
self-conscious individual, and the notions of freedom of will and recognition
of right it entails, than Hegel envisions. In acting, she is not consumed by
guilt, she seizes and implements it, reflects upon it, and attaches conditions
to it. Antigone herself understands the necessary relation between the experience of guilt, and the culpability of the will: she attains a rational conception of guilt. Oedipus, by contrast experiences a sense of remorse
which is, essentially, disassociated with his willing self, and therefore his
experience of guilt is irrational, guilt is in his case a false notion.
In his interpretation of tragic drama, Hegel observes that the element
of guilt, as intertwined with the notion of destiny, plays a key role in the
cancellation of conflict and the restoration of harmonious ethical life. To acknowledge one’s guilt, is equally to recognise in one’s fate the consequence of one’s (mis)conduct: “because we suffer we acknowledge we
have erred.” 89 To acknowledge one’s guilt is thereby to acknowledge the
opposite law, whose violation by your own hand causes you such remorse.
The one who experiences guilt now recognises the division within ethical
life between the two laws, each of the same essential nature, and internalises this division as an insurmountable contradiction which ultimately destroys the individual as such.
Fate comes on the scene as an abstract universal power that surpasses both the particularity of men and of gods alike, it is the negative
power of an eternal necessity that overrides both human and divine law. 90
This force comes to life as a consequence of the event of transgression,
“fate drives individuality back within its limits and destroys it if these are
crossed.” 91 In Greek tragedy, the absolute power of fate coincides with the
function of an eternal justice within ethical life. Fate establishes equilibrium
within the ethical world, in assigning equal validity to both powers that were
in conflict. Hegel envisages this reconciliation as taking effect among the
spectators of tragic drama, to whom the fate of the characters appears as
“absolute rationality,” true justice which cannot but result in the satisfaction
of the spirit. 92 The Antigone represents this idea of a self-compelled fate,
by situating the conflict between the two mutually supporting powers of
ethical life. Within this conflict, therefore, there is “immanent in both” Antigone and Creon something that they violate that they should be honouring,
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so they are destroyed by something “intrinsic to their own actual being.” 93
To be subject to fate, one must have attained a degree of selfconsciousness. 94 Hegel distinguishes between several notions of fate corresponding to varying degrees of self-consciousness. For the purposes of
demonstrating the transition represented by the Antigone from the idea of
fate as ‘blind’ necessity, to the notion of a rational necessity, we shall once
again compare the example of Oedipus with that of Antigone.
Hegel defines necessity as the “union of possibility and actuality.” 95
This is a definition of the objective form of necessity, through the eyes of a
self-conscious individual, however, necessity appears in a different form. In
the process of ‘blind’, or uncomprehended necessity, the final cause is not
explicitly known to consciousness. Necessity appears as rational and is
‘seeing,’ or understood, if, on the other hand, the end of action corresponds
to what has been foreknown and forewilled. 96 The latter form involves an
ethical engagement, on the part of the fated one, with the question of his
fate, the former does not enter into the field of the ethical.
The problem posed in “The Ethical Order,” centres around this issue of
the ethical, as it pertains to the self-conscious individual’s reflection upon
the actual. Conflict arises as a reaction to the detection of a discrepancy
between these two provinces, which the reflective self-consciousness perceives as a contradiction between what is, and what ought to be. The unreflective consciousness, contrastingly, is blind to the difference between
possibility and actuality, and cannot distinguish what ought to be from what
is. Oedipus, from this perspective, lacks a critical competence for discrimination, he lacks an ethical consciousness, and hence is without choice. He
accepts with resignation his irrational fate as his actuality with an acquiescent, it is so. 97 According to Hegel, the antithesis created as a result of reflective differentiation on the part of the ethical consciousness, is surmounted by a reconciliation, and not at all by a resignation. By acknowledging, through guilt, the opposite law as its actuality, the ethical consciousness is reconciled with the notion that what is ethical must be actual. 98
Hegel draws on this idea of a rational fate, to develop further his theory of freedom. Freedom, as the essence of Spirit, is self-contained existence: “I am free … when my existence depends upon myself.” 99 Necessity, as pure self-reciprocation, or infinite negative self-relation, is Freedom
in truth. 100 Freedom consists in the realisation that one’s fate is, of necessity, the outcome of oneself. Hegel believes that to live by such a principle
is to spare oneself the consciousness of having suffered a wrong, in times
of adversity. To stand free, therefore, one must learn to bear one’s guilt. 101
This idea of rational necessity thus corresponds with the movement of selfreconciliation immanent within consciousness. Hegel also develops a no-
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tion of justice inspired by Sophoclean tragedy, by which true justice is to be
found in the reconciling of oneself to one’s fate.
But, does this reconciliation occur in the character of Antigone? For,
when she learns of the fate she is condemned to suffer, she does not endeavour to reconcile herself to it. She does not say “all is as it ought to be,”
but, rather, she declares “that ought to be!” Nevertheless, she does not
seek consolation, nor does she desire to escape this most dreadful of fates.
What, in the seeing eyes of Antigone, is the most iniquitous and deceitful
injustice, is the possibility that this fate which she is to suffer, may or may
not be her own. “But if they are the wrongdoers”: Antigone thus refuses to
bear a guilt that is foreign to her, refuses even the prospect of it. To free
herself from this injustice, she self-consciously creates a fate for herself
that is truly her own, and takes her own life by her own hand: self-sacrifice
par excellence. A denouement as just, as it is tragic.
To conclude, Hegel makes use of the tragic model to present the ethical dilemma that necessarily becomes manifest between subjective will and
objective law, as that concerning the mutual demand for justification. The
tragic genre dramatises this problem in terms of a conflictual dynamic between two opposing manifestations of the ethical. The Antigone is, for
Hegel, the “most magnificent and satisfying work of art” 102 of the tragic
genre, in that it distinctly features the act of a rational being as being the
most divisive, and yet also most significant event within ethical life. Through
his forewilled deed, the individual comes to the realisation that his existence is, fundamentally, self-determined, and therefore rational. This journey of self-reflection is represented in terms of the reconciliation of the individual with his fate. The tragic art form, therefore, dramatises the dialectical
trajectory of the subject’s rational self-realisation as a determinate existence. This notwithstanding, to do justice to the particular instance of
Sophocles’ Antigone, would entail acknowledgment of the reductive factors
implicated in an entirely Hegelian reading of the play, which forgoes the
prospect that Antigone transcends its context in Greek ethics, and equally,
forgoes the possibility for a comparatively more modern interpretation of
the play.
Monash University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977).
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2
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§444-83, pp. 266-94.
3
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §233, p. 140.
4
See Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1974),
p. 322; Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1975), p. 166.
5
See Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 322.
6
See Taylor, Hegel, p. 168.
7
The term Spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology properly refers to a state of existence,
an underlying mode of consciousness that is intrinsic to all rational beings. Thus,
the sense of Spirit first becomes significant with the introduction of the universal
self, by which individuality gains a consciousness of itself in immediate identification within the social sphere. In its immersion in social substance, the nature of individuality is “such that its being is the action of the single individual and of all individuals and whose action is immediately for others, or is a ‘matter in hand’ and is
such only as the action of each and everyone: the essence which is the essence
of all beings, viz. spiritual essence”; “The pure ‘matter in hand’ itself is what was
defined as ‘the category,’ being that is the ‘I’ or ‘I’ that is being, but in the form of
thought which is still distinguished from actual self-consciousness” (Phenomenology of Spirit, §418, p. 252); see also §438, p. 263: “this is spiritual essence that is
in and for itself, but which is not yet consciousness of itself.”
8
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §398, p. 237-8; §438, p. 263.
9
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §418, p.252.
10
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §420, p. 253.
11
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §438, p. 263.
12
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §438, p. 263: “This still abstract determination which constitutes ‘the matter in hand’ itself is at first only spiritual essence,
and its consciousness [only] a formal knowing of it.”; and, §442, p. 265: “the living
ethical world is Spirit in its truth. When Spirit first arrives at an abstract knowledge
of its essence, ethical life is submerged in the formal universality of legality or law.”
13
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §441, p. 265.
14
See Taylor, Hegel, pp. 172-8 ; Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 326.
15
See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J.Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), pp. 250-2.
16
See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 253.
17
See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 252.
18
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §438, p. 263: “this consciousness, as a particular individual, is still in fact distinct from substance.”
Within this mode of ethical life, Hegel argues, reflexive subjectivity is not yet historically developed.
19
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §354, p. 541; The Philosophy of Right,
“Second Part: Morality.”
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Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy
20
More specifically, in the context of society, contradiction arises via the manifestation or assertion of subjective will, by which is introduced a ‘corruptive element’
into the unity of State, and are set the conditions whereby, “the individual finds
himself in a position to bring everything to the test of his own conscience, even in
defiance of the existing constitution” (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 253).
21
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 252. For Hegel, subjective reflection posed
the threat of ruin to the Greek state – then established upon ‘Objective Will’, or an
‘immanent Objective Morality’ – in that: “When reflection once comes into play, the
inquiry is started whether the Principles of Law (das Recht) cannot be improved.
Instead of holding by the existing state of things, internal conviction is relied upon;
and thus begins a subjective independent Freedom, in which the individual finds
himself in a position to bring everything to the test of his own conscience, even in
defiance of the existing constitution” (pp. 252-3).
22
Cf. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 93; see also
Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 337.
23
See Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, pp. 91-2; Hegel develops this distinction between ethical order and abstract morality in The Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B.
Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge UP, 1991), parts 2 and 3.
24
Cf. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, p. 191.
25
Cf. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, p. 93.
26
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §452, pp. 270-1: “This universality which the
individual as such attains is pure being, death; it is a state which has been
reached immediately, in the course of Nature, not the result of an action consciously done. The duty of the member of a Family is on that account to add this
aspect, in order that the individual’s ultimate being, too, shall not belong solely to
Nature and remain something irrational, but shall be something done, and the right
of consciousness asserted to it”; “Blood-relationship supplements, then, the abstract natural process by adding to it the movement of consciousness, interrupting
the work of Nature and rescuing the blood-relation from destruction; or better, because destruction is necessary, the passage of the blood-relation into mere being,
it takes on itself the act of destruction. … the Family keeps away from the dead
this dishonouring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts
its own action in their place.”
27
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §460, p. 276: “Just as the Family … possesses in the community its substance and enduring being, so, conversely, the
community possesses in the Family the formal element of its actual existence, and
in the divine law its power and authentication. Neither of the two is by itself absolutely valid; human law proceeds in its living process from the divine, and law valid
on earth from that of the nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy – and equally returns whence it came. The power of the
nether world, on the other hand, has its actual existence on earth; through consciousness, it becomes existence and activity.”
28
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel perceives the identity of the universal and the
particular will (which, in abstract terms correspond to the domain of the state, and
the familial realm, respectively) necessarily to involve the coincidence of the no-
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tions of duty and right. In the ethical realm, “a human being has rights in so far as
he has duties, and duties in so far as he has rights” (§155, p. 197). This ethical
economy of reciprocity was merely implicit within the structure of Greek ethical life,
and would have needed consciously to be realised in order that the function of this
dynamic actualise itself in the preservation of the ancient state. It is precisely this
blindness to the coincidence of duty and right that is the represented as tragic in
Greek drama, and, according to Hegel, in the Antigone, in particular.
29
See Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, §156, p. 197.
30
See Hegel, On Tragedy, eds. Anne and Henry Paolucci (New York: Harper &
Row,1962), p. 152; Hegel, Aesthetics, volumes I and II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975), I: 236: “The gods become human ‘pathos’, and ‘pathos’ in concrete activity is the human character.”
31
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §465, p. 280.
32
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §465, p. 280: “This immediate firmness of decision is
something implicit, and therefore has at the same time the significance of a natural
being as we have seen. Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law.”
33
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §466, p. 280: “The ethical consciousness, because it
is decisively for one of the two powers, is essentially character; it does not accept
that both have the same essential nature.”
34
Hegel, Phenomenology, §466, p. 280.
35
See Hegel, On Tragedy, p. 292.
36
See Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 232.
37
Hegel describes the disparity in perspective as to right and wrong, between individual and state, and, furthermore, remarks on the unequal authority of state
power: “Since it sees right only on one side and wrong on the other, that consciousness which belongs to the divine law sees in the other side only the violence of human caprice, while that which holds to human law sees in the other
only the self-will and disobedience of the individual who insists on being his own
authority. For the commands of government have a universal, public meaning
open to the light of day; the will of the other law, however, is locked up in the
darkness of the nether regions, and in its outer existence manifests as the will of
an isolated individual which, as contradicting the first, is a wanton outrage” (Phenomenology, §466, 280).
38
See Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 232.
39
Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 204.
40
See Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 218.
41
Hegel expounds the circular relationship of cause and effect in the Logic, trans.
William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), §154, p. 217: “the rectilinear movement out from causes to effects, and from effects to causes, is bent round and
back into itself, and thus the progress ad infinitum of causes and effects is, really
and truly suspended.”
42
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1217.
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Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy
43
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel expounds the interrelated institutional spheres
of Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Life.
44
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes a distinction between right and morality,
the former pertaining to state power, the latter pertaining to the individual will
(§94A, p. 121).
45
See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §94A, p. 121.
46
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1212, “In Greek tragedy … the occasion for collisions is
produced by the moral justification of a specific act, and not at all by an evil will, a
crime, or infamy. … For evil in the abstract has no truth in itself and is of no interest.”
47
See Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 219, “Action is the clearest revelation of the individual.”
48
See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §113, p. 140.
49
According to Hegel, individuality arrives at a moral relation to the world through a
recognition and acknowledgement of its agency and realisation that its agency
and duty coincide. See Phenomenology, §616, p.374: “In the moral view of the
world we see … consciousness itself consciously produce its object; we see that it
neither encounters the object as something alien to it, nor does the object come
before it in an unconscious manner … for it knows itself to be the active agent that
produces it”; §637, p. 387: “the content of the moral action is the doer’s own immediate individuality; and the form of that content is just this self as a pure movement, viz. as [the individual’s] knowing or his own conviction”; §638, p. 387: “this
self, qua a pure self-identical knowing, is the absolute universal, so that just this
knowing, as its own knowing, as conviction, is duty. Duty is no longer the universal
that stands over against the self; on the contrary, it is known to have no validity
when thus separated. It is now the law that exists for the sake of the self, not the
self that exists for the sake of the law.”
50
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1214.
51
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1215.
52
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1214.
53
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
1994), p. 10
54
For Hegel, the ethical consciousness, of which the tragic character is representative, is ethical in so far as its “deed, the shape in which it actualises itself, shall be
nothing else but what it knows” (Phenomenology, §467, p. 281).
55
Sophocles, Antigone, p. 11.
56
Sophocles, Antigone, Antigone addresses Creon with this confrontational claim: “I
would say that all these men would approve this, if it were not that fear shuts their
mouths. But kingship is fortunate in many ways, and in particular it has power to
do and say what it wishes” (p. 49).
57
See Sophocles, Antigone, p. 89.
58
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §466, p. 280: “The ethical consciousness, because it
is decisively for one of the two powers … does not accept that both have the same
essential nature. For this reason, the opposition between them appears as an un-
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fortunate collision of duty merely with a reality which possesses no rights of its
own. … Since it sees right only on one side and wrong on the other, that consciousness which belongs to the divine law sees in the other side only the violence of human caprice, while that which holds to human law sees in the other
only the self-will and disobedience of the individual who insists on being his own
authority.”
59
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §117, p. 144; §118A, p. 146. The principle of ‘the
Right of knowledge’ is the translation of ‘Recht des Wissens’ (Inwood, A Hegel
Dictionary, p. 192).
60
See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §118A, p. 146. This form of consciousness corresponds to Greek ethical life or Sittlichkeit.
61
Sophocles, Antigone, pp. 43-4.
62
Compare Hegel, Phenomenology, §462, p. 277.
63
This, for Hegel, constitutes an “absolute relation:” “the true and absolute relation is
that the one really does illumine the other; each has a living bearing on the other,
and each is the other’s serious fate. The absolute relation, then, is set forth in
tragedy” (from the essay on Natural Law, trans. T. M. Knox [U of Pennsylvania P,
1975], p. 108).
64
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §458, p. 275.
65
The division between Divine and Human Law becomes explicitly gendered in the
section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit entitled “The Ethical World. Human
and Divine Law: Man and Woman.”
66
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §460, p. 276.
67
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §457, pp. 274-5; Judith Butler offers a critical interpretation of the gender difference structuring Hegel’s reading of Antigone. Specifically, in Hegel’s emphasis on the blood relation of brother and sister as one devoid of desire, Butler interprets the implicit contention that the prohibition against
incest reinforces the structure of kinship (see Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between
Life and Death [New York: Columbia UP, 2000], p. 13). Operating with her novel
version of the figure of Antigone as transgressive – taking into account the incestuous convolutions of her ancestry – of the ideal structure of kinship, rather than
as categorically representative of these norms, Butler is lead to question the way
in which socially idealised forms of kinship are instituted and legitimated as ethical
structures constituting the basis of modern “cultural intelligibility.”
68
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §457, p. 275: it is interesting to note the evident discrepancy here between the model of recognition put forth in “Lordship and Bondage” (see §167, pp.104-5) in which desire features as a necessary precondition,
as compared to the apparent prohibition of desire as the factor which disqualifies
and renders impossible recognition: “The brother, however, is for the sister a passive, similar being in general; the recognition of herself in him is pure and unmixed
with any natural desire.” For a discussion of this variance, see Butler, Antigone’s
Claim, pp. 13-4.
69
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §473, p. 286; §474, p. 286; §475, p. 288: “The
community, however, can only maintain itself by suppressing this spirit of individu-
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Ethical Consciousness in the Spirit of Tragedy
alism.”
70
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §§472-7, pp. 284-90.
71
See Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 29.
72
See Butler, Antigone’s Claim, chapter 1, “Antigone’s Claim”; Antigone “speaks in
public, precisely when she ought to be sequestered to the private domain,” (p. 4);
“She attempts to speak in the political sphere in the language of sovereignty that
is the instrument of political power” (p. 29); which leads Butler to question, “what
sort of political speech is this that transgresses the very boundaries of the political,
which sets into scandalous motion the boundary by which her speech ought to be
contained?” (p. 4); “Her words … are chiasmically related to the vernacular of sovereign power, speaking in and against it, delivering and defying imperatives at the
same time, inhabiting the language of sovereignty at the very moment in which
she opposes sovereign power and is excluded from its terms” (p. 28).
73
In Butler’s reading, in Antigone’s Claim, “not only does the state presuppose kinship and kinship presuppose the state but ‘acts’ that are performed in the name of
the one principle take place in the idiom of the other, confounding the distinction
between the two at a rhetorical level and thus bringing into crisis the stability of the
conceptual distinction between them” (p. 11); “Opposing Antigone to Creon as the
encounter between the forces of kinship and those of state power fails to take into
account the ways in which Antigone has already departed from kinship, herself the
daughter of an incestuous bond” (p. 5-6).
74
See Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 4: “She is outside the terms of the polis, but she
is, as it were, an outside without which the polis could not be”; pp. 28, 30; see also
pp. 67-8 (and esp. note 6, pp. 94-5) on “the structural necessity of perversion to
the law.”
75
See Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 2.
76
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §450, p. 268 and §457, p. 274.
77
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1214. The tragic genre represented by the Antigone
conceptualises conflict not as that arising between forces of good and evil, but as
that which, of necessity, arises within a structure wherein two powers, each of
them self-justifying, are in action.
78
Hegel, Phenomenology, §468, p. 282.
79
See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §118A, p. 146: “What is at issue here is not the
individual aspect but the whole, which concerns not the determinate character of
the particular action but its universal nature. The transition from purpose to intention consists, then, in the fact that I ought to be aware not only of my individual action, but also of the universal which is associated with it. When it emerges in this
manner, the universal is what I have willed, i.e. my intention.”
80
In the subsection of “The Ethical Order” entitled, “Ethical Action. Human and Divine Knowledge. Guilt and Destiny,” Hegel demonstrates action incurs guilt regardless of whether or not the doer was fully conscious: “the one character, like
the other is split up into a conscious and an unconscious part; and since each itself calls forth this opposition and its not-knowing is, through the deed, its own affair, each is responsible for the guilt which destroys it” (Phenomenology, §472, p.
97
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285). The deed, once accomplished is irreversible, regardless of whether or not
the doer was aware of his action: “for the accomplished deed is the removal of the
antithesis between the knowing self and the actuality confronting it.” Thus, “the
doer cannot deny the crime or his guilt” (§469, p. 283). Hegel does, however, see
the contrast between the nature of guilt as resulting from a deed that was willed,
and one that was not.
81
Taylor, Hegel, p. 174
82
Hegel, Phenomenology, §470, p. 284.
83
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §470, p. 284: “The ethical consciousness must, on
account of its deed, acknowledge its opposite as its own actuality, must acknowledge its guilt.”
84
Sophocles, Antigone, p. 43.
85
Sophocles, Antigone, p. 89.
86
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §468, p. 282.
87
Indeed, the awareness of guilt sets the conditions for reflection upon one’s deed,
or in Hegel’s words, guilt takes effect such that “the deed is brought out into the
light of day, as something in which the conscious is bound up with the unconscious” (Phenomenology, §469, p. 283).
88
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §470, p. 284; within the context of ancient Greek Sittlichkeit, the notion of right is to be distinguished from the modern conception of
abstract right, which is intelligible to a “consciously free will” (see Hegel, Philosophy of Right, “First Part: Abstract Right,” §35, p. 37).
89
Sophocles, Antigone, cited in Hegel, Phenomenology, §470, p. 284.
90
See Hegel, Aesthetics, I: 503.
91
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1216.
92
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1215.
93
See Hegel, Aesthetics, II:1218.
94
Cf. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, pp. 102-3
95
See Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, §147, pp. 207-8. Hegel elaborates upon this definition
thus: “developed actuality, as the coincident alternation of inner and outer, the alternation of their opposite motions combined into a single motion, is Necessity.”
96
See Hegel, Logic, §147A, p. 209.
97
Hegel, in the Logic (§147A, p. 210) remarks on the mentality of the ‘ancient mind’:
“in the ancient mind the feeling was more of the following kind: Because such a
thing is, it is, and as it is, so it ought to be.”
98
See Hegel, Phenomenology, §470, p. 284.
99
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 17.
100
See Hegel, Logic, §157-8, pp. 219-20.
101
See Hegel, Logic, §147A, pp. 210-1.
102
Hegel, Aesthetics, II: 1218.
The Precedence of Citation:
On Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles
Robert Savage
[W]e dream of originality and autonomy; we believe to be
saying all kinds of new things and, still, all this is reaction, as
it were, a mild revenge against the slavery with which we
have behaved toward antiquity.
Hölderlin, “The Perspective From Which We Have
to Look at Antiquity” 1
I
In the beginning was the citation: The Antigone of Sophocles. Adapted
for the stage from Hölderlin’s translation. By attributing Antigone to a single
author, the title encloses every word that follows within a pair of invisible
quotation marks. Even Brecht’s interpolations, those amendments and sections of newly-added dialogue which allow one to speak of “Brecht’s Antigone” as a play in its own right, 2 will have been indirect quotations from the
master script, paraphrastic marginalia to an urtext twice removed. The title
thus disables in advance the charge of plagiarism (the illicit denial of citation) which had been leveled against him in the past on account of his selfprofessed laxness in matters of intellectual property. 3 Since its 1948 premiere in the Swiss town of Chur, The Antigone of Sophocles has never
found its way into the Brecht canon, even though the case could be made
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/savage.pdf
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that it is no more derivative, no less authentically Brechtian a production
than, say, The Threepenny Opera. 4 One need look no further than the title
to understand why. It defines Brecht’s task, not as one of rewriting Antigone, in a manner akin to Jean Anouilh’s famous wartime production in
Paris, but of reciting it for the modern stage. Anouilh had retold the story in
a racy, colloquial speech that paid little heed to the letter of Sophocles’
drama, preferring to treat the text of the tragedy as the dispensable vehicle
for the mythic narrative at its core. 5 Brecht’s title, by contrast, announces
his intention to decontextualize and recontextualize – to re-site – words that
already have a history of their own, and so to establish, through that act of
selective translation, a continuity with the time and place of recital. Before
any particular content, The Antigone of Sophocles affirms a line of tradition
(and not just any line, either, but the most redolent imaginable, that of the
“tyranny of Greece over Germany” 6 ), and it affirms tradition as such, if by
‘tradition’ we mean the present-day citability of texts that belong to a bygone era. This should make us wary of placing undue emphasis on
Brecht’s denial, made shortly before he set to work on Hölderlin’s translation, that “something like a german literature” had survived Hitler’s war. 7
Brecht’s self-effacing nod to Sophocles is nonetheless ambiguous: it
can equally be read as a distancing gesture. A cited textual tradition or traditional text is, by definition, not one’s own, and therefore never simply
goes without saying. Drawing upon a vast stockpile of endlessly recyclable
(re)sources, the recitalist enjoys a certain liberty with regard to the material
he chooses to cite, for which he knows someone else to be accountable.
Pushed to insouciance, the citation avails itself as a self-disavowing comic
device, as witnessed by its rise to prominence in the German novel since
Wieland. 8 At the same time, the recitalist incurs the responsibility of inventing tradition each time anew by striking a distinction between what is still
citable, and by that measure canonic, and what is out-of-date or better reserved for later use. Like Mr Peachum from The Threepenny Opera, he
recognizes that the same phrases which yesterday moved an audience to
tears may have become jaded and utterly ineffective overnight: “What’s the
use of the finest and most stirring sayings painted on the most enticing
boards if they get used up so quickly?” 9 And he draws from this the conclusion that sometimes a citation needs to be tampered with in order to prolong its shelf life.
Any decision to cite one text over another demonstrates that the socalled Erbe or national literary heritage, which the likes of Johannes R. Becher and Georg Lukács had defended during the war and now thought to
administer as its sole legitimate heirs, 10 was never theirs to begin with. The
choice of a citation, unlike the bequest of an inheritance, is contingent and
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The Precedence of Citation
non-binding. Why is Brecht citing Sophocles’ play here, and not some
other? Under what conditions is he citing it, and to what ends? Why cite at
all? Such questions are not extrinsic to the title, which Adorno rightly regards as the microcosm of the work. 11 In the space opened up between citation (énoncé) and recital (énonciation), between the play by Sophocles
and the play that cites the play by Sophocles, the person who is reciting
wins the freedom to reflect upon, criticize, or reject what she is saying. To
recite lines that are not one’s own is to act. The title thus draws attention to
the play’s status as a performance of Antigone, counter-acting the theatrical illusion which for the course of the presentation suspends the ontological difference between an actor and the role she occupies. One cannot
take at face value the convictions, feelings or intentions expressed in
someone’s words if it is simultaneously made clear that that person has
borrowed those words from someone else.
Further, the elevation of an author’s name to the title of a production
vacates the space ordinarily reserved for acknowledging his entitlement to
the play. If Sophocles owns Antigone, who owns The Antigone of Sophocles? Not Brecht, surely, otherwise the title would be meaningless or disingenuous; but not Sophocles, either, for then the authorship of the title
would still remain unaccounted for. By invoking what Brecht once called
“the question of ownership, which in the bourgeoisie, even as far as spiritual matters are concerned, plays a (quite bizarre) role,” the citation of
ownership in the title problematizes the ownership of citation. 12 The cited
word, like the loan-word, has been removed from its native context without
yet settling in to its new environment. Its strangeness, marked by the typographical, verbal or gestural acknowledgement that it belongs elsewhere, is
never absolute: the citation is required here and now, in this passage, to
help secure my argument or to plug a gap created by the inadequacy of my
powers of expression, and is therefore always on the way to becoming my
own. 13 Split between its original and current contexts, the citation belongs
nowhere, too, since it can in principle be transplanted to any other setting.
In his adaptation of the first choral stasimon (pollà tà deiná…), Brecht introduces an excursus on property relations that suggests a radical solution to
the titular aporia. Man, the Chorus of Elders proclaims, cannot fill his belly
by himself, “but the wall / He erects around his property, and the wall / Must
be torn down!” 14 Do these lines, which resituate Antigone through the indirect citation of Rousseau and Marx, 15 invite us to tear down the wall
erected in the title? Could and should the Antigone of Sophocles be collectivized into our Antigone (and who might this collective include: the audience, the Germans, the ‘workers of the world’, das Volk)? Or does the inappropriability of the citation – no matter how much I identify with them, the
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words I quote will always bear the trace of another – make such questions
inappropriate? In short, is it possible to continue a tradition without first taking possession of it?
The problems of citation raised in the title become particularly acute,
and acutely political, once it is considered that the Antigone ascribed to
Sophocles refers as much to the eponymous heroine as to the play in
which she stars. In 1948, the year of the production, Antigone was being
refashioned in Germany as a paragon of those civic and moral virtues
which had been sorely wanting under the Third Reich, and would need to
be inculcated in the next generation were the disasters of the past not to be
repeated. Educational authorities on both sides of the newly-hung Iron Curtain seized upon the tragedy as a relatively non-controversial, potentially
cathartic contribution to the process of denazification. In the wake of the
dictatorship, Creon’s insistence on patriotic duty over private scruple no
longer seemed, as it still had for Hegel, equally defensible a position as Antigone’s appeal to the unwritten laws of heaven. 16 For many, it stirred up
instead fresh memories of the man who had overseen the execution of millions in the name of a national exigency that brooked no opposition. In Part
Three of his epic novel of exile November 1918, written during the siege of
Stalingrad, Alfred Döblin had seen the spirit of Antigone incarnated in the
communist revolutionary and martyr Rosa Luxemburg. 17 His friend Brecht
went a step further, depicting the ruler of Thebes as a tyrant and clown addressed by his lackeys as “Mein Führer” (changed from “My king”). 18 Perhaps unwittingly, he was following the example furnished by Hölderlin, for
whom Antigone embodies a “form of reason” that is resolutely “political,
namely republican.” 19
At stake in the title, then, is the possibility of adopting Antigone as the
figurehead of a new Germany, ‘Antigone’ now understood as a citable
character-type instantiating the values of anti-fascist resistance. Brecht
raises this possibility in his foreword to the Antigonemodell 1948 – the very
title of the book in which he published the play seems to recommend her as
a role model – but he dismisses it just as quickly: “The drama of Antigone
was selected for the following theatrical endeavour because its content ensured it a certain actuality and because it set interesting formal tasks. As
far as the political content is concerned, the analogies to the present, which
after the thoroughgoing rationalisation [of the fable] had become surprisingly powerful, proved disadvantageous on the whole: the great figure of
resistance in the ancient drama does not represent the fighters of the German resistance who must appear most important to us.” 20 This exclusion of
Antigone from the elaborate system of correspondences established in the
adaptation comes as something of a surprise, and goes some way to ex-
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plaining why the play failed to resonate with contemporary audiences. For
Brecht, Antigone was a scion of the Theban ruling elite, driven by conscience, insight and religious custom to betray her class interest, but she
was not the true representative of her people. That part, which would eventually be cast in The Days of the Commune, is still missing from the ancient
drama: “Antigone’s deed can only consist in helping the enemy [i.e. Argos,
the city against which Creon is waging an imperialist war], which is her
moral contribution; she, too, has eaten all too long of the bread which was
baked in the dark.” 21 The inverted commas have hardened here into scare
quotes: Antigone, still schackled to the mind-forged manacles of her time
and class, is better left to Sophocles, after all.
Yet this passage, which seems to bring her closer to Count Stauffenberg than to Red Rosa, needs to be read in conjunction with a short poem
appended by Brecht to the programme booklet: 22
Antigone
Komm aus dem Dämmer und geh
Vor uns her eine Zeit
Freundliche, mit dem leichten Schritt
Der ganz Bestimmten, schrecklich
Den Schrecklichen.
Abgewandte, ich weiss
Wie du den Tod gefürchtet hast, aber
Mehr noch fürchtest du
Unwürdig Leben.
Und ließest den Mächtigen
Nichts durch, und glichst dich
Mit den Verwirrern nicht aus, noch je
Vergassest du Schimpf und über der Untat wuchs
Ihnen kein Gras.
Salut!
Antigone
Come out of the twilight
And walk before us a while,
Kind one, with the light step
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Of one whose mind is fully made up, terrible
To the terrible.
You who turn away, I know
How you feared death, but
Still more you fear
Unworthy life.
And you let the powerful get away
With nothing, and did not reconcile yourself
With the bewilderers, nor did you ever
Forget affront and let the dust settle
On the misdeed.
Salut!
The sober disavowal of Antigone in the foreword and the enthusiastic
avowal of Antigone in the poem reflect the double nature of the citation as
estrangement and repetitive renewal. For whereas Brecht maintains in the
foreword that the “historical remoteness” of the play forbids an “identification with the main character,” hence that Antigone is citable only as belonging to Sophocles and cannot be translated without remainder into the present, in the poem he lends her story a perennial topicality bordering on the
timeless. 23 The citation distances, but it can also bridge that distance
through the recurrence of the once-said in the now-time of the speaker; it
demythologizes by confining a legend or saying (Sage) to the moment and
agent of its fixation in writing, and it preserves myth by re-presenting it to
an audience that may yet recognize, in its fading letters, the refracted image of its own condition. Brecht’s vacillation between emphasizing Antigone’s exemplariness for the revolution and her unsuitability for exemplification, which Jan Knopf puts down to a change of heart, in truth expresses
a tension in the citation itself. 24
This tension is already apparent in the poem which dispenses with the
detour of a byline to call Antigone directly by name, so addressing her as a
free agent whom no man is entitled to claim as his chattel. For what exactly
is the twilight from which she is invited to emerge? Is it the barbaric dawn of
the West? Is it the haze of interpretations and mystifications that had gathered around her over the centuries, shrouding what Brecht calls the “highly
realistic popular legend” at the core of the play? 25 Or is it simply the sepulchral gloom to which Creon had banished her? Should we join Bernard
Knox in reading the appeal to Antigone as a lament for the failure of ordinary Germans under Hitler to step onto the political stage, thereby forsaking the everyday anonymity in which they hoped to escape detection? 26 Or
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is she called forth instead to illuminate the crepuscular entr’acte in which
the Germans found themselves at the time of the production, three years
after the collapse of the Third Reich and twenty months before the foundation of the GDR – to “go before us” in this obscure state as a beacon of
light, blazing with the same fierce spirit that once brought a tyrant to his
knees? The technique of citation resolves the hermeneutic dilemma, not by
making disappear the shadow of the past, but by causing it to appear as
such; it trains the spotlight on Antigone, not that she may communicate with
us face to face, but that we may see and salute her in her inimitable aversion. It is no accident that the poem whose title summons her to unmediated presence should go on to apostrophize her as “Abgewandte,” literally
“averted one” (and it should be remembered that in Antigone’s mother
tongue, an apo-strophe is, literally, a turning away). Does not every citation
likewise turn toward a figure that is turned away from it? Might not the citation be the figure of this deviant form of address, as Sibylle BenninghofLühl has suggested? 27
The O.E.D. reminds us that to cite is not only “to quote (a passage,
book, or author); gen. with implication of adducing as an authority”; it is
also, and in the first place, “to summon officially to appear in court of law.” 28
The relationship between poem and play is accordingly that between Antigone’s initial citation from backstage and her subsequent testimony before
the tribunal of posterity. Like Brecht’s earlier drama The Trial of Lucullus,
The Antigone of Sophocles restages the trial (or stages the retrial) of the title character. 29 Illuminated from this angle, the poem’s opening injunction
can be seen to bring into focus the essential difference between Brecht’s
and Lacan’s recension of the myth. For Lacan, Antigone places herself outside the symbolic network which structures and organizes the everyday life
of the polis. She incarnates the death drive at its purest and most destructive, the suicidal impulse to transgress all socio-symbolic limits that carries
her to an impossible zero-position beyond the reach of the law; 30 or as
Creon puts it in Anouilh’s production: “Ce qui importait pour elle, c’est de
refuser et de mourir.” 31 For Brecht, the obverse is true: Try as she might to
tarry in the shadowy realm of atè, Antigone cannot avoid interpellation by
the symbolic order. Her situation is not that of someone who is already
dead while still alive, as Lacan maintains; rather, some two and a half millennia after being removed from sight, she still finds herself prevented from
dying by the fascinated gaze of the big Other, the invisible public which
commands her to perform in a space of absolute visibility. Her attempt to
escape through suicide the punishment imposed by Creon is thus undertaken in vain: she is in truth condemned to a fate worse than death, that of
a “buried life with a good roof for shelter,” as Creon puts it; that is to say, a
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life in the theatre. 32 After taking her final curtain call, she withdraws to the
twilight zone whence she came, there to languish in silence until her next
citation.
What could break her out of the loop in which she is caught, which is,
precisely, that of mythic repetition? At the height of her cross-examination
by Creon, already sensing the crypt looming before her, Antigone cries out
(to the Elders, who are refusing to listen? or to the audience, which is powerless to intervene?): “But I call upon you to help me in distress / And, in so
doing, help yourselves.” 33 On the level of the citation, her plea registers the
forlornness of her plight to the same extent that it is doomed to ineffectuality. If Antigone’s fate is already scripted, as textual authority and the laws of
the polis join Creon in stipulating, if recourse to an appellate court is out of
the question, then her petition loses all sense of urgency and becomes
susceptible to its transfiguration unto innocuousness. Like the deathbed
speech of St Joan of the Stockyards, it can be brushed aside by being
made to signify nothing more threatening than the last sigh of a beautiful
soul. This is of course the (non-)reaction of the Elders, for whom Antigone
is simply playing her preordained part in a spectacle that will culminate in
her immurement, when they will be relieved of the obligation to lend her an
ear. Their recognition of the theatricality of her cry for help entrenches them
in their position as voyeurs at the very moment she is demanding that they
abandon it. In this respect, the Elders function as stand-ins for the theatregoers in front of them, whose response to the desperate entreaties of the
heroine is to remain motionless in their seats, looking on in silence as she
is dragged off by the palace guards. 34 On the level of the recital, however,
which is that of a theatricality to the second degree (the performance of a
performance), her words exert a more subversive influence. They remind
the audience, long since inured to the inexorability of tragedy, of the individual and collective responsibility it bears for the perpetuance of the conditions under which tragedy is still possible. We, the people, are shown to be
no less implicated in the show trial we are witnessing than is Antigone herself. At this moment, the contemplative attitude with which we have drawn
pleasure from her impending sacrifice becomes tendentially (and tendentiously!) inseparable from the culpability incurred by those who stood by
while the horror unfolded. The roles of spectator and accused have undergone a dramatic reversal. Antigone, once cited, cites us in return, and
against her damning indictment there can, in 1948, be no appeal: “So you
let it happen. And hold your tongues before him. / Let it not be forgotten!” 35
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II
Brecht’s ambivalence regarding the appropriability of Antigone after
the catastrophe is already thematized in the prelude (Vorspiel) to the play,
set in Berlin during the last month of the war. Returning to their flat after a
night spent in an air-raid shelter, two nameless sisters notice that someone
has paid a visit while they were out: the door stands ajar, fresh footprints
disturb the dust, and in the corner of the room they find a knapsack, with
ham and bread inside. The second sister, who will soon step into the role of
Antigone, realizes that their brother must have returned from the front: “And
we embraced and were glad / For our brother was in the war and he was
well.” 36 Suddenly they hear a blood-curdling scream from outside. The second sister wants to investigate, but is held back with the warning: “whoever
wants to see will be seen.” As they get ready for their day shift in a local
factory, the first sister, later Ismene, sees her brother’s military overcoat
hanging in the cupboard. She concludes that he must have deserted from
the army: “And we laughed and were glad: / Our brother was out of the war.
He was well.” Once again a terrifying cry interrupts their celebrations. This
time “Sister Two” ignores her sibling’s advice and leaves the flat to find her
brother strung up outside, apparently lifeless: “Sister, they have hanged
him, / That’s why he cried out for us.” The second sister is about to cut him
down and try to resuscitate him when an SS man appears and accuses
them of consorting with the “people’s traitor” he has just executed. The first
sister replies – and the echoes of the passion play, of Peter’s denial of
Christ and of the two Marys weeping at the foot of the cross, are too strong
not to be overheard – “Dear sir, do not punish us / For we do not know this
man.” 37 The Vorspiel ends with a question mark: will the second sister risk
her life in a foolhardy attempt to free her brother, who is probably dead anyway, or will she follow her sister’s example in passively acquiescing to his
murder?
The function of this prelude, according to Brecht, is to set a “point of
topicality” and to “sketch the subjective problem.” 38 (One might add that it
does so in adapting the conventions of Greek tragedy to a modern setting.
The reversal of fortune in the Vorspiel, the dashing of the sisters’ expectant
happiness at its height, the cruel irony that their brother is being executed
at precisely the moment when, for the first time since he left for the front,
they believe him to be safe from harm, their lack of understanding [diánoia]
which at the same time is an ethical failing – all these motifs accord surprisingly well with the Aristotelian account of tragedy from which Brecht was
polemically distancing himself at the time.) 39 It is not difficult to trace the
parallels between the wartime drama in Berlin and the tragedy about to
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transpire in Thebes, especially when we learn in the next scene that the
traitor Polynices, like the brother in the prelude, has deserted from the
front. In Brecht’s version, Creon has conscripted the young men of Thebes
to invade the distant city of Argos – “a Stalingrad of today” 40 – and rob it of
its mineral wealth. Fleeing the battlefield after seeing his brother fall in
combat, Polynices returns to his home town, only to be hacked to pieces
outside the city gates on Creon’s orders. Antigone’s decision to bury his
mangled corpse in defiance of Creon’s edict is thus as much a symbolic
protest against the latter’s gross mismanagement of the state as it is an act
of familial piety. In the prelude, the second sister stands on the threshold of
an analogous decision. All the other players in the scene have already
slipped into their later roles; she alone is poised to become her future self,
contemplating the step into open rebellion but not yet prepared to take it.
This is presumably the subjective problem to which Brecht refers.
But is her translation into Antigone at all possible? As Brecht was well
aware, the similarities between the sister’s situation and Antigone’s break
down upon closer inspection. Were she to disobey the SS thug, her likely
reward would be a bullet in the back of the head, not a public forum at
which to speak out against Hitler’s tyranny. The suffering inflicted upon an
individual in Greek tragedy has the potential to inaugurate a turning in the
historical destiny of his or her people; that unleashed by the German catastrophe merely adds to the statistics. Dürrenmatt’s remark that today, Creon
would get his secretary to dispose of Antigone is apposite here. 41 The
woman’s complicity in her brother’s murder, subjectively indicated by her
initial heedlessness to his cries for help and objectively corroborated by her
daily service to the total war economy, means that a failure to act now
would be no less disastrous than rash defiance. Yet because the selfsacrifice demanded by her situation will not have been tragic, but utterly
meaningless, her best efforts to emulate Antigone are doomed to fall short
of their target. As that illustrious proper name recedes ever deeper into the
pluperfect, the anonymous “Sister Two” is left stranded in a traumatic present, bereft of any precedent to guide her conduct. Brecht has no choice
but to discontinue the scene here: to show her assuming the mantle of Antigone would be to forfeit credibility; to show her refusing it would be to
abandon hope. The freeze frame at the moment of (in)decision, followed by
the cut to ancient Thebes, offers the protagonist an escape from a predicament that admits of no individual solution. 42 The stalled actualization of
the Antigone myth makes way for its distanced repetition qua citation: “The
Antigone drama then unfurls the whole narrative objectively, on the foreign
level of the ruling class.” 43
If the last lines of the Vorspiel cast into doubt the project of updating
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Antigone for the new Germanies that have emerged, rather by default than
by design, from out of the ruins of fascist dictatorship, its first lines shed
light on the considerations that motivated Brecht to recite this particular
play at this time and at this stage in his career. The opening quatrain introduces two motifs that will be of cardinal importance, those of homecoming
and daybreak:
Tagesanbruch. Zwei Schwestern kommen aus dem Luftschutzkeller
zurück in ihre Wohnung.
DIE ERSTE
Und als wir kamen aus dem Luftschutzkeller
Und es war unversehrt das Haus und heller
Als von der Früh, vom Feuer gegenüber, da
War es meine Schwester, die zuerst es sah.
Daybreak. Two sisters return from the air-raid shelter to their flat.
SISTER ONE
And as we came from out of the air-raid shelter
And the house was unscathed and brighter
From the fire opposite than from the daybreak, then
It was my sister who saw it first.
The long night of terror appears to be over, a new day is dawning, both sisters have survived their ordeal and their house stands intact. Yet the catastrophe which is about to befall them, dimly foreshadowed in the proleptic “it”
of line four, takes place on the level of syntax in the very sentence expressing the hope that the perils and dangers of the night have been put behind
them. In the context of the first couplet, the word “brighter” (heller) stands in
contrast to an earlier, darker time: the house is brighter than when the sisters left it for the air-raid shelter. The comparative first emerges in its true,
sinister meaning in the enjambement connecting lines two and three. The
word which suggested a fresh start is now revealed to be the very opposite,
for the brighter light bathing the house has been spent by the conflagration
across the street caused by the night-time bombing, not by the morning
sun. The Nazi Götterdämmerung, which reached its hellish apotheosis at
just this time, “April 1945,” and in just this city, overpowers the false dawn
of a new era, dragging the optimistic first couplet back into the nightmare
from which its speaker thought herself provisionally secure.
Brecht had sketched this apocalyptic scenario once before, in a diary
entry from August 1943: “One’s heart stops beating when one reads about
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the air bombardments on Berlin. Because they are not connected with any
military operations, one sees no end to the war, only an end to Germany.” 44
The theme of inauthentic daybreak added to the 1948 version preempts
one of the most important changes made to Sophocles’ fable in the adaptation. In the Antigone of Sophocles the war against Argos is already won,
and the war-weary citizens of Thebes would like nothing better than to forget about the bloodshed and return to their everyday lives. The first choral
ode begins with the image of the rising sun banishing the spectres of the
foregoing night: “Glory! – great beam of the sun, brightest of all / that ever
rose on the seven gates of Thebes, / you burn through night at last!” 45 Only
against this background is the chorus’ initial support of Creon comprehensible, even sympathetic. Antigone threatens to reignite the internecine strife
that had almost destroyed Thebes, which is why Creon is entirely within his
rights when he orders her to be caved in for refusing to accede to his demands. In Brecht’s version, by contrast, the war is not yet over, it merely
appears to be so. Upon his first entrance, Creon orchestrates a triumphal
procession to divert attention from the fact that his campaign against Argos
is consuming ever more material and human resources, with no foreseeable end to the hostilities. While Creon crows his success before the chorus of old men, Tiresias, despite his blindness, is perceptive enough to realize that the metal lacquer coating the victory columns is “thin indeed.” 46
Like the sisters whose premature rejoicing drowns out the cries for help
coming from outside, the elders are as much the authors as the victims of
their delusion. Tiresias’ clear-sighted analysis of the city’s plight indicates
that they accept Creon’s lies only because they do not want to open their
eyes. This crucial change to Sophocles’ conception is already prefigured in
the opening lines of the Vorspiel. The night in the air-raid shelter which the
sisters have survived can be read as a symbol of Hitler’s suicidal war, the
brighter light that greets them as they emerge from the bunker as the sign
that it has finally come to an end. That this sign proves in line three to be
deceptive, that the war has in fact entered its most desperate and dangerous stage, shows clearly enough the Vorspiel’s function as a harbinger of
events to come.
The theme of daybreak needs to be read in conjunction with its counterpart. The precarious situation outlined in the quatrain – namely, one of
coming home to find the destructive legacy of fascism (the rampant fire) still
virulently active in the guise of a fresh start (the morning light) – corresponds exactly to Brecht’s view of his own situation in returning to the
German theatre scene in 1948; both motifs, that of homecoming and that of
an illusory (literally scheinhaft) beginning, are to be found in neither of his
pre-texts. It might be recalled that his return to the German-speaking world
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had by his own admission “driven” him to undertake the play, his first since
the end of the war. The opening lines of the Vorspiel can accordingly be
understood not just as a coded anticipation of the adaptation’s plot, but
equally as a meta-commentary on the conditions of its reception as they
were perceived by Brecht at the time of writing. Brecht expands upon these
conditions at the beginning of his foreword to the Antigonemodell 1948, in a
passage that could almost be taken for an explication of the sister’s parable: 47
The total material and spiritual breakdown has doubtless created a
vague thirst for the new in our unhappy, hapless-making land, and
as far as art is concerned, it is ... gearing up to try out new things
here and there. But because there seems to be a lot of confusion
about what is old and what new, and because fear of the return of
the old is mixed up with fear of the advent of the new, and because,
furthermore, the defeated are in many places being instructed to
overcome solely the mental and spiritual aspects of Nazism, artists
would do well not blindly to place their trust in the assertion that the
new is welcome. […] Thus it may prove difficult, precisely in the time
of reconstruction, to make progressive art. This should spur us on.
Brecht is arguing here neither for a return to the discredited old, nor for a
cult of the new under whose auspices the old will continue to flourish, but
for a new relationship between old and new. 48 While the foreword does not
go into this relationship in any detail, The Antigone of Sophocles is evidently meant to represent just such a progressive dramaturgy which steers
a course between artistic recidivism and innovation for innovation’s sake;
hence the need for citation as a self-conscious deportment toward a national repertory which, while deeply compromised by thirteen years of
“Göring theater,” still contains too much of value to warrant its outright rejection. 49
The Vorspiel ends as it began, with a demonstration of the supremacy
of old over new, night over day, hellfire over regenerative light. The second
sister, like art after the catastrophe, is left paralysed by her inability to find a
reliable point of orientation. “Nonetheless, art can only orient itself by progressing, and it must ... emerge from the state of waiting for action to that
of action itself, and in the general decay set to work at some place or
other.” 50 By the next scene, she is suddenly at this ‘someplace’ which could
be any place, even “in front of Creon’s palace,” urging to rebellion a woman
who, just minutes before, was wringing her hands in despair, addressing
her by name in a strange and archaic tongue: “Sister, Ismene, twinned
sprig / Of Oedipus’ bough ....” 51 Citation makes it possible.
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III
The paradigm of citation briefly sketched by Brecht in the foreword,
and ushered in by the frustrated attempt at mythic re-enactment in the Vorspiel, determines the changes made to Hölderlin’s translation in the adaptation itself. This, my central claim regarding The Antigone of Sophocles, may
strike the reader as being contradictory. After all, what sense does it make
to talk of citation when, as Hans Bunge has calculated, Brecht left only
19.5% of Hölderlin’s verses untouched, adopting a further 32.3% almost
unchanged? What of the remaining 48.2%, which Brecht either subjected to
substantial revision or dropped altogether, not to mention the numerous
new verses he penned for the production? 52 It is certainly true that if one
defines citation as the exact replication of a given wording, the concept will
be of limited value in understanding the play. Then one would also be
forced to dismiss Brecht’s title as a fraudulent attempt to pass off as
Sophocles’ the caprices of his own dramaturgical fancy. But my point is that
the play draws attention to the fact that no citation, and be it even the most
fastidious or comprehensive, takes place without an element of distortion
(or interpretation, depending on one’s perspective). The risk of being
quoted out of context is not only inherent to every utterance, it is the condition of its being quoted at all. By citing Hölderlin in other words, Brecht
brings to the surface of the text the ordinarily inconspicuous process of
transformation which a source undergoes whenever it is deployed in a different context, whereby the original context is acknowledged to be the
more or less speculative hypostasis of later citations. ‘(Re-)Translation’
might seem to describe more fittingly what Brecht is doing here, but it is too
broad a term to account for the distancing effects he aims at in the production, nor does it capture the performativity specific to the citation, its inseparability from the here and now of its recital.
Brecht discusses the relationship between his citation and the source
from which it derives its authority, but whose ‘solid letter’ 53 it repeatedly violates, in a letter sent from the workshop to his son Stefan. “The changes
which compelled me to write entirely new sections,” he explains there, “are
done in order to cut out the Greek ‘moira’ (the fateful); that is to say, I am
attempting to push through to the underlying folktale [Volkslegende].” 54 Far
from superimposing the image of his own time on events of long ago, as
some critics argue, 55 Brecht maintains that his alterations and expurgations
are derived from – are literally dictated by – an antecedent recitation. In
breaking the spell cast by myth, his rationalization of the fable lays bare its
long-concealed substrate. (Needless to say, this conflation of terminus ad
quem with terminus a quo is itself a mythic, indeed typically Romantic
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move). Like Hölderlin before him, Brecht thus refuses to concede that he
may have distorted the substance of the play through his interventions. All
appearances to the contrary, the process of citation continues unabated,
indeed with a greater degree of fidelity than ever before. Both Hölderlin and
Brecht purport to have liberated the quintessence of the tragedy, the one
through a translational procedure aimed at rekindling the primordial, heavenly fire which barely flickers through Sophocles’ verse, the other through a
citational procedure aimed at recurring to its more fundamental hypotext. 56
Both see themselves pursuing an archaeological, although by no means
antiquarian agenda. The tale of Antigone, they insist, was already partially
occluded in the Sophoclean ‘original’, itself the first surviving deposit in a
textual palimpsest covering a foundation that is anonymous, authorless,
and long since effaced – if indeed it ever existed. For in the absence of
hard documentary evidence, who can vouch for this autochthonous prehistory, 57 or refute Hellmut Flashar’s suspicion that we are dealing here
with another of Brecht’s tall stories? 58 Who can tell the difference between
citation and confabulation once the cited source has gone irretrievably
missing?
When adaptation is equated with adequation to a legendary ur-text,
origin is the goal. Benjamin chose this Karl Kraus quote as the motto for his
fourteenth thesis on the philosophy of history, in which the act of citation is
likened to a “tiger’s leap” that seizes hold of the “actual present, no matter
where it moves in the thickets of long ago.” 59 Brecht was probably familiar
with Thesis XIV, either through his conversations with Benjamin in the late
1930s, when it was first put to paper, or through its posthumous publication
in 1944. At any rate, the concepts developed there aptly summarize his
practice in The Antigone of Sophocles. The tiger’s leap is dramatized in the
sudden transition from Berlin to Thebes at the end of the Vorspiel. It disrupts the continuity of linear narrative (in Benjamin’s words: it blasts open
the continuum of history) by ripping out of context the material upon which
it pounces, in this case the Antigone of Sophocles, and arranging it in a
new, unforeseen constellation. 60 In the now-time of citation, which is also
the time of the stage, disparate temporalities are juxtaposed in a configuration that is one of neither simple supersession nor simple retrogression.
Taking up the metaphor of the public spectacle, Benjamin adds that the
leap lands “in an arena in which the ruling class gives the commands.” In
the production in Chur, this is the space in which Creon and his cast(e)
hold sway, symbolically demarcated by a row of four totem-poles crested
with horses’ skulls; the people remains silent and invisible throughout. Atavism and actualization, like derivation and innovation, are fused together in
the sign of an immutable barbarism, “given that we still have the idolized
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state of class warfare!” 61 The doctrine of progress, enshrined as socialist
orthodoxy in the state Brecht would shortly make his own, has been relinquished in this, his last production of exile – without, as we will see, having
been replaced by the platitude that there can be nothing new under the
sun.
One would nonetheless be mistaken to confuse Brecht’s mission to
excavate the popular legend with the putative recuperation of some great
and unsurpassable origin. What lies at the beginning, before Antigone embarks upon her remarkable literary and philosophical career, is not the singularity of an epochal event (and be it ever so ripe with futurity), but the plurality of folktale, with its plethora of minimal variations and embellishments;
not Antigone as she appears for the first time on stage, resplendent in the
afterglow of creation, but Antigone in the obscurity from which Sophocles
plucked her. The origin of the origin is lost in common speech, dispersed in
the breath of a thousand retellings that are coeval, immemorial, and equally
(in)authentic. The origin of the origin, that is to say, is itself a citation, the
scene of an infinite regress rather than of ultimate referential certainty. The
radicality of this position becomes apparent once its corollary is taken into
account: if the origin is secondary, the secondary is original; Brecht anticipates Derrida in deconstructing their opposition. Citation is therewith freed
from a slavish adherence to scripture and elevated to an art form in its own
right. The Antigone ascribed to Sophocles is also a play by Brecht. In order
to keep functioning, however, the act of citation still requires the regulative
idea of an ur-text. Without such an idea, it risks lapsing into the bourgeois
ideology of creative genius against which it was directed in the first place.
When there is nothing outside the citation, there is no such thing as citation, all distinctions based on text-genetic priority having faded into
equiprimordiality. This is why Brecht is compelled to rewrite the origin under
erasure, holding fast to the goal of a return to the source while all but admitting that this source is the figment of the citations to which it gives rise.
In the same letter to his son, Brecht remarks: “Used is the Hölderlinian
(fairly faithful) translation from the Greek; it has something Hegelian about
it that you’ll probably recognise, and a Swabian popular gestus [Volksgestus] that you probably won’t (the ‘people’s grammar’ extends right into the
highly artistic choruses!).” Around the same time, he transcribed several of
Hölderlin’s more pungent swabianisms into his work journal, all of which he
retained in the adaptation itself, notwithstanding his audience’s potential
unfamiliarity with the idiom. 62 To a certain extent, his enthusiasm may be
attributed to his fierce and lifelong attachment to his native Swabia, 63
doubtless consolidated by his reunion in Chur with his boyhood friend Neher. 64 Brecht felt “right at home” in the translation, as he noted in his jour-
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nal, in part because he was able to hear the distant echo of his youth in its
unusual mix of “Swabian intonations and grammar school Latin constructions.” 65 Of greater significance than any affinity based on the accident of
birth, however, was his professional interest in exploiting such colloquial
turns of phrase for the pseudo-ethnographic, anti-classicistic tendency
which characterized the production as a whole (as well as, behind it, the
broader project of epic theatre schematized a few months later in the Short
Organon). By leavening high tragedy with south German dialect, practically
an example of the V-Effect before the letter, Hölderlin succeeded in recapturing something of that earthy, vernacular quality which had suffered from
the folktale’s transformation into Literature, and gone entirely missing from
the polished translations that had since established themselves in the repertory. Hölderlin’s erratic, frequently erroneous version struck Brecht as being “fairly faithful,” then, not because it accurately rendered the nuances of
Sophocles’ Greek into modern German – Brecht lacked the philological
acumen to ascertain whether this was the case, and the pedantry to care –
but because he thought it best approximated to the rough-hewn, archaic
and specifically oral linguistic gestus proper to its hypotext. 66
Brecht’s citation may accordingly be read as an attempt to rehabilitate
the Heimatdichter Hölderlin in the wake of the latter’s nationalist appropriation during the Second World War. Like Heidegger, who also seized on this
aspect of Hölderlin’s poetry, Brecht sensed the regenerative potential of a
language steeped in an ordinarily suppressed and silenced regional culture; like Heidegger, he rejected the smoothly sublime High German
brought to the height of its expressive power by Hölderlin’s contemporaries. 67 However, their differences in this regard should not be passed over
too quickly. Brecht’s attitude of “grateful malice” (to borrow Walter Jens’
phrase) 68 toward his place of birth is irreconcilable with what Peter Sloterdijk calls Heidegger’s “will to tarry in his natal space,” 69 not least because
bitter experience had taught him what it was like to have his countrymen
turn against him. In the first scene of the adaptation, Ismene tries to dissuade her grief-stricken sister from breaking Creon’s prohibition on burial
by appealing to her sense of civic belonging, which she insists will prove to
be stronger, and more enduring, than the anger she currently feels about
the infamy done to their brother. Antigone’s place, she pleads, is in Thebes
and amongst the living; “the old / homely elms and rooftops” will soon reemerge through her “veil of tears” to assuage her pain. The wistful image
evoked by these words, which are to be found nowhere in Sophocles, is not
that of an ancient cityscape, but the remembered Augsburg of Brecht’s
youth, with its lovely baroque skyline and elm-lined river. It is as if Brecht,
poised on the brink of return from exile, were allowing himself a brief retro-
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spective glance at the life that might have been his had he followed Ismene’s advice, the snug security he might have enjoyed had he chosen,
like his compatriot from Meßkirch, to stay put in the provinces. But Ismene
is cast in the role of the temptress here, and Antigone’s response – “I hate
you” – is unparalleled in its bluntness (compare Hölderlin: “If you should
say such a thing, I would hate you”). 70 This is as close as we will ever
come to a real-life dialogue between Heidegger and Brecht, whom we must
imagine standing in front of Hitler’s palace, circa 1934, as they deliver
these lines: the former justifying his decision to spend the years of national
awakening ensconced in “Alemanian-Swabian rootedness in the native
soil,” as he put it in the same year; 71 the latter refusing to heed the call of
the origin if it means falling silent before a political regime he knows to be
abhorrent. At the end of the conversation, Heidegger retreats upriver to
stage his fantasy of beautiful dwelling along the sanitized, sanctified and
de-urbanized banks of the Danube. 72 Brecht, meanwhile, locates his Marxist play firmly within the walls of the polis, amidst a bloody power struggle
being waged between a proto-fascist military oligarchy and a dissident
splinter faction that has aligned itself with the enemy.
All the changes made to Hölderlin’s translation in the name of its rationalization serve to accentuate this political dimension; I will restrict myself to outlining the most significant. Following Brecht’s operation to excise
the Greek moira from the play, the blind augur Tiresias employs his reason
alone, rather than his prophetic gifts, to divine that something is rotten in
the state of Thebes. The people is reported to be aghast less at the severity of the punishment meted out by Creon – this is a side issue for Brecht –
as at the more comprehensive failure of his rule, which has left them
blighted with poverty and burdened with an unwinnable war. Creon’s attempt to intimidate the populace by making an example of Antigone is both
the sign and consequence of that failure, not its root cause. Haimon informs his father in Hölderlin’s version “how the city is full of mourning for
the virgin” 73 ; this is generalized and sharpened by Brecht to “Know that the
city is full of inner disquiet.” 74 The chorus of elders undergoes a similar
‘transmotivation’ in Brecht’s hypertext, revealing itself to be far more interested in the material gains it expects from the sack of Argos than in any
martial glory. 75 Hölderlin’s chorus proclaims with patriotic pride: “But illustrious Victory has arrived, / Favourable to Thebes, rich in wagons.” 76 Brecht
has at the same point: “But lucrative Victory has arrived, / Favourable to
Thebans rich in wagons.” 77 Whereas victory was once perceived to benefit
the entire polis, it now only adds to the coffers of those who are wealthy
enough as it is: the elders themselves. Brazenly identifying their particular
interests with the greater good of Thebes, the big property owners confirm
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Marx’s maxim that the leading ideas of a given age are ever the ideas of
the ruling class. To concentrate the audience’s attention still further on the
political drama, and to prevent its sympathies gravitating toward Creon at
the end, Brecht also jettisons the figure of Euridyce, the tyrant’s wife. Antigone’s parting words to the chorus make explicit the lesson he hopes to
communicate by eliminating the metaphysical backdrop from the play (or
rather, as Werner Frick comments, substituting for it a Marxist moira): 78 “Do
not, I beg you, speak of fate. / That I know. Of that speaks / He who dispatches me, guiltless; weave / Him a fate!” 79 The infernal machine of tragedy has not been set in motion for the amusement of the gods, as Cocteau
would have it, but by a human hand, and for all-too-human purposes. 80
Although such emendations to the plot are motivated by the impulse to
show that man is the author of his own destiny, 81 their cumulative effect is
to minimize the influence of individual actions upon the affairs of state.
Asked why she seems so intent on stirring up trouble, Brecht’s Antigone
volunteers the lapidary response: “Just to set an example.” 82 By her own
admission, her rebellion is a symbolic gesture that serves at best to illustrate and bring into focus the broader tensions that riddle the body politic; in
itself, it changes nothing. Creon’s fate has long since been decided by
forces beyond her control, as Tiresias is the first to grasp. By the end of the
play, the Elders who had backed Creon to power, distant relatives of the
Chicago cauliflower moguls of Arturo Ui, have deserted their man as the
resurgent army of Argos nears the city gates. Thebes faces absolute ruin:
“The city is over and done with for us, used to reins and / Without reins.” 83
The parallels to Germany’s own ‘zero hour’ hardly need stressing.
It is important that this dress rehearsal for the apocalypse be read in
the proper light. If the meaning of any citation is determined as much by the
manner of its deployment as by its propositional content, then the semipermeable borders which separate it from the discourse in which it is embedded – the margins between proper and borrowed speech, as it were –
deserve particular attention. They provide instruction on the speaker’s
comportment toward the cited material, as well as on how he expects an
audience to receive it: with approval or scepticism, in deference or disdain,
as confirmation or provocation. The prelude which precedes and prepares
the citation ends, as we have seen, with a crisis of indecision. More specifically, it sets up a double bind situation in which the second sister is confronted with the necessity and impossibility of becoming Antigone. A choice
has to be made; a choice cannot be made; incipit citatio. The Antigone of
Sophocles is thus introduced as a citation of precedent. A precedent case
is cited whenever a decision has to be reached for which normative guidelines are lacking. It operates on the assumption of a structural homology
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between past and present situations, without which the precedent would
prove incapable of providing useful counsel: the sister’s dilemma (and, behind it, that of the audience of 1948) is to be construed as being comparable to Antigone’s. At the same time, the current situation must be experienced in its historical discontinuity, as a genuine predicament, for the need
for a precedent to arise in the first place: her dilemma, along with that of the
audience, is also unlike Antigone’s. Were the horizon of possibilities already circumscribed by the ever-same, were we able to discern, in the infinite variety of human endeavour, nothing other than the permutations of
mythic invariance, there would be no point ransacking the archives of cultural memory in search of cases similar in kind to help guide our conduct,
for we would have no alternative but to act the way we do. Brecht’s citation
of Antigone as a precedent for postwar Germany, far from forcing the conclusion that things are predestined to remain much the way they always
have been (the cynical plus ça change muttered by the onlooker to the
tragedy of history), necessarily implies that the future still stands wide
open.
We should bear this in mind when making sense of the last lines of the
play, spoken by the Elders as the city comes crashing down around them:
“For time is short / Catastrophe is all around, and it never suffices / to live
on, thoughtless and easy, / From connivance to sacrilege and / To grow
wise in old age.” 84 Hölderlin ends on the exact opposite note, offering the
consolation that while the blows dealt by the gods may have destroyed the
ruling family, “they have taught us in old age to think.” 85 By denying his
chorus the benefit of such hindsight, Brecht ensures that the ‘great disorder’ which set the city on the course to self-destruction will survive right
down to the present day. The cuts he made to the fable point to the existence of underlying laws of history which will continue to demand the sacrifice of countless unnamed Antigones, including the second sister, so long
as Creon and his ilk remain in charge. We still have tragedy, Brecht seems
to be saying, because those who bear witness to it – the theatre-going public no less than the chorus of ancients – fail to grow wise after the event.
Through their tacit consent, the metaphorical devastation of the house of
Thebes comes full circle in the literal devastation of the houses of Berlin.
Crucially, however, the “catastrophe” posited as inescapable from within
the immanence of the citation appears as the result of a choice when
viewed from the standpoint of the recitalist. The fact that the Elders’ fatalistic credo is given the final word in the play challenges the audience to see
to it that it not have the final word elsewhere, thereby overturning the
precedent of myth cited in (and as) the (genre of) tragedy. The selfsame
time of eternal return, which the old men of Thebes believe to be too fleet-
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The Precedence of Citation
ing to permit reflection, provides the essential counterpart and foil to the
revolutionary project of a ‘great order’, whose realization depends upon us
learning from the mistakes of the past. 86 So regarded, the playwright’s innermost concern is to issue a caveat powerful enough to abolish the need
for subsequent recitals of the trial of Antigone: “…”
– end of citation.
IV
The paradigm of citation developed in The Antigone of Sophocles has
been examined under its three constitutive aspects. By way of conclusion,
these may be summarized as follows:
1.
Conceived in spatial terms, citation, like translation, enacts a process of decontextualizing recontextualization, such that the very
givenness of the chosen text is revealed to be the after-effect of its
originary dislocation (a dis-location at, and of, the origin). “Quotation,” writes Edward Said, “is a constant reminder that writing is a
form of displacement.” 87 He might well have cited The Antigone of
Sophocles in support of this claim. The site proper to the play is neither Thebes, its point of departure, nor Berlin, its provisional destination, but a habitable inbetween called Chur. The matter of citation
constantly finds itself held up at such way stations, where its transit
from terminal to terminal is both frustrated and impelled by the impossibility of its assimilation without remainder into a new setting.
This indwelling itineracy, which is both the condition and the index of
its citability, makes its every sojourn a stopover from the start. As a
rhetorical topos, the citation is as far removed from a free-floating
utopianism as from the nativist dream of rootedness to a privileged
place. It is an émigré much like Brecht, forced to set up house
amidst strangers while waiting with half-unpacked bags for the next
train out of town. After paying a visit to Brecht’s apartment in Zürich
around the time of the adaptation, Max Frisch noted in his diary:
“Everything is set up so that he could leave within forty-eight hours;
unhomely.” 88 Citation, the portmanteau tradition of the intellectual in
exile, belongs at the heart of this scene of non-belonging.
2.
Considered in its temporal dimension, the act of citation brings about
the estrangement in repetition of its signified. The multiple versions
of the play which jostle together in the ‘final’ performance script – a
script which eschews precisely the historical-philosophical category
of finality – are fused into a single horizon during the recital, resulting
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in a virtual simultaneity of Antigones past and present. At the same
time, and in the same time, we have seen how Brecht reiterates the
play in such a manner as to distance it from the immediate concerns
of his audience – not because such concerns were a matter of indifference to him, but because he thought they were best to be addressed by avoiding the false actualization of the myth. Antigone is
cited not as the heroine of the current historical moment, as Wagner
had cited her exactly a century before, at another turning point in
German (and European) history, but as the heroine of a bygone historical moment, and she is to be treated with due caution. 89
3.
In legal parlance, citation designates a summons to adjudication.
Brecht’s citation of Antigone transforms the stage into a brightly-lit
courtroom, the actors into witnesses called forth from the ‘twilight’ to
read aloud from their age-old affidavits, and the public into jurors
charged with determining the pertinence of the myth to postwar Germany. Such a concept of citation stands at odds with the idealist
doctrine which holds the autonomy of art and the disinterestedness
of aesthetic judgement to be sacrosanct. The evidence presented in
the theatre subserves a verdict that lies outside the domain of art
and beyond the jurisdiction of the playwright. It falls in the sphere of
social praxis: the (re)actions of the public will decide whether the
catastrophic precedent cited by Brecht is to be upheld in future.
Consequently, the meaning of the citation qua speech act will depend upon the response it elicits from those for whom it is recited.
Brecht’s task – one that is both modest and immeasurably ambitious
– is to precipitate the decision by heightening their awareness of the
stakes involved.
Monash University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, tr. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1988), p. 39.
2
“One may speak of a premiere,” argued Bruno Snell after the premiere, “for Bert
Brecht has ... made such far-reaching changes to Sophocles’ structure and
Hölderlin’s diction that in essential parts a new Antigone has arisen.” Cited in
Werner Hecht, Brechts Antigone des Sophokles (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 205.
3
See Brecht’s 1929 fragment “Plagiat als Kunst”, in Brecht, ed. Werner Hecht et al.,
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The Precedence of Citation
Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (FfM: Suhrkamp, 19881998), Volume 21, p. 318; henceforth cited as BFA.
4
For example, Die Antigone des Sophokles is missing from the standard onevolume edition of Brecht’s plays; see Die Stücke von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band
(FfM: Suhrkamp, 1981). Fredric Jameson has remarked that in a sense: “everything in Brecht is plagiarism in one way or another.” Jameson, Brecht and Method
(London: Verso, 1998), p. 105.
5
Anouilh’s play, which profiles Antigone’s wittingly absurd defiance of her uncle’s
edict against the background of a kitschy upper middle-class soap opera, can be
regarded as a counter-pole to Brecht’s adaptation. Whereas Anouilh presents Antigone as a compulsive nay-sayer whose death drive Créon, despite his best efforts, proves unable to check, Brecht derives her rebellion from her rational insight
into the strategies of exploitation and military aggression that allow a hated tyrant
to cling to power. Anouilh privatises and psychologises, even pathologises, her
deed; Brecht construes it as a symbolic protest against a proto-fascist regime.
Volker Riedel concludes: “Whether Brecht consciously directed his adaptation
against Anouilh is not clear from the sources; factually, however, it is ... a first and
particularly striking testimonial to the contradictory relationship of the socialist and
the late bourgeois reception of classical antiquity.” Riedel, “Antigone-Rezeption in
der DDR”, in Hecht, Brechts Antigone des Sophokles, p. 269. See also Jean
Anoilh, Antigone (Paris: Le Table Ronde, 1946).
6
The phrase is E.M. Butler’s; see her eponymous The Tyranny of Greece over
Germany (London: Macmillan, 1935).
7
BFA 27, p. 227.
8
See Herman Meyer, Das Zitat in der Erzählkunst. Zur Geschichte und Poetik des
europäischen Romans (FfM: Fischer, 1988).
9
BFA 2, pp. 233-34; Brecht, Plays Volume I (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 102.
10
In 1938, at the height of the realism debate, Eisler’s selective, supposedly disrespectful treatment of the Erbe had come under fire from Lukács, who accused him
of handling the “illustrious literary past of the German people” with arrogance and
contempt. Lukács, “Es geht um den Realismus”, in Essays über den Realismus
(Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971), p. 339. At the time, Brecht had
defended Eisler with a wit all the more caustic because not intended for the public
eye; see BFA 22/1, pp. 420-21. See also Helen Fehervary, Hölderlin and the Left.
The Search for a Dialectic of Art and Life (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), p. 50.
11
Theodor W. Adorno, tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature, Volume 2
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 4.
12
BFA 21, p. 285.
13
See Hermann Meyer, Das Zitat in der Erzählkunst, p. 12.
14
BFA 8, p. 209.
15
“The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying ‘This is
mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil
society.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of
Inequality Among Men” in Rousseau, eds. Alan Ritter and Julia Bodanella, Rous-
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seau’s Political Writings (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 34.
16
“The antinomy of two equally justified principles”, argues Hegel, “constitutes the
essence of tragedy.” See also George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1984), p. 288: “The full meaning of Creon’s deeds (errors) has come home to us
as it cannot have to any spectator or reader before our present danger.”
17
See Alfred Döblin, November 1918. Dritter Teil. Karl und Rosa (Munich: dtv,
1978), esp. Book VIII (“Auf den Spuren der Antigone”, “König Kreon”).
18
BFA 8, p. 205; Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, eds. Friedrich Beissner and Adolf
Beck (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1943-1985), Volume 5, p. 232; henceforth cited as
SW.
19
Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, p. 115.
20
BFA 25, p. 74.
21
BFA 27, p. 264.
22
BFA 15, p. 191. I have borrowed the first four lines of the English translation from
Bernard Knox’s “Introduction” to Sophocles, tr. Robert Fagles, The Theban Plays
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 37.
23
BFA 25, p. 75.
24
Knopf argues that by 1949, when Brecht was working on the foreword, his conception of Antigone had shifted from one of popular resistance to one of inneraristocratic struggle. Jan Knopf, Brecht-Handbuch: Theater (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1980), p. 274.
25
BFA 27, p. 255.
26
Knox, “Introduction”, p. 37. See also the entries in Brecht’s journal from the last
months of the war: “Still nothing from Upper Silesia about the stance of the workers”; “ruins and no sigh of life from the workers.” BFA 27, pp. 219, 221.
27
See Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl, “Figuren des Zitats”: Eine Untersuchung zur Funktionsweise übertragener Rede (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1998), p. 26.
28
Mr Peachum is also familiar with this meaning. In 1948, the same year he cited
Antigone, Brecht added a new strophe to Peachum’s Morität: “And the fish, they
disappear / yet to the sorrow of the court: / One cites the shark at the end / yet the
shark knows of nothing.” BFA 2, p. 309.
29
In the poem, however, the tables have been turned: Antigone is now called up as
a witness for the prosecution, while her one-time accusers themselves stand accused of having perpetrated a “misdeed”.
30
Lacan’s interpretation is to be found in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, tr. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 243-87.
31
Jean Anouilh, Antigone (Paris: Le Table Ronde, 1946), p. 102.
32
Sophocles, The Theban Plays, p. 104. In Brecht’s production, Antigone endures
her time of trial with the listlessness of an actress worn down by umpteen performances of the role that made her famous. Brecht’s instruction to Weigel that
she speak her lines as if citing them, coupled with the fact that she was conspicu-
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The Precedence of Citation
ously far too old for a part meant to be played by a girl (in Sophocles’ play, Antigone is persistently referred to as ή παις ), captures exactly this sense of weary
routine. Exiled to a provincial theatre and in the twilight phase of her career, Antigone is now simply going through the motions.
33
BFA 8, p. 213. Brecht’s notes to the production, published in the Antigonemodell,
stipulate that this, her most impassioned appeal, is to be spoken “like a citation.”
BFA 25, p. 104.
34
In a revised version of the prologue written for a later production, the actor who
plays the part of Tiresias, the personification of omniscience, urges the audience
“To search your consciences for similar deeds / Of the recent past or the omission
/ Of similar deeds.” BFA 8, p. 242.
35
BFA 8, p. 213.
36
BFA 8, pp. 195-96.
37
BFA 8, p. 198.
38
BFA 25, pp. 74-5.
39
It remains unclear, however, whether the sisters will attain the insight into their
mistake prescribed by Aristotle in the wake of the peripeteia. Brecht’s conception
of didactic drama dictates that it is up to the audience to reflect upon the situation
in which the protagonists find themselves hopelessly embroiled: the likes of
Mother Courage are condemned to repeat their errors because they will never
learn for themselves. See Aristotle, Poetics, §11. The Kleines Organon, also composed during Brecht’s sojourn in Switzerland, was directed against a dominant
strand of Aristotle reception, inherited from French neo-classicism, rather than
against Aristotle himself. There is no evidence that Brecht ever read a line of the
Poetics.
40
BFA 24, p. 350. Ronald Gray aptly calls Brecht’s Creon “a flatly rapacious caricature of Hitler.” Gray, Brecht (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1961), p. 95.
41
Quoted in Steiner, Antigones, 194.
42
Adorno observes that the liquidation of the individual under late capitalist conditions of production compels Brecht to fall back on pre-modern fables: “Brecht
needed those wild old-fashioned times nonetheless, as an image of the present
day, for he himself well knew that the society of his own time could no longer be
grasped directly in terms of human beings and things.” Adorno, Notes to Literature
Volume 2, p. 86.
43
BFA 25, p. 75.
44
BFA 27, p. 168.
45
Sophocles, The Theban Plays, p. 65.
46
BFA 8, p. 231.
47
BFA 25, p. 73. See also Brecht’s journal entry from August 5, 1940; BFA 26, p.
409.
48
See Hans Mayer, Brecht (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 110.
49
BFA 25, p. 73.
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50
BFA 25, p. 73.
51
BFA 8, p. 200.
52
Hans Bunge, Antigone-Modell 1948 von Bertolt Brecht und Caspar Neher: Zur
Praxis und Theorie des epischen (dialektischen) Theaters Bertolt Brechts (Greifswald: Diss., 1957). Pohl remarks that these figures seem “rather too precise considering the philologically complicated state of affairs.” Rainer Pohl, Strukturelemente und Entwicklung von Pathosformen in der Dramensprache Bertold Brechts
(Bonn: Bouvier, 1969), p. 165.
53
SW 2, p. 172.
54
BFA 29, p. 440. The letter was written some time in December 1948. See also his
entry in the Arbeitsjournal from December 16: “Bit by bit, as the adaptation of the
scenes continues apace, the highly realistic popular legend emerges from out of
the ideological fog.” BFA 27, p. 255.
55
Hellmuth Karasek, for example, considers Brecht’s historical parables to be
“translated examples of acute and current problems into different times and cultural conditions, whose different constitutions they are neither willing nor or able to
take into account.” Hellmuth Karasek, Bertolt Brecht. Der jüngste Fall eines Theaterklassikers (München: Kindler, 1978), p. 99.
56
On Hölderlin’s “return to the occult source”, see Steiner, Antigones, pp. 74-75. I
borrow the terms ‘hypotext’ and ‘hypertext’ from Gérard Genette, tr. Wolfram
Bayer and Dieter Hornig, Palimpseste. Die Literatur auf zweiter Stufe (FfM:
Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 14.
57
See Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 28.
58
Flashar argues that the true relationship between the original Antigone legend
and its revision by Sophocles is exactly the reverse of that assumed by Brecht:
“Only with Sophocles does the mythic material become a political play with an
idea of the polis and a situation of conflict in human society.” Hellmut Flashar,
Inszenierung der Antike. Das griechische Drama auf der Bühne der Neuzeit,
1585-1990 (München: C.H. Beck, 1991), p. 190.
59
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Herrmann
Schweppenhäuser (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1974), I.2, p. 701.
60
See Andrew Benjamin, “Being Roman Now: The Time of Fashion. A Commentary
on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ XIV”, Thesis Eleven
75 (2003), pp. 39-53, here p. 45.
61
BFA 27, p. 261.
62
BFA 27, pp. 258-59. Berlau recalled in her memoirs: “He took the ‘Antigone’ for
more than just a literary translation. If only because of the ‘Swabian linguistic gestus’, which Brecht constantly pointed out to me during readings, Hölderlin’s text
was for him ‘the most powerful and most amusing.’” Ruth Berlau, ed. Hans Bunge,
Brechts Lai-Tu. Erinnerungen und Notate von Ruth Berlau (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985), p. 210. Even the adaptation’s departures from the text are couched
in a pseudo-Hölderlinian style, establishing a continuity of tone which smooths
over the deep cuts inflicted upon the fable. Several commentators have noted the
extent to which Brecht remains faithful to the arcane diction of the translation.
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The Precedence of Citation
Reinhold Grimm, for instance, remarks that the rationalization of the fable “by no
means comes across as violent,” finding the reason in the “linguistic affinity of the
Swabian Brecht with the Swabian Hölderlin.” Reinhold Grimm, Brecht und die
Weltliteratur (Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1961), p. 39.
63
See Werner Mittenzwei, Das Leben des Bertolt Brecht. Erster Band (FfM:
Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 11; André Müller and Gerd Semmer, Geschichten vom Herrn
Brecht. 99 Brecht-Anekdoten, (FfM: Insel, 1967), p. 31.
64
Hans Curjel, who commissioned the adaptation, speculated in 1961: “The little old
town of Chur might have seemed familiar to the Augsburger Brecht.” Cited in
Hecht, Brechts Antigone des Sophokles, p. 188.
65
BFA 27, p. 255.
66
See Ulrich Weisstein, “Imitation, Stylization, and Adaptation: The Language of
Brecht’s Antigone and its relation to Hölderlin’s version of Sophocles”, German
Quarterly 46 (1973), p. 590: “Hölderlin’s equivalents often (and characteristically)
carry an archaic flavor which restores metaphorical meaning in a drama that is
otherwise relatively poor in imagery. This is one trait of the 1803 Antigone which
must have attracted Brecht, who in all likelihood saw the possibility of equating
linguistic archaism with socio-political barbarism.”
67
Knopf detects in Brecht, beginning with The Antigone of Sophocles, a “differentiation beween Schiller/Goethe on the one hand ... and Hölderlin on the other.”
Knopf, Brecht-Handbuch: Theater, p. 276.
68
Walter Jens, Statt einer Literaturgeschichte (Tübingen: Neske, 1957), p. 227.
69
Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet. Versuche nach Heidegger (FfM: Suhrkamp, 2001),
p. 51.
70
SW 5, p. 209.
71
Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (= GA13) (FfM: Klostermann,
1983), p. 11.
72
See Heidegger’s dialogue “Das abendländische Gespräch”, composed from 1946
to 1948; Heidegger, Zu Hölderlin. Griechenlandreisen (=GA75) (FfM: Klostermann, 2000).
73
SW 5, p. 233.
74
SW 5, p. 254; BFA 8, p. 220.
75
See Genette, Palimpseste, p. 440.
76
SW 5, p. 211.
77
BFA 8, p. 203. See also the ensuing victory address by Creon: “You men, let it be
known: Argos / Is no more. Reckoning [Abrechnung] was / Complete.” BFA 8, p.
203. Brecht’s retrospective projection of the language of fascist genocide
(Abrechnung is taken from the vocabulary of a desk-top murderer) upon the
mythic ruler of an ancient Greek city-state is not dissimilar to the manner in which
Horkheimer and Adorno telescope bourgeois categories of self-understanding
onto the figure of Odysseus: it provokes the shock of recognition from across a
vast historical distance.
78
Werner Frick, ‘Die mythische Methode.’ Komparatistische Studien zur Transfor-
125
126
Robert Savage
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mation der griechischen Tragödie im Drama der klassischen Moderne (Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer, 1998), pp. 542-51.
79
BFA 8, p. 227.
80
Jean Cocteau, “La Machine Infernale”, in Œuvres Complètes de Jean Cocteau.
Volume V (Genève: Marguerat, 1948), p. 190.
81
See BFA 24, p. 350.
82
BFA 8, p. 212.
83
BFA 8, p. 240.
84
BFA 8, p. 241.
85
SW 5, p. 262.
86
See Dieter Baldo, Bertolt Brechts ‘Antigonemodell 1948’. Theaterarbeit nach dem
Faschismus (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1987), pp. 17-8.
87
Edward Said, Beginnings. Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975),
p. 22.
88
Max Frisch, Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge. Band II (FfM: Suhrkamp,
1976), p. 597.
89
See Richard Wagner, tr. William Ashton Ellis, Opera and Drama (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1995), p. 190: “O holy Antigone! on thee I cry! Let wave thy banner, that
beneath it we destroy and yet redeem!”
No Longer Lost for Words
Antigone’s Afterlife
Alison Forsyth
Why Revisit Classics Like Antigone?
Sophocles’ dramatic depiction of the myth of Antigone (441 BC) has
undergone a range of theatrical reincarnations over the centuries, from the
tellingly entitled Antigone ou le piete by Robert Garnier (1580) to versions
and free translations by Vittorio Alfieri (1783), Friedrich Hölderin (1804),
Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1808), Walter Hasenclaver (1917), Jean Cocteau (1922), Jean Anouilh (1943), Bertolt Brecht (1948, an adaptation that
was to be further re-adapted by Judith Malina in 1967), Tom Paulin (1984),
Athol Fugard (1974), Miro Gavran (1990) and Seamus Heaney (2004) – to
name just a few. It is the contention of this analysis that dramatic reinterpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone have fallen into two very distinct phases;
firstly those comprising predominantly reverential appropriations of the ancient classic which tap into the source text’s cultural cachet to bolster the
cultural, religious and political aims of the society in which it was currently
being performed; and secondly, the post 1945 appropriations. It is the second phase that will provide the particular focus for this discussion.
During the twentieth century and in particular since the Second World
War, Antigone was to be the subject of a marked interpretative transformation. This transformation was in the guise of adaptations and re-workings
which attempted to liberate the source text from what was increasingly
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/forsyth.pdf
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deemed to be centuries of interpretative distortion, containment and stasis
in the service of the ideological and moral beliefs at the centre of the Western liberal humanist tradition. Following a brief overview of the way in which
Antigone was to experience an unrelenting campaign of appropriative christianization, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this
article will focus upon two key but contrasting examples of post-war adaptations that contest the earlier canonical reading practices which sought to
train and thus constrain Antigone’s “voice.” The two post-war adaptations to
be focused on are Brecht’s inspired and contemplative “model” warning
against totalitarianism past, present and future and Athol Fugard’s antiApartheid protest drama, The Island.
Adapting and Reinterpreting The Classics
Jonathan Miller has commented upon the “afterlife” of works of art,
and how this mark of endurance cannot always be best nourished by later
(and indeed often unrealisable) slavish reconstruction as “there comes a
point in the life of any cultural artefact, whether a play or a painting, when
the continued existence of the physical token that represents it does not
necessarily mean that the original identity of the work survives.” 1 In this respect, Miller is equating adaptation and creative appropriation to a type of
performative re-reading, a process whereby certain aspects of the artwork
may be highlighted or obscured according to the concerns of the interpretative community which scrutinizes them. Similarly, Roland Barthes urgently
endorses this kind of interpretative practice, particularly for a world that he
perceives to be increasingly media saturated and in which the acceleration
of information even extends to our “message” gathering reception of those
texts at the very centre of the Western canon:
Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological
habits of our society which would have us “throw away” the story
once it has been consumed (“devoured”) so that we can then move
onto another story, buy another book. 2
Classics, like Antigone, are so implicated in our cultural tradition and history
that very often they provide eminently suitable sites for not only aesthetic
but also socio-cultural re-investigation and re-reading. Indeed, processes of
adaptation and re-interpretation in relation to such eminent texts are at the
very root of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s espousal of “effective history” through
which our traditions, our past, might reveal something to ourselves of our
present predicament. 3 Walter Benjamin, years earlier, also highlighted the
necessity for a dialogic encounter between past and present:
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It is not a question of presenting written works in the context of their
time but of articulating the time, which grasps them – namely ours –
in the time in which they originated. 4
In this respect, classics like Antigone, are more than a mere text; they are
the textual manifestations of tradition which, whether we read the texts or
not, have shaped and formed our cultural situation and which thus represent an inescapably strong and irresistible pull on our cultural consciousness in the present. Arguably, our hermeneutic responsibility is to engage
in dialogue with these classics, and thereby to initiate a conversation between the past and the present. Great texts/artworks are not the cultural artefacts that espouse eternal verities; rather, they are those in which subsequent generations are able to find a living significance for themselves. By
way of performatively re-reading or creatively appropriating such canonical
works emergent and hitherto untapped meanings in such classics are elicited. As Joel Weinsheimer astutely suggests, “the full process of interpreting the classic consists in a reciprocal questioning, a dialogue whereby the
interpreter too becomes interpreted.” 5 Appropriations of a work like Antigone are reflective of a hermeneutic responsibility on the part of the dramatist, and by extension the audience/reader, to recognize his or her own
situated and contingent historical interpretative position. Once such an interpretative responsibility is assumed, the classic is liberated from past historical associations and evaluations for a different and, most importantly,
significant understanding in the present. As Jonathan Miller points out, “it is
not the meaning of the text that changes with the passage of time but its
significance. The mere fact that a modern reader can recognize implications which would have been unrecognizable to the original author does not
imply that the meaning has altered.” 6
A further dimension to take into account when discussing our reception of later reinterpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone is the source text’s
mythical origins, which provide a suitably vague sense of creation that potentially liberates our ability to re-interpret the work. This is a point raised by
Isabel Capeloa Gil: “myths describe a meaningful collectively important reality and are multi-significant. In Levy-Strauss’ opinion, this feature not only
enables but also causes new readings of old myths in ever changing
time/space coordinates.” 7 Similarly, Michael J. Walton also observes the
polysemic power of myth, which, he states, “becomes personal by virtue of
its universality, inviting decodings tied to each new occasion or circumstance. Myth can reveal you to yourself.” 8 Indeed, Hans Blumenberg has
suggested how the mythical foundations of plays like Antigone provide us
with a symbolic framework within which current issues may be examined
along philosophical, literary, historical, economical and social lines. 9 Such
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reworking, Blumenberg suggests, may take the form of two opposing interpretative strategies – affirmative or subversive. Gil refines this distinction by
identifying the former strategy as one that views mythical narratives as
truthful and she cites the major exponents of such an approach as Wagner,
Nietzsche and Hubner. The latter subversive approach is, according to Gil,
characterised by interpretation that brings mythical stories to immanence
by denying their truthful basis as defined by Weber’s concepts of Entzauberung. Although this analysis of the way in which reinterpretations of
the Antigonal myth fall into two antithetical categories is quite convincing,
the very clear chronological divide between the re-interpretations of Sophocles’ play cannot be dismissed. Such a historically interpretative chasm between pre-twentieth century and post-twentieth century appropriations, and
most notably, those written post 1945, further illustrates a distinction between affirmative or subversive readings. However, in addition, a chronological awareness of adaptations’ production highlights the way those written during the twentieth century and later were often oppositional negotiations with the earlier re-interpretations which sought to expose their constraining effect upon the source text. These re-appropriations are often
acutely intertextual with a critical edge and none more so than those which
focus upon Sophocles’ Antigone.
Following the crisis of conscience that followed the end of the war and
the horrifying realisation of the unimaginable, the Holocaust, the West’s
hitherto uncontested philosophical, social, political and cultural values were
to undergo a rigorous intellectual interrogation at all levels. Many artists
strove for new modes of articulation and new forms of expression. Ironically, one way in which many dramatists sought to understand the world
was to revisit the ancients, to embark upon a creative return to the classics
that contested the received, often reified interpretations and hermeneutic
stasis that had contained such works during the many centuries prior to the
horrors of the Second World War. Such a post-bellum hermeneutic return
was no less apparent than with Sophocles’ Antigone. This resurgence of interest in the play was partly due to its central concern with post-war strife
and reprisal, but also because it captured the nightmarish imaginings of a
world that had lost its sense of moral anchorage, a post-Holocaust existence that was compelled to reassess its once unquestioned certainties
and faith in progress.
The unseen but highly complex social dynamic that operates behind
cultural evaluation, and the way in which a certain work, like Sophocles’
Antigone, might possess an uncanny significance for an audience or readership centuries later is noteworthy. Herrnstein Smith observes such a
process as being “in accord with the changing interests and other values of
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No Longer Lost for Words
a community, various potential meanings of a work will become more or
less visible (or ‘realisable’) and the visibility – and hence value – of the
work for that community will change accordingly.” 10 Post war, it would
seem, the significance of Antigone was to resonate loud and clear.
Antigone as Christian Martyr
Although homage, in the form of rewriting or adapting the cultural cornerstones of the Western dramatic canon, has long been practised and exercised, it is what George Steiner identifies as the peculiarly and “radically
transformative” nature of the re-interpretations of Antigone that make an investigation into the play and indeed the leading protagonist’s after-life so
very compelling. 11 Unlike Medea or Electra, not only has this particular ancient play been re-contextualised, modernised and creatively allegorised –
it has became subject to hermeneutic manipulation and even bowdlerization in the service of the Manichean cosmology of the Judea-Christian tradition. Examples of such an ideological superimposition upon the play are
manifold, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s reference to the “godlike” Antigone in a letter to John Gisborne in 1812, and De Quincey’s exclamatory
praise for the central protagonist as, “Holy heathen! … idolatrous yet Christian lady, that in the spirit of martyrdom trodst alone the yawning billows of
the grave.” 12 Indeed, by the time of the French Revolution, the figure of Antigone became “talismanic to the European spirit,” as she was re-cast in a
role that confirmed her Promethean status as the ceaselessly oppressed
rebel, the ever struggling underdog and the unrelenting champion of the
powerless – an uncompromizingly sympathetic, but nonetheless eternally
suffering characterisation. 13 Subsequently, Antigone, the play, has been instrumental in propounding and disseminating ethical precepts and moral
values that were not known at the times of its material production in the fifth
century BC. As a result, the play has often been reinterpreted in the service
of ideologies far removed from the philosophical context of ancient Greece:
Why did Barthelemy choose just this tragedy for seminal reference?
Why did Shelley, Hegel, Hebbel see in the mythical persona of Antigone the ‘highest presence’ to have entered the world of men? What
intention attaches to the repeated hints (in de Quincey, in Kierkegaard, they are more than hints) that Antigone is understood as a
counterpart to Christ, as God’s child and messenger before Revelation? 14
The almost casual hermeneutic elision of the tortuously ambiguous struggle
between conscience and state in the source text into a later iconographic
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representation of Christian martyrdom was still to be in evidence well into
the twentieth century and was reflected in the writings of critics and philosophers alike:
Among the Greek poets, Sophocles is the one whose quality of inspiration is the most visibly Christian and perhaps the most pure (he
is, to my knowledge, much more Christian than any other tragic poet
of the last twenty centuries. This Christian quality is generally recognised in the tragedy of Antigone, which might be an illustration of the
saying: We ought to obey God, rather than men. 15
However, as Charles W. Oudemans observes, it is unlikely that the Greeks
would have “recognized the essentially romantic problem of the individual
in revolt against the state.” 16 The ancients’ response to the outspoken
woman depicted in Sophocles’ play would have been far more complicated
and shaped by current philosophical concepts, including that of the pharmakon. The concept of the pharmakon, that is, the expulsion of poison to
elicit a cure, was closely linked to the practice of ostracism in fifth century
Athens, whereby the very crimes which are ultimately held against the ostracised were at the same time born of the very superior qualities which
raised him or her above “the common herd.” The pharmakon highlights the
intrinsic ambiguity at the centre of Greek thought, wholly devoid of reductively conditioned notions of good and evil, and very much of topical concern at the time the play was first performed. At that time, Athens was experiencing a time of tumultuous change, resulting in a marked clash between the ancient forms of religious thought and the new ideas relating to
the development of the law and new political practices. This conflict was
played out at the ancient dramatic festivals, through plays such as Sophocles’ Antigone, and it is the centrality of concepts such as the pharmakon in
the source text that have been subject to subsequent distortion and omission with later christianised appropriations. The complexities of character
embodied in the original play have often been reinterpreted in such a way
that only the “remedy” of idealistic Christian utopianism is fore-grounded
and the representation of the power of the spirit of good to overcome evil
through suffering is artificially emphasized. However, as Jaques Derrida
observes, this ill-balanced interpretation totally distorts the original ancient
concept and its meaning:
The common translation of pharmakon by remedy – a beneficent
drug – is not of course accurate. Not only can pharmakon really
mean remedy and thus erase, on a certain surface of its functioning,
the ambiguity of its meaning. … Its translation by “remedy” nonetheless erases, in going outside the Greek language, the other pole re-
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served in the word pharmakon. It cancels out the resources of ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossible, an understanding of
the context. 17
For Derrida, the pharmakon has been devalued and misrepresented by
subsequent interpretations. Indeed, it is clear to see how translations have
overlooked the ambiguity of this central concept in Greek culture and art, in
preference for interpretative closure and hermeneutic resolution, contributed to the ease of its disappearance form later christianising interpretations. However, the text does not permit us to see Antigone in such simplistic terms, merely as a noble heroine who acts righteously and dies for her
beliefs. Instead, it clearly confronts and focuses on the dilemma presented
by the seemingly irreconcilable conflicting loyalties to the state and to the
family, polis and oikos, presented in the play. The struggle of evenly
matched principles which lies at the very heart of the concept of the pharmakon was central to the ancient Athenian experience, and, as such, was
far removed from what was to become little more than the dramaturgical
reaffirmation of pre-ordained moralistic tenets about good and evil.
Certainly, popular ideas about women would have influenced ancient
opinion about Antigone and it is highly likely that the unmarried protagonist
would have been viewed by the all-male audience as conforming to the
stereotype of emotional, irrational female virgin and that she might even
have been considered a histrionic “menace to society.” 18 Just as the
eponymous heroine’s unmarried status may have depicted her in a particular light to the spectators at the theatre, similarly her name – Anti-gone or
“anti-generation” – could have immediately suggested something unnatural
or perverse to an Athenian all-male audience. However, the rich polyvalence of Antigone’s name cannot be underestimated, for not only does
“anti” suggest “in opposition to” but also “in compensation of.” Critics such
as Stathis Gourgouris, see the etymological polyphony of the name as further emphasizing the irreconcilable battle at the heart of the play, for it
seems to suggest that Antigone could be in opposition to progeny simultaneous to her being a “replacement” mother for her dead brother and her incestuously created, disintegrating family. Indeed, it has been suggested
that the best to way to summon up the contradictory nature of Antigone’s
name is by way of the phrase, “generated in place of another” or “born to
oppose.” However, over and above the intriguing and ongoing debate
about the meaning of Antigone’s name, the conflict between state and family becomes all the more complex, for we are presented with a betrothed,
much loved and fiercely principled young woman who in order to honour
her ties of kinship denies herself husband, family life, future progeny and
generational continuity for her noble line. In her strict, pious devotion to the
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gods of death and burial, and indeed at the risk of her own life, Antigone is
simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the equally important facets of
those same gods: birth and renewal. This dichotomy makes it far less easy
to see Antigone as purely a victim to patriarchal tyranny, and it makes us
recognise that “the fact that she has much of the right on her side does not
mean she has all the right.” 19 Whether loyalty to the state superseded the
rigid adherence to the family was very much a live issue of debate for fifth
century Athenians. Increasingly, as David Wiles points out, the establishment of Athenian democracy rested in part on breaking down allegiance to
the oikos, in favour of unstinting support for the polis, and “in Greek democratic society ties of the family have to be subordinated to those socially
constructed ties which constitute the political system.” 20
Reflective of the changing nature of society at that time, Sophocles
seems to critique the developing Athenian civic ideology that was often so
forcibly represented in the pre-play ceremonies that took place in the theatre of the day. Such ritual at the dramatic competitions was used to boast of
the wealth, power and civilized laws of Athens, and to encourage the citizens to endorse the democratic ideals that lay behind daily city operations.
Conversely, however, ancient theatre was a debating forum par excellence,
and it would be fair to surmise that Sophocles took advantage of this as
“theatre was both an act of worship of a god and a kind of surrogate political assembly, it was in its nature to explore this middle ground between ritual, family and politics.” 21
With the onset of the Second World War, followed by the myriad horrors thrown up by a divided Europe and the aftermath of the Holocaust, reinterpretations of Antigone were to assume a less overtly tendentious and
oversimplified slant than those appropriations previously outlined, that had
predominated since the French Revolution. Antigone as little more than a
basic Christian triumphalist narrative, that piously celebrated the laudable
constancy of human suffering for the “good,” no longer filled the spiritual
and ethical vacuum left by l’univers concentrationnaire. Thus, post-war appropriations of Antigone sought to recapture the philosophical conundrum
of the pharmakon at the core of Sophocles’ play, but for very topical issues
in the present. The compelling ambiguity of the source text was in tune with
the zeitgeist of a post-Holocaust world confronted by the unrepresentable,
the inarticulable, the unimaginable. This, I would argue, would be the second and long-awaited phase of Antigone’s “afterlife” – one that reinvested
the classic with its original ambiguity, liberating it from the teleological certainties of redemptive narratives which Phillip Cohen characterizes as
those with the propensity to:
Ease the pain of lived contradictions, furnishing missing links be-
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No Longer Lost for Words
tween origins and destinies, stitching together scattered histories
into a singular totalising consciousness. 22
Consequently, the character that had provided such an eloquently affirmative mouthpiece for the moralising tenets of a prevailing and dominant ideology, once again became as belligerent, as irrepressibly subversive and
dangerously radical as the day she defied Creon’s unyielding edict. The often hazardous and certainly never-ending struggle of conscience, represented by both the play and character of Antigone, had re-entered the
stage.
“The Model” and Brecht’s Antigone
Bertolt Brecht’s re-incarnation of Antigone was very much motivated
by the situation that he found himself in at that time – amidst the aftermath
of global conflict and confronted by the seemingly insurmountable challenges of a post-war defeated Germany. Although written post-war, in
1948, the action of the play commences three years earlier, during the
death throes of the war and just as Antigone and Ismene discover their
brother Polynices has been summarily executed as a traitor. Immediately,
Brecht re-invests the Sophoclean play with the ethical complexities about
treachery, partisanship, loyalty and recrimination often thrown up by international conflict and in so doing the war which led to the argument over
Polynices’ burial rites is emphasised far more so than in the source text. As
the manipulative but desperate Creon attempts to delude his own people
into believing in the war with promises of booty and reward, despite the fact
that crucial battles are still taking place and remain far from resolved, our
attention is focused upon the human cost of war, rather than issues surrounding victory and defeat. The play emphasises the way in which the
young are sacrificed to satisfy the misguided principles or dangerous apathy of the aged. This theme is not only reinforced by the early death of Antigone, but also the needless death of two sons, the defiant Haemon and
the compliant Megareus, which in turn serves as a reminder of the earlier
fatal demise of two contrasting brothers, Eteokles and Polynikes. The repetitive emphasis on the sibling pairs in Brecht’s drama – Antigone and Ismene, Haemon and Megereus, Eteocles and Polynikes – serves to diminish the christianizing message of right and wrong that has been symbolized
for so long by the ostensible conflict between Antigone and Creon. Past,
present and future are summoned up in this reworking as Brecht looks
rather gingerly to a future that was being shaped daily by the menacingly
rigid and intransigent competing ideologies of the Cold War and, by extension, the increasing threat of a resultant nuclear catastrophe. Indeed, the
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play probes into the way in which future generations can be destroyed by
persuasive dogma, political sophistry and oral tradition (a quite different
slant on the power of speech in the play). This is clearly suggested by the
increasingly embattled leader’s manipulative attempts to drown out any
sound of perceived dissent be it from messengers (25), the Elders (32),
Haemon, his son (42), Tiresias, the prophet (50) or indeed Antigone (28). 23
Brecht suggests that, in Thebes, negotiation based upon understanding is
discouraged in place of clear-cut and easily labelled ideological stances
that consolidate self-perpetuating division and conflict. Thus, as opposed to
simply regurgitating the moralistically inspired notion of the struggle between clear cut good (Antigone) and evil (Creon), Brecht provides a far
more subtle warning against the failure to negotiate, to compromise, and to
openly discuss different standpoints and beliefs.
Over and above redrafting Sophocles’ masterpiece to forewarn of the
excesses of political dogma in the present and for the future, Brecht’s overt
acknowledgment to war and its aftermath is a focus of the play not only on
a thematic level but also with respect to his dramaturgical method and
form. Indeed, it was in response to the cultural disarray in post-war Germany that he formulated his concept of “The Dramatic Model” and his decision to return to the ancient dramas for inspiration. Brecht was also adamant that post-war art of all kinds be used to purify language and culture
from nazi heritage. The concept of Sprachswaschung or washing Germany’s immediate “cultural” past away, lies at the root of Brecht’s return to
ancient models and myth – such as that provided by Antigone – the myth
and Sophocles’ play. Indeed, the dramatist commented upon the urgency
he felt to return to ancient models to articulate post-bellum confusion, as
opposed to utilising the source text to propose any celebratory but quite artificial divide between victory and defeat, the past and future, tradition and
novelty. The confusion of post-war Germany, a nation trying to retrieve
some sense out of the destructive impact of a tyrannical leadership, is central to this re-interpretation, as opposed to being an invocation of the
Sophoclean tragedy through which to enunciate a reductively victorious
tone about the destruction of the nazi regime. The detection of a sober reconciliatory tone in the play is borne out by Brecht’s own, albeit rather ambiguously phrased, words:
The great character of the resister in the old play does not represent
the German resistance fighters who necessarily seem most important to us. It was not the occasion for a poetic tribute to them. 24
Brecht’s concept of “the model” encapsulates his view that instead of feverishly embracing anything of novelty in an effort to discard the wretched past
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that created nazism, those working towards a new post war cultural life in
Germany would be “well advised not to rely blindly on the assurance that
new ideas are welcome.” 25 Undoubtedly, the dramatist believed there was
room to create new ideas, but new ideas that resulted from negotiating with
past models in a productive and radical way. Antigone’s warning to Ismene
“when we forget the past the past returns,” 26 dramatically emphasizes this
view. Brecht’s approach to what he termed the “masterful treatment of a
model” was not reconstruction, but a productive archaeological exploration
that aimed to make something in the present from the fragmentary detritus
of the past. Benjamin’s analogy of the past, including past cultural works,
as being at its potentially most productive when in a state of ruin is echoed
here. In a similar vein, Brecht considered “the model” as the aesthetic
equivalent to “the architect’s plans [which despite the destruction of a
house or site] it seems, never get lost,” and to which we can make imaginative and productive reference following a time of cultural dislocation. 27
Typically, Brecht’s Antigone is depicted as an average person caught
up in the terrifying maelstrom that swept across Nazi Germany – not a
hero, not extraordinary, not exemplary – just an individual with enough
courage to confront Creon’s dictatorship, but whose defiant gestures are
tragically unsuccessful. The eponymous heroine is introduced as “The
Second” of two sisters hiding in an air-raid shelter in Berlin, 1945, who unwittingly hear the murder of their brother. The play emphasises the ordinary, the commonplace and the humanity of Antigone, and, somewhat
ironically with respect to Brecht’s oft-stated dramatic aims, this permits a
greater degree of empathy for Antigone on the part of an average audience
member. The anonymous label, “The Second,” reinforces a sense of the
average and the typical at the most extreme of times and in the midst of
war – the great leveller. Also, we are left uncertain whether Antigone and
Ismene are sisters of a German soldier fighting the allies, or whether he
was a partisan fighting with the allies, an uncertainty that pales into insignificance as the play’s polemical stance unfolds. In the light of the increasingly apparent ideological rift between East and West at the time of writing,
it is hardly a surprise that the diminution of true democratic debate, past,
present and future, is the central object of Brecht’s critique in his reappropriation. Indeed, the play’s resounding emphasis upon the pit-falls of
political rigidity, fuelled by the power-crazed leaders who we permit to rule,
is compellingly encapsulated by Antigone’s warning that “he who seeks
power is drinking salt water. He cannot keep it down, yet has to drink more.
I am not the first sacrifice, nor the last.” 28 Also, this caveat is summed up
by Haemon’s poetic plea against the unnatural rigidity of dictatorship:
HAEMON: Look, when the rain-swollen brook gushes
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Past the trees, how all those that bend
Are spared, but the unyielding are broken. Or when a laden ship
Spreads out her sails and won’t slacken,
Bending back from the rower’s bench,
How it must end in shipwreck. 29
Such hauntingly expressive words refocuses our attention away from the
specific conflict between Creon and Antigone to the wider ramifications,
past and future, of undiluted power and war-mongering, and how our unnatural acquiescence to such political situations is little less than infanticide. The maniacal leadership that was to result in the deaths of so many
millions under a range of artificially constructed precepts and exuberantly
verbose justifications during the Second World War reverberates throughout a play that steadfastly refuses to attribute any particular guilt or innocence to those caught up in the conflict. As Creon turns his increasingly
uncontained wrath upon Antigone, Ismene, Tiresias, the Messenger and
Haemon, the many sections of society that were to be labelled and added
to the ever-increasing number of casualties and victims of the nazi regime
are symbolically recalled and the horrifying roll-call of persecution and murder is highlighted. Celebration or retrospective triumphalism is not conjured
up by Brecht in this play which presents the pathos filled demise of the
house of Labdacus, as Creon exits “holding nothing more in his hands than
a bloodstained cloth,” from the body of his own dead son. Self-consciously
and sheep-like “the Elders” admit that “we follow him still, and its all downhill.” 30 The Elders’ exit serves as a chilling dramaturgical testimony to the
way in which the young are so often sacrificed for the sins of their fathers
and their silent followers who in an act of true self-immolation sublimate not
only their voice but also their mind to the state.
In Sophocles’ play, Creon learns, to his own devastating cost, that the
laws of kinship that he respects with regard to his own civic power, he neglects with regard to his own house. Acting as the authoritarian chief of the
family, he violates the sanctity of that larger oikos of which Antigone is a
part, by denying her marriage to Haemon and thus, future family life. However, it is important to note that Sophocles, and Brecht afterwards, do not
allow us to comfortably assert that either Creon or Antigone is completely
justified in their actions. Each encounters “laws” and justice that destroy his
or her own cherished and exclusive view. Creon’s refusal of the rights of
the household and family culminate in his loss of both, and thus he comes
to realise their importance to civic life. For Antigone, she is condemned to
death by the very civic laws she disregards and she too is forced to acknowledge their value. By her death, Antigone, whom Ismene warns is “too
strict,” 31 is ensuring the extinction of the oikos to which she so devotedly
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shows allegiance, and thus she returns to her dead parents “cursed to
lodge without a husband.” 32 In a perverse distortion of her designated role
in Athenian society, she marries herself only to death, and therefore puts a
stop to the continuation of the family line. This complex philosophical aporia, this moral gridlock, created just as much by Antigone as it is by Creon,
is articulated by the unheeded words of the prophet Teiresias, in Sophocles’ version, “self-will can turn out to be foolishness.” 33 Brecht re-focuses
us away from the interpretative stasis that has for so long painted Antigone
as innocent martyr sacrificed to satisfy the bloodlust of a brutal regime. Instead of utilising the source text to compose a modern day paean to his
own personal and political ideal of a just and righteous cause, Brecht advocates the need to respect and thus to vigilantly protect the necessary
struggle at the heart of democracy. Regardless of political persuasion,
Brecht asserts, this necessary struggle must never be suppressed by
dogma, raw might or unwieldy power. Such a call to be ever alert to the
diminution of basic rights, for comrade and enemy alike, is made all the
more poignant if we consider how Brecht had been summoned to the
HUAC interrogations held in America, immediately prior to the composition
of his own version of Antigone. In many respects, it is reasonable to suggest that, above all else, it was this harrowing experience of “democracy” in
action, in a post-war United States gripped by anti-communist hysteria, that
was to be the defining inspiration for his highly philosophical, as opposed to
triumphalist, post-war treatment of Sophocles’ classic.
Thus, in keeping with the polemical knot at the centre of the source
text, Brecht replaces any reductive apportioning of blame in his play, with a
compellingly clear advocacy for freedom of thought and expression at all
times, and in all contexts. Brecht’s Antigone, like the source text, is a plea
for voice par excellence. However, the play is not only advocating for the
voice of an iconographic “good” character called Antigone, but rather for all
who are denied expression of thought and expression by a crushingly
dominant ideology that seeks to silence alterity, difference and potential
dialogue.
Apartheid, Antigone and “Life Art”
The Island (a play initially devised in 1973 by Athol Fugard, John Kani
and Winston Ntshona during the Apartheid regime) is an example of what
Walter Benjamin identified as “revolutionary nostalgia.” 34 In accordance
with Benjamin’s thesis, The Island marks a return to the Western liberal
humanist literary tradition in order to articulate a critique of dominant conceptual and ideological notions about the “tradition of the oppressed” which
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had subsumed and rationalised Antigone over the centuries. Benjamin
warned against hermeneutic stasis, which anaesthetises against real life
suffering and can misleadingly result in responding to “the tradition of the
oppressed,” as the norm, and which thus no longer prompts action, but
rather perpetuates inaction. 35 Benjamin recognised that when reading becomes ritualised, as is the case with many of the classics, including Antigone, the suffering depicted in such works becomes aestheticised, and
thus distanced from the realities of daily praxis. In this way, the experience
of, for example, Sophocles’ play is supplanted by a ritualised reception of
an iconographic and perversely romanticised representation of the interminable, and by extension, accepted struggle of the oppressed. The audience/reader thus becomes strangely inured and comfortable with this aestheticized depiction of suffering. Over the centuries, “Antigone” has come to
assume an iconographic status as the martyred champion of the oppressed, and, by transplanting this image of Western liberal humanism to
an Apartheid-riven South Africa, Fugard questions the way the reception of
the classics can often degenerate into a tacit cultural endorsement of suffering and injustice under the euphemistic guise of a textual “tradition” of
the oppressed. In this way, Fugard returns to one of the most well-known
plays in the Western canon, but more importantly he revisits the christianised interpretation that had been superimposed upon the reception of that
play with an acutely critical voice – in order to highlight the moral flaws and
ethical insubstantiality of such canonised reading practices for and in an
Apartheid-riven South Africa. How, ask Fugard, Kani and Ntshona, could a
black South African version of Antigone’s suffering be deemed saintly, noble and thus “acceptable” when thousands upon thousands were incarcerated, beaten, humiliated and murdered purely on the basis of their skincolour?
The Island exposes the finite nature of redemptive and triumphalist
narratives as well as revealing the way in which racism operates by a process of the projection of values by those in power upon those who are powerless, often in the guise of virtue. As Philip Cohen points out:
Every time a literary critic claims a universal ethical, moral or emotional instance in a piece of English literature, he or she colludes in
the violence of the colonial legacy in which the European value or
truth is defined as a universal one. 36
Indeed, Bhekizizwe Petersen has commented upon the process of cultural
projection onto the indigenous population in South Africa during the early
years of the separatist and Apartheid regime:
The pedagogic appeal of performance for missionaries and liberal
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whites was that it seemed amenable to the transmission of Christian
‘civilized’ ideals and values. Furthermore, theatre could be locked
into their political and social projects. The stock themes of Theatrein-Education in mission schools were those of repentance, character
training, habits of industry, diligence, thrift and obedience. 37
In this respect, The Island’s return to the ancient play by Sophocles is a
strategy to critique all shades of imperialism, be it born of brute conquest or
resulting from distortedly misguided and overarching cultural paternalism.
The re-invocation of a play, which had become synonymous with martyrdom and the skewed piety behind the tradition of the oppressed, in order to
recount the very real situation of black South African political prisoners,
demands a hermeneutic reassessment on our part. In this way, we are
compelled to recognize the way in which the very foundations of our cultural heritage have often been implicated and used as justification for atrocity and persecution. Fugard draws our attention to the missionary quality
with which imperialist educators introduced christian interpretative stasis,
such as their appropriation of Antigone, to South Africa, and how they
thereby indirectly provided an interpretative justification for what was to
evolve into Apartheid – adding weight to Jean Paul Sartre’s sobering view
that often “humanism is the counterpart of racism: it is a practice of exclusion.” 38 Thus, active remembrance of the archetypal and iconographical
“tradition of the oppressed,” which had come to be represented by Antigone, is situated in violent opposition to the political present experienced in
South Africa under Apartheid in this play. The result of such a defiant juxtaposition is to actively deconstruct one of the grand recits enshrined in the
Western liberal humanist tradition in order to draw our attention to the limits
of such narratives. In a sense, one could say that The Island dramaturgically imposes upon a Western euro-centric audience a process that Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak has described as “unlearning privileged discourse.” 39
The voice of Antigone, the character, reverberates throughout the narrative structure of The Island, on a number of levels. Firstly, the play posits
that there are countless Antigones by suggesting she represents all the
black political prisoners who were incarcerated for speaking out against the
State during Apartheid. However, on another level the play centres around
two fictional characters – “John” and “Winston” – who besides suffering the
daily humiliations and torture of prison life in the notorious detention centre
Robben Island, are forced to entertain their unseen captors with a makeshift production of Antigone. This meta-theatric dimension to the play,
which later transforms us from mere spectators into the very captors who
demand to see the play, is a central device through which the audience are
compelled to re-consider not only Antigone, but also the canonised reading
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practices that have been superimposed upon the play and unquestioningly
perpetuated over the centuries. The third way in which Antigone is reinvoked is through the actors and co-devisers of the play, John Kani and
Winston Ntshona. Both actor/devisers are presented as almost indistinguishable from their characters “John” and “Winston,” not only through the
repetition of names, but also as black actors who were forced to work in
secret for fear of imprisonment, and who had experienced first hand the
brutality of a regime that imprisoned fellow actors for performing Antigone
to audiences in the culturally excluded black townships. Their suffering at
the hands of the State is inextricably linked to and represented through the
degradation suffered by the characters they play, and it is such a very firm
autobiographical link that makes this version of Antigone much more than a
politically inspired representation of injustice – it is “life art.” In the context
of the play’s original performance, Kani and Ntshona present their lives on
stage, unscripted, as black men who are at that very moment, politically
and culturally oppressed. This is most movingly suggested in the mimed
but physically demanding opening sequence of the play that depicts John
and Winston carrying out spirit-crushing tasks in the prison courtyard. The
script does not designate a set time for this sequence, leaving John Kani
and Winston Ntshona with the decision as to how long the audience will be
subjected to watching a deafeningly silent parody of not only their characters’ Sisyphian punishment, but a symbolic re-enactment of their own
seemingly never ending, often hopeless and frequently unacknowledged
struggle against Apartheid. In this way, Fugard et al utilise the power of
drama to make us feel uncomfortable, uneasy and even guilty.
The reception history of the play (and by play, I am referring to the
source text as well as the adaptation) is part of the subsequent dramaturgical effect of The Island. The play has literally broken free of the silence
imposed by not only the South African censorship laws, but also more importantly the constraints of the piously framed canonised reading practices
with which we cast Antigone as the “noble” embodiment of the “tradition of
the oppressed.” In this respect, the close intertwining of an ancient dramatic protagonist who dies for speaking out and the real life experiences of
those like Kani and Ntshona, as suggested in The Island, re-invests our
experience of the play not only with the authentically tragic proportions of
the source text, but also with the identifiably realist effect of a play that
makes us reassess our ethical and hermeneutic standpoint in and for the
present. Such “life art” is imbued with authentic and real voices, and by extension, it reinvigorates Antigone, the character, with the terrifying and exhilarating power with which she once challenged authority.
Ultimately, The Island far exceeds the considerable rigours of adapting
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an ancient play for a modern day audience, for it is a revivification. Fugard,
Kani and Ntshona present us with the reclamation of “life” on a number of
levels, textual, cultural and political, by repossessing Antigone for and as
their own story. As Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub point out, with respect
to the articulation of trauma:
Repossessing one’s life story through giving testimony is itself a
form of action, of change, which one has to actually pass through, in
order to continue and complete the process of survival after liberation. The event must be reclaimed because even if successfully repressed, it nevertheless invariably plays a decisive formative role in
who one comes to be and how one comes to live one’s life. 40
True to the testimonial spirit of The Island, voice and speaking are given
particular prominence throughout the play, alluding not only to Creon’s silencing tactics in the source text, but also directly referring to the policy of
denying all black South Africans any political and cultural expression during
the Apartheid years. One example of the way in which the struggle that
John and Winston undergo to find a “voice” is the telephone game they devise, and through which they enjoy imaginary conversations with their families when locked up in their cell. Conversely, the oratorical “voice” of John’s
staged ‘Creon’ is utilised to parody political sophistry. The effect of such
parody is to emphasise the way in which the most abhorrent and heinous of
ideas can be made to sound appealing and even attractive through the
adept manipulation of words and voice. John’s parodic rendition of Creon’s
oratory is one that demotes the misguided but often eloquent patriot of the
source text to being on a par with an unsophisticated and patronising touring evangelist. The finely tuned polemical balance between Antigone and
Creon in the source text, is now, with close reference to the intertextual
christianisation of the play, thus shown to be of little consequence when
applied to the horrific injustice of Apartheid.
Sophocles’ “play” as presented by John and Winston is not an exemplum of the nobility of suffering, for such an interpretation is exposed as a
sham, and most powerfully so when Winston reassumes his own rejuvenated sense of identity at the end of the play within the play:
[Tearing off his wig and confronting the audience as Winston, not
Antigone.]
WINSTON: Gods of our Fathers! My Land! My Home! Time waits no
longer. I go now to my living death, because I honoured those things
to which honour belongs. 41
A potent irony in The Island is that Winston’s journey toward a new found
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self-awareness of his own subjectivity is shaped as a result of his short relationship with the character of “Antigone.” In an ingenious reworking of one
of the central concerns of the source text – the denial of future progeny –
Fugard utilises the source text in his play as the impetus for a new born
sense of self-determination on the part of the black South African political
prisoner who has been cast in the role of “Antigone.” This moment of
epiphany for Winston takes place as he glances into his water bucket, only
to see and be disgusted by his image – an emasculated, wig-donning caricature:
[He is now at the cell door. He listens, then moves over to the wig on
the floor and circles it. He finally picks it up. Moves back to the cell
door to make sure no one is coming. The water bucket gives him an
idea. He puts on the wig and after some difficulty manages to see
his reflection in the water. A good laugh, which he cuts off abruptly.
He moves around the cell trying out a few of Antigone’s poses. None
of them work. He feels a fool. He finally tears off the wig and throws
it down on the floor with disgust.] 42
Winston’s disgust and abjection at the “Antigone” confronting him implicitly
suggests the birth of independent subjectivity as defined by Julia Kristeva’s
abjection theory. Unlike Lacan’s mirror-stage, Kristeva identifies a primal
repression of undifferentiated being called the chora, prior to the mirror
stage. Before abjection, when the child is immersed in the chora, being is
undifferentiated, and it is only through a process of abjection, that is, expelling the mother’s body from its own self, that the child begins to form personal boundaries and then can experience mirror identification with alien
images:
If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes
the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of
its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify
with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it
finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that is none other
than the abject. 43
Similarly, Winston’s sense of abjection is so great when he sees his
reflection, he rejects the disguise offered to him by the “nanny” state and
discards the mantle indicative of the teleology of the oppressed. Just as
this rejection represents a burgeoning sense of subjectivity and self-hood
on the part of Winston, it also symbolically represents the nascent free
South Africa in evolution. In effect, the disguise of Antigone is understood
for what it is by Winston, to such an extent that his newly discovered sense
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of identity is revealed to us by his failure to “play” the part at the end of the
play. In this respect, the self-effacement represented by the mirror image in
the cell water bucket has reasserted in Winston a new sense of self-hood.
This process is almost like rebirth in the face of imminent disappearance
through assimilation, for as Gadamer states:
The ideal copy would be a mirror image, for its being really does
disappear; it exists only for someone looking into the mirror, and is
nothing beyond its appearance. But in fact it is not a picture or a
copy at all, for it has not separate existence. 44
However, by the end of his performance, Winston’s claim for a “separate
existence” releases the double edged pharmakon of the source text’s Antigone, who, as opposed to assuming the role of martyr promulgated by
Christian interpretative stasis, re-emerges and gives voice to the liberated
Antigone that Winston has become. It is the pharmakon, as represented by
Antigone, which subsequently provides the psychological poison to elicit
the cure of a sense of self-hood and identity in Winston. It is the pharmakon
that facilitates his recognition that he is the “Antigone” that will not be silenced, that will not be immured by the frames of reference of an unjust interpretative stasis.
***
The christianised interpretative tradition that was constructed around
our reception of Antigone for so many centuries, eventually crumbled under
the weight of the horrifyingly momentous experiences of the twentieth century and beyond. Once again, our own uncertainties, doubts and fears in
the present have led us to listen to the complexities of the source text. The
celebratory pious depiction of the Sophoclean character, so beloved by the
Romantics, no longer resonates for a world in which racism, persecution,
terrorism, freedom fighting, state murder and genocide continues to take
place, often in the name of religion. During the twentieth century and particularly since 1945, Antigone’s vocal range has once again tested our resolve to listen. Her many cadences, be they healing, accusatory or bereaved, are testimony to the enduring allure of Sophocles’ Antigone for
dramatists today, and indeed they provide reaffirmation that after centuries
of interpretative stasis, Antigone is now most certainly not lost for words.
Maurice Blanchot’s evocative description of the potential of the classics to
engage our imagination today provides a particularly apposite conclusion to
this discussion of Antigone past, present and future: “What makes them
seductive is … the future of what they say. Their fascination is due not to
their current song but to what it promises to be.” 45
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University of Wales, Aberystwyth
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 28.
2
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Millar (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 15.
3
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (London:
Sheed and Ward, 1989), p. 15.
4
Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970) p. 219.
5
Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Gadamer’s Truth and
Method (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985),p.129.
6
Miller, Subsequent Performances, p. 71.
7
Isabel Capeloa Gil, “Antigone and Cassandra: Gender and Nationalism in German
Literature,” Orbis Litterarum, 55/2 (2000), p. 119.
8
Michael J. Walton, “Hit or Myth: The Greeks and Irish Drama,” Amid our Troubles:
Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, eds. Marianne Macdonald and Michael J. Walton
(London: Methuen, 2002), p. 4.
9
Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 10.
10
Barbara Hernnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for
Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1988), p. 10.
11
George Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and
Thought (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), p. 139.
12
Thomas De Quincey, De Quincey’s Works (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,
1863), p. 65.
13
Steiner, Antigones, p. 7.
14
Steiner, Antigones, p. 19.
15
Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Amongst the Ancient Greeks, trans. E C
Geissbuhler (New York: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 9.
16
Charles. W. Oudemans, Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy and Sophocles’ Antigone (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1987), p. 3.
17
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press,
1981), p. 97.
18
Paul Cartledge, “Deep Plays: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life,” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1997), p. 30.
19
Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Oklahoma: Oklahoma UP, 1999), p. 168.
20
David Wiles, An Introduction to Greek Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
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1992), p. 67.
21
Wiles, An Introduction to Greek Theatre, p. 77.
22
Phillip Cohen, “It’s Racism what Dunnit – Hidden Narratives in Theories of Racism,” in Race, Culture and “difference,” eds. James Donald and Ali Rattansi (London: Sage, 1992), p. 74.
23
Bertolt Brecht, Antigone, trans. Judith Malina (New York: First Applause, 1990),
pp. 25, 32, 42, 50, and 28 respectively.
24
Brecht, “Masterful Treatment of The Model,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development
of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1994), p. 210.
25
Brecht, “Masterful Treatment of the Model,” p. 209.
26
Brecht, Antigone, p. 18.
27
Brecht, “Masterful Treatment of the Model”, p. 209.
28
Brecht, Antigone, p. 3.
29
Brecht, Antigone, p. 42.
30
Brecht, Antigone, p. 64.
31
Brecht, Antigone, p. 36.
32
Brecht, Antigone, p. 47.
33
Sophocles, The Theban Plays, trans. A. L. Brown (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 74.
34
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 2.
35
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 211.
36
Cohen, Race, Culture and “difference,” p. 248.
37
Bhekizizwe Petersen, “Apartheid and the Political Imagination in Black South African Theatre,” Politics, Power and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in
South Africa, ed. Liz Gunner (Johannesburg: Witswatersrand Unversity Press,
1994), p. 36.
38
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensembles,
trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 762.
39
Gayarti Chakravorty Spivak, “Criticism, Feminism and The Institution,” The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harsym (New York:
Routledge, 1990), p. 9.
40
Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge 1992), p. 85.
41
Athol Fugard, The Township Plays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), p. 226.
42
Athol Fugard, The Township Plays, p. 211.
43
Julia Kristva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia UP,
1982), p. 5.
44
Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 138.
45
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1993), p. 41.
147
Irish Antigones:
Burying the Colonial Symptom
Kelly Younger
The word “tragedy,” as Irish critic Shaun Richards points out, “is a term
frequently used to describe the contemporary Northern Irish situation. It is
applied both by newspaper headline writers trying to express the sense of
futility and loss at the brutal extinction of individual lives and by commentators attempting to convey a sense of the country and its history in more
general terms.” 1 Since identifying this particular use of the word, it has become clear that the Irish are not referring to tragedy in general, but to
Greek tragedy in particular. For example, Deaglán de Bréadun writes in
The Irish Times: “The whole community knows outright disaster was only
narrowly averted at Drumcree last year [1996]. There is also a terrible
creeping feeling that Drumcree Three will be upon us soon and that, like a
Greek tragedy, this time disaster is inevitable.” 2 Another article the following year, on Sinn Fein’s exclusion from the 1998 Peace Process, reported:
“One long-distance peace processor lamented that today’s events were
‘like a Greek tragedy. You can see the end coming but you can’t do anything about it.’” 3
This “language of exhausted fatalism” 4 is not unfamiliar to the Irish,
and offers an explanation for the more than twenty Irish authors who have
translated, produced, or adapted over two dozen Irish versions of Greek
tragedies in the last century alone. 5 Irish poets have translated the trageCOLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/younger.pdf
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dies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, yet all with a distinctly Irish
stamp. Moreover, these Irish-Greek (or Hiberno-Hellenic) adaptations all, in
one way or another, comment upon and question the instability of twentieth-century Ireland – the people, the poets, and the divided country.
Of all the Greek tragedies available for translation and adaptation, two
in particular offer an insight into the Irish perception of self and nation: one
for its peculiar paucity, the other for its abundance. The Oedipus Rex is not
only the first Greek tragedy to appear on the professional Irish stage, but it
is also the least performed. Its first run was its last. The Antigone, on the
other hand, arises again and again in Ireland, at one point appearing four
times by four different authors in the very same year. Lacan explains the attraction:
We know very well that over and beyond the dialogue, over and beyond the question of family and country, over and beyond the moralizing arguments, it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in
her unbearable splendour. She has a quality that both attracts us
and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible, self-willed
victim disturbs us. 6
But why are the Irish drawn to her in particular, and why have the Irish
given preference to Antigone over Oedipus?
In this article, I will argue that the Irish were drawn to this dutiful
daughter because of their familiarity with her predicament. By predicament
I refer to Judith Butler’s description: “Antigone appropriates the stance and
idiom of the one she opposes, assumes Creon’s sovereignty, even claims
the glory that is destined for her brother, and lives out a strange loyalty to
her father, bound as she is to him through his curse.” 7 The Irish, similarly,
have appropriated the “stance and idiom” of the one they opposed (i.e.,
England) while simultaneously living out a “strange loyalty” to the English,
bound as they were through the curse of their colonial past. This past, consisting of futile attempts to overthrow the colonizer, explains why the Irish
were not drawn toward productions of the Oedipus. For nearly eighthundred years of English colonization, political patricide had proven impossible. The Antigone, therefore, becomes a symptom of this failure to decolonize. Moreover, it changes the course of Irish drama in the twentieth
century by taking on two forms: first, a kind of analogue deferral of actual
productions of the Oedipus play (resolving into an affinity for melancholy
comedies) and second, the symptomatic staging and re-staging of the Antigone as a rebellious, political, and anti-Oedipal drama.
In order to understand this problematic relationship between Oedipus
and Antigone, we must first turn to the most important voice of early 20th
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Century Irish letters. In the winter of 1904, W.B. Yeats began work on his
version of King Oedipus for the new Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and “was all
the more enthusiastic about it because the play was banned in London.” 8
By 1905, Oliver St John Gogarty provided Yeats with a verse translation of
the play, but Yeats disapproved of it. Yeats turned then to the English classicist Gilbert Murray for a translation, but Murray refused. He said:
I will not translate the Oedipus Rex for the Irish Theatre, because it
is a play with nothing Irish about it: no religion, not one beautiful action, hardly a stroke of poetry. Even the good things that have to be
done in order to make the plot work are done through mere loss of
temper. The spiritual tragedy is never faced or understood: all the
stress is laid on the mere external uncleanness. Sophocles no doubt
did many bad things in his life. I would not try to shield him from just
blame. But in this case I am sure, he was in a trance and his body
was possessed by a series of devils … It has splendid acting qualities as an acting play, but all of the most English-French-German
sort; it is all construction and no spirit. 9
It is interesting that Murray denied Yeats request on the grounds that Oedipus “is a play with nothing Irish about it,” yet he considers it to have “splendid acting qualities” for English, French, or German actors. Murray suggested, instead, that Yeats perform Prometheus, the Persae, or Antigone at
the Abbey – plays “with a seditious innuendo.” 10 In other words, rebellious
plays for the rebel Irish.
Yeats “lost interest in the project” late in 1910 when “the English censor withdrew his ban on the play.” 11 Yeats became discouraged not just
because of the lifting of the ban, but from news that someone else – someone who knew Greek very well – had already gained the Lord Chamberlain’s permission to produce their new version of Oedipus. The translator?
Gilbert Murray. 12 In a disappointed and hurt voice, Yeats informs Lady
Gregory of the news: “So you were right. … They will do it better than we
will – alas.” 13
In his “Plain Man’s Oedipus” published in the New York Times on 15
January 1933, Yeats is more specific as to his motivation for producing an
Oedipus for the Irish National Theatre and his hopeful results:
When I first lectured in America thirty years ago, I heard at the University of Notre Dame that they played Oedipus the King. That play
was forbidden by the English censorship on the ground of its immorality; Oedipus commits incest; but if a Catholic university could perform it in America my own theatre could perform it in Ireland. Ireland
had no censorship, and a successful performance might make her
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proud of her freedom say even, perhaps, “I have an old historical religion moulded to the body of man like an old suit of clothes, and am
therefore free.” 14
The Greek tragedy of Oedipus, then, would not only establish the new Abbey Theatre, but it would enable the Irish to the thumb their noses at the
English; it would ultimately free Ireland of its historical, political, and religious shackles. Quite a claim for a play. But just when the Irish production
was about to go through, it fell to pieces and the English production took to
the stage. This situation is not merely an historical disaster, however, but a
recapitulation of a personal, and deeply Irish version of the Oedipal complex.
Declan Kiberd, in his excellent Inventing Ireland, offers an analysis of
Ireland’s revolution in Oedipal terms. He writes:
In societies on the brink of revolution, the relation between fathers and sons is reversed. The Irish risorgimento was, among other
things, a revolt by angry sons against discredited fathers. The fathers had lost face, either because they had compromised with the
occupying English in return for safe positions as policemen or petty
clerks, or because they had retreated into a demeaning cycle of alcoholism and unemployment. The Irish father was often a defeated
man, whose wife frequently won the bread and usurped domestic
power, while the priest usurped his spiritual authority. Most fathers
accepted the English occupiers as part of the “given” and warned
their sons against revolt. …
In a colony the revolt by a son against a father is a meaningless
gesture, because it can have no social effect. Since the natives do
not have their hands on the levers of power, such a revolt can neither refurbish nor renew social institutions. … When the sons of
each generation rebelled, they soon saw the meaninglessness of
their gesture and lapsed back into family life, as into “a haven in a
heartless world”: yet it was a haven that, in every respect, reflected
the disorder of the outside colonial dispensation. The compromised
or broken father could provide no convincing image of authority. In
Memmi’s words: “It is the impossibility of enjoying a complete social
life which maintains vigour in the family and pulls the individual back
to that more restricted cell which saves and smothers him.” All that
remains is for the son, thus emasculated, to take the place of the
weak and ineffectual father. 15
Kiberd’s interpretation of the male Irish condition leads to an Oedipal complex, only on a national scale. England metaphorically plays the role of
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Laius (the Father) while Ireland plays Oedipus (the Son). Moreover, the
ruler (distant yet authoritative) emasculates the ruled (powerless yet rebellious). One paradox, however, complicates the situation for Ireland: the
Irish father is also a colonised son. The Irish son, as a result, has two fathers, neither of whom he can rebel against. One is too powerful, the other
too weak. Patricide, though desirable, is therefore impossible.
During the Irish literary renaissance, this failed Oedipal theme surfaced again and again in the works of many formative writers, including
Pearse, Kavanagh, and O’Casey. The most notable treatment, however, is
J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World where Christy Mahon wins
the hearts of a County Mayo village after killing his own father. Pegeen is
wooed away from the inept Shawn Keogh by Mahon’s defiant act. The villagers soon learn that the father-killing is a lie, and turn on Mahon for making them believe he was anything other than a servile child (like the rest of
them). Joyce, as well, “chronicles a whole series of unreliable, inadequate
or absent fathers, priests and authority figures.” 16 He takes the theme a
step further, however, and suggests that an absent father is actually preferable to an authoritative one. As a result, the son can freely re-invent himself. Just as Mahon metaphorically killed his father in order to create a new
mythological self, Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses is “himself his own father,”
“made not begotten.” 17 Kiberd notes:
What was written, again and again through the Irish revival, was
an Anti-Oedipus, which saw the ancient tale not as awful tragedy but
as happy comedy. True, the children of Oedipus felt the pangs of
fear and guilt which assailed the scattered offspring of Old Mahon –
but Christy’s comic patricide makes History possible. The ensuing
search for a father-surrogate may be rooted in a desire to erase the
memory of the necessary patricide … but no surrogate and no actual
father can suffice for the child who must invent a self. …
That said, it should be added that this constant preoccupation
with father-figures in revival texts is the tell-tale sign of a society
which is unsure of itself and of its ultimate destiny. Its rebellions are
conducted not so much against authority figures as against their
palpable absence. These gestures rehearse not the erosion of
power so much as the search for a true authority, and in them will
lurk the danger of re-Oedipalization. 18
The irony of the Oedpial situation, then, is that patricide is necessary for
historical progress. The Irish, it seems, viewed this complex as a melancholic comedy because the fathers could not be found; Irish sons had to invent authoritative Irish fathers before they could kill them.
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This tradition of failed or deferred attempts at oedipalization eventually
produced a symptomatic abundance of Antigones in Ireland. In 1984, four
Irish Antigones emerged from her stony tomb, and all written within months
of each other: Brendan Kennelly’s Antigone, Aidan Carl Mathew’s Antigone, Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act, and Pat Murphy’s film Ann Devlin. Anthony Roche and Christopher Murray each offer explanations for the four
Antigones of 1984. For Roche, it is the “difficult balance between the claims
of the status quo and the urge to revolution, between the need to build stable political structures and maintain tribal loyalties [that is] particularly
fraught and precarious in the Irish context.” 19 Roche then draws upon the
legacy of a Gaelic past – referring to the Brehon laws, the traditional Irish
family structure, and the former “centrality of woman to the culture” 20 – to
show how well Antigone transfers into an Irish milieu. Roche concludes that
Antigones “were never more needed than at present, when every statement from [Irish] political and church leaders carries with it the implicit injunction: ‘Antigones, lie down.’” 21
Murray goes a step further and explicitly identifies these political and
religious ‘injunctions.’ He says:
[1984] was the year of the New Ireland Forum Report; the year of
the Criminal Justice Bill; the year of the Kerry Babies’ Case; the year
after the failure of the abortion debate and the year before its sequel,
the debate on divorce which ended in a crushing defeat for liberal
opinion in Ireland. 1984, accordingly, was an appropriate year for
Antigone to walk forth and state her ‘non serviam’ to the Irish establishment, with the understanding that the establishment would not,
could not, be shaken from its position. 22
For Murray, these “Orwellian year” events “attracted [Irish poets] to the Antigone myth through an apocalyptic vision of political and social events in
Ireland, North and South, in 1984.” 23
The first Antigone we will investigate was written by Brendan Kennelly
(b. 1936). Kennelly’s version is interesting because he emphasizes not only
Antigone’s rebellious quest for articulate action, but her sister Ismene’s inability to rebel. Traditionally, the two sisters are categorised in much the
same way as Antigone and Creon. Ismene is afraid of Creon’s word, and
therefore will not act. She chooses to obey civil law rather than the ancient
laws of kinship. Ismene is all talk, and no action. Kennelly, however, in his
Irish version of the tragedy, moves us beyond these restrictive categories.
Ismene is usually the conservative litmus for Antigone’s radical demeanour,
but Kennelly merits her more dignity. She is not a coward. She does not
love her unburied brother any less than Antigone. She is equally trapped in
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her own marginality. Ismene, just as Antigone, struggles to find words that
express her own experience. She says:
Antigone, not a single word of friends,
Not a single happy or miserable word,
Has reached me
Since we two sisters
Were robbed of our two brothers,
Killed in a single day.
Since the Argive host fled
I might as well be dead
Because I know nothing more,
Not, as I have said, one solitary word. 24
Ismene, like her sister, is without ‘words.’ The two women struggle to find a
language of their own. Antigone may have remarked that ‘word and deed’
were one in her, but when her grief comes to a head, she is inarticulate.
When the Guard describes Antigone burying her brother, he says “She
gave a sharp cry / Like a wounded bird … She cried beyond all bounds of
words.” 25 Here, Antigone is without words because she cannot find the
proper male-vocabulary to express her experience. 26 Language is lost to
her. She must create her own. And yet how possible was it in Ireland at that
time to create a distinct, non-violent, or safe language. The “very day [Kennelly’s] Antigone opened at the Peacock [Theatre in Dublin] saw a huge funeral for a dead IRA man in Monaghan.” 27
Aidan Carl Mathews (b. 1956) produced an Antigone as well in 1984,
yet in contrast to Kennelly’s version, his is more ironic, humorous, and theatrical. His drama is set in “Ireland in the 1980s B.C., soon after Sparta has
entered the war on the German side.” 28 His setting reveals his affinity for
Greek, German, and Irish history as well as suggests the postmodern collapse of time. Mathews, like Kennelly, makes several important adjustments to the ancient script. For example, Haemon becomes HeMan, Creon
becomes a fascist dictator, Eteocles’ name is changed to Peteocles, or
Petey. It is highly significant that Mathews changes Eteocles’ name (so
both brother’s names begin with the letter ‘P’), because at one point Antigone writes a ‘P’ on a wall as graffiti – a symbolic act of burying or marking
the death of both brothers. Moreover, Mathews plays with the notion that
these characters have been playing their roles for 2000 years, and they are
simply worn out. The Chorus opens the play by saying: “I’ll come in here, I’ll
traipse around, I’ll say my lines – I got the most fuckin’ difficult lines in the
whole thing – I’ll do my party piece, scrub down, and fuck off home again,
O.K.?” 29 Clearly not a direct translation, yet at the same time, it is obviously
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written in Irish colloquialism. The play’s most radical departure from the
original text comes in Antigone’s final speech. She says to the audience:
Do any of you know Polyneices? Polyneices? Please. Please tell
them. Please stop them doing this. (Chorus attempts to muffle her
mouth with his hand. She bites, he strikes her.) Jesus, my nose is
bleeding. Stop it please. Tell them. Tell them. They’ll come for the
woman down the street. Will you tell them then? They’ll come for
your next door neighbour. Will you tell them then? They’ll come for
you. And after that, when there’s nobody left, they’ll come for themselves. 30
This passage is significant not only for its metatheatricality, but because the
attempt to silence Antigone takes place at a time in Ireland when Antigonelike figures were speaking out on abortion, divorce, and Catholic misogyny.
The Chorus, who remains cynical throughout, closes the play by commenting: “They say to me: You’re a middle-of-the-roader, Chorus. And they’re
not bein’ nice. But I ask you, I ask you … what is the most dangerous place
to be? It’s not the fuckin’ footpath. It’s the guy in the middle of the road who
gets mowed down.” 31
Tom Paulin (b. 1949) offers the most modified and controversial Irish
adaptation of the Antigone. This highly political Belfast poet frequently
writes in a thick, Northern Irish vernacular, and that fact leads to interesting
interpretations of his play The Riot Act: After Antigone (1984). While he
maintains the traditional conflicts of Antigone (i.e. man vs. woman, age vs.
youth, society vs. individual), his version has a distinct Irish parallel. Creon,
in the play, resembles a British politician in Northern Ireland during the
Thatcherite era. He sustains the political parallels through British and Ulster
accents, yet his version appears to celebrate materialistic endeavours
rather than the philosophical undertakings of Sophocles’ drama. Paulin
does not include any mention of man’s responsibility to be moral. In the
end, Creon is destroyed, but his stubbornness takes on the air of the deadlock that faced Northern Ireland at the time. His Chorus ends the drama
with:
There is no happiness, but there can be wisdom.
Revere the gods; revere them always.
When men get proud, they hurl hard words, then suffer for it.
Let them grow old and take no harm yet: they still get punished.
It teaches them. It teaches us. 32
Yet we are left to wonder who ‘they’ are – the Irish or the English, the moral
or the amoral? Moreover, who is ‘them’ and who is ‘us’? Paulin leaves us in
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a dead-lock – in a stale-mate without an answer – probably because in
1984, there was no answer in sight for the troubled North.
The fourth, and final, Antigone of 1984 is the film Anne Devlin by Pat
Murphy. Briefly, it is the dramatisation of the life of a housekeeper named
Anne Devlin who worked for the historical Robert Emmet (a member of the
United Irishmen who, after the failure of the rebellion of 1803, was executed by British soldiers). The film opens with Anne wiping dust away from
a dead male’s body, and preparing it for a proper Catholic burial. When the
British forces intervene, she, as expected, rebels against them. Major Sirr,
the Creon figure once again portrayed as British, serves as the symbolic
Law to Anne’s “disengagement from the fatally compromised, tainted
speech of male power in which the Irish and British sides have both engaged and to which her actions, questions, and final refusal to speak have
been a consistent challenge.” 33 The most moving image of the entire film,
however, comes when Anne, in her imprisonment, holds the body of her
younger brother in her arms. This mixed image of rebellion in defeat creates and further propagates “the colonial legacy of sentimentality and abject victimage.” 34 Moreover, it offers an image of irresistible suffering; a
symptom of yet another failed attempt at oedipalization.
If we accept the earlier proposal that the Irish son was fated to become the ineffectual Irish father, then we begin to understand why Irish audiences related with these rebellious Irish Antigones. By employing the Lacanian notion of the Father as Law, we see the inability of the Law to fully
castrate the Irish subject and define the subject’s symbolic role in the world.
This application makes for a reading of the Antigone where Creon, be he
the authoritative Catholic Church, the Irish father, or the English colonizer,
is attempting to represent the kind of lingering tribalism and irrational core
of resistance to symbolization.
We may come even closer to understanding these Irish Antigones if
we look at her in terms of the dutiful daughter faced with submission to the
Father’s Law. This dutiful daughter may submit, as Elizabeth Grosz outlines, in various ways: “a submission to the oedipalization of desire, to the
patriarchal denigration of her corporeality and pleasure, to a femininity defined as passive, castrated, superficial, seductive, narcissistic; or even a
submission through what appears to be resistance to the oedipal law, i.e.,
the so-called ‘masculinity complex.’” 35 It is clear that Oedipus’ other daughter, Ismene, opts for the former while Antigone chooses the latter. By resisting oedipalization, Antigone the daughter attempts to appropriate the masculine power hitherto denied the feminized and colonized Irish son.
The attempt, however, always fails. That is the tragedy. It also repeats
itself. That is the symptom. The Irish subject, therefore, relishes in passive
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narcissism, not from despair or apathy, but from a pleasure taken in irresistible suffering. In other words, the feminized Irish male identifies with Antigone’s masculinity complex – desiring it himself – but recognizes the futility and consequences of such resistance in the enduring colonial matrix.
Moreover, this Irish subject prefers to remain within that realm of narcisistic
victimization, i.e. forever licking his own wounds. Antigone the character,
therefore, represents the strength for political insurgency and the potency
of individual resistance that was denied to the Irish by the English. At the
same time, according to the relentless plot, her character must be sacrificed and the play must conclude with the victimization of her body, the castration of her voice, and the burial of her resistance. The drama demands a
return to repression and passivity – the state of the Irish in 1984 under their
church, their state, their history. Antigone serves, then, as an outlet in
which the Irish not only identify with her defiant nature, but canonize her as
a martyr for the Republic. The tension formalized in this vision of the rebel/victim signifies less an egoistic compensation for political impotence,
than an enjoyment of living within the boundaries of symptomatic suffering.
But why would the Irish desire to hold onto the symptoms of colonization when they are no longer a colony? Why find jouissance in victimization
if victimhood no longer applies? Although the Republic of Ireland has been
decolonized for almost a century, the presence of the occupiers remains
both in mind (i.e., through the English language) and in proximity (i.e.,
Northern Ireland). The North, especially during the mid-1980s, continued to
play the traditional role of an English Creon to the Republican Antigone. It
served as a continual reminder of a colonial past, yet because its presence
could neither be denied nor ignored, Irish Antigones continued to play the
worn out, failed, and futile attempt at masculinity in the face of colonization.
And the Irish, at the time, continued to buy into it because they found
pleasure in such a dramatic display of failure. They desired her ability to resist, but took delight in her failure and fell back into their own familiar space
of narcissistic passivity – a space no longer necessary in their post-colonial
situation. If what constitutes a symptom is that one believes in it, it is also
the belief in it that draws one to revisit, repeat, and redramatize the
trauma/tragedy.
It took over a decade for a new Irish Antigone to appear who, I believe,
stops buying into her symptomatic situation. An Antigone finally emerged
who is able to locate the unavoidable trauma of colonization and tragedy
into the childish, beautiful, and even transcendentally incestuous body of
Polyneices himself. Perhaps it is the cultural, political, and economic stability Ireland experienced during the end of the twentieth century – in conjunction with the Good Friday peace agreement between North and South –
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that finally created a space for a new Antigone. Irish poet Catherine Phil
McCarthy filled this new space with her poem “Antigone”:
What kind of fury made you
steal out at dawn
and again at noon
hardly seeing
where you were going,
your head down,
to seek out his body
left past the city
for carrion?
When you found it
exposed to the skies
you laid it out
with bare hands
like the child who played
in the sand at
burying her brother,
as he shut his laughing eyes
tight to wait
motionless
while the fine dust falls
on the honey brown skin
of his legs,
pale valley of his neck
on ribs of divine hair. 36
With this poem, McCarthy does two important and radical things. First, she
asks Antigone the question: ‘Why did you do it?’ Such a simple question,
yet no one – not even the Irish writers discussed above – ever really asked
that of Antigone. As the result of centuries of traditional criticism, Antigone’s
actions are often written off as fraternal love or respect for divine law.
McCarthy, however, acknowledges that sense of mystery in this particular
character’s actions. Much like Lacan’s discussion of James Joyce’s writing
in terms of the sinthome – that is an “‘artificial’ self creation” as a means of
inventing “a new way of using language to organize enjoyment” 37 – MacCarthy transports the burial back to Antigone’s childhood, creating an image of a young brother and sister playing in a sandbox or on the beach.
There is a sense of laughter, childish innocence, and tanned skin. According to the Irish critic Fintan O’Toole, “there is not and never has been a
pure, universal text of Antigone divorced from contemporary politics. The
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effort to construct one now is as appropriate as taking the figs out of the fig
rolls.” 38 Yet in eight stanzas, McCarthy does what countless men have tried
to do in their own translations or adaptations of the Antigone: she takes the
figs out of the fig rolls; she removes Antigone from the political arena, and
transforms the burial of her brother from a political, defiant, riotous act into
a synthesis of the Imaginary, Real, and Symbolic. If the Irish symptom is a
return of the repressed signifier of their colonization, MacCarthy’s poem
challenges the Irish not to cure this symptom – for as we know, a symptom
can never fully be cured, only partially analyzed – but to identify that sympotmatic region where the undissolvable sinthome can be enjoyed as a
childlike, playful act of poetry.
Just recently, The Abbey Theatre commissioned a play by Seamus
Heaney to mark the centenary celebration of the Irish National Theatre. To
mark one hundred years of Irish drama, the theatre did not request a revival of an Irish play nor even a new – specifically Irish – drama that would
speak to a contemporary audience. Instead, they commissioned a new
translation of the Antigone. Heaney’s play, retitled The Burial at Thebes, is
significant for two reasons. First, obviously, because it shows that Antigone
continues to resurface and fascinate the Irish. Second, because of all the
Irish versions of Antigone, Heaney’s is the most Greek and the least Irish.
There are very few Irish colloquialisms in the language of the play and no
real departures from the original that would hint at an Irish subtext. It is a
close, faithful, and academic adaptation. Antigone, finally, crosses the Irish
stage solely as a Greek heroine in a Greek tragedy, not an Irish one.
At her final exit, on the way to her own burial, Heaney has his Antigone proclaim:
Now gods of Thebes, look down.
Through my native streets and fields
I’m being marched away.
And never, you men of Thebes,
Forget what you saw today:
Oedipus’s daughter,
The last of his royal house
Condemned. And condemned for what?
For practising devotion,
For a reverence that was right. 39
The stage direction then reads: “Antigone is led out.” 40 This particular Antigone is an attempt to lead her out of Ireland as well. Heaney’s title, The
Burial at Thebes, refers both to the burial of Polyneices and to the burial of
Antigone. It is a burial, however, that is elsewhere; not in Ireland, but at
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Thebes where the children of Oedipus originated. The hope is that she, as
a symbol of the colonial symptom, will remain buried. The return of the repressed, however, is a powerful exhumer. How and when the next Antigone returns to the Emerald Isle, therefore, remains to be seen.
Loyola Marymount University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Sean Richards, “In the Border Country: Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Irish
Drama”, Cedric Barfoot and Rias van den Doel (eds.) Ritual Remembering: History, Myth and Politics in Anglo-Irish Drama (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995),
p. 191.
2
Deaglán de Bréadun, “Orange factions struggle at the edge of the abyss,” The Irish
Times (5 April 1997), p. A1.
3
Deaglán de Bréadun, “Sinn Fein exclusion is likely to be short,” The Irish Times
(16 February 1998), p. A3.
4
Eammon Hughes, “‘Introduction: Northern Ireland – Border Country”, in Eammon
Hughes (ed.), Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 7-9.
5
See Kelly Younger, Irish Adaptations of Greek Tragedies: Dionysus in Ireland
(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).
6
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 247.
7
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 23.
8
Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe Publishers, 1990), pp. 127-8.
9
Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats: 1865-1939 (London: Penguin Books, 1942), p. 257.
10
Hone, W.B. Yeats, p. 257.
11
Frederic Grab, “Yeats’s King Oedipus”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXXI (1972), p. 339.
12
See Murray’s letters to Harley Granville Barker Barker in C.B. Purdom, Harley
Granville Barker (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1955), pp. 112-16.
13
Collection of Michael Yeats; National Library of Ireland Manuscript 18689 referenced in David Clark and James McGuire, W.B. Yeats: The Writing of Sophocles’
King Oedipus (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), pp. 17-8.
14
W.B. Yeats, “Plain Man’s Oedipus,” New York Times (15 January 1933).
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Irish Antigones
15
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London:
Vintage, 1996), pp. 380-1.
16
Kiberd, Inventing, p. 381.
17
Kiberd, Inventing, p. 385.
18
Kiberd, Inventing, p. 388-9.
19
Anthony Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones: Tragedy North and South” in Michael Kenneally (ed.), Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature
(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Publishers, 1988), pp. 249-50.
20
Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones”, p. 250. For a discussion of the Brehon laws and ancient Irish women’s rights, see Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race
(36th ed., Old Greenwich: Gramercy, 1982) pp. 129-41 and Patrick Power, Sex
and Marriage in Ancient Ireland (2nd ed., Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1997).
21
Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones”, p. 250.
22
Christopher Murray, “Three Irish Antigones” in Jacqueline Genet and Richard Alan
Cave (eds.) Perspectives of Irish Drama and Theatre (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe Publishers, 1991), p. 129. For a thorough telling of these events, see
Tony Gray, Ireland This Century (London: Little Brown and Company, 1994), pp.
309-16.
23
Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones”, p. 250.
24
Brendan Kennelly, Antigone (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986), p. 7.
25
Kennelly, Antigone, pp. 20-1.
26
Cf. Eurydice’s silent exit before her suicide. The Chorus says: “Why has Eurydice
left without a word?” The Messenger responds: “I don’t know. Perhaps to grieve in
private” (Kennelly, Antigone, p. 46). It is appropriate to point out that Sophocles
gives Eurydice 9 lines (1183-1192), while Kennelly writes her over 60 lines, plus
an invented scene between herself and an attendant.
27
Colm Toibin, “Oh, oh, Antigone,” The Independent on Sunday (London 4 May
1986), p. E1. He is referring to the following from the Guard’s opening speech: “I
said to myself ‘You eejit, you’re / Going to your doom.’ / And I said to myself
‘What, you old slowcoach!’” (Kennelly, Antigone, p. 14).
28
Aidan Carl Mathews, Antigone (unpublished script 1984), p. 1.
29
Mathews, Antigone, p. 1.
30
Mathews, Antigone, p. 58.
31
Mathews, Antigone, p. 60.
32
Tom Paulin, The Riot Act: After Antigone (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 63.
33
Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones”, p. 249.
34
Roche, “Ireland’s Antigones”, p. 249.
35
Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge,
1990), p. 150.
36
Catharine Phil McCarthy, “Antigone” from The Blue Globe (Belfast: Blackstaff
Press, 1998), pp. 81-2.
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Kelly Younger
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37
Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge,
1996), p. 190.
38
Fintan O’Toole, “Struggling with the Greeks” in The Sunday Tribune (4 May 1986),
p. C6.
39
Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone (London: Faber and
Faber, 2004), p. 41.
40
Heaney, Burial, p. 41.
GENERAL ARTICLES
Imperial Therapy: Mark Twain and the Discourse
of National Consciousness in Innocents Abroad
Daniel McKay
“It may be thought that I am prejudiced. Perhaps I am. I would be
ashamed of myself if I were not.” 1 When Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne
Clemens, 1835-1910) undertook correspondence for San Francisco’s Alta
California on a $1250 trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 he had an
established reputation as a humorist and was on the cusp of making the
transition from journalist to author. Innocents Abroad, “an unvarnished
tale” 2 published in 1869 and sewn together with questionable regard for
coherence or thematic consistency, sold thirty-one thousand copies in one
year. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done better, as Twain himself noted.
What made his work such a success? “This book is the record of a pleasure trip” (I, xxi), Twain declared, yet there had already been innumerable
pleasure trips and by more established authors than he.
The multiplicity and seemingly contradictory narrative stances in Innocents makes any essentialist reading hard to establish and what one
stance purports is as likely and easy to prove as any other. In the main
though, two bodies of criticism have prevailed hitherto, one seeing the text
as flawed by internal discontinuities, the other perceiving that disjointed
narration need not preclude a unified authorial consciousness. 3 It is my
contention that Twain most likely wrote with at least five entirely separate
purposes in mind, none of which coexisted simultaneously:
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/mckay.pdf
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i.
The profit, reputation and contractual fulfilment to be had in writing c. 1500 words to newspapers daily.
ii.
The demonstrable acquisition of high society vocabulary and cultural regard commended by Mrs. Fairbanks and Olivia Langdom. 4
iii.
An arrant attack upon Presbyterianism.
iv.
A break with the codified genre of travel writing.
v.
The promotion of Twain as healer of a wounded nation.
Point v) has gone largely neglected by critics. Yet Twain’s role as a unifier
in post Civil-War society, as projector of national identity abroad for the
benefit of domestic patriotism, and as healer of war-torn America is a cornerstone to our understanding Innocents. As shall be seen, shades of mental/national injury coexist in the text, alongside a humorous (and sometimes
not-so-humorous) denigration of foreigners. The resultant implied superiority of America and Americans, notwithstanding Twain’s passing jabs at
them and in spite of their bloody internecine conflict, is what I term “imperial
therapy.”
This idea involves not the erection of a new multidisciplinary sociopolitical construct, but more a counter-reaction to the prevalent Eurocentric
world view already in place. In other words, it is a revisionist stance. The
reader’s recognition of European hegemony with regard to cultural discourse is taken for granted by Twain, or rather he seeks to displace its apparent immovability in the American social mindset. As Edward W. Said
notes, “to have knowledge of … a thing is to dominate it, to have authority
over it,” 5 and Twain, unrepentantly prejudiced, is the self-acknowledged
purveyor of authoritative, possessive standpoints. In Innocents, as we shall
see, humour becomes the all-powerful tool of the seer viewing the seen,
playfully mulling the object’s importance and ultimately redirecting it to the
narrator’s area of perceived (and most often lowered) importance. “Imperial
therapy” indicates something of the reason for this in terms of national identity at home and the comfort to be had in patriotism reflected upon the extra-American world (along with encompassing the process itself as one of
objectifying Europe a propos America).
Forrest G. Robinson usefully notes that “movement toward the ‘positive’ pole of one cultural axis inevitably involves simultaneous movement
toward the ‘negative’ pole of another.” 6 In other words, one cannot compliment or criticise a foreign people without implying either deficit or surplus in
one’s own culture. A realignment such as this concerned Twain very much,
carrying with him as he did the knowledge that Europeans had long passed
judgement upon his “rapacious and ruthless developing nation” 7 both mor-
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ally and culturally. To him fell the task of re-evaluating the American psyche
and satisfying a readership which was “avid, newly lettered, newly leisured,
the beneficiaries of a democratised culture.” 8
Yet equipoise between a culturally arrogant Europe and resurgent
America was never on the literary agenda; Lynn asserts that Innocents
gives us “the American: newborn, not yet come of age, but nevertheless
prepared to … judge all the nations of earth by his own.” 9 In Innocents,
Europe as perceived through Twain undergoes a readjusted interpretation
via realism coupled with satirical exaggeration. The reviewer writing under
the pseudonym Folio notes that Twain “saw things as they were, not as
they [had] been described by poets and romancers” 10 and yet Twain wholly
redefines what is seen, as shown in the episode with the guide in Rome:
We came very near expressing interest, sometimes – even admiration – it was very hard to keep from it. We succeeded though. Nobody else ever did, in the Vatican museums. The guide was bewildered – nonplussed. He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a
failure; we never showed any interest in anything. (I, 306)
In this passage, the self-other dyad is most apparent. For Twain and his
group are cultural insiders, privy to “the subtleties of the American joke” involving an imposition of humour inevitably lost on European minds. Thus
the group’s own identity is maintained and enforced through their isolationist bantering and consequent refusal to engage in cultural reciprocity. This
humour has the added effect of reversing standard roles – it is the guide,
not they, who becomes the cultural outsider: “If he does not enjoy it, so
much the worse for him. We do” (I, 302). Any reader would have sensed
this barrier of comical yet calculated difference and “the implication that the
history of Europe is but a burden to be cast off by the man of the new
world.” 11 Humour, then, becomes a codified tool of amendment in redressing Europe’s suffocating cultural dominion, refusing to accede to it, and
promoting “an attitude of national assurance and confidence which neither
the nation nor its travellers had had before the war.” 12
Such apparent levity represented Twain’s subtlest manifestation of imperial therapy. Robert A. Wiggins puts it plainly when he reveals Twain’s
eulogising of the noble savage:
The humour in The Innocents Abroad is founded upon this assumption of folk superiority. The elemental mind is somehow superior to
the more complex but morally corrupt civilised mind. 13
This is all too apparent when Twain declares: “These creatures [guides]
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never suspect – they have no idea of a sarcasm” (I, 301). In other areas his
role as travel writer allows him to dispense with humour altogether and a
crass cultural narcissism usurps the comedy. Ultimately, in the aftermath of
Civil War, the capacity to comprehend historical meaning (through memory)
becomes the property of Americans, and guides, as delegates of old preU.S. European society, become unwelcome impostors:
If they would only show you a masterpiece of art, or a venerable
tomb, or a prison-house, or a battle-field, hallowed by touching
memories … it would not be so bad. But they interrupt every dream.
(I, 180)
Guides, under the universal cognomen of “Ferguson,” are perceived not
only as functional illiterates but as divorced from all that they seek to represent. This is clear in Twain’s refusal to divulge his admiration for artwork
except, of course, to his readers. We alone are privy to what his “shrewd
pair of American eyes” 14 fixates upon and the intimacy established is directly relative to the distance – i.e. negative difference – between Twain
and his host cultures. The humorist has made a smooth transition to the
imperialist, appropriating all that is deemed essentially American – humour
and historical appreciation – and, by the time he reaches Constantinople,
Twain no longer has need of even a peripheral dialogue with the people but
begins at once with an attack on indigenous appearance: “There was no
freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted” (II, 67).
A transition in cultural evaluation takes place throughout the trip, with
the textual journey paralleling the journey itself. J. DeLancey Ferguson
states that “the continuity of the Innocents is the continuity of the tour it records, nothing more.” 15 However, I would hold that there is a unity to Innocents and it rests in the replacement of the humorist’s banter with the
franker prejudices of the travel writer as a tool of imperial discourse. While
Twain starts from an amusingly superior stance, he shifts toward the disparagingly aloof and finally, at Endor, all pretence at impartiality is
shrugged away:
They do not mind dirt; they do not mind rags; they do not mind vermin; they do not mind barbarous ignorance and savagery; they do
not mind a reasonable degree of starvation, but they do like to be
pure and holy before their god, whoever he may be. (II, 227)
Implicit is the idea of America as unpolluted, fully enlightened and graced
with a clean bill of health sadly lacking in the Old World. By this time, the
narrator’s voice is free of any semblance of relative thinking (i.e. suspend-
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Daniel McKay
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ing judgement and recognising “other” criteria for self-evaluation) and his
judgements fall hard and severe, a fact which sits uncomfortably with Near
Eastern critics even to this day. 16 Such totalising depreciation is earlier predicted in the imperialist paradigm employed in Morocco:
I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish women (for
they are only human, and will expose their faces for the admiration
of a Christian dog when no male Moor is by), and I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness. (I, 75)
As Blunt notes, the unveiling of a woman is symbolic of a country acquiescing in colonisation and the influx of Western civilisation. 17 This action, or
the encouragement of it by Twain, must be seen in the established tradition
of colonialist discourse.
References to the veil were typically constructed around the topos of
the sensual Orient and therefore, by implication, loaded images redolent
with sexuality and allurement. William Dean Howells had stated that “there
is very little to say of The Innocents Abroad which is not of the most obvious and easy description.” 18 Yet Twain’s unmasking of the Oriental woman
(and, by default, the Orient itself) to find only disappointment sets up a
paradigm shift loaded with undertones which were anything but obvious.
No longer is the veil seen as masking anything desirable – no longer is the
Old World itself desirable – and, in speaking of the inferiority of French
women as opposed to American women, Twain concludes: “I feel, now, like
a man who has redeemed a failing reputation” (I, 148). One might point out
the necessity to distinguish between perceptions of Europe and the Near
East, yet Twain’s destruction of such topoi comes early on in the European
(i.e. pre-Holy Land) stage of his journey and can therefore be contextualised as a theme applicable to the European region as much as any. Much
of Innocents is constructed around this redemption of the homeland
through despoiling foreign myths, and, by reversing the established topos
of revered Old World sophistication, Twain effectively moves one step further toward asserting the positive pole of his native culture.
Synchronous with this idea comes a disengagement with associationism, “the notion that a writer could endow a landscape [and people] with
aesthetic value by evoking images of past events connected with it.” 19
Twain made this break clear by crafting Innocents as “an act of irreverence
toward Europe and the past.” 20 Writers such as “Cooper, Hawthorne, and
Emerson … had seen and lamented the American tendency to stand in impotent awe of Europe, and they particularly resented the European affectation of superiority to Americans.” 21 Responding to this, Innocents recounts
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the entry to Horta thus:
A swarm of swarthy, noisy, lying, shoulder-shrugging, gesticulating
Portuguese boatmen, with brass rings in their ears, and fraud in their
hearts, climbed the ship’s sides. (I, 35-6)
Any romantic idealism is at once discounted, Twain’s sceptical tone making
a complete break with the sentimentalism we might have presumed forthcoming. Clearly one of the great attractions of Innocents to contemporary
readers was the book’s complete upending of traditional idealisation.
The inferiority of Horta’s defences relative to American naval power is
focused on next. This projection of America as technologically superior and
of Europe as industrially/technologically backward is a running theme. For
example, in regard to France, Twain states that “we are not infatuated with
these French railway-cars” (I, 98) and later it is presented as wondrous that
many American streets are twice as wide as the Jordan (II, 342). Should
Europe present cutting-edge industry, then Twain is complimentary but incredulous: “As for the railways – we have none like them. The cars slide as
smoothly along as if they were on runners” (I, 262). That Europe could possess such transportation systems is deemed hardly credible but, unconvinced that such discoveries imply shared national qualities, Twain later reestablishes the perceived contrast:
The Popes have long been the patrons and preservers of art, just as
our new, practical Republic is the encourager and upholder of mechanics. In their Vatican is stored up all that is curious and beautiful
in art; in our Patent Office is hoarded all that is curious or useful in
mechanics. (II, 8)
The reader is thus assured that while Europe monopolises history, America
is the pioneer of progressive mechanisation. Here, being the beneficiary of
industrialisation is seen as incompatible with boundless heritage. One cannot have both and, by deemphasising this possibility, Twain once more reassures his readership that America is modernising while anything vaguely
similar or better in Europe is an abnormality. Much later, there also comes
a telling description of Galilee:
If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that
never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade
and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaeum; this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal plumes of palms … if these things are not food for rock me to
sleep, mother, none exist, I think. (II, 239)
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That the land is negatively described in terms of absence rather than presence, and the village as dormant and apathetic, touches upon the “capitalist vanguard” 22 rhetoric of the type that sees no worth in landscape beyond
industrial potential or the lack of it. At an extreme, this viewpoint highlights
raw materials over appreciation of the aesthetic and although Twain never
goes this far, his geographical comparisons betray overt colonialist language. Leslie A. Fiedler reminds us that Twain “had lived in a landscape so
terrifyingly beautiful … that beside it the scenery of the Old World was
bound to seem pallid, domesticated, dwarfed.” 23 It is indeed likely that
“what is said is most naturally said” 24 and that Twain recounted these details out of genuine bemusement, yet they occur frequently:
The Tiber, that celebrated river of ours [sic], which stretches its
mighty course almost two hundred miles, and which a lad can
scarcely throw a stone across at Rome, is not so long, nor yet so
wide, as the American Mississippi – nor yet the Ohio, nor even the
Hudson. (I, 280)
Innocents, meant less for the educated and well-travelled, was “bought and
read and laughed over by ‘the belly and members,’ as [Twain] put it –
Americans in small towns and farms all over the country.” 25 These people
needed clear points of comparison (e.g. Samaria to Rhode Island: II, 283)
and, as long as associationism, with all its implied romanticism, was cast
aside, Twain was free to indulge in purely dimensional comparisons. This
he does a great deal. At Como, considering the lake, he exclaims: “how dull
its waters are compared with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe” (I,
203). Then, speaking of the Arno: “It would be a very plausible river if they
would pump some water into it” (I, 253). When he describes Magdala as
“thoroughly Syrian … thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy” (II, 233), the colonial dominance over the foreign is observed. America, by contrast, must be sanitary, new, Anglo-Saxon and
spacious. Here, Twain is not only “applying the standard of Nevada to historical Europe,” 26 but establishing a clear-cut difference favouring American
geography in every way. Upon entry into the Holy Land, relative thinking
has entirely departed from Twain’s culture-shocked discourse: “Such roasting heat, such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation cannot
surely exist elsewhere on earth” (II, 352, my emphases). As to why such
extreme language should be employed at this point, one may speculate
that a combination of factors came into play. The disparity between his expectations and the reality, the taxing climate and the duration of the journey
itself must all have contributed.
Despite his apparent break with associationism, Twain resorted to lit-
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erary pastiche by inserting passages which clearly were ascribing historically romantic images to landscapes. It has been noted that “the poses the
narrator strikes … vary so widely that no single one can be called typical of
all the rest” 27 and that “Innocents Abroad has over nine thousand words
borrowed from books, letters and notices of various sorts.” 28 Thus the passage concerning Venice is clearly reliant upon cultural familiarity:
Under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their
battered sculptures are hidden in the shadows, and the old city
seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five
hundred years ago. It is easy, then, to fancy, to people these silent
canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies. (I, 223)
The oft-quoted Sphinx passage (II, 382-3), as with the above, was later
added and is strongly influenced by sentimentalist writing such as that of
William C. Prime. Bret Harte noted that “when Mark Twain is not simulating
indignation, he is really sentimental.” 29 This is clear when Twain describes
Vesuvius as “a circular ditch” but then seems to switch register by noting
how “the sun burst through the morning mists and … topped Vesuvius like
a jewelled crown!” (II, 30). Such anomalous insertions arise elsewhere and
yet it is likely that these inconsistencies are not representative of the style
originally intended. Indeed, since the American Publishing Company of
Hartford required a book of two volumes, Twain had to fill out his correspondence with additional material 30 and “the changes he made in revision
were dictated … by his effort to become the kind of writer he thought [his
wife Livy] wanted him to be.” 31 Of necessity then, Twain “is committed to a
series of exaggerated poses,” 32 ranging from realism/colonial discourse for
the purposes of readership to associationism/padding to please his future
wife and publishers. There is also the possibility that, despite his humorist’s
mandate to destabilise conventions, Twain may have had a genuinely ambivalent response to the scenes he encountered.
Whatever the intent, such disjointed stances create a “nervous, at
times even frantic rhythm” 33 which Henry B. Wonham believes part of a
“game of juxtaposition.” 34 Robinson, however, criticises Wonham, who
has nothing to say about the numerous, much more mingled, and often baffling passages – eruptions of anger, dismay, disenchantment,
and horror – in which the traveller’s feelings are evidently less controlled and much less easily brought into alignment with critical
schemes featuring self-conscious authorial design. 35
But literary intentionality is not incompatible with the mental instability suggested by Robinson. We have already seen how Twain employed and
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lapsed into colonialist rhetoric for the purposes of aggrandising America
and that this was especially welcome and/or necessary following April
1865, when U.S. citizens were ready to receive “an American point of view
toward Europe as opposed to a Southern, Western or New England point
of view.” 36 The instances of disequilibrium can be seen as both indicative of
post Civil-War shock and as literary techniques in their own right. Robinson’s argument rests on the premise that mental disturbance leads to a total disability in authorial design. I propose that Twain may indeed have undergone serious psychic disturbance during and following the Civil War.
While, later in the century, Stephen Crane was able to compose harrowing
scenes in The Red Badge Of Courage without having taken any part himself, Twain was able to fully incorporate both his childhood experiences and
morbid fixations as textual elements with which his readership would likely
have identified. Indeed, the abruptness of the grim passages seems very
much akin to a type of shellshock flashback, e.g. his visit to the Paris
morgue:
On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked, swollen, purple;
clasping the fragment of a broken bush with a grip which death had
so petrified that human strength could not unloose it – mute witness
of the last despairing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond
all help. (I, 127)
Such imagery would have been familiar to the veteran section of the
American population and Twain’s pondering hardly an uncommon experience in much of the rest. Later, speaking of a gondola, he writes, “it was
more like a hearse than anything else” (I, 219) and, looking at a tear jug in
Pisa, holds that “it spoke to us in a language of its own; and with a pathos
more tender than any words might bring” (I, 259). Twain is clearly identifying with life-departure imagery and the bond between author and reader is
a private one – as distanced from people in the locality as it is from us today.
A type of transcultural appropriation takes place at these moments.
Scenes of pathos and morbidity, viewed through Twain, are perceived in
terminology uniquely self-referential. Twain becomes, in the main, alone in
his reactions and, by extension, so is the reader. Just as humour had
erected a difference between the American and the European, so the
scenes of despondency do likewise. A system of transference is erected
whereby Europe presents to Twain various images which invite a sorrowful
free association. He interprets these, sometimes personally – as in the
memory of the corpse in his father’s office (I, 173-4) – but more often in
generally dolorous language with which the contemporary reader, through
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the immediacy of the Civil War, can equate and thus appropriate as a personally resounding image-emotion-memory. That Europe does not and
cannot experience such thoughts is indicative of the erection of difference
in Twain’s discourse and, accordingly, the narrative employs an imagebased acquisition. America no longer takes art or culture from Europe on
European terms, but reinterprets the proffered experiences to accord with
American history. This is best shown at Jerusalem when, in the midst of
scepticism about the crucifixion’s locality, Twain suddenly switches tone to
one of acceptance based on the War of Independence: “there will be no
vestige of Bunker Hill Monument left, but America will still know where the
battle was fought” (II, 313). Only war can make the improbable seem wholly
likely and, in this sense, becomes a currency which lends credence to anything.
In conjunction with this is the deprecation of Twain’s sycophantic companions, “the pilgrims,” for here too he chooses a portrayal with a fixed
meaning for his readership. Much has been said on Twain’s antipathy toward religion but such critiques have been more concerned with Twain visà-vis the established church than to religion in general. 37 The pilgrims –
made distinct, by literalist religious belief, from the pilgrimage in which
Twain himself was on – according to my reading, are literary devices in
which the America/Europe divide is embodied. The act of despoliation, a
key element to this, is focused on in many areas: “The incorrigible pilgrims
have come in with their pockets full of specimens broken from the ruins” (II,
196). It is shortly after this that Twain appends: “The ruins here are not very
interesting.” From this we may gather that it is less the damage to the
monuments than the act itself which annoys him. In other words, it is the
deed, not the damage, which he abhors. Later, prior to detailing the ultimate sacrilege of defacing the Sphinx, Twain says:
There are some things which, for the credit of America, should be
left unsaid, perhaps; but … for the real benefit of Americans, ought
to have prominent notice. (II, 384-5)
We are therefore to understand his comments as instructive. Undoubtedly
there is, in Twain, a real sense of righteous outrage but, coincident with
this, is the symbol of the pilgrims as part of latter-day America. This polarity
is summarised as follows:
America
“Sinners”
U.S. Patriotism
Observation
vs.
vs.
vs.
vs.
Old America
Pilgrims
Veneration (of the Old World)
Participation
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Put simply, the act of exporting things from Europe, of filling the void in
one’s own civilisation by taking specimens/cultural pointers from another, is
too indicative of historical vacancy in America for Twain to feel comfortable.
The pilgrims’ expropriation of religion and Old World culture, itself epitomised in the specimens, causes the pilgrims to represent an outdated
mode of veneration in place of patriotism. For Twain, art in Europe is not to
be automatically hallowed but to be downplayed as ignoble, as Harriet
Beecher Stowe had written before the war:
There are more pretty pictures, and popular lithographs, from France
than from any other country in the world; but it produces very little of
the deepest and highest style of art. 38
The absolute idolatry espoused by the pilgrims, along with their characteristic need to take Europe back to America, is shunned in Innocents as an obsolete style. The symbolism of pilgrims as the antithesis of national allegiance deepens when we note how they quote from books discarded by
Twain: “The pilgrims will tell of Palestine … not as it appeared to them, but
as it appeared to Thompson” (II, 244).
The pilgrims, then, do not observe except to confirm and conform.
They have, in short, come to personify the old formula of unquestioning
veneration and, in Twain’s world, such fawning is unbecoming to the revived nation. Viewed this way, the scene of their haggling for passage
across a river and subsequent argument becomes an allegory for the Civil
War itself: “how the pilgrims abused each other! Each said it was the
other’s fault, and each in turn denied it” (II, 227). Economics is a key motivation; they lose sight of their goal and lapse into internecine struggle. All of
this is hypocritical: just as America had attempted to distance itself from
European corruption so the pilgrims attack avarice. Each proves guilty of
the selfsame faults and, as a consequence, innocence is lost. Twain’s
group represent the New World: distanced from Europe, objectifying it and
critiquing it from the point of view of unlearned “innocents” as bold in their
rejection of literary influences as they are in their espousal of patriotic
prejudice. In this context, Innocents forms “a very lively portrait of the uncultivated American tourist” 39 who, by his rejection of antebellum humility,
frees the readership from the conventions of the United States as cultural
suppliant and allows for the transparent and unabashed partiality we have
seen thus far.
Remarks in Summary
Mark Twain, as I have argued, had no single narrative purpose per se
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Imperial Therapy
but employed a broad spectrum of knowledge, reactions, prejudices and
punch lines all contributory and complementary to their own separate vignettes. The humour, overall, is “at the expense both of the Old World and
the New” 40 and yet is frequently less an end in itself than a method for shifting the interpretation of American culture markedly toward the favoured.
Said notes that “culture is a sort of theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one another.” 41 In this vein, we may state that no intercultural commentary is free of ulterior motive, and imperial therapy,
founded upon a conscious interpretive readjustment of all things European
and dispensing with literary conventionalism, celebrated an “innocent” perspective free of all constraints, even impartiality.
This revisionist position may be seen as both conscious and unconscious. Where Twain undermines the European/Old World cultural hegemony he is overtly nationalistic. Where the observations call up resonances
from home this seems a different, more faltering kind of appropriation.
Overall, both approaches resulted from and addressed the impact of the
Civil War which “produced a vast impatience with rhetorics that bore no relation to experience.” 42 Innocents, though humorous, cannot be categorically branded as such; in Twain’s “pleasure tour through modes of narration,” 43 a travelogue develops which employs the subtlest imperial impulses
in conjunction with such comical declamations as: “We always took care to
make it understood that we were Americans – Americans!” (II, 401). The
comical elements both promote and mask the imperialist inclination at work
and, where humour leaves off, symbolism, interpretative geography, sombre contemplation and the [America as] technology vs. [Europe as] history
dialectic take over.
Purdue University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, Vol. II (New York: Harper, 1929), p. 19. All in-text
parenthetical references are to Twain’s Innocents Abroad.
2
Anonymous, Review of The Innocents Abroad, Nation (New York), IX, September
2, 1869, p. 194.
3
Forrest G. Robinson, “Patterns of Consciousness in The Innocents Abroad,”
American Literature, 58:1 (1986), passim.
4
Robert Edison Lee, From West To East (Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1966), passim.
5
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, [1978] 1995), p. 32.
175
176
Daniel McKay
░
6
Robinson, “Patterns of Consciousness,” p. 58.
7
Shirley Foster and Sara Mills, An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002), p. 19.
8
Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p.
57.
9
Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humour (Massachusetts: Little,
Brown & Company, 1959), p. 151.
10
Tom Folio, Evening Transcript (Boston), p. 1.
11
Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Massachusetts:
Harvard UP, 1962), p. 31.
12
James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate Of Humour (New Jersey: Princeton UP,
1966), p. 38.
13
Robert A. Wiggins, Mark Twain: Jackleg Novelist (Washington: U of Washington
P, 1964), p. 85.
14
Anonymous, Review of The Innocents Abroad, Buffalo Express (Buffalo), October
16, 1869, quoted in Louis J. Budd, Critical Essays on Mark Twain, 1867-1910
(Massachusetts: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982), p. 20.
15
J. DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain: Man and Legend (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), p. 137.
16
Muhammed Raji Zughoul, “The Emperor and the Sultan in Mark Twain: How Innocent were the ‘Innocents’?,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 11 (2000),
Passim.
17
Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender & Imperialism (New York: Guilford, 1994), p. 29.
18
William Dean Howells, “Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad”, Atlantic Monthly
(Boston), XXIV, December 1869, p. 764.
19
Smith, Mark Twain, p. 26.
20
Smith, Mark Twain, p. 37.
21
Cox, Mark Twain, p. 38.
22
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:
Routledge, 1992), p. 148.
23
Leslie A. Fiedler, “An American Abroad,” Partisan Review, (Winter, 1966), p. 47.
24
Anonymous, Review of The Innocents Abroad, Packard's Monthly: The Young
Men's Magazine (New York), II, October 1869, p. 318.
25
William H. Gibson, The Art Of Mark Twain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976), p. 34.
26
Anonymous, Review of The Innocents Abroad, The Athenaeum (London), No.
2239, September 24, 1870, p. 395.
27
Robert Regan, Uncompromising Heroes: Mark Twain And His Characters (California: U of California P, 1966), p. 50.
28
Minnie M. Brashear, Mark Twain: Son Of Missouri (New York: Russell & Russell,
1964), p. 197.
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Imperial Therapy
29
Bret Harte, Overland Monthly (San Francisco), IV, January 1870, p. 100.
30
Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain Social Critic (New York: International Publishers,
1966), p. 24.
31
Smith, Mark Twain, p. 24.
32
Henry B. Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1993), p. 87.
33
Robinson, “Patterns of Consciousness,” p. 51.
34
Wonham, Mark Twain, p. 88.
35
Forrest G. Robinson, “‘An Unconscious and Profitable Cerebration’: Mark Twain
and Literary Intentionality,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 50:3 (1993), p. 373
36
Cox, Mark Twain, p. 38.
37
Foner, Mark Twain, p. 102.
38
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (London: Sampson
Low, 1854), p. 354.
39
Anonymous, Review of The Innocents Abroad, Saturday Review (London), XXX,
October 8, 1870, p. 468.
40
Margaret Drabble, English Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), p. 502.
41
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), p. xiv.
42
Lynn, Mark Twain, p. 152.
43
Bruce Michaelson, “Mark Twain The Tourist: The Form of Innocents Abroad,”
American Literature, 49:3 (1977), p. 395.
177
“Nothing New Under the Sun”:
Postsentimental Conflict in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig
Karsten H. Piep
Storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the
mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and
rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and
faith with vain questioning.
1
W.E.B. DuBois
The content of a work of literature, Walter Benjamin reminds us in
“The Author as Producer,” is inextricably bound up with its form. 2 Hence, it
is hardly astounding that much critical attention has been focused on the
proper generic classification of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). 3 This
task, though, has not been easy. Henry Louis Gates, rediscoverer and earliest critic of Our Nig, for example, goes to great length discussing parallels
between Wilson’s work and Nina Baym’s ‘overplot’ of the ‘women’s novel,’
before settling on reading it as a new form of distinctly African-American literature that combines “conventions of the sentimental novel with certain
key conventions of the slave narratives” (lii). Elizabeth Ammons, by contrast, places Our Nig squarely in the feminist tradition of the sentimental
novel and argues that “the ideal of mother love explicit in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin operates implicitly in Our Nig.” 4 Contesting Ammons’ claim, Eric
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/piep.pdf
░
“Nothing new under the sun”
Gardner asserts that Our Nig is not a ‘novel of abolition’ but “a novel about
Northern racial issues, a young black woman’s bildungsroman, and, as
such, is far from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” 5 Echoing some of Gardner’s points,
Elizabeth Breau contends that Our Nig “is actually satiric” and therefore
gives an overly “bleak picture of northern antebellum society.” 6 Foregrounding neither Bildung nor “ironic inversions” but the “politics of rage at
work in Wilson’s tale,” Julia Stern argues that Our Nig “used the sentimental form to mask a gothic message.” 7 Rejecting Gates’ attempt to posit Our
Nig as “a significant beginning of an African-American literary mode, a distinctive first in a century of firsts,” John Ernest wants to read Wilson’s work
as a traditional “blend of autobiography and fiction,” hoping to ‘re-place’ it
“within the racial, gender, and economic matrix of secular history.” 8 R.J.
Ellis, while accepting Gates’ assessment that Our Nig “draw[s] on the genres of sentimental fiction and abolitionist slave narrative,” stresses the ways
in which the ‘hybrid’ work “fractures generic boundaries” in order to provide
a “full retrieval of Frado’s pain, her experience of body politics.” 9 Lastly, offering a reading that links Our Nig to the Puritan tradition, Elizabeth West
argues that Our Nig “manipulates well-known trappings of the conversion
narrative” by telling “the story of the heroine’s failed initiation into the community of earthly saints.” 10
Aside from illustrating that classification or categorisation itself constitutes an act of interpretation, this critical disagreement about the very form
of Our Nig also seems to hint at a deep conflict, or better, a whole series of
conflicts that mark its content. For whether one reads Wilson’s deceptively
plain work as a blend of women’s novel and slave narrative, which transforms blacks into subjects (Gates), or as sentimental novel, which exposes
the oppressiveness of American patriarchy (Ammons), or as gothic novel,
which undermines the ‘mother-saviour myth’ (Stern), or as testimony to
‘body politics’ (Ellis), or as an inversion of the Puritan conversion narrative
(West), there always seems to remain an unresolvable conflictedness at
Our Nig’s core. “Our Nig’s Tale ends ambiguously, if it ends at all,” Gates
notes (xlvii). Nothing seems to quite fit. Our Nig attempts to elicit the sympathy of both ‘coloured’ and white readers, but “is far from flattering to
Northerners or abolitionists.” 11 It begins like a sentimental novel with an orphaned, friendless girl, but it “does not end either with a happy marriage or
with institutional consolidation … of the forces of good” (xlviii). It projects
“maternal violence and filial terror,” yet it does not reject Uncle Tom’s
Cabin’s central premise of the ‘mother saviour.’ 12 Our Nig calls “for effective communal action in the public sphere,” but also “elects … the more
empowering doctrine of self-reliance.” 13 The protagonist “reposes in God”
and puts her trust in “God’s economy,” but she offers “no profession of
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Karsten H. Piep
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faith.” 14 What is one to make of this series of formal and textual incongruities, ambiguities, even paradoxes?
Wilson’s startling refusal to provide unambiguous endings or clear solutions, I suggest, is less the result of generic hybridisation than of her calculated use of an almost Brechtian literary technique that focuses on the
“blunt depiction of conditions” or Zustände rather than the elaborate development of plots or Handlungen. 15 In opting for a simple, episodic storyline
that ends where it begins, Wilson deliberately breaks with the linear ‘overplot’ of the typical ‘women’s novel’ to foreground the “horrors of [Frado’s]
condition” (128, emphasis added) that keep her in various yet recurrent
states of bondage, abuse, domination, exploitation, and servitude. Our
Nig’s aims are therefore at once more modest and more ambitious than
those of the antislavery and women’s novels. For Wilson neither attempts
to reproduce nor to adapt well-known accounts of how the nation may be
saved through mother-love, domesticity, repose in God, Bildung, communal
action, compassion, or self-reliance. Instead, drawing upon her own experience, Wilson endeavors to disrupt and complicate dominant narratives
of national uplift so as, firstly, to draw attention to the subtle mechanisms
that keep nominally free blacks in a condition of permanent unfreedom, and
thereby, secondly, to question the bourgeois ideologies of ‘unconflictedness’ that underlie such sacrosanct institutions as friendship, love, marriage, motherhood, family, and religion. Thrust into public view at a moment
of great personal peril for the author, Our Nig may thus be seen as what
Lauren Berlant has termed an act of ‘Diva Citizenship.’ “Flashing up and
startling the public,” Wilson, like Berlant’s ‘Divas,’ not only “renarrates the
dominant history as one that the abjected people have once lived sotto
voce,” but “challenges her audience to identify with the enormity of the suffering she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce, calling on
people to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to
which they currently consent.” 16 Put another way, Our Nig is not a blueprint
for easily achievable societal reforms, but a literary attempt to ‘startle’ its
readership into recognising persistent political problems concerning race,
class, and gender relations.
What Wilson in her preface calls “some experiment which shall aid me
in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life,” then,
is both an attempt to make the material conditions of literary production
visible and to revise the traditional relationship between the self-exposing
black author and her passively indulgent white audience. For although Our
Nig, in the vein of most sentimental novels, “demand[s] sympathy and aid,”
Wilson’s prefatory claim “to have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home” conveys in no uncer-
░
“Nothing new under the sun”
tain terms that mere charity does not absolve a sympathetic white readership from what W.E.B. DuBois was later to call the political ‘burden’ that
“belongs to the nation.” 17 Calling upon her “colored brethren universally”
and the “good anti-slavery friends” in particular, Wilson makes clear from
the outset that the latter can never hope to cast off “Slavery’s Shadows”
without consciously and openly engaging in an economic, political, and cultural struggle with the former (2-3).
Accordingly, unlike the “slave authors” who “had to satisfy the dual expectation of shaping the random events of their lives into a meaningful and
compelling pattern, while also making the narrative of their odyssey from
slavery to freedom an emblem of every black person’s potential for higher
education and the desire to be free,” 18 Wilson intentionally thwarts her audience’s sentimental expectations of an unconflicted happy ending. Far
from trying to ‘satisfy’ her readership with what is conventionally deemed a
‘meaningful and compelling’ narrative, Wilson presents Frado’s despair at
the end of Our Nig as a mirror image of “poor” Mag’s dejection at the beginning of the novel. Substituting the linear plot of slave narratives for a cyclical plot that begins and ends in conflict, Wilson foils sentimental notions
that Frado can achieve freedom and happiness within the domestic world
of the novel. Instead, Wilson deprivatises Frado’s personal experience of
persistent domination, projecting her despair back out into the public
sphere of the literary marketplace. Moving beyond the mere declaration of
Frado’s “desire to be free,” Our Nig deploys the recurrent image of the
heroine’s unresolved struggles to hold the compassionate reader liable for
the larger societal conditions that ensure the exploitation and domination of
nominally free blacks under the mantle of pity and charity. The “kind friends
and purchasers” (130) are thus pushed from their role of indulgent bystanders into that of active participants, who, willingly or not, must confront
the ongoing political conflicts over race, class, and gender relations. In refusing to proffer ‘universalist’ resolution and to grant ‘narrative satisfaction,’
the reader is thrown out of the comfortable armchair: he or she is made to
see that “a change of mind” does not “change the world.” 19
Wilson’s literary technique, which deprivatises the political yet does
not, as Stern asserts, simply “privilege … the public sphere,” 20 points to a
historical materialist reading of her own experiences that links the conflicts
within Northern antebellum society to those of the Reconstruction period.
Similar to Frederick Douglass, who ends My Bondage and My Freedom
with an image of himself as an early desegregationist, Wilson’s fictionalised
retelling of her indentured servitude portends the end of abolitionism and,
from personal ‘countermemory,’ excavates the vocabulary that speaks to
the conditions of freedom rather than the mere need for escape. Thus, Wil-
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Karsten H. Piep
░
son’s Frado, much like the matured Douglass in My Bondage and My
Freedom, is not offered up as a pitiable figure for sympathetic identification
or well-intentioned appropriation by white liberals, but emerges as a conscious agent in the fight for black self-emancipation. Analogous to Douglass’s victory over the “slave breaker” Covey, Frado’s hard-won courage to
defy Mrs. Bellmont in Chapter X represents just the first step in her quest
for self-determination. In a society of “professed abolitionists,” who neither
“want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North,” Frado
still faces the more daunting tasks “to cast off the unpleasant charities of
the public” and to demand both gainful employment and respect from the
villagers (124, 129). Genuine cooperation across class and race lines, Wilson underscores, can only spring from the conscious recognition of the
fundamental conflicts over material and cultural property.
At the risk of placing yet another ill-fitting label on Our Nig, I further
suggest that Wilson’s work, with its cyclical plot as well as its emphasis on
the depiction of conditions or Zustände, can be read within the context of
what Berlant has called “postsentimentality.” 21 According to Berlant, “postsentimental narratives are lacerated by ambivalence,” because while they
(still) desire private, sentimental solutions to persistent racial, class, and
gender conflicts, they only find quarrels, strives, and disputes. Hence,
“postsentimental texts withdraw from the contract that presumes consent of
the conventionally desired outcomes of identification and empathy.” 22 Instead of presupposing that a tacit consensus exists “about what constitutes
uplift, amelioration, and emancipation,” postsentimental works describe the
steady clash of interest between individuals and groups. 23
Two scenes – one from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the other from
Our Nig – clarify the postsentimental impulse in Our Nig, which no longer
promises to solve political conflicts through escape, ‘true feelings,’ Christian
charity, marriage, or the termination of the ‘peculiar institution,’ but recasts
private suffering as unremitting. Toward the end of Chapter XXV in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, Eva, marked by impending death, passes on the gospel of
Christian love and redemption to “Poor Topsy,” the maltreated black orphan
child who has hitherto resisted Aunt Ophelia’s attempts to civilise her with
the stick of a Puritan work ethic. Following a tearful exchange during which
Topsy wishes that she “could be skinned, and come white,” Eva, “with a
sudden outburst of feeling,” exclaims: “I love you, because you haven’t had
any father, or mother, or friends; – because you’ve been a poor and
abused child! I love you, and I want you to be good.” 24 Moved by Eva’s impulsive spate of empathy Topsy finally renounces her rebelliousness: “‘O,
dear Miss Eva, dear Miss Eva!’” said the child; “I will try, I will try; I never
did care nothin’ about it before.” 25
░
“Nothing new under the sun”
A strikingly similar scene takes place in Chapter VII of Our Nig. On a
stroll to the barn, James, afflicted with an incurable disease, encounters
Frado, the household’s indentured servant girl whose mind and body has
been nearly broken under the “raw hide” of his callous mother, Mrs. Bellingham (77). Touched by the girl’s lonely sobbing – “no mother, father,
brother or sister to care for me, and then it is, You lazy nigger, lazy nigger”
– James takes Frado aside and “under a shady tree” assures her “that she
was not unpitied, friendless, and utterly despised; that she might hope for
better things in the future” (75-6).
Yet, unlike in Topsy’s case, James’ professions of sympathy neither
prompt a conversion experience in Frado nor move her to confess alleged
“impudence” (72). Moreover, whereas Eva’s subsequent death imparts
Topsy with “sensibility, hope, desire, and the striving for good,” 26 James’
eventual demise only exacerbates Frado’s suspicions concerning eternal
life to the point that she resolves “to give over all thought of the future
world, and str[i]ve daily to put her anxiety far from her” (99, 104). Like
Topsy, Frado resolves to ‘strive,’ but the direction or outcome of this striving is uncertain. In Stowe’s fictional world, an inferred consensus exists as
to what it means “to be good.” This consensus is posited as the “transhistorical,” universalist knowledge of values such as empathy, meekness, maternity, and domesticity, all of which are firmly anchored in white, middleclass Christian ideology. Wilson’s novel challenges this ahistoric consent,
revealing its historical constructedness when Frado contemplates a segregated heaven or seeks to avenge Mary’s cruelties toward her (80). Given
Frado’s failed conversion to a passive acceptance of fate, it is not surprising that she remains an inassimilable troublemaker, offering living testimony to capitalist exploitation as well as the racist hypocrisies of professed
abolitionists. Unlike Stowe’s Africa-bound ‘train of liberated slaves,’ Wilson’s disquieting mulatto heroine is here to stay, and so are the disquieting
racial, class, and gender conflicts she embodies.
More clearly than anywhere else in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the scene of
Topsy’s conversion highlights Stowe’s sentimental strategy of privatising
the political at the very moment when the experience of private pain suggests the larger, socio-political mechanism of cruel domination. Eva’s “sudden outburst of feeling” prevents any further probing into the causes of
Topsy’s racial self-hatred, abuse, exclusion, and poverty, so that Topsy’s
experience of violence becomes a formless emblem of universal pain that
produces empathy rather than political action. Stowe’s ‘sudden’ deployment
of empathy not only overrides political or ethical motives for reforming society, but recasts them as the much more elemental promise of personal deliverance. Hence, it is no longer society but Topsy who must purge herself
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Karsten H. Piep
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of sin and become ‘good.’ Only if Topsy submits herself unconditionally to
the benign authorities of Aunt Ophelia and a Christian God, Eva makes
clear, may she “go to heaven at last, and be an angel forever, just as much
as [she] were white.” 27 A resolution to the political conflict over race and
slavery is thus deferred to the seemingly sheltered realm of introspective
privacy where good deeds, obedience, and piety promise deliverance from
societal ills. As Berlant writes in “Poor Eliza”:
when sentimentality meets politics, it uses personal stories to tell of
structural effects, but in so doing it risks thwarting its very attempt to
perform rhetorically a scene of pain that must be soothed politically.
Because the ideology of true feeling cannot admit the nonuniversality of pain, its cases become all jumbled together and the ethical imperative toward social transformation is replaced by a civic-minded
but passive ideal of empathy. The political as a place of acts oriented toward publicness becomes replaced by a world of private
thoughts, leanings, and gestures. 28
It is precisely in light of this “civic-minded but passive ideal of empathy”
perpetuated by Stowe that Wilson’s ‘reworking’ of what Elizabeth West has
described as the “traditional conversion narrative” assumes added significance. 29 For Frado’s inability or unwillingness to separate Jack, Jane, or
James’ sporadic acts of kindness from Mrs. Bellmont’s relentless acts of
cruelty signal a shift from the privatisation of the political to the
(re)politicisation of the private thus bringing into view the essential conflictedness of postsentimentality. While Frado wishes for her mother’s return, longs for James’ friendship, hopes for Aunt Abby’s heavenly revelation, and desires Samuel’s love, the repetition of letdowns, disappointments, and sufferings teach her that a solution to material exploitation, racial hatred, and gender discrimination cannot be found through intimacy, at
least not the white bourgeois version thereof. 30
Having sketched out how Wilson’s postsentimental portrayal of Frado
strives to deprivatise the political, the second part of this essay investigates
in greater detail the ways in which Our Nig presents a ‘Diva’ reading of publicised personal history that challenges liberal notions of sentimental unconflictedness and calls “on people to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent.” 31 As we shall see, Wilson’s depiction of the “horror of [Frado’s] condition” not only startles the
“gentle reader” into perceiving unresolved conflicts behind the smokescreen of sympathy, but furthermore outlines the contours of a postsentimental, postslavery mentality that demands genuine collaboration across
race, class, and gender lines.
░
“Nothing new under the sun”
Marked with the racial stamp of inferiority, Frado, like her white but
permanently ostracised mother, Mag, must learn early on that conventional
notions of friendship, motherhood, and marriage provide no redress against
prejudice, exploitation, poverty. This is a decidedly unsentimental lesson
and so it seems befitting that the reader is left sad or angered rather than
tearful when “lonely Mag Smith” abandons Frado, leaving her in the exploitative ‘care’ of Mrs. Bellmont. Frado’s fate, though, hardly comes as a
surprise. Her subsequent plight as an abused servant, unemployable labourer, deserted wife, and careworn mother is already foreshadowed in
Mag’s story. As Ernest points out, Mag’s descent “down the ladder of infamy” exposes the social and cultural “structures that later confine Frado
even more tightly than they did her mother.” 32 Yet, perhaps more significantly, Mag’s firm refusal “to ask favors or friendship from a sneering world”
(7) as well as her deliberate acts of social transgression also already intimate that these societal structures of confinement are by no means uncontestable or immutable.
At first, however, Mag is introduced as an orphaned girl with a “loving,
trusting heart,” who falls for a nameless “charmer” because she innocently
believes that she may “ascend to him and become an equal” (5, 6). Her
childish hopes are, naturally, shattered and with them any prospect of respectable life. Still trying to “regain in a measure what she had lost,” Mag is
soon forced to realise that her “home” is “contaminated by the publicity of
her fall” (7). Forced into the margins of society by “foul tongues,” “averted
looks, and “cold greetings,” Mag retreats into a “hovel,” returning to the “village” only now and then to compete with “foreigners” over scarce jobs (7,
8). An increasingly “revengeful” outcast who steadfastly refuses “favors of
familiar faces,” Mag “lives for years, hugging her wrongs, but making no effort to escape”(8).
It is not until her acquaintance with Jim, “a kind-hearted African,” that
Mag for the first time gains a measure of control over her life, even though,
or, better because it denotes “the climax of repulsion” from white society
(15). As Wilson’s detailed account of Jim’s and Mag’s “courtship” shows,
their eventual union represents a strategic alliance between socially stigmatised individuals that redefines culturally sanctioned views of love and
marriage. Though destitute, Mag – in marked contrast to her affair with the
nameless “charmer” – meets Jim as “an equal,” who offers relative economic comfort in exchange for status elevation in the form of “a white wife”
(14). Notwithstanding Wilson’s suspiciously solemn explanation to the “gentle reader” that “want is a … powerful preacher and philosopher,” Jim’s
marriage proposal thus not only presents Mag with a chance for economic
betterment, but, more importantly, with an opportunity to “sunder another
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Karsten H. Piep
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bond which held her to her fellows” (13). Having “for years” endured the
false and self-serving charities of “old acquaintances,” who would occasionally “call … to be favored with help of some kind,” Jim’s proposition allows Mag to free herself from “painful” and repressive social constraints (8).
As Jim explains: “You’s had trial with white folks, any how. They run off and
left ye, and now none of ‘em come near ye to see if you’s dead or alive”
(12).
Refuting the presumed “evils of amalgamation,” Mag and Jim dutifully
stand by their contractual relationship until the end. Jim “tried hard to fulfil
his promises; and furnished her with a more comfortable dwelling,” which
she had previously declined to accept from her self-interested “old acquaintances” (8). And when Jim succumbs to consumption, Mag “nursed
him faithfully,” not out of pity, but of an acute understanding of their mutual
dependence (15). Especially in light of Frado’s later struggles, Wilson’s portrayal of Mag’s and Jim’s tactical alliance takes on a political significance
that connects the book’s private world with the public world. For in stark
contrast to Frado’s subsequent relationships with James or the aptly
named Mrs. Hoggs, Mag’s and Jim’s pact points to a form of genuine interracial cooperation that is anchored in the open negotiation of conflicting interests as well as a recognition of mutual dependence.
As Wilson is quick to show, however, in the face of overbearing racism, the hope for genuine interracial cooperation remains limited. After
Jim’s death, Mag enters “the darkness of perpetual infamy” when she consorts with Seth Shipley, Jim’s former business partner. Yet, unlike Susan
Rowson’s Charlotte Temple or other countless tragic heroines of sentimental novels, Mag manages to survive even in utter infamy, largely because
she feels no longer bound by the strict mores and customs of the dominant
culture. Wilson explains: “She had ceased to feel the gushings of penitence; she had crushed the sharp agonies of an awakened conscience. …
She asked not the rite of civilization or Christianity” (16). Finally, when circumstances again worsen, Mag feels compelled to break the last societal
taboo and consents to sending Frado into indentured servitude.
“The great evil in this book,” Gates comments, “is poverty, both the
desperation it inflicts as well as the evils it implicitly sanctions” (xlvi). While
Gates’s observation is certainly accurate, the scene of Frado’s abandonment serves as more than a bitter indictment against economic and social
injustices. Breaking the silence on the collapse of maternal care in the face
of exceedingly adverse conditions long before Toni Morrison would publish
Beloved, Wilson thematises the postsentimental conflictedness that seems
to have marked quite a few relationships between black (slave) girls and
their desperate mothers. As Stern remarks, “in the antebellum period it was
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“Nothing new under the sun”
not uncommon for poor free black single mothers to bind their children into
indentured servitude.” 33 Yet, Wilson’s aim here is not so much to simply
describe ‘cultural practices of the time’ as to stress that mother-child relations do not afford an autonomous private sphere, wherein the inherent and
irreconcilable conflicts of society can be resolved. It is through this early
identification of postsentimental conflictedness, then, that Wilson can represent Frado as the inversion of the tragic mulatto of convention, who, like
her mother, learns to reject mollifying charities and to claim agency over
her own life. 34
The most ferocious antagonist Frado faces during her indentured servitude is unquestionably Mrs. Bellmont, whose avarice and cruelty, as Ammons concedes, mocks the 19th century “myth of the mother-savior, of the
superiority of maternal values.” 35 “Wholly imbued with southern principles,”
Mrs. Bellmont treats ‘Nig’ worse than many a plantation mistress would
treat a domestic slave, steadily “multiplying her labor” and frequently beating her into submission with “the raw hide” (3, 30). Frado is bound into
submissive servitude not by Mrs. Bellmont’s consistent use of physical
force alone, though. Even more confining are the calculated acts of kindness, sporadically conferred upon her by the feminised Mr. Bellmont, invalid Jane, careless Jack, absent James, and pious Aunt Abby. Grateful for
the smallest token of friendship, love, and acceptance from her kinder, gentler superiors, Frado endures Mrs. Bellmont’s ‘raw-hide’ and Mary’s scoffs
almost beyond the breaking point. Only gradually does Frado internalise
her mother’s lesson that in order to attain a measure of free agency within
a world of covert self-interests, she has to resist idle professions of sympathy, assuaging charities, and promises of heavenly salvation. Similar to
Douglass, Frado eventually recognises that she was “under the influence of
something like a slavish adoration of” her supposed friends, 36 from whose
“memories” she quickly “passed” (131).
Although everyone in the family, save Mary, objects to Mrs. Bellmont’s
cruelties, neither Jack, nor James, nor Mr. Bellmont do anything to stop it.
Characteristically, the latter’s response to his wife’s abuse of Frado is to
take a walk. As Frado, wrongly accused of having pushed Mary into a
creek, is about to receive “a good whipping,” Mr. Bellmont flatly declares “I
shall not punish her … and left the house, as he usually did when a tempest threatened to envelop him” (34). Fully aware that these “kitchen
scenes” of domestic violence are daily occurrences within their house yet
too complacent to avert them, the Bellmont men now and again opt to reprieve their consciences through little acts of benevolence toward Frado
(66). Thus, finding Frado on the floor following the aforementioned beating,
“her mouth wedged apart, her face swollen, and full of pain,” Jack is so
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overcome by tearful pity that he brings “her some supper, t[akes] her to her
room,” comforts her, and sits “by her till she f[alls] asleep” (36). What is
more, the next day he takes “her with him to the field” and buys “her a dog,
which became a great favorite of both” (37). For a brief moment, Frado experiences genuine happiness and friendship. “But it could not be so generally,” and before long, “she must return … to her household duties,” toiling
as an unpaid servant for the entire family (37). Unwittingly or not, Jack’s
self-serving act of charity thus coaxes Frado into a situation, wherein she
feels compelled to endure her continued exploitation gratefully.
In a similar vein, Frado becomes “an object of interest to James” neither because he is opposed to her status of a quasi-slave nor because he
believes in the equal treatment of blacks, but because he resents the particular “cruelty of his mother” (50). Not surprisingly, James’s rare interventions on her behalf, such as his offer of temporary protection from his
mother’s whip, are usually coupled with exhortations that “she must try to
be a good girl” (50). Just as Eva’s sudden outpouring of sentiment in
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin entices Topsy “to behave” and to fulfill her
household duties, James’s attention wheedles Frado into silent acceptance
of her servitude. The sheer “remembrance of his kindness,” Wilson writes,
“cheered her through many weary month, and an occasional word to her in
letters to Jack, were like ‘cold water to a thirsty soul’” (52). Inspired by the
futile hope that “he would … remove her from such severe treatment as
she was subjected to,” Frado takes on the “additional burdens laid on her
since his return” without complaint. “She must now milk the cows,” herd the
sheep, “harness the horse for Mary and her mother to ride, go to mill, in
short, do the work of a boy, could one be procured to endure the tirades of
Mrs. Bellmont” (52-3). Obviously James’s ‘kindness’ comes at a heavy
price.
That James’s concern for the improvement of her ‘spiritual condition’ is
not only self-interested, but effectively prolongs Frado’s passive submissiveness becomes apparent when declining health forces him and his new
wife to return home. Though James compels his mother to permit Frado to
eat at the family table, he remains “cautious about pressing too closely her
claims on his mother, as it would increase the burdened one he so anxiously wished to relieve” (70). Instead of openly supporting her against his
mother, he “cheered her on with the hope of returning with his family, when
he recovered sufficiently” (70). Notwithstanding James’s repeated assurances that “there were thousands upon thousands who favored the elevation of her race, disapproving of oppression in all its forms,” Frado’s “new
hopes and aspirations” are soon dashed (76). For aside from her regular
duties, she now also has to attend to the invalid James. “The calls upon
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“Nothing new under the sun”
Frado were consequently more frequent, her nights less tranquil. Her
health was impaired by lifting the sick man, and by drudgery in the kitchen.
… She was at last so much reduced as to be unable to stand erect for any
great length of time” (81-2).
“Becoming seriously ill,” Frado eagerly seeks consolation in the religious discourse of James and Aunt Abby, “who kindly directed her to
Christ, and instructed her in the way of salvation” (86). Tormented by
thoughts of “doubt and sin which clouded her soul,” Frado eventually
comes to see James as a sort of saviour figure. “As James approached
that blessed world, she felt a strong desire to follow, and be with one who
was such a dear, kind friend” (87, 85). Under his, Aunt Abby’s, and the minister’s “instructions,” Frado becomes “a believer in a future existence,”
where she may “cast off the fetters of sin, and rise to the communion of
saints” (87). Under the influence of James and Aunt Abby, who tirelessly
counsel patience and nonresistance, Frado “continue[s], as usual, her labors,” hoping “to share the abode of James” in the hereafter (84-5).
James’s death, however, abruptly halts her incipient conversion experience. On the verge of leaping after him into the grave, she suddenly
realises that “she was not fit to die. She could not go where he was if she
did. She did not love God; she did not serve him or know how to” (99). Released from James’s spell, her old doubt that the Christian promise of salvation “was all for white people” becomes certainty, as “[h]er mistress
grasping her raw-hide, caused a longer flow of tears, and wounded a spirit
that was craving healing mercies” (84, 101).
As indicated earlier, Wilson’s deliberate move to overturn Frado’s anticipated conversion just at the point where she seems willing to sacrifice
herself in accordance with James’s doctrine of nonresistance and passive
suffering, not only exposes “the failure of Christianity to stand as a critique
of white hegemonic ideals,” but, more broadly, constitutes a postsentimental attack against white liberal notions of compassion, charity, and uplift. 37
Before Frado can become an independent agent in the political and economic struggle for black emancipation, she has to throw off the specious
ideology of compassion that on the one hand absolves a white bourgeoisie
from political responsibility and on the other reinvests it with the moral supremacy that legitimises existing conditions of black servitude. 38
Notably, it is only after James’s death that Frado musters enough
courage to openly challenge Mrs. Bellmont. Returning from an errand to
fetch wood, Frado is scolded for “not returning as soon as Mrs. B. calculated” (105). But just as the evil mistress is about to administer physical
punishment, Frado shouts: “‘Stop!… strike me, and I’ll never work a mite for
you;’ and throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels
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the stirring of free and independent thoughts” (105). Of course, as in Douglass’ case, this single act of defiance by and in itself does not lead to physical freedom. Yet, “the stirring of free and independent thoughts” signals
that Frado no longer pins her hopes to the promised aid of charitable masters, but instead begins to actively confront the powers that be. Henceforth,
Frado’s overjoyed reaction to “the astounding news” of “Mary’s untimely
death,” shocking as it may seem to Aunt Abby and the “gentle reader,”
marks her successful conversion from an object of sentimental piety to a
subject of postsentimental resistance. 39 Thus, having cast off James’s hollow dictum of Christian empathy, which “was all for white people” to begin
with, Frado plots her way to freedom, resolves “to flee,” and even “contemplated administering poison to her mistress” (84, 108).
Frado’s eventual release from bondage does not clear the path toward
freedom, of course. In keeping with her aim to illuminate the socioeconomic conditions that permanently relegate free blacks to the fringes of
society, Wilson adds a depiction of Frado’s post-servitude struggles to eek
out a living. In contrasting the genuine help Frado receives from Mrs.
Moore, Mrs. Hale, and two nameless friends with the false charities Mrs.
Hoggs bestows upon her and Samuel’s antislavery profiteering, Wilson outlines the contours of a postsentimental, postslavery cooperation between
and among racial lines that acknowledges both persistent conflicts of interests and mutual interdependence.
Frado’s first summer after release from bondage “passed pleasantly,”
as Mrs. Moore affords her gainful employment from which both parties
benefit (117). Soon, however, Frado’s lingering illness catches up with her
and when “the kind Mrs. Hale” falls sick too, she is “removed to the home of
two maidens, (old,) who had principle enough to be willing to earn the
money a charitable public disburses” (122). As earlier under the protection
of “kind” James, under the self-serving care of these two old maidens,
Frado’s physical condition actually deteriorates. Matters take a turn for the
worse, when, two years later, Frado is given into the care of the greedy
Mrs. Hoggs, “a lover of gold and silver,” who asks “the favor of filling her
coffers by caring for the sick” (122). Once again leveling a postsentimental
attack against the uncritical notion of public compassion, Wilson uses this
scene to expose the specious nature of charities that fill the coffers of the
lower middle class, while keeping the destitute in a permanent state of
helpless confinement. And just in case one might doubt that this system of
calculated charity primarily aims at confining needy mulatto girls, Mrs. Hogg
reports Frado to the “town officers as an impostor,” after the latter had
taken up needle work in an attempt to “yet help herself” (123).
True aid, Wilson highlights toward the end of the penultimate chapter,
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“Nothing new under the sun”
originates in the recognition of difference as well as a shared humanity,
from whence it proceeds to promote self-help and self-improvement.
Hence, even though Mrs. Moore had seen better days herself, she resolves
to assist Frado, not because she is suddenly overwhelmed by pity, but because “she felt humanity required her to” do so. Unlike James or Aunt
Abby, whose sympathy toward Frado sprung from pure emotion, Mrs.
Moore’s decision to assist Frado is reason-based, rooted less in religious
beliefs than in humanitarian principles. Not surprisingly, with Mrs. Moore’s
support Frado first regains a measure of health and then once more resolves “to take care of herself, to cast off the unpleasant charities of the
public” (124). Of course, “black, feeble and poor,” Frado by now is only too
aware of the obstacles that race and class prejudices pose to her advancement. Yet, having learned that independence requires collaboration,
Frado puts her trust in a more practical-minded God and before long finds
“a plain, simple woman, who could see merit beneath a dark skin” (124).
The “plain, simple woman” not only agrees to instruct her “with the needle,”
but “also to teach her the value of useful books” (124). As a result of this
cooperation between the “simple” white woman and the “invalid mulatto,”
Frado feels “herself capable of elevation” for the first time (124). Working
hard and maintaining “a devout and Christian exterior” for the benefit of “the
villagers,” Frado passes “months of quiet, growing in the confidence of her
neighbors and new found friends” (125).
Alas, Our Nig does not conclude with this serene picture of “quiet” and
relative contentment. In fact, rather than “winding up … the matter,” the final chapter yet again complicates Frado’s troubles. Wilson’s terse description of Frado’s short marriage with a “professed fugitive … from slavery,”
which leaves her, like her mother, abandoned with child and “nearly prostrated,” once again obliges the “gentle reader” to discard all sentimental
ideas and to recognise the unresolved race, class, and gender conflicts that
swelter underneath his or her very own nose (126, 127). Hence, the “silent
sympathy” that initially attracted Frado to the “fine, straight negro” soon
proves deceptive, as Samuel prolongs his “‘lectures’” on the abolitionist circuit “often for weeks” and eventually “embarked at sea, with the disclosure
that he had never seen the South, and that his illiterate harangues were
humbugs for hungry abolitionists” (128). As nearly all commentators have
noted, Wilson’s portrayal of Samuel as a con artist, who makes a living by
flattering the “thousands who favored the elevation” of blacks yet refuse “to
admit one through the front door,” constitutes her most unequivocal indictment against white hypocrisy and self-righteousness (76, 129). Equally unambiguously, though, Samuel’s scheming and irresponsible behavior furthermore repudiates notions, according to which love and marriage afford
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women with fulfillment and protection. For not only does Frado find her
“feelings of trust” shattered, she is also “again thrown upon the public for
sustenance” and – not unlike “poor Mag” before her – forced to leave her
baby boy “in charge of a Mrs. Capon” (128, 129). The sentimental investment in love and marriage, Wilson makes clear, is no substitute for the recognition of mutual dependency as well as a firm commitment to reciprocal
aid.
Wilson ultimately abstains from offering any clear solutions to the persistent race, class, and gender conflicts that her heroine embodies. Our Nig
ends where it begins; namely, with the continual struggle for survival and
acceptance. The reader catches a last glimpse of Frado, “busily employed
in preparing her merchandise; sallying forth to encounter many frowns, but
some kind friends and purchasers” (130). Yet, as we have seen, it is precisely Wilson’s postsentimental refusal to supply either an unambiguously
tragic or a decidedly happy ending that preserves the political double thrust
of Our Nig. For on the one hand, Frado’s hard-won realisation that blind
faith in the sentimental promise of deliverance through motherhood, domesticity, compassion, friendship, and Christianity will invariably result in
self-destruction of the oppressed, testifies to the necessity of open conflict.
On the other hand, though, Wilson’s exposure of the subtle mechanisms
that preserve old modes of exploitation under the new guise of compassion, underscores that the dominant culture will never cast off “Slavery’s
Shadows,” unless it recognises that its own fate lies in the hands of the oppressed and eventually commits itself to genuine cooperation across race,
class, and gender lines.
Miami University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
W.E.B. DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folks,” in Three Negro Classics, ed. John
Hope Franklin (New York: Avon, 1999), 219.
2
Walter Benjamin, “Der Autor als Produzent,” in Versuche über Brecht, ed. Rolf
Tiedmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), 101-20.
3
Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, ed. Henry
Louis Gates (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). All in-text parenthetical references
are to this book, including those to Gates’ “Introduction.”
4
Elizabeth Ammons, “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother-Savior: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
American Women Writers Before the 1920s,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom’s
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“Nothing new under the sun”
Cabin, ed. Eric Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 183.
5
Eric Gardner, “‘This Attempt of Their Sister:’ Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig from Printer
to Readers,” The New England Quarterly, 66.2 (1993), 242.
6
Elizabeth Breau, “Identifying Satire: ‘Our Nig,’” Callaloo, 16.2 (1993), 465.
7
Julia Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” American Literature, 67 (1995), 439,
441.
8
John Ernest, Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth Century African-American
Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper (Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1995), 56-7.
9
R.J. Ellis, “Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown’s Clotel and
Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and the Masculine Traditions, ed. Karen Kilcup (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999), 99-100.
10
Elizabeth West, “Reworking the Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in
Our Nig,” Melus, 24.2 (1999), 3.
11
Gardner, “‘This Attempt of Their Sister,’” 242.
12
Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” 448; Ammons, “Stowe’s Dream of the
Mother-Savior,” 188.
13
Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” 453; West, “Reworking the Conversion Narrative,” 23.
14
See, e.g., Katherine Clay Bassard, “‘Beyond Mortal Vision:’ Harriet E. Wilson’s
Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text,” in Female Subjectivity in Black and
White, eds. Elizabeth Abel et al. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997), 189; Ernest,
Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth Century African-American Literature,
70; West, “Reworking the Conversion Narrative,” 22.
15
Benjamin, “Der Autor als Produzent,” 116.
16
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), 223.
17
DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folks,” 251.
18
Henry Louis Gates, “Introduction,” in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry
Louis Gates (New York: Mentor, 1989), x.
19
Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature, 70.3 (1998), 641.
20
Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” 440.
21
Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 641.
22
Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 642.
23
Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 648.
24
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Norton, 1994), 245.
25
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 246.
26
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 267.
27
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 246.
28
Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 640.
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29
West, “Reworking the Conversion Narrative,” 4.
30
Representing her personal history of crisis as symptomatic of the violent tensions
within society, Wilson’s Frado resembles Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angelus Novus’: “His
faced turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in
front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught
in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This
storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skyward” (“Thesis on the Philosophy of History” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken Books, 1985], 257-8). Like
the angel of history, a matured Frado can perceive the past only as a reappearance of neglect, abuse, exploitation, and violence. But even though she “give[s]
over all thought of the future world,” Frado must follow “the way” “God prepares,”
“resolutely” avoiding the “[t]raps slyly laid by the vicious to ensnare her” (104, 124,
129).
31
Berlant, The Queen, 223.
32
Ernest, Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth Century African-American Literature, 60.
33
Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” 446.
34
As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese notes, “[w]here the tragic mulatto is patient and longsuffering, Frado is angry and rebellious.” And “[u]nlike the mulatto heroine, Frado
exposes the internal scares that her experience has traced in her mind”: FoxGenovese, “‘To Weave It Into the Literature of the Country:’ Epic and Fictions of
African American Women,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, eds. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State UP, 1997), 42.
35
Ammons, “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother-Savior,” 182.
36
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Salem: Ayer Publishers,
1984), 394, emphasis added.
37
West, “Reworking the Conversion Narrative,” 16.
38
Thus, unlike Stowe’s heaven-bound Uncle Tom, Frado suddenly realises that
turning herself into “a martyr” would be nothing more than a politically ineffective,
self-destructive gesture of defeat (83).
39
As Gates observes, it is this “transformation from black-as-object into the blackas-subject” that attests to a newfound “will to power” (“Introduction,” lv).
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature of Time and Space
in Contemporary Installation
Victoria Baker
The role of time and space in contemporary art is not a simplistic linear
relationship. Instead it is a complex network, where every aspect of time
within an artwork is reliant on the surrounding space, or vice versa. In fact I
believe that the relationship between time, space and contemporary art is
as complex and diverse as the terms time and space themselves. This article presents an overview of my current research, and introduces the integral terminology and methodology. Therefore, some concepts are not dealt
with as extensively as I might otherwise wish and I am only able to summarise this relationship between time, space and contemporary art. Initially, in
order to understand the complexity of this network, a causal model representing the full life-space of an artwork will be briefly introduced. The key to
deconstructing these complex relationships is to identify the suitable terminology, therefore I will utilize the dual concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic to
identify time and space, and to enable a deconstruction of contemporary art
work. Examples of installations featured in the 2004 Biennale of Sydney will
be used and due to word constraints this article will briefly consider the generic concept of contemporary installation. The methodology presented can
be effectively applied to the deconstruction of any contemporary medium.
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/baker.pdf
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Causal Model
The success of this method of deconstruction relies on a number of
factors, however the key lies in the consideration of the full life span of an
art work This life-span is a series of causal or hierarchical events, each one
leading to the next. Although there are many more possible stages, there
are at least four generic elements in every work (figure 1).
Conception
Creation
Discursive Space
Archival
Figure 1 – Causal Model
These stages are closely based on the model proposed by Graham
Coulter-Smith in his 1986 article, “Criticising Peter Tyndall.” 1 Focusing on
the ideology surrounding the work of Peter Tyndall, Coulter-Smith develops
Greimas’ ‘Actant Model’, and uses this as a basic framework on which to
base his analytical model of narrative within art. Coulter-Smith focuses on
the active role of the critic, and parallels this with the primary process, the
creation of the artwork (figure 2). 2
Primary
Process
Critical
Model
Artwork
Humankind
Viewer
Dominant
Ideology
Figure 2 – Coulter-Smith’s Model
Coulter-Smith’s model does not adequately allow for the necessary
emphasis on the causal production of an artwork, although through its nonlinear construction it emphasises the cyclic and continuous nature of the
process. As important as this continuum is, it is however essential to focus
on the hierarchy of actions. The causal model (figure 1) is represented here
as four simple stages, yet each stage does not necessarily need to be concluded before completion of the first, every stage can be repeated and all
stages involve complex issues of both time and space. Simply described,
the conception stage is the event at which motivation for the creation of an
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Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature of Time and Space
artwork occurs. There is no timeframe to limit this gestation period, indeed
the development of concept will probably evolve well into the creation
stage. However, it is not possible to reach the creation stage without building upon ideas or decisions formed within the concept stage and it is in this
way that this model is hierarchical. The creation stage is the making of the
object, the installing of an exhibition, and incorporates any action that leads
to the completion of the object. Discursive Space exists when a discourse
is created between viewer and object. This concept will be dealt with in
depth in the discussion of the extrinsic. Finally, the archival stage includes
all the documentation, deconstruction, academic discourse, and of course
the archiving of an artwork. This stage is in many ways optional, for example, art movements such as the land art of the 1960s and 1970s and performance art, whose objects or events are not always recorded or archived,
do not necessarily need to reach this final stage. The discussion on discursive space further explains the significance of the archival stage.
The causal model has been introduced here for two purposes, initially
to allow for a discussion of the overall life-span of an artwork using the language of time, and secondly to create a framework within which it is possible to base a more complex analysis of contemporary art. As mentioned,
each stage, although simply represented, is in fact an intricate network of
time and space. The concept and creation stages are primarily represented
by the intrinsic, while the discursive space and the deconstruction stages
are dominated by the extrinsic. These two terms allow for a discussion of
time and space within contemporary art, without relying on the traditional
dichotomy of space and time or loaded terminology such as “space-time.”
Intrinsic and Extrinsic
The terms intrinsic and extrinsic are based on the pedagogical concepts of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation for students. 3 Extrinsic
motivation refers to an educator’s use of external rewards to motivate students, intrinsic motivation refers to the student motivating themselves
through feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction. These terms were adopted
because unlike words such as open/shut and inside/outside they are not
laden with social implications and do not automatically imply a vehement
dialectic opposition and are often used in conjunction with one another.
These issues of metaphor and social implication are cited by Gaston
Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, as one of his reasons for selecting the
terms inside and outside. 4 I have avoided using the terms outside and inside as I feel that both are diametrically opposed and are not flexible
enough to allow for the existence of a cooperative relationship. The idea of
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inherent and not inherent is implied strongly when considering the intrinsic
and extrinsic nature of a work. The intrinsic connotes values that are to
some extent independent to the surrounding environment and are an inherent quality within every artwork. The intrinsic attributes of an artwork are
present without the interaction of a viewer and therefore exist when discursive space is not occurring. The extrinsic aspect of any work is not inherent
in the sense that it relies on the actions of an external agent, usually a
viewer. Although this externalisation implies that the extrinsic is an accessory to the object, the degree to which an artwork is exposed to any external element or agent is so great, that it is impossible to consider the object
without this aspect. By definition, the extrinsic has its origin outside the object, however in the application of extrinsic to art one must consider the external as a catalyst. In this sense both the object and the agent (either in
the form of viewer or society) are essential elements of the extrinsic, and
when considered together they are the fundamental properties of discursive
space. Although these terms imply opposing positions, (inherent or not inherent), and initially appear diametrically opposed, the intrinsic and extrinsic are paradoxically complementary elements. Furthermore they are both
essential elements in every work of art. Deconstruction of an object or
event with only one of these aspects would be incomplete; indeed it is the
relationship between the intrinsic elements and the extrinsic elements that
fully reveals the characteristics of time and space within the object. This
method of deconstruction has been utilized by a number of researchers,
notably Michel de Certeau’s 1988 research, The Practice of Everyday Life,
in which instability is contrasted with stability. 5 Deconstruction through the
isolation of distinct characteristics is an essential element in Mark Wigley’s
philosophical investigation, The Architecture of Deconstruction. 6 In identifying the primary features of architecture, Wigley places a similar emphasis
on ornament as we find in the application of the extrinsic. Ornament and
structure are two aspects of the same object, and the ornament is controlled by the structure to which it is attached. Wigley goes on to discuss
the nature of bonds and support as they move further away from their
foundation. Although he is discussing physical aspects of architecture,
there is a parallel between the relationships of the fundament (directly
linked to structure)/ ornament and the intrinsic/extrinsic. This correlation will
be explored as an element of discursive space and reproduction. Jacques
Lacan’s “mirror stage” again uses a similar method of identifying separate
elements and their subsequent application to a process of deconstruction. 7
His theories are particularly relevant to the complex intrinsic and narrative
that will be dealt with at length later.
The elemental nature of time is emphasised by Jan Faye, in the intro-
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Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature of Time and Space
duction to the edited book, Perspectives on time:
Time seems to be a fundamental concept which we have to accept
as a precondition of our understanding of our own life and the whole
universe around us. … Even if we cannot provide a formal definition
of time, something instructive and important about time can always
be said concerning how it is related to other fundamental concepts
like space, event, thing, causation, free will and human experience. 8
By deconstructing contemporary installation through the framework of the
intrinsic and the extrinsic it is possible to isolate this fundamental nature of
time and to then consider the active role it plays both within the artwork itself and within subsequent discourse. The role of space is as fundamental
to the existence of any artwork as time, indeed the complex relationship between time and space means that each element can rarely be considered
without regard to the other. The visual arts is a spatial pursuit, a fact that is
emphasised in contemporary installation, where location and site are a
dominating aspect of the work itself. Space and location as essential factors of contemporary installation can be considered as an example of the
intrinsic and extrinsic functioning in conjunction. As noted by Faye, perhaps
the most problematic characteristic of considering time and space in contemporary installation, is the indefinable nature of almost all the terms involved. There is no basic definition or social understanding of time, there is
also no simple definition of space. These terms can be defined within a scientific classification, the psychological genus and a social-cultural sense.
However, when they are applied to contemporary art, to gain a true understanding of their functions one must consider all definitions and implications
of these terms simultaneously, and this is where problems begin to occur. If
one cannot rely on the solid and definable nature of the terms that are being used, then analysis becomes an almost impossible task. This problem
might be negotiable if the other terms we are considering were not equally
as problematic. The definition of contemporary art is just as, if not more,
elusive than the terms time and space; even to hazard the task of creating
a working definition is a thesis in itself. Through the identification and
analysis of simple concepts intrinsic and extrinsic, it is possible to create a
terminology and methodology that enables a deconstruction of the role and
evidence of time and space in contemporary art. The installations discussed are works selected from the 2004 Biennale of Sydney.
Simple Intrinsic
The simple intrinsic is used to consider each individual object or ele-
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ment independently of the whole installation. The complexity of this task
depends greatly on the installation in question. Contemporary installation is
a fertile area for the simple intrinsic, as there is much diversity in the construction of installations. Contemporary installation can utilise numerous different disciplines such as: video, performance, accumulation, appropriation,
parody and many more devices. Aspects of an individual object that can be
considered through the framework created by simple intrinsic may include
any conscious choice the artist has made during either the making or collecting of individual objects. Again the diversity of installation becomes
relevant, for some installations, lighting, sound or space amongst many
other variables, may need to be considered as individual objects and as active parts of the installation. However, for other installations lighting, sound
and space may be incidental elements and best considered during the investigation of the complex intrinsic or the extrinsic. As individual elements
of the whole installation are considered through simple intrinsic framework,
the conception stage and the creation stage as identified in the causal
model are of primary concern.
Blocks of cheese are featured in Pessimism no more (2002) by
Pravdoliub Ivanov. 9 Some holes in each block of cheese have been bandaged up, and a single piece of cheese is placed on a plate that is then
placed on a desk. The sequence is repeated to form the installation. Considering this work in terms of simple intrinsic, the individual object can be
initially considered as the cheese. The inclusion of a perishable object creates a temporal framework for the work, this manifestation of the installation can exist only as long as the cheese survives. 10 The work is not static
as the organic cheese will alter with the passage of time. The unexpected
interaction between the bandages and the holes in the cheese highlight the
holes as a spatial void, and the absence of cheese becomes an active
space within the object. The absurdity of placing bandages over an expect
feature of the cheese creates a parody through which meaning can be constructed and has created a new focus for the deconstruction. The simple intrinsic can once again be extended to consider the table on which the
cheese, bandages and plates are placed. Again the unexpected nature of
the object becomes the vessel for meaning. Although each of the “cheese,
bandage, plate and table” objects occupy a set space there is no use made
of the void beneath the tables. The exhibition space is a variable entity and
not a set parameter of the object, (the dimensions of the work are variable)
therefore it will be considered as an element of simple extrinsic. Each individual element identified has unique aspects of time and space that become apparent through systematic deconstruction.
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Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature of Time and Space
Complex Intrinsic
In the case of installation, the primary function of complex intrinsic is to
consider the effects of the combined individual elements identified through
the simple intrinsic. The complex intrinsic is situated within the stages of
conception and creation of the causal model. The use of complex intrinsic
allows the identification of concerns such as: the cumulative effect created
by the arrangement of individual elements and objects, sound, lighting, and
the use of space (space as an aspect of site will be further discussed as an
element of complementary intrinsic and extrinsic). The installation of objects is an essential element in the creation of meaning with a contemporary installation. Video installation regularly uses carefully selected spaces
and synchronised time to install the individual video elements of an installation. 11 There is an important distinction between the role of the artist and
curator, just as there is a distinction between installation and series. The
display of individual pieces in a series is not the same as a deliberate unification of individual elements to create an installation. In the case of installation, all elements are working together to form a single entity, whereas exhibitions and series are a collection of complete works with some link or
commonalities. This distinction is essential when considering complex intrinsic, as this deconstructive tool can be as effectively applied to a series
as it can to an installation.
Considering complex intrinsic elements within Pessimism no more allows for the identification of complex spatial relationships resulting from
cumulation and the placement of individual entities. Ivanov’s installation
dominated an area within the MCA whose primary function was a transition
space between the elevator and the main exhibition spaces. The tables
were deliberately placed to force viewers to negotiate the room in a manner
dictated by the artist. Utilizing the site the “cheese, bandage, plate and table” objects were effectively incorporated into an unexpected spatial arrangement, enhancing the meaning created in each individual object. The
repetition of the objects reinforces the unexpected relationships of the single elements. In this installation, the complex intrinsic emphasises the spatial nature of the installation, however the cumulative effect of multiple
pieces of cheese slowly aging in the gallery does call attention to the temporal nature of the work. Jimmie Durham’s Still Life with Stone and Car,
has only very simple individual elements (boulder with face painted and red
car), the metaphor is primarily derived from the interaction of these objects. 12 Elements of site and physical location are incidental to meaning,
the paradox inherent to this installation is apparent regardless of location,
indeed it is difficult to imagine a setting where the combination of these two
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objects in this particular manner could not be considered absurd. The temporal nature of this work is complex; the act of dropping the boulder on the
car became a performance and the resulting still life only physically existed
for the duration of the exhibition. The roles of time and space in this installation are fluctuating; initially during the performance (or installation) of this
work, time became the domination factor, the installation resulting from this
performance was dominated by space through the physical presence of the
passive object.
Simple Extrinsic
Although affected by the results of the creation of an object, the simple
extrinsic occurs when an active element in the form of an agent is introduced. Simple extrinsic is concerned with identifying the results of viewer
interaction and viewer interpretation. It is this way strongly related to semiotics and the conclusions drawn are based on subjective responses, with
outcomes at times dependent on individual viewer responses. For the first
time, the conscious choices made by the artist in the conception stage and
realised in the creation stage are considered passive signifiers. They are
relevant only to the extent that they direct the viewer’s construction of
meaning and are the controlling elements of interaction. The simple extrinsic is always a present action, as it occurs during interaction with the installation. Simple extrinsic is in this sense opposed to both simple and complex
intrinsic as the former is the event that occurs only with the completion of
the latter.
Viewer interaction with Pravdoliub Ivanov’s Pessimism no more, creates an interesting example of the simple extrinsic. Initially discourse is irrevocably controlled by the artist’s placement of the individual object and
the selection of the exhibition space. The positioning of the collection of tables in a transition space forces this involuntary interaction and thus we see
elements of the simple extrinsic. Interactive elements in installation create a
situation where the objects are active components of the discourse created.
In this case the temporal nature of this interaction is simply an extension of
the viewer / object discourse. The interactive nature of Project for Sydney
by Thomas Mulcaire and Amanda Rodrigues Alves creates an extension of
the simple intrinsic. 13 By inviting the viewer to take the A1 posters as memento of the work, the artists are essentially expanding the physical space
of the artwork. With the retention of an element of the artwork, the viewer
has the potential for continual discourse with the object. This indefinitely extends the potential “present” that is essential to the simple extrinsic.
Through the distribution of the posters, the time and space surrounding this
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work have essentially become simultaneously static and unbounded. This
situation is mimicked in Rubens Mano’s Visor, where the performance of
the work occurred away from the gallery but the visors featured in this performance were freely distributed during the biennale. 14 The time and space
of this interaction within both these works is removed from reference to the
flow of physical time or restrictions of physical presence of the installation.
Complex Extrinsic
Viewer constructed meaning can be extended to include narrative. The
potential of a narrative in installation is incorporated into individual elements or into the installation as a whole by the artist during the creation
phase. However, as with simple extrinsic an external agent is required as a
catalyst in order for the narrative to emerge. There must be a common social dialogue between object and agent for the occurrence of a discourse
resulting in narrative. Complex extrinsic with regard to narrative is reliant on
the presence of a common social language. The agent brings a personal
history and knowledge to the installation allowing the emergence of a narrative. Although this discourse occurs in the presence of the installation, it
is situated in the imagination of the viewer. Rosalind Krauss’ interpretation
of Lacan’s “mirror-stage” provides a method to identify elements of time
within this narrative.
The Imaginary is in the realm of fantasy, specified as a-temporal,
because it is disengaged from the conditions of history. For the child,
a sense of history, both his own and particularly that of others,
wholly independent of himself, comes only with the full acquisition of
language. Language presents him with an historical framework preexistent to his own being. Following the designation of spoken or
written language as constituted of that type of sign called the symbol, Lacan names this stage of development the Symbolic and opposes it to the Imaginary. 15
Although the imagined narrative is a-temporal and occurs in the mind
space of the agent, there are more complex relationships of time and space
at play. The discourse occurs in the presence of the object and is therefore
directly linked to a physical space and time. The narrative itself is being
imagined in the present, it is however relying on the agent’s prior knowledge, so is in this sense dominated by the past.
Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds’ site specific, sound installation Gargalesis 2004 is an example of narrative as an element of complex extrinsic. 16 The institutional critique offered by the recording simulating white-ant
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conversations, created a narrative that was accessible only to those familiar with the terminology of the termites. Success of the simulation relied on
the viewers’ ability to allow themselves to be convinced of the plausibility of
an absurd event, an event that saw white-ants discussing the concerns of
the institution and art world. The role of the imagination in this piece was
exaggerated by the artists referencing only indexical signs of white-ants
and not featuring the insects themselves. The complex extrinsic only existed while the viewer was directly engaging with the work by listening into
simulated conversations. At another level, narrative within the installation
was constructed by the juxtaposition of a termite mound placed on the lush
grass outside the MCA. The success of this dislocation relied on a viewer’s
pre-existing knowledge. Finally, the social critique of the work, the undermining of the foundations of art through these conversations was a narrative primarily accessible to those viewers with knowledge of the contemporary art world. The construction of narrative within any installation requires
an active discourse between object and viewer. More so than within the
construction of meaning, narrative is a product of a common social language. Through recognised symbolism, the artist can deliberately evoke a
viewer’s memory, triggering a narrative; this narrative can then be constructed by the viewer and not a direct reference to a known story. Gordon
Hookey’s installation Paranoia Annoy Ya relied on the political knowledge
of the viewer for narrative to be created. 17 To gain a full understanding of
the symbolism within the work the viewer was also required to be familiar
with images of contemporary Australian popular culture. Hookey’s narrative
combined regions of linear progression and spatially dominated areas. The
Aboriginal plight over the last 200 years was documented, as was a protest
over Australia’s current relationship with the United States of America. This
element of the installation showed a linear progression of historical events,
however the adjacent panels portrayed representations of seemingly temporally unrelated images. Objects included in this complex installation engaged the viewer in a complementary narrative.
Discursive Space
The interaction between viewer and installation that occurs in both
simple and complex extrinsic create a discourse best described as discursive space. Discursive space allows for the continuation of the discourse
beyond the present, and is therefore not subject to the limitations placed on
the extrinsic. Indeed it is not necessary that discursive space occur as a
physical action and therefore hold certain similarities to Lacan’s imaginary
in his “mirror stage.” It is possible to argue that discursive space can occur
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exclusively within the mind of a viewer. The state of discursive space becomes progressively more abstract and subjective the further it is removed
from the physical reality of the object. Unlike Lacan I feel that this is not an
a-temporal experience, instead that it is bound in absolute time and space.
Let us propose that discursive space is triggered by the reflection of an
agent on a work they have just viewed. The memory will retain certain intrinsic elements which are interpreted through the framework of the extrinsic. The actual simple extrinsic experience may have lasted no more than 4
minutes, however the discursive space created by this initial experience
lasts for the duration of the reflective experience. Again, let us postulate
that our agent, inspired by the installation, purchases a book or image of
the object. While reading the text and reflecting on their experience the
agent will again encounter discursive space with the object. This space is
no longer bound by the physical presence of the installation; as it is occurring in the “imaginary,” it is not bound by the causal and temporal laws surrounding reality. As our agent becomes more detached from the physical
presence of the object, the discursive space relies more heavily on the
memory and the interpretation of the installation, becoming ever more subjective. If the agent has assimilated the visual memory of the object, an image or reproduction may no longer be necessary to trigger the occurrence
of discursive space. The final stage of the causal model, the archival stage,
is represented by this subjective discursive space. This stage implies not
only the physical archiving of an object, but also the continuing storage and
retrieval of the object in the mind of the agent. The role of discursive space
is essential to contemporary installation. Consider Lim Tzay Chuen’s event
specific installation A Proposition: 18 this work is no longer accessible except through documentation. 19 The simple and complex extrinsic occurred
when the instructions were filled, at the announcement of the winner and at
the subsequent exhibition. This, like many contemporary installations can
only be engaged with discursive space. The concept of discursive space
builds on information gained through the intrinsic and interaction of the extrinsic forming a discourse between viewer and object that exists outside
the direct constraints of physical time and space.
Complementary Intrinsic and Extrinsic
The terms intrinsic and extrinsic are not automatically mutually exclusive. All applications of the extrinsic rely on information presented in the intrinsic elements, however some aspects of contemporary installation require a continuous exchange between these two elements. With contemporary installation and the growing importance of site, the role of space has
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become increasingly complex. Miwon Kwon discusses this shift in her book
One Place After Another:
Emerging out of the lessons of minimalism, site-specific art was initially based in a phenomenological or experiential understanding of
the site, defined primarily as an agglomeration of the actual physical
attributes of a particular location. … Then, through the materialist investigations of institutional critique, the site was reconfigured as a
relay or network in interrelated spaces. 20
When site and location of an installation directly affect the meaning or narrative, the site itself becomes an element of the complementary intrinsic
and extrinsic. This arises because the site is an intrinsic element of the
work, yet when the extrinsic examination occurs it is occurring within the location of the installation. This is a subtle distinction and best explored
through an example installation. Koo Jeong-a’s 2004 installation Untitled 21
saw the artists living in the Glasshouse of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens during the creation stage. In this installation the role of site is so
linked with the meaning that the artist actively interacted with it and the site
itself guided the creation process. The significance of site to this installation
is further enhanced when the Glasshouse itself is considered. As an extrinsic element, discourse with the work is only achieved when the viewer enters the Glasshouse; in doing so he is effectively entering the artwork itself
and becoming a component of it. The structure of the glasshouse is an intrinsic element of the work and as important as any other object within the
exhibition. Koo Jeong-a initially uses site as an active element in the creation process, and then simultaneously as a component of both intrinsic and
extrinsic, thus in this installation site becomes complementary intrinsic and
extrinsic.
Concluding Remarks
This article has considered the methods of identifying time and space
within contemporary installation. This has been achieved initially through
the use of a generic causal model, used to describe the life-span of an artwork, and subsequently through the introduction of the terms intrinsic and
extrinsic. The simple and complex components of these terms have been
briefly discussed, allowing condensed examples of deconstruction and the
description of inherent examples of time and space in selected installations.
Although this article goes no further than basic description, the identification of the elements of time and space are only the foundation of this research. The significance of the time and space identified lies in their asso-
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Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature of Time and Space
ciation with contemporary social theory. The acknowledgment of a particular installation’s utilisation of time or space is only significant when considered as indexical to broader social concepts. This methodology allows for
questions such as, “what does this evidence indicate about contemporary
society?” and “how does this reflect contemporary society?” This method of
deconstruction makes such questions accessible. This article has presented a condensed argument for intrinsic and extrinsic deconstruction,
and only briefly examined the concept of discursive space. Additionally, it
has only considered contemporary installation, taking examples exclusively
from the 2004 Biennale of Sydney. The methodology introduced in this article when developed fully, can be applied to any medium and is not limited
to examples of Western contemporary art. When this methodology is thoroughly utilized it will allow for genuine comparisons of time and space both
between individual work, between styles and between cultures, making
possible subsequent related social comparisons.
Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Graham Coulter-Smith, “Criticising Peter Tyndall: Politics Versus Play in Postmodern Criticism”, in Practices of Criticism in Australia (Parkville, Vic.: Art Association
of Australia, 1986), pp. 19-27.
2
Coulter-Smith, “Criticising Peter Tyndall”, p. 20.
3
Dennis McInerney and Valentina McInerney, Educational Psychology: Constructing Learning (Sydney : Prentice Hall, 1994).
4
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon,
1994) p. 212.
5
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
U of California P, 1988).
6
Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1993), pp. 11-7.
7
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1987), pp. 197-8.
8
Jan Faye, Perspectives on time (Boston: Kluwer, 1997), p. 1.
9
Pravdoliub Ivanov, Pessimism no more (installation), 2002/2004, cheese, plasters,
bandage, plates, tables, dimensions variable (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Museum
of Contemporary Art).
10
This work was remade for the 2004 Biennale of Sydney.
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11
Examples of this synchronicity are: Javier Téllez, The Passion of Joan of Arc (Rozelle Hospital), 2004, 16mm film transferred to DVD, two DVD projectors, three
cinema curtains, hospital linens, furniture, dimensions variable (2004 Biennale of
Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art); and Amilcar Packer, Video #02, 2002,
DVD–video installation, five DVD players, five projectors, five pairs of speakers,
five amplifiers, carpet, baseboards, door-boards, painted walls dimensions variable (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art).
12
Jimmie Durham, Still Life with Stone and Car, 2004, car, granite boulder, acrylic
paint (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Opera House).
13
Thomas Mulcaire and Amanda Rodrigues Alves, Project for Sydney, 2004, two A1
posters, installation view (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South
Wales).
14
Rubens Mano, Visor, 2004 Plastic tubes, eye masks, 10,000 tubes, dimensions
variable (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art).
15
Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 197-8.
16
Sherre DeLys and Joan Grounds, Gargalesis 2004, Installation of simulated
white-ant mound, steel, concrete, foam, oxides, pigment, builder's paper, speakers, DVD, 700x220x120cm (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary
Art).
17
Gordon Hookey, Paranoia Annoy Ya, 2004, Oil on Linen, paper, wire, cloth, found
objects, ready-mades, textcrete, cement fondue, wood, dimensions variable; three
panels at 2743x4013mm and one at 660x4496mm (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art).
18
Lim Tzay Chuen, A Proposition, An open proposition by the artist for public participation, 5 June 2004 (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Artspace).
19
The debates surrounding the reconstruction and reinstallation of temporary installations, and also nomadic trends in contemporary art are relevant; however I feel
that they are peripheral to the current discussion.
20
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002), p. 3.
21
Koo Jeong-a, Untitled, 2004, Installation: Mixed media, found objects, dimensions
variable (2004 Biennale of Sydney, Royal Botanic Gardens).
Writing the Subject:
Virginia Woolf and Clothes
Carolyn Abbs
Virginia Woolf had a fascination with clothes and textiles. She wrote
about clothes in her diaries, fiction and non-fiction and she even wrote for
Vogue magazine – the editor was a friend. 1 There may have been some influence from William Morris’s designs and tapestries, the Omega workshops of the time, Serge Diaghilev and costume designs for the Ballets
Russes, and we know that she worked needlepoint with her sister Vanessa
Bell. However, in regard to writing the subject, it was more than a mere
fascination with clothes: she recognized the important link between clothes
and the body. The other aspect of her life and work of relevance here is her
intrigue with childhood and childhood experience – particularly the memory
of her mother. I am interested in the way Woolf’s fascination with clothes
and intrigue are entwined with childhood experience and memory in her
work. In this paper, I suggest that Virginia Woolf has a method of writing
the subject that involves clothes and textiles. The method stems from her
autobiographical writing, in particular the childhood memory of her mother,
and is carried through into her novelistic practice. I will argue that Woolf is
able to fictionalize/ re-work memory as perception of the body by involving
“clothes and textiles”; 2 that is, she understands a confluence between body
and clothes which she writes via the nonverbal and, in particular, the tactile
to create the subject in her writing practice. It is this confluence which I unCOLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/abbs.pdf
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derstand as “writing the subject.”
The “confluence” of body and clothes can be defined as Flugel does in
The Psychology of Clothes. Clothes create a variety of illusions such as to
do with status, power, size, space and so on, according to Flugel, but the
very fundamental importance of clothes is the illusion of the identity between body and clothes. This however is no more than an effect known to
psychologists as “confluence.” In this illusion, the mind fails to distinguish two things which under other circumstances are easily kept
apart. … The extension of the total (human) figure, really due to
clothes, is unconsciously attributed to the body that wears them, as
being the more vital and interesting portion of the whole. 3
And,
Apart from face and hands – which, it is true, are the most socially
expressive parts of our anatomy, and to which we have learnt to devote an especially alert attention – what we actually see and react to
are, not the bodies, but the clothes of those about us. 4
This paper will commence with an analysis of certain detail in Woolf’s autobiographical work “A Sketch of the Past” and then define what I see as her
extension of Bergson’s theory of memory. This will then enable me to discuss her method of writing the subject as a political ficto-performative subject in her novelistic practice.
Autobiographical Writings
As mentioned above, Woolf’s ability to fictionalize memory as perception seems to be developed from, and to begin with, a conceptual understanding of the memory of her mother. The following analysis of three brief
moments from Woolf’s autobiographical work “A Sketch of the Past” should
help us to begin to understand this concept.
I begin: the first memory. This was of red and purple flowers on a
black background − my mother’s dress; and she was either in a train
or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers
she was wearing very close; and can still see purple and red and
blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I
suppose. 5
Certainly there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral
space which was childhood; there she was from the very first. My
first memory is of her lap; the scratch of some beads on her dress
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Writing the Subject
comes back to me as I pressed my cheek against it. Then I see her
in her white dressing gown on the balcony; and the passion flower
with the purple star on its petals. Her voice is still faintly in my ears −
decided quick; and in particular the little drops with which laugh
ended – three diminishing ahs … ‘Ah-ah-ah …’ I sometimes end a
laugh that way myself. And I see her hands, like Adrian’s, with the
very individual square-tipped finger, each finger with a waist to it,
and the nail broadening out. (My own are the same size all the way,
so that I can slip a ring over my thumb.) She had three rings; a diamond ring, an emerald ring, and an opal ring. … 6
Also I hear the tinkle of her bracelets, made of twisted silver... I do
not think that I separated her face from that general being; or from
her whole body. 7
I want to argue that the clothes and, in particular, the fabric of her mother’s
clothes in these quotations, play a role in conveying the childhood memory.
It is important to note the emphasis upon the fact that it is “the first memory,” for Woolf was forever striving to achieve that first memory as far back
as possible before adulthood and experience of life diluted and inhibited
her feelings. In the first quote it is the memory of proximity with her mother;
she is “sitting on her lap.” What is interesting about this piece is the way it
plays with the visual in the cinematic sense, initially, to exhibit visual closeness. The filmic type of close-up of the flowers on the dress sets up a myopic focus so that there is a nearness that is both emotional and physical.
The colours on the dress produce a certain painterly effect and rhythm of
the body – “red and purple.” Next, the blackness of the background of the
flowers on the dress provides a void so that there is the feeling of being
alone with the flowers, that is, immersed in the rhythm and separate from
the rest of the world. The mother is her world. These flowers then procure a
virtual life in the present when in retrospect the child subject proposes that
these flowers must have been anemones. They become real flowers so
that the olfactory comes into play; we smell the perfume of the flowers because we are as if so near. In consequence, the perfume of the flowers is
then super-imposed upon the mother and becomes as if the mother's perfume. And as part of the dress, the perfume and flowers cause the dress
(to which she is close) to be the mother. That is, there is a confluence between her body and dress. The activation of the proximal sense between
mother and child is juxtaposed against the indefinite sense of place: “she
was either in a train or in an omnibus,” so that emphasis is of being on her
lap. Even the fact of the anemones is not absolutely clear if we take into
account the concluding adjunct of “I suppose.” The indefiniteness of de-
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scription could be regarded as a painterly blurring type of PostImpressionistic effect, but it should not be left at the aesthetic level of interpretation. Part of the reason is that the inexactness of vision produces a
corporeality of indefiniteness that, for Woolf, provided the impetus for the
production of ficto-performative subjects, as will be shown in due course.
The second quotation is once again about “first memory” and mediated in terms of the aesthetics of the fragmented dream space, or cinematic montage, while maintaining an emphasis on proximity between
mother and child, both near and far. The montage shifts between close-up
and long shots putting emphasis, once again, upon the proximity that is
both emotional as well as physical. Even the long shot of the dressinggown implies an intimate knowledge of the tactile feeling of the cloth due to
the understanding produced in the following close-up. While the mother is
described as “the centre of that great Cathedral space of childhood,” as if
both physically as well as spiritually towering over the child, it is not the
verbal that directly confirms presence. Rather, it is the visual image of the
Madonna and child (created through the verbal) that conveys emotion, and
a certain awesome spirituality out of a visual painterly aspect. However, I
argue that it is the cloth of the dressing-gown that summons the child to
become enfolded so there is a fluid type of merging, between child, mother
and cloth.
Next, it is the beads on the dress that not only cause the felt, tactile,
presence of the mother but simultaneously dispel the spiritual myth. As displeasure, the scratch of the beads is as if a reprimand from the mother –
“the scratch of some beads on her dress comes back to me as I pressed
my cheek against it.” The mother is now a human mother as opposed to a
mythical figure in that she is denied spiritual “perfection.” Instead, she reprimands the child, causing pain, which contritely, reinforces the recollected
closeness. Similarly, while the vision of the mother “in her white dressinggown on the balcony” depicts a certain ethereal presence, it is the following
close-up of “the passion flower with the purple star on its petals” that refocuses the mother as bodily rhythm. Her presence is confirmed by the recalled laughter which is then superimposed upon a self as if it is her laughter now or at least an inherited laughter. The comparison of the hands is
pertinent, that is, between Adrian, the mother and the self, But it should be
stressed that it is the jewellery that not only enables presence but, far more
importantly, it enables the “other’s” hand to feel like her own. There is a
merging of selves, a linking caused by the rings that once again produce
the feeling of putting on the rings while recalling the other hands. “And I see
her hands, like Adrian’s, with the very individual square-tipped finger, each
finger with a waist to it, and the nail broadening out. (My own are the same
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size all the way, so that I can slip a ring over my thumb.) She had three
rings; a diamond ring, an emerald ring, and an opal ring.”
In the third quote, the tinkling sound of her mother’s bracelets is very
much her sound as was her laughter. She has a general being that is a
merging of bracelets, face and whole body. Yet it is the fact that they are
made of twisted silver that gives the impression of the child twisting the
bracelets on the mother’s arm; or her own arm. It is a strong tactile and performative image.
Also I hear the tinkle of her bracelets, made of twisted silver... I do
not think that I separated her face from that general being; or from
her whole body. 8
There is a persistent activation of multiple senses – visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile – in Woolf’s autobiographical work and I am interested in how
she reworks this method in her fiction. I shall argue, as stated earlier, that
Woolf creates the subject via clothes and textiles due to her understanding
of the confluence of clothes and the body; and that she includes her own
experiential ficto-autobiographical memory. In other words, I maintain that
Woolf fictionalizes memory as perception and, in particular the intensely
emotional memory of her mother in order to create the subject. It will be
productive now to define some understanding of Woolf’s philosophy of
memory.
Memory: Beyond Bergson
With regard to memory, Woolf is most often read as a Bergsonian or
follower of Proust. While she did perhaps work with some ideas that were
similar to that of Bergson’s, it is a mistake to regard her merely as a Bergsonian. 9 The main difference is that she worked with recollected memory in
the manner of childhood feelings and sensations and it is in this respect
that she is considered to be Proustian. However, it seems that Woolf extends the aims of Proust to include the political. While Proust is famous for
recalling the sensation of childhood, such as in the well-known petite madeleine episode, 10 Woolf recovers childhood feelings and fictionalizes (reworks) them so as to mediate certain sensations that create the subject as
a politics of the body in writing. Her achievements in this regard are complex and partly to do with an understanding of writing itself but also with the
way she comprehends memory; and in many ways an extension of Bergson’s ideas on memory as well as Proustian memory. Let us begin with the
thoughts of Bergson that are relevant.
Bergson proposes that there are three aspects of memory: pure mem-
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ory, memory-image, and perception. He posits that pure memory and
memory-images are realized from the Perception of the present.
Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some
period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by
which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past
– a work of adjustment, something like the focussing of a camera.
But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves
to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it
comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it
passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and
its surface takes on colour, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots. 11
Virginia Woolf had a keen interest in cinema 12 and we can see that she
works with traits of the cinema in her writing such as, for instance, closeups enable things to “come into view” and imitate perception. Yet, it is in
the previous sentence, where Bergson says that we “prepare ourselves to
see it by appropriating the right attitude,” that we begin to see how Woolf
differs. It seems there are two main differences between Woolf and Bergson. The first is that the adopted appropriate attitude, for Woolf, is specific
and one of childhood feelings and sensations. So far we have only seen
this childhood attitude in relation to the memory of her mother. I now want
to work towards arguing that in her fictional writing, that is, in the presentation of subjects, she also applies a similar attitude of childhood in order to
create the uninhibited closeness which children so often live in relation to
others. The second difference is related to the first in that Woolf does indeed appropriate the Proustian attitude of the recollection of a broad range
of childhood sensations, whereas Bergson seems to want to put the main
emphasis upon the visual. For instance, Bergson stresses the visual focussing in the latter part of the above quote. “Little by little it comes into view
like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and
as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on colour, it
tends to imitate perception.” (Woolf does not rely merely on the visual but
works with multiple senses.) This is in fact partly the reason that Bergson
then argues for the impossibility of pure memory because we are inclined
to adopt a memory-image that in effect denies or obliterates pure memory
because of perception.
If it is the remembered image that we are considering, we are bidden
to take it already made, realized in a weak perception, and to shut
our eyes to the pure memory which this image has progressively de-
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veloped. In the rivalry which associationism thus sets up between
the stable and the unstable, perception is bound to expel the memory-image, and the memory-image to expel pure memory. And thus
the pure memory disappears altogether. 13
A memory-image does indeed expel pure memory because it obliterates, or
at least works instead of pure memory, as in representation, and thus causing a barrier between the past and present. Bergson states that “To picture
is not to remember.” 14 And memory-image type of writing was, of course,
part of the aesthetics of realism. As a modernist, Woolf aims rather, to present the subject as one who feels and, although she does produce images,
they are not reliant on the visual as in direct delineation and nor are they
reliant on the verbal, albeit through the verbal. Thus the type of perception
now differs. Bergson argues that we cannot know the past unless we put
ourselves in it (which, of course, we cannot do in any literal sense) but, as
we have seen, Woolf manages to re-create the feeling of being in the past.
Yet, with regard to writing the body as movement, Woolf does follow
Bergson, to a certain extent, in the way he understands the present and indeed past to be a determination of a future.
[W]hat I call “my present” has one foot in my past and another in my
future … next, because this moment is impending over the future: it
is to the future that I am tending. … The psychical state, then, that I
call my “present,” must be both a perception of the immediate past
and a determination of the immediate future … my present consists
in a joint system of sensations and movements. … my present consists in the consciousness that I have of my body. 15
Woolf’s difference, however, is fundamental because Bergson can only understand the body in the present. He does not realize that the body of the
past can live by another means such as in writing.
My actual sensations occupy definite portions of the surface of my
body; pure memory, on the other hand, interests no part of my body.
No doubt, it will beget sensations as it materializes; but at that very
moment it will cease to be a memory and pass into the state of a
present thing, something actually lived. 16
Bergson fails to realize that in pure memory the body cannot play a role.
The problem, or at least his difference, is that Bergson, unlike Woolf, is
not referring to a specific type of language with the use of multiple senses
to convey memory. Woolf does not tell all in terms of language but, rather,
part of her strategy is to activate multiple senses – such as the visual, haptic, auditory and so on – via and through language to the extent that the
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nonverbal dominates. Not only does she create a corporeal presence of her
mother in her autobiographical writing (as demonstrated above) but, she
also carries this through to her novelistic practice in that she fictionalizes
memory as perception via the nonverbal and at times the non-visual. This
type of writing differs because, by focussing on multiple senses, the language operates with what might be described as a certain “literary aphasia” 17 in that it feels, it touches, it hears and so on, and develops an alterity 18 of the subject. It is by no means an objective representation but instead, a very private and secret memory that cannot be created in ordinary
everyday language. By working with the nonverbal she is able to achieve
her aim of writing the body. While it is construed from the fictionalization of
memory in perception, it is through the inclusion of the aesthetic dimensions of clothes and textiles that she writes the political. I want to argue
now that for Woolf there is a domination of the tactile. In this regard, let us
now look a little more at the importance of the tactile in memory in order to
understand how memory becomes fictionalized/re-written as perception
and produces the body.
Memory: The Tactile
My point now is that the tactile is very much to do with memory. Earlier
in the paper, we discussed some of Woolf’s autobiographical writing. I now
want to take a step further and define how she transforms her ability to
write about the “closeness” of her mother into the creation of a selfhood
and indeed other subjects. It is to do with her ability to fictionalize memory
as perception, but the transformation has specificities of the tactile as well
as complexities that will need unpacking. In terms of the subject and bodily
closeness, Woolf works with the nonverbal with a specific emphasis upon
the tactile. As Horst Ruthrof has argued in The Body in Language, when we
go beyond ordinary syntax “we step into the sign systems of the body.” 19
That is, when we work with other senses beyond the verbal and understand
by a form of “perceptual or quasi-perceptual” fantasy which is inherently
tactile, olfactory and so on: the corporeal signified is the “linguistic signifier
activated by nonverbal signs.” 20 Woolf is profoundly aware of the remembered non-linguistic sensations of childhood.
I am hardly aware of myself, but only of sensation. I am only the
container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture. Perhaps
this is characteristic of all childhood memories; perhaps it accounts
for their strength. Later we add to feelings much that makes them
more complex; and therefore less strong; or if not less strong less
isolated, less complete. 21
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This is a very personal perspective on memory with a profundity of sensation and feeling. In a memory of St Ives, we can note, in particular, how
Woolf stresses that it is not possible to describe (in language) the “rapture”
and yet the sense of “rapture” is excessive.
The next memory − all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives – was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It
was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe;
humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all making a
whole that even now makes me stop – as I stopped then going down
to the beach; I stopped at the top to look down at the gardens. They
were sunk beneath the road. The apples were on a level with one’s
head. The gardens gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were red
and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves.
The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously
against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such
a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. But
again I cannot describe the rapture. It was rapture rather than ecstasy. 22
There is the emphasis on “colour and sound memories” that hang together,
but what does this emphasis do but activate other senses such as the haptic, olfactory, proximal and tactile so that we understand that none operate
on their own nor rely on the verbal for meaning. However, it is this lateral
means of making meaning via a multitude of senses that accrues the dominance of the tactile and in turn seems to be the understanding of rapture.
Notice how she stops to touch, as if it is to stop time, to form a repetition, a
perpetuation, to install the feeling of rapture as tactile.
Next, I want to look at a couple of Woolf’s childhood memories of old
women because I think that they exemplify how Woolf begins to develop
the tactile sense of the subject. These are instances, where we can recognize a potential for the transition from memory per se towards the fictionalization or (re)writing memory as perception. The recollection of the first old
woman is interesting for the way the writing works specifically with the nonverbal and texture in relation to clothes and the body.
The Queen’s Gate old woman was an elongated emaciated figure
with a goat-like face, yellow and pockmarked. She sold nuts and
boot-laces, I think … She always sat, and wore a shawl and had to
me a faint, obliterated, debased likeness to Granny; whose face was
elongated too, but she wore a very soft shawl, like tapioca pudding,
over her head, and it was fastened by an amethyst brooch set in
pearls. 23
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Understanding is in terms of texture here and causes the tactile to dominate. The “goat-like face” of the old woman that is “yellow and pockmarked” gives the impression that her face is almost furry and nobbled like
a goat. The amethyst brooch is proximally very close with its detail of the
pearls. But it is not so much that the brooch is seen as a cinematic close-up
(although this does play a minor role) but, rather, it is the texture of the
brooch with its smoothness of the pearls that becomes super-imposed
upon the old woman’s face. There is, thus, a sense of childhood’s uninhibited rapture, as if she touches the face in awe and dispels the vision of what
might be, from an adult’s point of view, an otherwise rather unattractive
pockmarked face. The face then has an exquisite jewel-like texture. Next,
and perhaps what is even more important, is the tactile softness of the
shawl. While the reference to tapioca pudding may add the feeling of
warmth and satiated comfort, it is the texture of softness that causes a certain yielding of response: 24 a certain humble relation between child and
subject that is taken even further in the next excerpt. There is an induced
performance of the subject by the child, who as such re-enacts the old
woman’s spiderly gait, by the means of focusing upon the tactile sense of
textures.
One more caricature comes into mind; though pity entered into this
one. I am thinking of Justine Nonon. She was immensely old. Little
hairs sprouted on her long bony chin. She was a hunchback; and
walked like a spider, feeling her way with her long dry fingers from
one chair to another. Most of the time she sat in the arm-chair beside the fire. I used to sit on her knee; and her knee jogged up and
down; and she sang in hoarse cracked voice ‘Ron ron ron – et plon
plon plon −’ and then her knee gave and I was tumbled onto the
floor. She was French; she had been with the Thackerays. She only
came to us on visits. She lived by herself at Shepherd’s Bush; and
used to bring Adrian a glass jar of honey. I got the notion that she
was extremely poor. 25
While it can be argued that the presence of this old woman is accrued via
multiple nonverbal means such as rhythm, the auditory (in particular the intonation), the visual and so on, it is pertinent to argue that it is the tactile
sense of texture that causes the intimacy. In other words, it is because the
child-subject mimics the old woman (as a performance of the subject) that
there is an inference of the chair as tactile. Note how she felt her way “with
her long dry fingers from one chair to another.” Not only is it the texture of
her skin but the texture of the cloth on the backs of the chairs that creates
the child-like fun of enacting the spiderly gait. It is to do with the understood
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bodily connection between subject and cloth that is the tactile response.
However, I suggest that not only does Woolf create fictional subjects from
memory per se but that she also creates the subject as a selfhood through
the means of clothes. That is, she recalls the tactile experience or memory
perception of clothes to produce a ficto-self as subject in writing.
Clothes and the Ficto-Performative Self
However, Woolf was not only able to develop a highly sensitive understanding of the feeling of wearing clothes but, also, she was well aware of
the power and opportunities, or the potential detriment and shame, that
clothes could give an individual. While others have discussed this diverse
interest as a double consciousness, 26 I am interested in, and will focus on,
the means in which Woolf produces the subject as a self via clothes. Thus,
I am taking the idea of corporeality of the subject a step further to see how
Woolf presents the self as a body consciousness. She sought to research
the matter further and in a diary entry dated Thursday 14th May 1925 wrote:
But I must remember to write about my clothes next time I have an
impulse to write. My love of clothes interests me profoundly; only it is
not love; & what it is I must discover. 27
At times, she presents the subject by the way a subject feels wearing certain types of clothes so there is a corporeal feeling of being a subject as a
self. Such a concept can be extended to say that the subject as a self is
created by a performance, a consciousness, which is enhanced by clothes
and textiles. In a diary entry dated Monday 27th April, 1925 we can observe
her interest in different levels of consciousness.
But my present reflection is that people have any number of states
of consciousness: &c. I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness &c. 28
Yet, she still works with memory. As opposed to being the memory of her
mother recalled so as to produce a bodily closeness of an other subject, we
now work towards understanding her means of creating a self as subject in
writing. This is an intimate knowledge of a selfhood and thus a greater
closeness than we have seen so far. Because we are dealing with feelings
that we might consider to be of the specific, as well as non-specific, it is
worthwhile running through some of the layers of consciousness to do with
the wearing of clothes. Again, I shall first return to a “Sketch of the Past”
where Woolf speaks of the shame that can be related to the wearing of certain clothes.
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Vanessa and I were both what was called tomboys. … Perhaps
therefore to have been found looking in the glass would have been
against our tomboy code. But I think that my feeling of shame went a
great deal deeper. … Everything to do with dress – to be fitted, to
come into a room wearing a new dress – still frightens me; at least
makes me shy, self-conscious uncomfortable. …Yet femininity was
very strong in our family. We were famous for our beauty – my
mother’s beauty, Stella’s beauty, gave me as early as I can remember, pride and pleasure. What then gave me this feeling of shame,
unless it were that I inherited some opposite instinct? My father was
spartan. 29
The shame here is like a torment imposed upon the body and exemplifies
the confluence between body and clothes in that, as is stated, shame is
“everything to do with dress – to be fitted, to come into a room wearing a
new dress” and so on. But what is of particular interest here is the way it
gives the memory of the intimate feelings of the shame of the body. This
shame has perhaps a causal history to do with the sexual abuse Woolf received as a child and more general “bourgeois Victorian taboos surrounding the body.” 30 But we can also observe that she put such experience to
work in her philosophy of the subject – as a fictionalization/re-working of
memory as perception. The feelings of the subject are expressed in a nonverbal manner (and indeed via clothes) in that the fear and shame is described in terms of the tactile: to be fitted; to be touched. In addition the
subject is not the one that looks but rather, the feeling of being observed is
portrayed by movement of the body: “to come into a room” as if with lowered eyes. This excerpt from “A Sketch” can almost be regarded as a prototype of the short story “The New Dress” although as we shall see the
nonverbal, theoretical aspect is extended. We have in this story the sense
of a performance of what Hermione Lee has called a “secret self.” 31 There
is a sense of being the subject that differs from being near other subjects
such as was described in relation to Woolf’s mother because there is access to her thoughts.
[O]h these men, oh these women were thinking – “What’s Mabel
wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!”
… But she dared not look in the glass. She could not face the
whole horror − the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress
with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist and all the things
that looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not
among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s
dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into. 32
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It is not so much how she feels, but rather that her feelings are portrayed
by nonverbal emotions and sensations. The visual delineation is limited in
that she does not look (in the glass) nor is the fact that she is being looked
at defined in a verbal manner. Instead, it is the tactile that produces the
feeling of a self and once again it is the bodily aspect of language that
gives meaning. There is the tactile feeling of wearing the silk dress, which
could otherwise be sensual if the sensuality was not diminished by the lack
of power which is signified as above by the lowering of the eyes that merely
notices the “long skirt.” The painful situation is then metaphorically summarised by the pins that are stuck into her as if she were a dressmaker’s
dummy. In other words, it is the feeling of immobility that is so disempowering and this immobility and shame is caused by the particular dress. However, Woolf was, of course, not writing about the disempowerment of
women but, rather, the empowerment of women as subjects and this example, we might say, highlights the important link between clothes and the
body.
In a manner similar to how Flugel was interested in how clothes could
empower the body, Woolf also used clothing to enable the subject to perform in an empowering manner. According to Flugel, “clothing, by adding to
the apparent size of the body in one way or another, gives us an increased
sense of power, a sense of extension of our bodily self – ultimately by enabling us to fill more space.” 33 Whereas in the previous example Woolf’s
subject has limited space and little or no extension of the body (as in the
appropriation of further bodily space with clothes), at other times she mobilizes the body and extends space with the use of clothes. Watch how not
only is space made for Ottoline in the diary entry here dated Friday 13th
February, 1920 – “I must spare a phrase [space]” – but also how the colour
of the dress dominates the room; it is brought close by the tactile sense of
the silk. “I must spare a phrase for the sealing wax green of Ottoline’s
dress. This bright silk stood out over genuine crinoline. She did control the
room on account of it.” 34 This diary entry is perhaps a memory ripe for
Woolf to fictionalize as perception but there is often an overlap between
Woolf’s fictional writing and non-fiction. It is as if she practiced her fiction in
the diaries. The difference in the diary entry here, for instance, is that she
tells us that Ottoline controlled the room on account of the dress whereas in
the fictional texts the meaning is more likely to be conveyed via the nonverbal such as in the next excerpt from “The New Dress.”
Miss Milan’s little workroom was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It
smelt of clothes and cabbage cooking; and yet when Miss Milan put
the glass in her hand, and she looked at herself with the dress on,
finished, an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with
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light, she sprang into existence. 35
Boredom and the unpleasantness of the situation (being fitted for clothes
as mentioned earlier as well as the smell of cabbage cooking) precede the
delight of the empowered performance of the subject as she looks in the
mirror when the dress is finished. However, it is the fact that she becomes
mobile as well as that she extends her space that it is empowering. “[A]n
extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with light she sprang
into existence.” 36 The created energy is created by the tactile feel of the
dress and brings awareness and connectedness of the body. The body is
the dress. The dress is movement: the mobile body is performativity due to
the confluence of dress and body. Woolf works with the confluence of body
and clothes to fictionalize memory and experience of sensation as perception. As we have seen in the last quote from “A Sketch of the Past,” it is the
memory of the feeling of lightness of body and movement that certain
clothes give, as opposed to the inflicted humiliation by others. Note how in
the concluding lines of the story “The New Dress” the movement and fluid
swirl of cloth create the feeling of not only presence but in addition the feeling of almost being the subject who wraps herself, round and round in the
cloak.
“Lies, lies, lies!” she said to herself, going downstairs, and “Right in
the saucer!” she said to herself as he thanked Mrs Barnet for helping
her and wrapped herself, round and round and round, in the Chinese
cloak she had worn these twenty years. 37
There is the creation of selfhood, which is tactile and cocoon-like but, also
with the sensation of a type of unfolding free movement.
Thus it can be seen that Virginia Woolf’s interest in clothes and textiles
and childhood memory are entwined in her work. Not only does she understand the confluence between body and clothes, but she is able to fictionalize memory as perception. It seems that she has developed this method of
writing the subject from her autobiographical writings, in particular those involving the memory of her mother. Woolf’s understanding of memory, then,
goes beyond Bergson’s theory to include multiple nonverbal senses,
through the verbal, with an emphasis on the tactile. By implementing this
method in her novelistic practice she is able to create the ficto-performative
subject.
Curtin University of Technology
[email protected]
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Writing the Subject
NOTES
1
I am disrupting the notion that Woolf wrote for Vogue purely for financial reasons,
suggesting that it was perhaps in addition an interest and gave impetus for and
furthered her politico-creative writing practice.
2
I shall be making no clear boundaries between “clothes and textiles” and will include jewellery in this category.
3
J.C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), p. 36.
4
Flugel, Psychology, p. 15.
5
Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”, Moments of Being (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace, 1985), p. 64.
6
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 81.
7
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 82.
8
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 82.
9
We cannot be sure that Woolf did actually read Bergson, but this is not my concern. Rather, I am interested in the similarity of some of her ideas on memory.
However, we do know that Proust read Bergson and that Woolf did read Proust,
so the influence may have been indirect.
10
See Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: 1, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff
and Terence Kilmartin (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1989), pp. 48-51, where the
subject recalls the childhood memory of the taste of the “petites madeleines” given
to him by his mother.
11
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (New York: Allen & Unwin. 1970), p. 171.
12
See for instance, Virginia Wolf’s essay, “The Cinema”, The Crowded Dance of
Modern Day Life (Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1993); see also my paper on Woolf
and the cinema, Carolyn Abbs, “Virginia Woolf and Gilles Deleuze: Cinematic emotion and the Mobile Subject”, Interactive Media: E-Journal of the National
Academy of Screen and Sound, 1 (2005), Murdoch University, date of access:
28.3.05, http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/nass/nass_current_issue.htm; and, see
many instances in Woolf’s diaries.
13
Bergson, Matter, p.172.
14
Bergson, Matter, pp. 173-4.
15
Bergson, Matter, p. 177.
16
Bergson, Matter, p. 179.
17
I am not using the term “literary aphasia” in any medical or clinical sense but as a
means of referring to a disruption of the linguistic. I am suggesting that, when Virginia Woolf works with multiple senses in writing to create the visual, auditory,
haptic and so on, she operates with a form of “literary aphasia” and disrupts the
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ordinary (prose) use of language so that it leans towards “poetic” language. For
further explanation of this type of language see Roman Jakobson, “On the Relation between Visual and Auditory Signs”, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (The Hague:
Mouton, 1971), pp. 345-59; Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague:
Mouton, 1971). And, in particular, Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles”, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. D. Lodge (London:
Longman, 1989), pp. 57-61, for a discussion on clinical aphasia in children where
he argues that the metaphoric pole links to poetic language. From this perspective, “literary aphasia” is poetic and linguistic.
18
By the use of the term “alterity” here I am merely referring to the “otherness” of the
subject in that the subject’s feelings are understood as if from her point of view.
19
Horst Ruthrof, The Body in Language (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 99.
20
Ruthrof, The Body, p.103.
21
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 67.
22
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 66.
23
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 75.
24
Gail Jones writes of softness in relation to textiles, stating that the art critic Max
Kosloff in an essay entitled “The Poetics of Softness” (although writing about
sculpture) “sought to examine how engagement with yielding substance evokes a
particular field of sensibility and response. Softness, he suggests, ‘Mimes a kind of
surrender to the natural condition that pulls bodies down.’ In the best sense, then,
the soft edges yielding, pressure, gravity, even fatigue; that is to say it corresponds in certain hypothetical ways to haptic intuitions – to the flexible, the organic, the elastic, the impressionable, and most of all, to the depredation of time.
This might suggest why works of cloth, ‘miming surrender,’ so often suggest pathos and sentimentality. The connection is a subtle one. … It also connects, albeit
obliquely, tropes of mortality, artifice and the precariousness of selfhood.” See
Gail Jones, “Four Meditations on the Poetics of Cloth”, From Within: Jane Whiteley
Works in Cloth (Fremantle, Western Australia: Art on the Move, 1999), pp. 7-8.
25
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 74.
26
See Lisa Cohen, “Frock Consciousness: Virginia Woolf, the Open Secret, and the
Language of Fashion”, Fashion Theory, 3.2 (1999), pp. 149-74; and Molly Hite,
“Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies”, Genders 31 (2000), pp. 1-22.
27
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925-1930, ed. Anne Olivier
Bell (San Diego Harcourt Brace, 1980), p. 21.
28
Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 12.
29
Woolf, “A Sketch”, p. 68.
30
Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical
Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), p. 89.
31
I am referring here to the introductory theme of Hermione Lee’s edited book of
short stories The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women (London:
Phoenix Giants, 1995).
32
Virginia Woolf, “The New Dress”, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf,
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Writing the Subject
ed. Susan Dick (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1989), pp. 171-2.
33
Flugel, Psychology, p. 34.
34
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1980), pp. 19-20.
35
Woolf, “New Dress”, p. 172.
36
Woolf, “New Dress”, p.172.
37
Woolf, “New Dress”, p. 177.
225
REVIEW ARTICLE
The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
Liz Conor. The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in
the 1920s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. ISBN 0 253 21670 2.
Juliette Peers. The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie.
Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004. ISBN 1 85973 743 9.
Robyn Walton
“Dolls raise so many issues about the representation and cultural positioning of the feminine in society,” writes Juliette Peers in the “Introduction”
to her book The Fashion Doll (Peers: 8). Liz Conor might well have begun
her text about feminine visibility by using the same statement, substituting
for “dolls” the words “mass media images of women.” “Appearance” and
“appearing,” in their multiple meanings, are also key words for both authors. Peers’s primary interest is fashionably dressed dolls’ appearance
(looks) and appearance (emergence) in the market-place, while Conor
elaborates on the emergence of the “new formation of subjectivity” she
calls the Modern Appearing Woman in the technologically enhanced ocular
field of the 1920s.
Discussing these two books in terms of their covers is a temptation not
to be resisted since each text is so much about representation. Appropriately, a photographic image of a woman or an inorganic 3D representation
of a woman occupies each cover. The front of Peers’s book shows a stylishly dressed young woman ostensibly adjusting her underwear in the
company of an up-to-date doll; the front of Conor’s is occupied by the
glamorously painted face of a store display dummy or mannequin. AccordCOLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/walton.pdf
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Robyn Walton
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ing to captions within the texts, the sepia-toned picture of the young woman
was reproduced on a French postcard during the 1920s while the face belongs to a replica of a 1920s mannequin. 1 It is disappointing that neither author went out of her way to date and contextualise her image more precisely. (I date both as c.1927.) 2 However it has to be conceded that intentionality raises its head here: it is likely that final cover image decisions
were made by overseas publishers and may not have coincided with the
authors’ preferences for what are effectively their own store window displays. Nevertheless, both images have plenty to say to browsers and serious readers of cultural history, visual sociology and gender studies about
how the feminine was (and is) represented in Western market economies.
On Peers’s cover the postcard has been cropped so that the pert doll
propped up on the dressing table is relegated to a corner, the focal point of
the image then becoming the crotch of the young woman completing her
toilette in the supposed privacy of her boudoir. Sitting with one knee raised
high and the heel of her Mary Jane shoe supported by a pulled-out drawer,
the woman inspects the hem of her knickers. There is a naughty display of
the bare flesh above her stocking tops and a teasing shielding of the geni-
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
tals by means of fabric and hand. Is this a case of bait and switch packaging by Peers’s publishers? The strategy is perhaps defensible on the
ground that it demonstrates how an alluring image works to engage the
senses, provoking the casual browser to pay attention, touch or imagine
touching, and ultimately buy a product or service. Any adult viewer of the
Peers cover image must be aware of the longstanding association of desirable women with lovely dolls and the implied suggestion that women may
be rated in terms of their attractiveness and cuteness. 3 Postcards like the
one on Peers’s cover, along with others more risqué, had a lineage extending back to the Second Empire; 4 and inevitably the boundaries of the populations of intended purchasers and intended or incidental viewers were at
times blurry. 5
The figure of a child or young woman with a doll also has things to say
to the viewer about his or her bodily sense of self, the natural versus the invented child, and the child as representing one’s interiority, the deepest
place inside, the self perhaps lost or repressed. A doll may function as a
person’s infant, confidante, alter ego, pet substitute, fantasy/sex object,
decorative feature or sign of somewhat precious sophistication or patriotic
loyalty. To the extent that the fashionably dressed, cute doll was a stylised,
infantilised miniature of its owner, it invited a diminishing reading of the
owner and her peers. And it was a sign of its times. Nineteen twenties
dolls, for instance, were “the annunciatory angels of popular culture,” as
Peers nicely puts it (Peers: 134). They were offered in the market-place
alongside scores of doll-like toys and partial dolls incorporated into household items – all variously sentimental, comical, whimsical and grotesque.
“These novelties were a vernacular expression of the vastly different outlook and experience of postwar society, and the supercession of the moods
and demeanour of the Edwardian and Victorian eras,” Peers summarises in
a sentence typical of her prose style here (Peers: 130).
By the 1920s adolescent and girl consumer demographics were increasingly differentiated from each other and from the adult market, with increasing sexualisation of childhood and precocious adoption of quickly
changing fashions. Conor’s book surprised me with the complementary information that many of the Flappers were teenagers or even children. The
Flapper’s tubular body shape was informed by that of the lanky premenarchal girl, and her movements were characteristically youthful, rapid and
reckless, “like the whirring movements of a clockwork toy, or even the
spasmodic jerks of a just decapitated creature,” as Australian author Dulcie
Deamer put it (Conor: 215).
Peers notes the links in the 1920s between dolls, graphics in the popular media and the new art form of animation. She mentions cartoon charac-
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ters such as Felix the Cat being reproduced in all manner of materials, but
omits the most commercially successful representation of a human female,
Betty Boop. 6 On and off during the 1910s and 1920s it was fashionable for
adults to wear doll motifs in accessories, to carry dolls or teddy bears, to
decorate house and car interiors with dolls, and to feature novelty toys and
childish fancy-dress in social gatherings. 7 Peers does not allow herself the
space to thoroughly account for this faux juvenileness but briefly refers to
the horrors of the Great War, the destabilisation of European society and
the dissident expressiveness of Dadaist and Surrealist artworks which incorporated mutilated and disassembled dolls and mannequins in shocking
ways. 8
Transferring our gaze to the mannequin on Conor’s cover we open
ourselves to a close-up demonstration of how to apply the coloured cosmetics that were coming into everyday use in the 1920s, ceasing to be
luxuries as women’s discretionary purchasing power increased, mass production lowered prices and international trade in non-essentials picked up,
and ceasing to be morally objectionable as Victorian attitudes relaxed. 9 Did
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
the costly, rigorous and time-consuming self-care routines of beauty culture
constitute a re-subduing of the so recently and incompletely emancipated
woman? Was women’s autonomy being channelled into obsession with
conforming to new bodily ideals, thereby producing a form of selfoppression at odds with general feminine aspirations to acquire still greater
latitude in the public domain? To her credit Conor grapples with differing
responses to such questions, especially in her chapter on the Flapper.
The finely modelled and coloured head on Conor’s cover wears a
haunting expression and is intriguingly layered with cultural references. The
lean face has a cool, immaculate beauty. The skin appears poreless,
sealed against intrusion. Although the mannequin’s irises are not blue, her
arching, symmetrical eyebrows and perfectly straight nose are true to a
stylised northern European ideal of beauty. A pleated white covering resembling a turban fits closely to the mannequin’s head, while curls kick up
on her cheeks with the geometric precision of chorus dancers’ legs.
It is probable that the demeanour and overtly cosmeticised look of
Conor’s mannequin was a replication of what was being popularised on
screen in the second half of the 1920s. These woman-objects were not the
winsome Cinderellas and ingenue-vamps of the early 1920s. They represented women in transition, becomingly presented women becoming more
independent, which is very much Conor’s theme. 10 This facial look persisted through into the talkies of the 1930s, although lips thinned, mouths
widened, and Garboesque hauteur and inferred spirituality increased. 11
Obviously the dark-ringed eyes and strongly coloured lips which had
served a practical highlighting purpose on male as well as female actors in
the early days of silent moving pictures (c.1912) were not going to be rapidly abandoned, since additionally they drew attention to secondary sexual
characteristics.
If window shoppers did not read an impeccably groomed mannequin
like this one as an acceptable model for everyday girls, 12 then they may
have regarded it with trepidation as a worldly, out-there New Woman in full
possession of her own house keys, motorcar keys and cigarettes. 13 To
those with a resistant attitude to stand-alone women this mannequin could
even have represented a chilling, cruelly self-involved goddess-matriarch
from an occult-scientific new world order, a descendant of those devastating femmes fatale conjured up in the nineteenth century. With her flattened,
elongated body, the Art Deco fantasy female could look almost androgynous, a fusion of the phallic and the feminine, of machine-made straight
lines and sharp points with convexities and concavities. Inevitably, consciousness of mechanisation was provoked in the viewer, especially since
such abstracted simulacra were being made by way of new technological
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know-how which was reported to the public and some of which was known
to be owned and operated by women. 14
***
Now that we have looked at the front covers, what can be observed
about the other elements framing and shaping these two texts? How effectively do they guide the reader into these books’ densely packed assemblies of (arguably trivial) historical facts, factoids and opinions?
Peers’s succinct encyclopaedic survey of fashion doll production, merchandising and consumption spans more than one hundred and fifty years,
from mid-nineteenth century Paris to twenty-first century USA. Her subtitle,
From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie, undersells in that coverage begins before
the Jumeau firm (founded 1843) made its first Bébé in 1876 and continues
for almost forty-five years beyond the launching of Barbie in 1959. In her
closing pages Peers notes the booming 2002 Australian sales figures for a
then new US doll range, Bratz, alongside the Mattel corporation’s struggle
to update and create successors for the aging Barbie. Mattel’s new lines at
that time were the My Scene dolls (“think Spice Girls and Japanese animation,” i.e. larger head, almond-shaped eyes and numerous accessories)
pitched to young girls in the KGOY (kids growing older younger) category,
the Modern Circle dolls pitched to older girls and the young women who
were fans of television shows such as Sex and the City, and the multiethnic Flāvas range (Peers: 192-3). 15 As it has turned out, the large, up-todate and quite sexy Bratz range has stolen so many sales from Barbie that
had Peers been releasing her book now and directing it to the rising generation of readers she might have considered sub-titling it From Bébé
Jumeau to Bratz.
Assuming a readership sufficiently fascinated by doll history to contend with 200-odd pages of closely worded prose with only about 20 scattered black and white illustrations, Peers does not spend time justifying her
choice of subject. In this she differs from the author of another recent book
on dolls, A. F. Robertson, an American anthropologist. Robertson tells her
readers she persevered with her inquiry into porcelain dolls and the women
who collect them despite one colleague’s comment that her subject was
“nauseating,” another’s that “everything about these dolls is a lie” and a
third’s that “[I] could never bring [my]self to care about what seems to be a
relatively arbitrary feature of western U.S. culture in the late twentieth century.” 16
Peers characterises her work here as empirical historicism. Her trajectory, she writes, was shaped opportunistically rather than by a pre-
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
determined methodology or theoretical framework. She proceeds chronologically without any overarching theory or even a suite of conclusions.
Readers hoping for a sustained attempt to integrate critical theory with selected data will appreciate more Conor’s book.
While limiting her scope to those areas of doll culture which can be
described as “white Eurocentric cultural experience,” Peers does mention
two-way East-West trafficking in dolls and the modification of North American dolls for Asian and South and Central American markets (Peers: 4-5,
12-3, 192-3). She acknowledges that her narrative could have been extended to take in ethnicity, postcolonialism and Othering, just as – space
permitting – it could have covered the erotic, censorship, early childhood
education, body image, collectors’ psychology and numerous other issues.
One aspect Peers does include is women’s agency in doll production and
related businesses. Her positively toned emphasis on women’s commercial
creativity and entrepreneurship leaves little room, she acknowledges, for
those negative feminist critiques of doll culture that spell out “harsh, reductive lessons for oppressed females” (Peers: 9).
Peers’s literature review readily shows there is space for an academic
treatment such as hers. Her sharp comments on collectors’ limiting range
of interests (“narrow, arid codified knowledges”) parallel Conor’s frustration
with 1980s feminism’s failure to recognise “underlying questions about the
relation between visual representation and gendered identity” (Peers: 5;
Conor: xiv). So far as theorising goes, Peers all but dispenses with it. Roland Barthes’s writing on French children’s socialisation through toys finds
its way into the text, but only within an epigraph from an American academic’s essay on Barbie; and Walter Benjamin’s writing on collecting is referred to in a footnote dealing with another author’s work (Peers: 97, 1967). Susan Stewart’s thoughts on collecting would have been apposite since
she concentrates on leisure and fantasy areas often dominated by girls and
women (doll houses, models, souvenirs, fairies, manikins and dressed-up
children) in relation to nostalgia, longing and conservatism. 17 Performance
is another aspect that is under-played. Typically Peers mentions it only
when it appears in others’ publications – for example, the “performance of
high fashion amongst young [French] children” as deplored by the BritishAustralian authors and illustrators of a 1903 book (Peers: 85-6).
Now that the philosophy and performance of beauty have made a
strong return to the area of feminist inquiry readers might expect the abstract terminology of aesthetics to recur in Peers’s text. It does not. Rather,
Peers stays with historic instances. The index entry “Woman as sign of the
‘beautiful’” takes us to the nineteenth-century Bébé, “radiating supreme,
compelling beauty,” and to similar images in painting. Peers highlights peri-
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ods when girls’ admiration of and desire to emulate certain publicly lauded
beauties were of indisputable cultural significance and had long-term repercussions. For example, in Second Empire France the Empress Eugénie
– frequently photographed and painted – not only raised standards of personal attractiveness and stylish dressing but inspired the ongoing creation
of dolls with beautiful faces and haute couture wardrobes (Peers: 56-7).
“Sign” is a word favoured but loosely used by Peers. Various dolls are
said to be signs of class distinctions, excess, the city, order, status, Second
World War atrocities and the Other. Fashion can be a sign of class difference, female transgression and the modern. Haute Couture (French) is a
sign of femininity, humanity and Paris. The removable tight sweaters and
short skirts of Lilli, the German predecessor of Barbie, could be valued aids
for men who wanted “a sexual come-on to randy girl friends,” according to
a male commentator, yet – Peers adds – they could also be deplored for
suggesting “foolishness or excess in … women,” such preoccupation with
fashion being “a sign of women’s unsuitability for public life” (Peers: 140). 18
“Barbie, and women as falsehood” in Peers’s index refers to an article by
Wendy Varney in Arena in which, according to Peers’s reading, the Barbie
doll is associated with femininity and frivolity. “[F]emale insufficiency, consumerism, fashion and Barbie” are regarded as mutually interchangeable:
“each is a sign of the other and each is to be resisted equally” (Peers:
101). 19 Evidently Varney, if not Peers herself, runs the risk of collapsing
categories.
“Woman as unstable” takes us to several tendentiously toned discussions. After quoting some mid-nineteenth-century male commentators’ objections to dolls which they regarded as a moral hazard to impressionable
young women and girls, Peers remarks: “Often those who define or calibrate an ‘appropriate’ level of sexual content in a given doll are masculine,
as with the department store buyers who rejected Barbie in 1959. Perhaps
the issue being protected is male privilege as much as female purity?”
(Peers: 64).
In the early Victorian period, according to Peers, there was a blurring
of existential assumptions. In texts and visual narratives the inanimate doll
took on lifelikeness. It was regarded as living, in need of nurture, and capable of possessing other cultural artefacts and functioning independently in
its own (fantasised) sphere (Peers: 28). Although Peers does not mention
Baudrillard here, the reader may think of the applicability of his notion of the
hyperreal to dolls, as well as to toys, gadgets, anime and online entertainments. 20
A parallel discussion opens up the question of a possible gender divide within doll making and designing. Peers cites cases to refute this sup-
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
posed divide, but then credits women with being responsible for “the most
dramatic technical advances in doll construction and the most extravagant
placement of the doll as an object of beauty, serving the gaze and visual
pleasure.” In fact the entire history of commercial doll making and marketing has been shadowed, Peers tells us, by anxieties about women’s potential neglect of home and mothering, anxieties summed up in the “tension
between differing functions of the doll as maternal trainer for domestic duties and the superficiality of the luxurious doll, whose raison d’être is to
wear glorious clothes” (Peers: 35-6).
***
Conor goes to eastern-states Australian periodicals for the majority of
her archival material illustrating 1920s public representations of women, but
also crosses the Pacific to the USA and occasionally alludes to the British
experience. Each keyword in her title and subtitle – spectacular, modern,
woman, feminine, visibility – carries a weight of referents. Inevitably some
questions are begged, observations selectively invoked, interpretations
skewed, oppositions left unexplored. For example, if we accept that there
was noteworthy feminine visibility in the 1920s – that “roaring” decade
popularly identified with the visual emblem of the slim young woman dancing, smoking, drinking, partying, nightclubbing, motoring, diving, playing
sports and generally seizing the day and night – then we may immediately
wonder: what of masculine visibility? And was there “feminine invisibility”
before the 1920s?
Within her text Conor proves ready to address the second of these
questions by pointing to the new technologies which made possible or enhanced public visibility of women and things gendered feminine in the
1920s. But male visibility remains beyond her scope – which is not to say
that males are excluded from these pages. Of the many 1920s cartoons,
advertisements, films, newsreels, theatrical productions, artworks, merchandising displays, photographs, verses, lyrics, prose fictions and pieces
of journalism cited in relation to female visibility, a majority were created,
edited and promulgated by men. The male viewpoint is everywhere in this
book, as is male intervention. Much as Conor is keen to celebrate 1920s
women’s increasing public presence, she is frequently obliged to contend
with obstructive and mocking male opinions from that time and to acknowledge certain men’s crucial roles in facilitating women’s progress into public
participation.
Subjectivity, identity, modernity, appearing, performance, image and
objectification are collapsed together here in a way which, to my mind,
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Robyn Walton
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makes this book’s argument circular, and I was still finding it difficult going
when I reached Conor’s “Conclusion.” A return to the more colloquially
worded, self-reflective “Preface” helped me disentangle Conor’s thesis.
Conor begins by noting the popular – but, according to her, little examined
– assumption that feminine visibility has political significance. She asks:
“When did the visibility of women become important?” before discussing
her own conflicting experiences during the 1980s, when she dressed in
retro glamour style.
When, why and even whether Conor specifically chose to research the
1920s remains unclear, as does what she was initially looking for in the 60odd periodicals she studied. The closest she comes to explaining is to allude to her “hunch” that “the modern industrialised production of images …
forged a new relation between feminine visibility and public visibility.” Modernity, she believes, intensified the visual scene and spectacularised
women within it. In a “dramatic historical shift,” 1920s women were “invited
to articulate themselves as modern subjects by constituting themselves as
spectacles.” Consequently, feminine subjectivity came to be increasingly
performed within the visual register (Conor: xiii-xvi).
These statements are best read in conjunction with a few sentences in
Conor’s “Conclusion”: “This book was intended to be not an argument for
the importance of visibility, but rather a cultural history of how visibility became important. [Film pioneer] Lev Kuleshov was prescient when he stated
… that modern image production had enabled him to create a new woman.
But this new woman was more than a composite of montaged body parts:
she represented the newly emerged subject position of the modern appearing woman, who was produced, as Kuleshov’s [film] woman was, within the
altered visual conditions of the modern perceptual field” (Conor: 254).
This dating and line of argument will doubtless appeal to those focused on the early twentieth century and on cinema and other visual media; however those with greater knowledge of nineteenth century cultural
history will think of earlier phenomena which constitute stumbling blocks to
Conor’s claims for the exceptional character of the 1920s. Too many of us
have been unduly influenced by the plethora of American research focusing
on the early twentieth-century products of US capitalism, Hollywood films in
particular.
Once Conor gets into her fine collection of media material her writing
becomes less congested. Despite her introductory disquisition on “appearing,” Conor does not in fact directly substitute “appearing” for “spectacularisation” in the chapters that follow, possibly because the un-English phrase
“the appearing of women” would not play. And whoever made the final decision on her title has opted – wisely I think if sales matter – for the lively
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
wordplay of “Spectacular Modern Woman” over “Modern Appearing
Woman.”
Conor’s organising principle in the body of her text is the typology, although she concedes the approach has its shortcomings. We are all familiar with snappy lists presented in the popular media, and Conor gives a
1919 instance from the prurient Truth newspaper, in which “Tarts about
Town,” young single women living unsupervised in the city, are characterised as Flappers, Love Birds and Privateers (Conor: 53, and 268 n. 56). We
are also familiar with academic studies structured around purportedly representative types, and again Conor mentions an instance, Pamela Niehoff’s
description of the New Woman under four headings, the flapper, the modern leisured woman, the thinking woman and the resourceful woman
(Conor: 267 n. 40). However, it is to a third kind of list, the physiology of urban types, that Conor admits indebtedness.
The male flâneur having been one early type, Conor gives space to
the ongoing quest to retrospectively identify female equivalents. She cites
Anke Gleber’s conclusion that only inside cinemas could women enjoy
spectatorship, and in an endnote refers to “the invisible status of the female
flâneur in the literature of modernity” as an outcome of females’ “excessive
spectacularisation as woman-on-the-street” (Conor: 15-8; 258 n.1; 259 n.
10). It is surprising that in the course of her reading Conor did not come
across sufficient cases of female spectatorship to question Gleber et al. In
the course of my background reading for this essay I noticed a few women
who might be described as flâneurs and one (in Paris in 1912) who was
later explicitly described as “a born flâneuse or saunterer” by her companion of the time. 21 My working conclusion: go to female writers of the past for
recognition of fellow out-and-about women as observers rather than objects
for ogling and censorious comment.
A first glance at Conor’s own typology suggests she has separated out
five types of actual women (the so-called City Girl, Screen-Struck Girl,
Beauty Contestant, Flapper and Primitive) and one artificial, the store Mannequin. However, when we reflect that Conor’s examples of the first five
types are all drawn from media depictions, we realise that in fact she is
presenting six representations. So far, so reader-friendly. The closest typology to Conor’s that I know of is in Barbara Sato’s The New Japanese
Woman (2003). Sato’s chief source of information is Japanese women’s
mass-circulation magazines of the interwar period. She uses evidence from
these periodicals to argue for the emergence in Japanese cities in the
interwar years of certain new representations of women similar to those already recognised in Europe and America. She concentrates on three
modes of self-presentation, “each of which offered Japanese women new
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identities in the 1920s.” They are: “the bobbed-haired, short-skirted modern
girl (modan gāru); the self-motivated housewife (shufu); and the rational,
extroverted professional working woman (shokugyō fujin).” 22
Conor’s use of typing is strengthened by the fact that she places each
type in a setting. She uses the performance-related, Butlerian term “scene”
in preference to alternate metaphors such as field, area or arena. The Metropolitan, Cinematic, Commodity, Photographic and Heterosexual Leisure
scenes, each lightly sketched in, fit with Conor’s visual and transformational
emphases; but the formula wobbles when it comes to placing representations of Indigenous Australians, East Asians, people of African descent and
other supposed “Primitives” in the diffuse and time-delimited “Late Colonial
Scene.”
Conor’s scenes are outside the home (or, in the Indigenous case, at a
physical and/or psychological remove from the home territory). Her high
functioning urban subjects have acquired the psychological freedom and
earning capacity to be out-and-about. One factor facilitating this transition
was access to trustworthy, mass-produced and easily purchasable (if expensive) sanitary protection. Conor devotes the opening six pages of her
second chapter to this development, which worldwide made women’s
physical participation in public activities far easier. However, she concentrates on product origins and the need for inconspicuousness, relegating to
an endnote the fact of “women’s new mobility in the public realm as travellers, professionals, students, consumers, shop girls and factory hands.”
Unless one reads attentively, then, one is left puzzling why this material is
being presented at all (Conor: 265 n. 2).
Another reservation – which applies more generally to both books –
concerns the question of whether religion-related taboos were easing as
Western society became more secular. Did the greater freedom of participation facilitated by sanitary pads coincide with lessening of religio-cultural
restrictions on menstruating women? Both authors seem to assume conditions of increasing secularisation, or at least religious nominalism, without
weighing the importance of this trend in permitting greater feminine visibility
(and audibility), relaxation of dress codes and rising purchasing power.
Clergy and Christian denominations are mentioned fleetingly as wowsers or
voices of social conscience, depending upon the commentator’s point of
view – for example, Peers reports a claim that the Salvation Army was
amongst groups critical of the New Look after the Second World War, and
Conor reports Australian clergy joining in campaigns against the influx of
American films promoting liberal values (Peers: 145, quoting an anonymous writer; Conor: 84) – but there remains room for more to be said.
For painterly illustrations of women’s progress out of (idealised) interi-
░
The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
ority, I recommend the catalogue of the National Gallery of Australia’s 2004
exhibition of Edwardian artworks. While many of the women subjects are
placed indoors and decoratively rendered, there is in the later paintings –
particularly those by women – an absence of costly staginess. Vanessa
Bell’s Virginia Woolf (1911-12), Laura Knight’s Self-portrait (1913), Kathleen O’Connor’s Two café girls (1914) and Norah Simpson’s Studio portrait,
Chelsea (1915) convey the vividly immediate and yet flat, banal character
of everyday activities. 23 Susan Sidlauskas dates the demise of the home
interior as analogue of self to about 1914-15, when wartime bombing raids
were destroying or unroofing and exposing in cross-section previously snug
houses and when Freudians were bringing the unconscious to popular attention. If a woman’s material surroundings could no longer be relied upon
and no longer constituted her universe, her sense of self might have to become internalised. Alternatively subjectivity might be described as becoming decentred, displaced onto the external flow of experience. 24
Conor effectively cuts in at this point to give her reading of how, rather
than withdrawing inward or becoming merged with and dispersed through
the outside world, women’s subjectivity self-consciously stepped out into
the postwar streets in novel forms. Peers’s doll history then modifies the
story’s trajectory through an account of the post-Second World War period
when there were pressures for women to leave paid employment and concentrate on childbearing and homemaking. It was against this later backdrop that many girls, products of the resultant baby boom, were presented
with their first stylishly dressed and groomed Barbies (or in the UK Sindys)
or cheaper chain-store equivalents in the early 1960s. Did these Barbies
function as inspirational models of womanhood or were they symptoms of
pernicious consumerist excess and suppression of non-mainstream behaviours? Peers gives more weight to the former point of view. She also points
to how comprehensively the later Barbies and Sindys and their sisters have
reflected, if not influenced, popular trends in women’s dress, employment
options and civic participation rates.
Despite general care with chronology, neither Peers nor Conor makes
clear precisely what she means by “modern,” “modernism,” “modernity” or
“modernisation.” Each author is seemingly keener to get into the pleasures
of her detailed material. Perhaps bristling in anticipation of such a remark,
Conor quotes Jim Collins on the tendency of commentators to make fascination antithetical to critique: “fascination has been made to mean uncritical
acceptance, promiscuity, lack of rigour” (Conor: 305 n. 89). Peers’s understanding of modernity stretches back as far as Adelaide Huret’s innovative
dolls of Second Empire Paris; Conor, paralleling this, alludes to women’s
entrance into metropolitan space in the 1850s as “indicative of the modern”
239
240
Robyn Walton
░
(Peers: 48-9; Conor: 47). Yet on her final page, dealing with the year 2003,
Peers writes of “modern life” and “modern fashion,” while in her “Preface”
Conor aligns herself with “Western feminists and modern women across
the [twentieth] century” and later mentions the University of Washington’s
Modern Girl Around the World Project, which claims on its website to be investigating “a figure who appeared around the world … in the early to mid
twentieth century.” 25 Clearly all of us writing about the last 150 years in
Western societies face comparable difficulties. The lesson would seem to
be to address formal and colloquial usage differences, definitions and
shades of meaning early on.
Difficulties of terminology and interpretation are compounded when an
author is looking at representations of both white and non-white women in
transition between cultures and socio-economic strata. Conor implicitly
connects events in the lives of an Aboriginal housemaid and a white Australian actress [sic] to point up how a novel experience of confronting her
own visual image disturbs a woman’s self-perception – but she judges the
two experiences by different criteria.
In Hollywood in 1924, through the use of the new montage technique,
the filmed legs of Lotus Thompson were grafted onto the filmed bodies of
other women on screen. Thompson, “in a poignant and desperate protest
[sic],” responded by pouring acid over her legs (Conor: 1). Thompson’s reaction could be read in diminishing terms: as commercially and technologically naïve, as self-punishing and self-defeating, or as the acting out in an
impetuously self-dramatising fashion of conventional resistance to and
suspicion of new devices and technologies that might harm or steal one’s
self/spirit or yield a picture very different to one’s pre-existing mental selfimage. The use of the images of Thompson’s legs could be read as objectification causing loss of self-determination. However, since the innovation
was quickly adopted by the commercial movie industry, and later generations of actors willingly agreed to their images being distorted in various
ways, Conor takes the pragmatic path of finding the good in the situation.
She chooses to read Thompson’s reaction positively as an assertion, a reclamation, an intervention, a showing of “ownership of her own spectacle,”
and the filmmaker’s actions as helping to facilitate “the production of a new
modern feminine subjectivity.” As a result of her reaction Thompson received enormous publicity, her notoriety leading to new screen roles: she
“achieved the status of Screen Star” (Conor: 3 and 257n. 2).
In the other case, an Aboriginal girl who had been taken from her people at the age of twelve and given the Anglo name Irene saw her (nondistorted) reflection in a full-length mirror for the first time. She reacted with
fright and disbelief, having, according to the lady of the household, “thought
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
that she was much more handsome” (Conor: 175). Aboriginal and Islander
women, Conor writes, were perceived to lack modern people’s capacity to
imagine themselves as under an appraising gaze and to self-consciously
stand before a mirror and adjust/manage the visual effect presented; and if
these women did attempt to act and see in the modern Western manner,
the result was comically or abjectly inept (Conor: 175-6). Conor does not
envisage Irene resisting or making some calculated intervention on her own
behalf; Irene remains an object captured by the gaze, “unable to transcend
the racially inflected space of mimicry.” Conor seems to assume Irene’s
subsequent life was as fraught with difficulties as were the lives of many
other Indigenous women newly encountering Western technologies and
techniques: “failing to appreciate the meaning of her reflection … destined
to fail … failure to believe in themselves.” Such a woman or girl was emphatically “not modern” (Conor: 176-8).
Gayatri Spivak puts it differently: in her reading the figure of the thirdworld woman disappears as she is shuttled between tradition and modernisation, patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation
(Conor: 200). It is at this juncture in her discussion that I think Conor could
have capitalised on the overlaps in interest between women’s and postcolonial studies; instead she merely touches on some postcolonialist insights, effectively perpetuating a deficiency to which Rita Felski admitted in
her The Gender of Modernity. 26
Another instance of problematic reasoning associated with terminology
occurs in chapter 7 of The Fashion Doll when Peers suddenly makes an
astounding claim: dolls, she states, “are inherently postmodern rather than
modern.” Further, dolls “suggest that postmodernist values have existed in
albeit simple forms and parallels during earlier eras and beyond the academy” (Peers: 169-70). Here I would query Peers’s logic; the subject of dolls
may be well suited to a postmodern style of analysis without all dolls that
have ever existed being recast as indicators of postmodernity. Cultural
theorists have tended to emphasise art as commodity within an environment of flux, overlap and fluidity, and Peers follows their lead here.
“[P]resentations of elite design in doll form make perfect sense,” she
claims, in a “cultural climate” characterised by “hybridity, the creole, the
transitional, [and] the crossover.” The (alleged) increase in imbrication of
art and commerce, the increase in honesty about artworks’ status as tradeable commodities, and the breaking down of barriers between fine arts and
items of popular and juvenile taste are all factors favouring a more mature
analysis of the doll. But need each shift in intellectual outlook necessitate
re-labelling of the object of attention and the values prevailing at its time of
production? A doll is still a doll.
241
242
Robyn Walton
░
Overall, each of these two authors stays close to her factual materials
and the immediately obvious issues they raise. And each invariably leans
toward defence of the fascinating woman-object (the fashion doll, the representation of the progressive young woman) when hostile critique threatens. If both treatments are skewed by authorial enthusiasm, this is a relatively minor failing in light of the substantial contributions they make to cultural studies.
La Trobe University
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Peers, p.132; the uncropped version of the postcard is reproduced on the same
page. Conor, p.107; Jeremy Ludowyke is credited with the photography.
2
My limited research places the Peers image as having been created in the 192527 period and the original of the Conor mannequin as c.1927.
Peers identifies the doll as a rag doll possibly by Raynal or Venus (132). Raynal produced felt and cloth dolls advertised as of a “new kind” in Paris from 1925,
and the short curly-all-over hairstyle first became common on dolls in 1924, according to Dorothy S., Elizabeth A. and Evelyn J. Coleman, The Collector’s Encyclopaedia of Dolls (London: Robert Hale, 1968), pp. 276, 518. A mail order catalogue put out by David Jones Ltd, Sydney, in 1926-27 offered the fuzzy-haired,
solidly proportioned French novelty doll “Gaby” at a reduced price suggestive of a
bulk purchase of a line that was being discontinued. The pleated, dropped-waist
style of dress worn by the young woman was fashionable around 1927: Ruth S.
Countryman and Elizabeth Weiss Hopper, Women’s Wear of the 1920’s (Studio
City, CA: Players Press, 1998), p. 2.
I went out to try to inspect the Conor mannequin in the ‘flesh.’ Conor’s “Acknowledgements” directed me to the Melbourne Visual Merchandising department
of the David Jones retail chain, where I learned the face belonged to a display
head rather than a complete human form. It had been inherited along with others
when David Jones had taken over the venerable Buckley and Nunn business, and
it had recently been disposed of. The trail led me to a shop premises once leased
to a fashion designer, then to a temporary outlet where the designer was selling
off stock and fittings. For a second time I was just too late: the elusive head had
been sold again and there was no record of the buyer. My investigations also took
me to David Jones’s Sydney archive, which I knew had acquired some of the old
artefacts from the Melbourne Buckley and Nunn store and therefore might be
holding onto some comparable mannequins. No luck there, although I was able to
study advertisements, mail-order catalogues and other records from the early
twentieth century. The closest counterpart to the Conor mannequin I found was in
a photograph of a 1927 David Jones, Sydney window display; the mannequin had
a boyish crop with a triangular forelock leading the gaze down to enormously ex-
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
aggerated brows and big-lidded, slanting eyes. My thanks to David Jones’s Archivist, Barbara Horton, in Silverwater, Sydney, and to Sue Roennfeldt in David
Jones Visual Merchandising, Melbourne.
3
On connotations of the words “attractive” and “cute” in relation to the appearance
of dolls and human females, see A. F. Robertson, Life Like Dolls: The Collector
Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them (New York:
Routledge, 2004), pp. 162-8, 193-205.
4
See Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in
Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), p. 8, pp. 156-7; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New
Haven: Yale UP, 2000), pp. 149-53, p. 161, and p. 229, n. 26.
5
For instance, Peers points out that in the 1920s and 1930s new fashions in European underwear were marketed by way of newsreels using an erotic mix of boudoir dolls and partly dressed live models; these were viewed by both females and
males in cinemas. Peers, p. 133.
6
Boop’s sassy image (still available on merchandise, and popular with young Asian
buyers) reflects that of the real-life performers on whom she was modelled: bosomy, wise-cracking Mae West and the singer Helen Kane. However, when first
drawn in 1930 Boop had floppy ears and a black button nose and was the love interest for a dog. By 1932 she had taken fully human form, and by ’34 Fleischer
Studios, producer of the Boop cartoons, was suing a doll manufacturer for infringing its copyright. Anon, ‘Betty Boop History’, http://www.pathcom.com/~dsk/betty_
boop.htm (accessed 27-11-2005). Anon., ‘Boop in Court’, Time, 19 Feb. 1934,
http://www.time.com/time/archive/printout/0,23657,746979,00.html (accessed 2711-2005).
7
Novelty dolls with adult appeal had become popular before the First World War,
most notably in the form of Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie (based on her press illustrations), the big-eyed, side-glancing “googly” doll, and character dolls based on
Wilhelm Busch’s stories. Peers, pp.130-131. Rose O’Neill conceived of the Kewpie as a naked male Cupid-Elf able to be held in a child’s hand and resisted early
manufacturers’ attempts to alter the model’s dimensions and face. Later Kewpies
were feminised and further infantilised. She watched adults taking Kewpies home
from resorts (“A great number of the elves were carried about with no wrapping,
just for the fun of it”) and carrying Kewpies in city trains. See Rose O’Neill, The
Story of Rose O’Neill: An Autobiography, ed. Miriam Formanek-Brunell (Columbia:
U of Missouri P, 1997), chapter 4, particularly pp. 94-5, 104-9, and also the “Introduction” by Formanek-Brunell. Also see Robertson, Life Like, p. 167.
8
Peers, pp. 131, 133-4. Anne Marsh reproduces one such artwork, from a series by
Hans Bellmer, in her The Darkroom (2003). Bellmer’s series is said to have been
inspired by a performance of Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann, based on
three of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories. Act One of this opera features a man fitted with
rose-tinted glasses becoming infatuated with a beautiful “woman” who, disintegrating after dancing, proves to be a mechanical doll. The ballet Coppelia was based
on the same Hoffmann story. Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the
Theatre of Desire (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003), pp. 184-5 and Fig. 36; cf. Peers,
p. 8 and p. 195 n. 3.
243
244
Robyn Walton
░
9
Foundation, powder and rouge are simulated, also eyebrow pencil, eye shadow,
kohl eyeliner and mascara or false eyelashes, although eye make-up was not
generally accepted daywear in the 1920s. “By 1948, 80 to 90 percent of adult
American women used lipstick, about two-thirds used rouge, and one in four wore
eye makeup.” Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan, 1998), p. 245.
10
For a study of “the despotic face of white femininity” in recent American contexts
see Camilla Griggers, Becoming-woman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).
11
Cf. Roland Barthes’ early essay “The Face of Garbo,” in Susan Sontag, ed.,
Barthes: Selected Writings (Oxford: Fontana, 1982), pp. 82-4.
12
Star-struck women imitated not only actresses’ make-up and hair styles but their
clothes and accessories, as evidenced locally by newspaper reports of the Cinema Fashion Shop opened within David Jones’s main Sydney store in 1933 to sell
knock-offs of the latest screen outfits: David Jones’s Archive contains publicity cuttings from The Telegraph [Sydney], 15 September 1933 and The Sydney Sun &
Guardian, 8 July 1934. Metropolitan and regional newspapers and periodicals also
carried fashion advice attributed to Hollywood stars, with cross-promotion to coming movies.
13
On terminology see Conor, p. 47. The term “New Woman” is generally agreed to
have been in circulation from the 1880s through to the 1910s and 1920s. On the
rise of the femme nouvelle in 1880s France, one English-language source is Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and
Style (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989), chapter 4. Also see The New Woman
and her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850-1914, ed. Viv Gardner and Susan
Rutherford (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 2-6.
14
Conor reports that in 1925 in America a Mrs Stubergh’s mannequins were said to
be capturing the market because they were moulded from real women (Conor:
279 n. 16). An Australian firm, Wilkin & Jones, developed papier mâché figures
“after the design of Vogue” in response to David Jones Ltd’s desire for “animated
and life-like” replacements for its wax dummies (Sunday News, Sydney, 7 March
1926, p.12). A number of American women founded cosmetics and toiletries businesses prior to the 1920s, when the growing companies tended to be taken over
by male managers – see Peiss, Hope, pp. 106-13. Peers notes that European and
Euro-American women founded and retained control of a number of doll manufacturing enterprises.
15
The quote about My Scene is from Claire Morgan and Alexa Moses, “Bratz Takes
on Barbie in Push for Girls.” The Age [Melbourne], 16 December 2002, p. 7. A
BBC television documentary released since Peers finalised her text reported that
the Flāvas line (misspelled by Peers) flopped; it “look[ed] like Beach Boys trying to
do rap,” according to toy industry analyst Sean McGowan. See Barbie’s Mid-Life
Crisis, BBC, 2004.
16
Robertson, Life Like, pp. 226-7. On other objections to fashion dolls see Robertson, pp. 218-9 and Peers, pp. 105-7.
17
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984; reissued Durham: Duke
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The Woman-Object’s Glorious New Clothes
UP, 1993).
18
The commentator is G.Wayne Miller; see his Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie and the Companies Who Made Them (New York: Time
Books/Random House, 1998), p. 68.
19
See Varney, “Pink Paradoxes on Nevsky Prospect,” Arena 62 (2002), pp. 41-3.
20
See, for example, Michel Valentin, “Transformation/Trance/In-formation: Rubik’s
Cube and Transformer Toy,” The Montana Professor 1.2 (1991) http://mtprof.
msun.edu/Spr1991/trans.html (accessed 13-05-2005).
21
O’Neill, The Story of Rose O’Neill, p. 99.
22
Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in
Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), p. 7. Dina Lowy’s recent research leads
her to identify certain types or stages, including a tendentious category, the True
New Woman. Dina B. Lowy, The Japanese “New Woman”: Contending Images of
Gender and Modernity, 1910-1920 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2002).
23
Susan Hall (ed.), The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2004), pp. 142, 183, 200, 227.
24
Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 146, drawing on Charles Taylor, Sources of the
Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1989), p.
465. Also see review of Sidlauskas’s book by Elizabeth Mansfield, NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide 1.1. (2002), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring_02/
reviews/mans.html. (accessed 23-12-2004).
25
See The Modern Girl Around the World project, Institute for Transnational Studies,
University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/its/moderngirlmain.htm (accessed 14-05-05). This project is a welcome corrective to those studies by junior
America-centric scholars who write as if unaware of international antecedents to
modernist/feminist developments in the USA in the 1920s and who attribute subsequent international developments solely to American cultural influence.
26
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1995) pp.
211-2. Felksi has provided the endorsement at the back cover of the Conor’s
book.
245
REVIEWS
Elizabeth Grosz. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the
Untimely. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004. ISBN 1 74114 327 6.
Elizabeth Grosz. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Sydney:
Allen and Unwin, 2005. ISBN 1 74114 572 4.
Claire Perkins
It is time, “a little time in the pure state,” which rises
up to the surface of the screen.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image
With her two books, The Nick of Time and Time Travels, Elizabeth
Grosz joins those writers and thinkers for whom the phenomenon of temporality holds a particular fascination. Grosz acknowledges early on in The
Nick of Time that there are many Western philosophical traditions that
could hold direct relevance for her attempt to reconsider the relationship
between time and life, but which are nonetheless neglected. She identifies,
in particular, the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, which are
both passed over in favour of the first book’s exclusive focus on Charles
Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, and the second’s wider,
but still eclectic, additions to this trio: Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Alfred Kinsey, William James, Luce Irigaray and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty.
The elision of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger seems particularly surprising, perhaps, until the full force of the first book’s subtitle dawns: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. If we are to properly consider time as an
ontological element, as Grosz’ project insists we must, it is not the reality of
text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/perkins.pdf
COLLOQUY
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Elizabeth Grosz ░
time that is critical, but the peculiar qualities and characteristics that evade
the conception of reality: the untimeliness of time. Time needs to be considered ontologically, argues Grosz, in terms of its evanescence and waywardness:
Time is neither fully “present”, a thing in itself, nor is it a pure abstraction, a metaphysical assumption that can be ignored in everyday practice … We can think it only in passing moments, through
ruptures, nicks, cuts, in instances of dislocation, though it contains
no moments or ruptures and has no being or presence, functioning
only as continuous becoming. (2004: 5)
Philosophy, as Grosz reminds us, tends to submerge time in representations of space and matter. Life and reason attempt to control time with limited acknowledgment of the way all forms of life necessarily organise themselves according to a (conscious or unconscious) temporal economy. All
the philosophical figures represented across the two books acknowledge,
in their own ways, this organisation and the epistemological complications it
impels. Temporality is, for all, conditioned by the event, by nicks or ruptures
that emerge from the systems which aim to contain them, to incite change
and unpredictability (2004: 8).
The figures across the books, and the books themselves, are linked
then by the motivation to recognise the full force of temporality in relation to
life. This connectedness is traceable in a number of ways. Firstly, the motivation is unmistakably expressed, as already suggested, as fascination.
The specific concern with time discernable in Grosz’ writing and those she
discusses means that fascination can here be productively considered in
Maurice Blanchot’s sense of the term. The reconsideration of time encouraged by Grosz impels a mode of attunement which overwhelms any dialectical comportment to the world. Another way of conceptualising a thread
across and between the two books is to consider them as practical
Deleuzian exercises. When Grosz describes The Nick of Time as an exploration of the philosophical models that underlie much evolutionary research, it is difficult to avoid thinking foremost of the “model” of schizoanalysis.
Given Deleuze’s own sustained engagements with both Nietzsche and
Bergson it is perhaps not surprising to find these as two of the figures
whose understanding of temporality is here central to a practical ontology
of becoming. The figure who stands out across the two books is Darwin, although what Grosz is ultimately drawing out in her engagement with his
work is what Deleuze (with Guattari) also notices, namely just how nomadic
Darwin’s contributions to an understanding of life are. The first three chap-
░
The Nick of Time and Time Travels
ters of The Nick of Time and the second chapter (in particular) of Time
Travels explore how Darwin’s account of life can be understood as an open
and generative field constituted by forces of growing complexity. The features of this system, in Grosz’ extrapolations, do not exhibit stasis and essence, but are more appropriately understood as “active vectors of change”
(2004: 19).
The exploration in the first book of the practical implications for living
beings of their immersion in the continuous forward movement of time explicitly outlines an ontology of becoming. But Grosz’ concern here, as ever,
is fundamentally pragmatic. In moving beyond the phenomenological tradition to consider the reality of time as constitutive of becoming and not being, she is attesting to the possibilities of practical transformation. Her engagement with Deleuze in this first book is, in this way, an especially relevant example of applied Deleuzianism. Dispensing with his explicit vocabulary, the concepts of openness and transformation are instead sought in the
very scientific discourse (evolution) where such a re-viewing has real power
to reconfigure the possibility of transformation in feminist, queer and antiracist discourses.
The explicit link that Grosz makes here is to the body. The ontology of
life that she draws out in Darwin impels an understanding of bodies as beings that are foremost temporal, rather than spatial. In this movement
Grosz readily acknowledges the ways in which she is moving beyond the
relationship between biology and culture she has worked with previously.
What she is also moving beyond, of course, is the still influential stranglehold that psychoanalysis has on the biology-culture model. The biological
body is here explored neither as a passive receiver of cultural inscription,
nor as an “alien” force which inhibits such inscription, but as an interactive
surface which gives itself up to cultural location (2004: 4). It is by reconsidering the ways in which Darwin’s ontology posits forms of life as unavoidably immersed in the forward movement of temporality that this “reversal”
of the biology-culture schema can be thought.
Although Nietzsche and Bergson can be more readily anticipated from
the Deleuzian impulse of the two books, their location here in relation to
Darwin, to each other and to the particular temporal concerns of the project
ensures some interesting juxtapositions. Having re-thought the model of
evolutionary biology in the first section of The Nick of Time, Grosz’ second
and third sections – on Nietzsche and Bergson respectively – cast the two
in a unique light which refuses the singularity of the Darwinian or Deleuzian
frameworks which tend to contextualise their work. Nietzsche and Bergson
are read here through Darwin, but through a peculiarly Deleuzian Darwin.
The results are dynamic: Nietzsche’s will to power, for example, when read
249
250
Elizabeth Grosz ░
in the second section as a transformation of Darwin’s ideas on the struggle
for existence, appears at once more and less bold than is typically appreciated. This ultimately, inevitably, challenges Nietzsche’s representation of
himself as the “Anti-Darwin” (2004: 101). As “champion of the exceptional,
the unique, the unrepeatable,” it emerges how Nietzsche has more, and
more unanticipated, aspects in common with Darwin than he admits. And,
in turn, the conceptualisation in the third section of Nietzsche as Bergsonian (by way of his understanding of the unpredictable continuity of the future) is a characterisation itself recast by reading Bergson as “the most philosophically rigorous of the early twentieth-century Darwinians” (2004: 156).
Across the books, these juxtapositions work to ensure that Grosz does
not fully submit to the process she cautions against, whereby philosophy
submerges time in static representation. As an exploration of the insights of
these diverse thinkers on temporality, Grosz’ project itself retains something of the unpredictable sense of the event. This is especially evident in
the two-book model itself: where the first book systematically (if, as suggested, surprisingly) investigates the cultural inheritance of the force of time
(2005: 4), the second draws together eight years worth of essays which reflect more generally on the question of time. Across the ideas and figures of
Time Travels, disjunction is less of an organising principle and more of an
organic affect: time itself rises up as the distance, and closeness, between
the concerns – from Darwin to the legal system to prostheses to female
sexuality. In this book, the evanescence of time is immanent; the two together preserve untimeliness by working as a nick, disrupting our immersion in temporal continuity by encouraging our fascination, but never our
mastery.
Monash University
[email protected]
Astrid Henry. Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and
Third Wave Feminism. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 2004.
ISBN: 0253344549.
Anthea Taylor
In Not My Mother’s Sister, Astrid Henry critiques the excessive use of
generational tropes and familial metaphors in American “third-wave” texts.
Henry’s stated aim is to analyse how the mother-daughter trope has become the central means of figuring relationships between second-wave and
third-wave feminists in the US (2). In so doing, Not My Mother’s Sister fills a
significant critical gap within feminist textual studies, specifically in relation
to the rhetoric of ‘popular’ feminist writing. Her study consists of close
analyses of a number of US texts defined as products of third-wave feminism and which exemplify the “overmaternalization of feminism” (146). She
trenchantly observes that such works repeatedly view feminism as a symbolic Mother necessitating repudiation to permit the individuation of her
wayward daughter. The feminist publications she analyses, both ‘popular’
and academic (although most can be categorised as the former), are clustered in the 1990s, the point at which she argues the third-wave becomes
most culturally visible. An Australian audience may be tempted to read the
highly visible media debates over the meaning (and ‘ownership’) of feminism in the 1990s, precipitated by the publication of Helen Garner’s The
First Stone, through Henry’s observations on the third-wave. However, the
term’s application and currency in Australia has been comparatively limited,
either in ‘mainstream’ or academic contexts. Nonetheless, her unpacking of
generational tropes and maternal metaphors provides important insight into
how relationships between different cohorts of feminists are being figured.
The book begins with an attempt to historicise the feminist ‘waves’
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phenomenon. In ‘Daughterhood is Powerful: The Emergence of Feminisms’
Third Wave’ she searches for the origins of the third-wave, a critical gesture
that historians of the second-wave have shown to be fraught, particularly
given that such stories seek to impose an unsustainable coherence and
linearity to feminist history. In Henry’s reading, the women of the third-wave
seek to rehabilitate feminism (36), a gesture that requires the invocation of
a particular feminist past. The next chapter – ‘Finding Ourselves in the
Past’ – offers a potted history of the US second-wave, identifying within it
problems that would be exaggerated by third-wave daughters seeking to
distinguish themselves from this earlier generation. Henry explores the relationship between the first- and second-waves, tracking how the latter
came to identify the former as “their history and their political foundation”
(58). In taking up the wave metaphor, second-wave feminists sought to
identify with their nineteenth or early twentieth century predecessors while
simultaneously positioning themselves as “the vanguard” (58), a process
that continues in writing of the so-called third-wave. The remainder of the
book, comprised of detailed rhetorical analysis, addresses the way thirdwave authors discursively construct the differences between feminists predominantly through the generational prism.
In Henry’s analysis, the key points on which this third-wave seeks to
distance itself from the second-wave as (M)Other are in attitudes to (hetero)sexuality, queer feminist identities and racial difference; chapters are
devoted to each of these issues and how they have provided the basis for a
differentiation between these two generations of feminism. Although there
are myriad similarities between the so-called “third-wave” texts she analyses, binding them is a rejection of (a particular type of) academic feminism;
the third-wave seeks to establish itself as practical as opposed to theoretical – itself a highly questionable demarcation given its apparent preoccupation with, and intervention into, the field of cultural politics. This separation
is more remarkable given the continuities and points of convergence between the work of feminist theorists informed by poststructuralist, postmodern and postcolonial critical discourses (produced by theorists such as Judith Butler, Liz Grosz and Ien Ang) and these ‘popular’ works: the instability
of identity, a consciousness of the exclusionary gestures of a totalising
hegemonic feminism, an emphasis on the contingencies of meaning, and
an acknowledgement that cultural politics represents a key site in the
struggle over power.
In each of the following chapters, she tracks the discursive ‘matricide’
(10) undertaken by authors of the third-wave. Through detailed textual
analysis, Henry comprehensively demonstrates how all these forms of
third-wave writing – pro (hetero)sex, queer and black American – tend to
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invoke an impossibly monolithic second-wave that must be disavowed to
enable the legitimation of their own contrastingly multifaceted feminist identities and practices. In “Taking Feminism to Bed: The Third Wave Does the
Sex Wars,” Henry identifies the approach to sexuality as one of the central
distinctions between second- and third-waves. Writers of the third-wave
considered in this chapter, such as celebrity feminists Rene Denfeld, Katie
Roiphe, Naomi Wolf and the lesser-known Merri Lisa Johnson, invariably
conceptualise its predecessor as anti-sex and puritanical. In contrast, feminism’s most recent manifestation professes to embrace (hetero)sexuality
and thus is credited not with alienating contemporary young women but attracting them. In terms of their sexual practices, these young women are
avowedly heterosexual and unashamedly hedonistic; they emphasise in
particular the pleasures of penetrative sex, pleasures they suggest the
misguided politics of second-wave feminism led women to surrender.
Henry demonstrates that such writers construct a straw second-wave
against which to define their form of feminism as superior and more sophisticated and liberated, a move reliant upon a problematic teleological notion
of feminism’s development.
Likewise, in the proceeding chapter, “Neither My Mother Nor My
Lover: Generational Relations in Queer Feminism,” Henry suggests that
young queer feminists commonly define themselves against a homogenised “frumpy and unsexy” (and, again, anti-phallic) generation of secondwave feminists (124). Feminism here is seen as a “repressive and intrusive
force” (123), impeding the sexual liberty of her self-aware daughters: “Viewing feminism as orthodoxy, oppressor, and stern patroller of behaviour
would appear to be a generational thing, not just a straight thing” (123).
Henry observes that, by figuring feminism as a puritanical Mother, these
writers are commonly trapped in a maternity/sexuality opposition with a
lengthy history which is predicated on an “ideologically suspect view of
motherhood” (183). For these third-wave queer writers, the lesbian Mother
to be rejected is the purportedly asexual lesbian feminist of the secondwave (126); moreover, Henry suggests, young women reject this ‘mother’
in favour of a politically loaded alliance with queer men and/or men in general. This embrace of the phallus (a term she uses interchangeably with the
actual penis) is seen as a way of demonstrating that young lesbians are
“not like ‘mama’” (137). Her assertion that queer feminism is defined
against second-wave feminism through its wholesale endorsement of a
pro-phallic sexuality – what she calls the “celebration of penetration” (137)
– serves to homogenise queer feminism (and feminists) in a way reminiscent of those writers she most heavily critiques (Wolf, Denfeld, Roiphe),
who reduce a diverse second-wave feminism to a wooden caricature. This
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Astrid Henry
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chapter, drawing mostly on queer-theory texts, is less convincing regarding
a third-wave queer feminism that predominantly manifests in non-academic
forms.
In “To Be, Or Not To Be, Real: Black Feminists and the Emerging
Third Wave,” the focus shifts to how young black women of the third-wave
(Rebecca Walker, Joan Morgan and Shani Jamila) persistently argue that
their version of feminism is inclusive of contradictions, tensions, ambiguities
and multiplicities in a way that their (literal and symbolic) feminist ‘mothers’
were not. For these writers, rather than being a heterogenous movement,
the ‘Mother feminism’ against which they rebel is regulating, puritanical
and, most problematically, white. The texts Henry examines consistently
invoke the phrases “to be real” or “keeping it real,” the meanings of which
themselves inevitably shift. Although this invocation of an authentic/inauthentic feminism binary is unsustainable, it is nonetheless a central
rhetorical strategy used in writing by young black feminists. Henry contends
that “within the variety of ‘reals’ being used in this writing, a representation
of the feminism(s) of the past emerges, one that is clearly not real enough”
(159). Like other third-wave writers, therefore, they seek to differentiate
their own brand of feminism from a homogenous second-wave. In this
chapter, texts rejecting the simplistic certainties of generational logic are
also interrogated, and their presence thus complicates the notion of a unified third-wave that marks other points of Not My Mother’s Sister.
In the book’s characteristic self-reflexivity, Henry is conscious that
even her own critique of the “matrophor” (the use of maternal metaphors in
feminist writing) remains trapped in the logic she seeks to disavow (11).
With some reservation, in the “Introduction” she confesses to an identification with the third-wave writers she explicitly sets out to critique (15). However, she does not argue that the third-wave is to be valued hierarchically
over the second; unlike her generational peers, she seeks to emphasise
both the points of continuity and the divergences between these two
‘waves.’ She also astutely criticises the third-wave’s rampant “ideology of
individualism” and emphasis on individual choice (44), and its homogenisation of a diverse second-wave. That said, whether the generation of (for?)
whom she speaks (itself being quickly superseded by the next) should embrace the characterisation “third-wave” is not sufficiently tackled. For Henry,
the signifier “third-wave” adequately describes a new theory, politics and
practice being embraced by young women; that is, the third-wave is an
empirical phenomenon not simply a textual practice. That said, she is critical of figuring feminism in maternal terms and emphasises the material
ramifications of the deployment of generational discourses: “While feminism’s familial language is, in fact, figurative, the metaphors we use to de-
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Not My Mother’s Sister
scribe feminism have real effects in the world and in the ways that feminists
develop intergenerational relationships and participate in intergenerational
dialogue” (182). Henry underscores the exclusions and the political consequences of the persistent mobilisation of mother-daughter tropes within a
broadly conceived feminist discourse. Like previous commentators in this
area, she argues that positioning differences in mother-daughter terms
functions to mask ‘real’ political differences between feminists and she emphasises that this figuring of internal feminist disagreements along generational lines has displaced the feminist focus from “external battles against
sexism, racism and homophobia” (183). In this vein, Henry cautiously concludes that feminism needs to refocus its energies: “If feminism is indeed
like a family, it would be wise of us not to forget its absent father” (183). Finally, the flaws and attractions (in terms of giving young feminists a readily
marketable – if problematic – place from which to speak) inherent in generational logic are both foregrounded throughout Not My Mother’s Sister,
thus producing a critical narrative attentive to the discursive potentialities of
the generational frame and its inherent limitations. In doing so, Not My
Mother’s Sister makes an important contribution to an emergent field of
scholarship on the rhetorics of both ‘popular’ and academic feminisms.
University of New South Wales
[email protected]
255
Avital Ronell. Test Drive.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. ISBN 0-252-02950-X.
Faye Brinsmead
Avital Ronell has clearly been preoccupied by the unholy trinity of science, the test, and Nietzsche, particularly the Nietzsche of The Gay Science, for some time. In 2003 her intricately woven musings on this threeheaded topic were published in two journals. 1 The articles, which can perhaps be seen as test runs, appear in re-worked and expanded form as the
central section of The Test Drive. Ronell states that these writings issue
from “a philosophical need – such needs still exist – to respond to the question of testing” (14). What drives her to take up the question of testing is its
non-question status in philosophical circles, she says:
The problem is that the test has not yet become a philosophical
question, although it belongs to an ever-mutating form of questioning. As that which legitimates and corroborates or, conversely, as
that which carries the considerable burden of delegitimating assumed forms of knowledge or legal, pharmaceutical, screen, and
other decisive claims of an epistemological or projective order, the
test at once affirms and deprives the world of confidence; it belongs
to a specific sequence of forces that not so much annihilates as it
disqualifies … think of the test as that which advances the technological gaze as if nothing were. (14)
We (post)moderns live out our lives under the sign of the test, observes
Ronell. Our relation to “questions of truth, knowledge, and even reality” now
hinges on testability (17). The imperative to test pervades “everything from
recent warfare (the unending Gulf War being a privileged example here) to
urban planning, military strategy and national security, space, medical and
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Test Drive
reproductive technologies, the aporias of ethics, drug and polygraph testing, the steroidal tests of the Olympic Games” (18). This battery of tests not
only facilitates the ‘policing of political sites and bodies’; it affects processes
of subjectivity on a deeper level, suspending the individual’s authority,
pending further investigations, to vouch for the “experienceability and constitution of reality in general” (19). Freud’s reality-test has updated and outdated Descartes’: in the post-psychoanalytic era, reality, the real deal, real
life, or your own favourite term for the existential bottom line “has been
submitted to various testing apparatuses whose character and significance
still need to be investigated” (19).
So, Ronell resolves to probe this “complicated extravagance of testing”
(19). Putting her foot on the accelerator, she drives her investigation
“through the backroads of scientific investigation and diverse cartographies
of rupture” (16). Her mapmaker-in-chief is none other than “‘Fred’
Nietzsche,” as she playfully calls him. This is because the said Fred opens
up scientificity to a myriad of possibilities which some would deny it today:
his is a scientificity that “without compromising the rigor of inquiry, would allow for the inventiveness of science fiction, experimental art, social innovation, and, above all, a highly stylized existence” (156). Most of all,
Nietzschean science is a research programme for joyousness, and Ronell
answers its call, romping ebulliently with some of the key motifs of the work
she nicknames “Gay Sci.”
The Test Drive is, at the very least, an exhilarating ride. Literary types
will applaud as Ronell unfurls the ‘cunning sails’ of her prose, to switch
from the road-trip metaphor to Nietzsche’s watery one in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. Reviews of Ronell’s work rarely fail to mention her daredevil
prose style with its constant multi-register surprises, although the surprise
factor is lessened, it must be said, if one reads her in the plural: she tends
to recycle her favourite conceits.
Those test runs paid off: the central, eponymous section of The Test
Drive is a fascinating engagement with The Gay Science. Nietzsche himself once confided to a friend that when reading he would attach his own
thoughts to the sentences of the writer in question, instantaneously erecting
“a new structure on the existing pillars that presented themselves in this
way.” 2 Ronell’s reading strategy is similarly free-wheeling and productive:
she can veer away from an aphorism in The Gay Science to an analysis of
how Abraham and Job were tested by God and, in the latter case, contested him right back, and then proceed to pole-vault into contemporary
American politics by reminding us that George W. Bush, “this little Isaac”
bent on replaying the wars of his father, informed his country on 9/11 that
what they had just experienced was a test (167).
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Avital Ronell
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Although at times The Gay Science temporarily disappears beneath
this welter of associations, at other times Ronell resuscitates its ability to
make its own claims. She points out, for example, that Nietzsche does not
anticipate contemporary fears about the dehumanising possibilities of the
test. For him, the experimental impulse is predicated on strength of personality and, more suprising still, love:
Nietzschean science scorns cold objectivist observation and limp
grapples, requiring instead something on the order of an affective
self-deposit and intense commitment. Prompting the encounter of
great problems with great love, scientific curiosity and experimental
imagination trace their novel routes. Nietzsche appears to envision a
mapping of scientific study that is auratically pulled together by the
love borne by a strong personality; buoyed by love, such a science
could not degenerate in principle to a hate crime against humanity.
(177)
The chapters preceding and following Ronell’s gay encounter with
Nietzschean science are arguably less successful. The later sections of the
book contain a ventriloquised meditation by Husserl – a Husserl who
quotes Derrida! – and another long examination of Nietzschean themes,
this time drawn from a variety of works. The former, although undeniably
creative, smacks of gimmickry, and the latter, while rich with insights on
Nietzsche, seems to take us away from the problematic Ronell initially assigns herself.
The early chapters cite a vast diversity of references to the test, from
ancient Greek writings on the practice of testing the testimony of slaves by
torture, to Popper on falsifiability, to the Turing Test, and many, many
more. This part of the book comes off as somewhat underargued: it is as
though Ronell opens book after book for our edification, piling them one on
top of the other and pointing to sundry interesting passages, but doesn’t
quite get around to putting all this embarrassment of riches to work. This
objection could be obtuseness on my part: she is often said to have trademarked a unique methodological gambit by deliberately breaching the conventional rules of engagement between the subject and the object of inquiry, stalking her putative quarry so closely that it fragilises beneath her
gaze, and ours. It could be that I’m missing the point about Ronell’s tactical
evasions of the point. However, it could also be that some parts of the book
attest to the strain of the contemporary academic philosopher obliged to
submit to the dominant form of institutional testing: perpetual publishing.
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Test Drive
University of New South Wales
[email protected]
NOTES
1
Avital Ronell, “Proving Grounds: On Nietzsche and the Test Drive”, MLN 118
(2003), pp 653-69; Ronell, “The Experimental Disposition: Nietzsche’s Discovery
of America (Or, Why the Present Administration Sees Everything in Terms of a
Test)”, American Literary History 15.3 (2003), pp 560-74.
2
Quoted in Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans Shelley
Frisch (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 127.
259
Matthew Sharpe. A Little Piece of the Real.
London: Ashgate, 2003. ISBN 0 7546 3918 5.
Geoff Boucher
Slavoj Žižek is the most influential interdisciplinary thinker to have
emerged in recent times. Yet despite the importance of his intervention into
contemporary theory, reception of his work has so far been limited to some
lucid introductions. Perhaps because of the astonishing breadth of knowledge displayed in Žižek’s writings, and the sometimes hermetic density of
his style, many commentators have just rounded up the usual suspects –
Laclau, Hegel, Lacan, then ethics and politics – and left it at that. But with
the crucial preliminary reconnaissance of the terrain now well underway,
the time has come for a deeper exploration of Žižek’s work.
Matthew Sharpe’s analysis of Žižek is not another introduction. To the
contrary: it is a sustained critical engagement that places Žižek’s heterogeneous texts under the microscope of an immanent critique that is informed
by an understanding of Western Marxism and German idealism. Although
he never rushes himself – the book contains plenty of careful exposition –
Sharpe probes and sifts with a healthy impatience for the moments in Žižek
that he describes as “journalistic and ad hoc analyses”. Throughout, the
work is animated by a drive towards clarity: weighing theoretical hypotheses, judging arguments and evidence, and carefully examining claims. Instead of accepting Žižek’s sometimes contradictory self-representations
and ever-changing theoretical positions as an aleatory series of localised
interventions, Sharpe insists on scrutinising arguments for the social theory
of contemporary capitalism that Žižek needs in order to justify his political
stance.
What makes this all the more significant is that Sharpe’s analysis is far
from hostile. Motivated by a declared political solidarity with Žižek’s efforts
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A little piece of the real
invigorated Marxism very seriously indeed. His interpretation is positioned
in opposition to (for instance) Ernesto Laclau’s claim that Žižek does not
really produce a political theory, but rather a psychoanalytic discourse
which draws upon the politico-ideological field for examples. By contrast
with the depoliticising interpretation, Sharpe locates Žižek’s project within
the lineage of Western Marxism. Predictably, he examines the Althusserian
heritage and its post-Althusserian sequel, but more intriguingly, he contends that Žižek encounters the same problems as the first generation of
the Frankfurt School. One of the most interesting aspects of this discussion
is the comparison between Marcuse and Žižek, which suggests that the latter reinvents many of the problems of the former. Like Marcuse, Sharpe
contends, once Žižek links contemporary depoliticisation to the success of
ideology in securing the smooth social reproduction of a reified total system, the consequence is a dilemma – either the cynical refusal of political
engagement, or an ultraleft voluntarism that rejects liberal democracy.
Sharpe divides Žižek’s work into three complementary components: a
psychoanalytically informed theory of ideology; a descriptive theory of capitalism centred on social reproduction; and, a prescriptive political response
that seeks to revive the fortunes of Marxism. Descriptively, Sharpe understands Žižek’s theory of capitalism as centred on the importance of ideology for social reproduction. While the crucial theoretical resource for
Žižek’s theory is Althusser, Sharpe highlights his debt to the problematic of
ideology springing from classical Marxism. The key challenge for Žižek is to
expand the concept of ideology to explain the enlightened cynicism characteristic of the subjectivity of “post-ideological” capitalism, without voiding the
critical implications of the term in an anthropologically neutral generality.
Sharpe proposes that Žižek accounts for cynical distance as the modality of
contemporary mystification through two conceptual modifications to the
Marxist theory of ideology. In the first shift, Žižek substitutes an Althusserian understanding of ideology as a set of meaningless, ritualised
practices for the classical conception of “false consciousness”. But this
lands Žižek with Althusser’s neutral description of ideology as an “imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence”. In the second shift, however, Žižek proposes that the ballast of ideology is unconscious, because
social identity is guaranteed through an unconscious belief in the omnipotence of the Other. From Žižek’s Lacanian perspective, this reverses Althusser’s neutral conception of ideology into a critical position once again,
since the belief in the omnipotence of the Other is a mystification. The
Other – the unified totality of ethical life, history conceptualised as a series
of necessary stages, and so forth – “does not exist,” except in the unconscious fantasy. Unconscious and meaningless, contemporary ideologies
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are immune to enlightenment critique and can only be traversed by means
of psychoanalytic politics. The centrepiece of such a politics is a reactivation of the traumatic kernel of a socio-symbolic field, the social antagonism
that is correlative to the “non-existence of the Other,” and which ideological
fantasy serves to conceal. The risk, as Sharpe observes, is that this inflates
ideology into something coextensive with the entire social formation, leaving nothing external to it that might ground a critical perspective.
For Žižek, however, the outside of ideology is the Real. Characteristically, Žižek claims that “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of
escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape
from some traumatic real kernel”. In one of the best parts of the book, then,
Sharpe sifts and dissects the possible referents of this term in Žižek’s work,
concluding that he wants to align “the kernel of the Real” simultaneously
with libidinal enjoyment and with class struggle. On the side of the libidinal
discontents of ideology, Sharpe acknowledges the rhetorical and moral
force of Žižek’s argument that liberal capitalism is responsible for its “inherent transgressions,” such as racism and fundamentalism. But this is
scarcely an emancipatory opportunity, and on the side of class struggle,
Žižek’s grasp of political economy is weak. Sharpe demonstrates that many
of Žižek’s efforts to politicise the economy are nothing more than leftwing
journalism and cannot be theoretically integrated into the account of how
ideology structures social reality. Žižek hopes to square the circle through a
revival of the concept of “commodity fetishism,” as that locus in which political economy and capitalist ideology are united. It is here that Sharpe
produces a master stroke, demonstrating that it is precisely the rapturous
embrace of commodity fetishism, as linked to the capitalist economy conceptualised as a seamless totality, that lands Žižek in Marcuse’s dilemma.
Provocatively, Sharpe suggests that Žižek is insufficiently dialectical.
His theory depends on the category of incompleteness, not inconsistency,
which entails an embrace of antinomy rather than contradiction. Unlike
Marx, then, Žižek does not regard capitalism as a system riven by class
contradictions, but as an incomplete field whose constitutive outside is social antagonism. The consequence is that despite Žižek’s invocation of
class struggle as the “Real of capitalism,” this takes on a very different
theoretical value from the internal contradiction of capitalism that it is for
historical materialism. As a kernel that remains the same despite the multiplicity of ideological permutations, social antagonism decompletes capitalism from the outside. This means that it is never present as such, appearing only through substitutes – race, gender and ethnicity, for instance.
While this enables Žižek to transform empirical evidence against class
struggle into evidence for its effectiveness “in the Real,” the political costs
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are high: in this schema, radical transformations necessarily originate outside the system. Politically, this is reminiscent of Marcuse, who also insisted that capitalism is a seamless (that is, consistent) system perturbed
only at the margins, by means of radically anti-systemic (and therefore
also, anti-political) movements. “Because Žižek does not adduce any such
category as the Hegelian notion of contradiction, which would allow him to
(claim to) discern tendencies within the current hegemony that might lead
to a revolutionary change of it, it seems difficult to envisage anything politically redemptive coming from his theoretical endeavours,” Sharpe suggests
(216). Žižek’s invocation of “class struggle” as the Real of a social antagonism that decompletes the seamless totality is unconvincing, then, for it
lacks empirical application and theoretical dynamism.
Instead of regarding capitalism as contradictory, Sharpe argues, Žižek
considers it to be antinomic. Sharpe observes that on this basis, Žižek cannot elude the political versions of the two sides of Kant’s third antinomy,
namely, decisionist voluntarism or quietistic determinism. Sharpe shows
how this results in a series of mutually exclusive formulations, so that Žižek
can be interpreted as both a radical democrat and an opponent of liberal
parliamentarism, as a theorist of democratisation and as a supporter of the
Leninist vanguard, and as a Kantian formalist and a Hegelian anti-formalist.
As Sharpe proposes, although Žižek needs a political theory to provide the
“outside” of ideology that would lend this term critical purchase, he does so
not so much by means of a social theory of contemporary capitalism, as
through the elaboration of a politicised version of the Lacanian subject.
Žižek’s resort to ontology to generate a redemptive politics is philosophically interesting, Sharpe reasons, but politically inadequate. The detour
through ontology, then, designed to “save the revolution,” ends by effacing
the revolutionaries, leaving only a desperate hunt for anti-systematic tendencies in the wasteland of an antinomic, but nonetheless uncontested,
multinational capitalism. While there is a bitter truth in all of this for today’s
Left, Žižek’s position is best interpreted as more of a symptom of the conjuncture than a solution to it. Nonetheless, Sharpe concludes, Žižek is not
to be dismissed. It is not only that Žižek asks all of the important questions.
By highlighting the incompleteness of Žižek’s political theory, while saluting
the reconstruction of the theory of ideology by means of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Sharpe seeks to delineate the scope of Žižek’s position rather
than to negate his contribution. Sharpe still wants his piece of the real,
then, but he’ll take it with a pinch of salt.
Deakin University
[email protected]
263
James Phillips. Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and
Poetry. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. ISBN: 0-8047-5071-8
Andrew Padgett
The space of the “in between” is a central figure in James Phillips’
study of Heidegger’s Volk (“the people”). Phillips’ reading of Heidegger
manages to navigate a path between so many dangerous, because dogmatic, views of his engagement with National Socialism. The picture of
Heidegger’s thought that Phillips constructs is one marked by das Fremde
(the strange; the alien) and Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness, or the unhomeliness of that which lacks a home) that characterise Heidegger’s conception
of Dasein’s poetic dwelling. The “in between” (80) which Heidegger’s
thought inhabits is marked, on the one hand, by what in 1933 he saw to be
the promise of National Socialism’s appeal to “the people,” and which he
still saw in 1953 to be the movement’s “inner truth.” The other pole of the
“in between” of Phillips’ study is that of Heidegger’s inevitable disillusionment with National Socialism, which his ontology exceeded but “could not
leave… behind and cut itself off from” (53).
The many faces of this “in between” are well known to Heidegger’s
readers: between presence and absence; unconcealing and concealing;
visibility and invisibility; das Man (the “they” or “the One”) and the authentic
Self. Phillips’ reading of Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism
raises several more, specific to this context: Heidegger is between liberalism’s ahistorical, autonomous subject and the “völkische Wissenschaft”
(folkish science) of Dasein’s transcendent, co-historizing, Being-with-oneanother (25); between liberal self-assertion and death as the “unforeseeable event of the true” (20); between the present-at-hand manifestation of a
people and a Volk who is always missing (28), or whose essence is its
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Heidegger’s Volk
ticality” which their sovereignty annuls; between Russia and America; between the Heideggerian polis of the concealment of Being, and the National
Socialist polis which controls Being (118); and between National Socialism,
which presences the people in its vulgar biologism, and poetry, which unconceals the absence of the Volk (113).
Faithful to Heidegger, Phillips refuses to reduce Heidegger to either
pole of such ‘oppositions’, but maintains his reading of Heidegger’s Volk,
and his engagement with National Socialism, within the “questionability” of
Heidegger’s guilt and innocence. Phillips argues that it is untenable both to
excuse Heidegger for his engagement with National Socialism and to condemn his ontology as a racist philosophy. Since Heidegger’s notion of the
Volk is one which understands “the people” to be constituted on the basis
of their ontological questionability and Unheimlichkeit, and since the Volk is
always other than how it (or any political system) may seek to manifest it, it
is thus anti-Heideggerian to determine Heidegger himself, either excusing
or condemning his engagement with National Socialism. Phillips’ refusal to
contain Heidegger, and his seeking to maintain Heidegger’s thought within
the uncanny openness it opens up, despite the ardour of those who seek to
excuse and condemn Heidegger, means that this study offers its reader a
most accessible entry point into Heidegger’s thought.
Phillips argues that it is clear that Heidegger’s disillusionment with National Socialism was inevitable when one contrasts the Heideggerian view
of Volk with that put forward by National Socialism. Heidegger’s view of the
German people was one which centred on their inherent unhomeliness (19;
169ff.). Phillips writes of Heidegger’s view that the German people “have
still to assert themselves as a people. More precisely, they have to assert
themselves as the people whose essence lies in the deferral of its assertion
as a people present-at-hand… the homecoming of the Germans… is the
future: the essence of the Heimat [native place] to which the German people is to come is not something that can ever be present-at-hand” (19).
Heidegger’s Volk lies between its assertion and the deferral of its assertion.
The question with which Heidegger’s Volk concerns itself (if “it” were ever
able to assert such a question) is of the order: “who are the German people?” In contrast, National Socialism all too readily transforms this question
to read “what are the Germans?” (36) The “unanswerable” of Heidegger’s
Volk becomes the present-at-hand of “the people” of National Socialism.
Thus, the tension between Heidegger’s Volk and “the people” of National
Socialism is that the former can only raise “the question concerning the essence of Being,” which Heidegger sees to be the “mission” of the German
people, “less on behalf of other peoples than against the standardization by
which the various peoples [the Russians and the Americans, for example]
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have fallen away from the possibility of grasping their own essential historicality” (33). National Socialism, in contrast, accepts “the people” as something present-at-hand, and thus all too easily reifies and standardises the
“questionability” of Heidegger’s Volk.
Heidegger’s disillusionment with National Socialism was inevitable,
moreover, insofar as the former’s conception of the homelessness of the
Volk inevitably found itself in conflict with the expanded home that National
Socialism sought to establish for “the people”. If the politics of the former is
one which resides in the “in between” and “priority” of “the decision” between politics and ontology, the politics of the latter lies in the raising of the
people to a position of sovereignty. For Heidegger, “a people cannot find itself either in power or out of power, but only in that which is ontologically
prior to power” (26). The “essential politicality” of Heidegger’s Volk is one
which is prior to any ontic determination of political power, prior to any delineation between the powerful and the powerless. The “essential politicality” of Heidegger’s Volk lies between a politics which makes power possible, and a power which purports to manifest the politics of the people. The
uncanniness of Heidegger’s Volk with regards to his engagement with National Socialism is that it elides both power and politics in its permanently
deferring its self-assertion, either politically or powerfully.
Phillips’ reading of Heidegger’s Volk remains faithful to its intrinsic
“questionability”. The view of Heidegger’s thought that Phillips proffers is,
like Heidegger’s Volk, one “whose time has not yet come” (33). Phillips’
book situates Heidegger between the tyranny and totalisation which his
fundamental ontology and National Socialism always threatens, and an
ethical thinking of Being (the perceived lack of which spurred so many of
Heidegger’s critics, most notably Levinas) which is the promise of poetry.
The paradox of Heidegger’s Volk and Heidegger’s own “grotesquely sophisticated” (55) engagement with National Socialism are nowhere more
evident than in the person of Heidegger himself. The abusive biologism to
which National Socialism subjected ‘the Volk’ mirrors the abusive reductionism to which Heidegger’s critics subject his thought, when viewed
through the prism of 1933. And just as Heidegger grew disillusioned with
the simplistic biologism of National Socialism, so too does Phillips offer a
view of Heidegger’s Volk which refuses its reduction to the Heidegger of
1933. 1933 provided no home or sanctuary for Heidegger’s Volk; neither
can 1933 offer a home or sanctuary to any who seek to reduce the infinite
complexity of Heidegger’s thought, his destruction of fundamental ontology,
and his insistence on the historicality and Unheimlichkeit of Dasein, to the
dangerous simplicity that 1933 offers.
Phillips presents a masterly and irresistibly learned reading of Heideg-
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ger’s Volk which locates Heidegger between his engagement with the regime, and the impossibility of excusing this engagement (38-9), between
the “gray” “inner truth” of Heidegger’s “private National Socialism” (99) and
its “outer falsehood” (40), between the regime’s polemics against liberalism
and its collapse into liberalism (43). As such, Phillips offers a view of Heidegger in which he emerges somewhere between his being to the right of
the far Right (as his criticisms of National Socialism for being too liberal
suggest), and the appearance of his Volk and Dasein to the left of the far
Left (which their destruction of presence, and the questionability and Unheimlichkeit of their ontological structure would suggest).
This, in the end, is the “in between” where Heidegger must rightly appear: between what Levinas sees to be the inevitable totalisation of Being
in his fundamental ontology, and Being’s disruption and deferral of its ontological totalisation in its constitution on the basis of Unheimlichkeit. Being –
Volk – is always other to however either ontology or the crude biologism of
National Socialism may seek to grasp it. As Phillips writes:
What must, but cannot, be rescued in Heidegger’s abasement before Hitler is this rupture. The intoxicated and unreserved acquiescence to dictatorship is inseparable from the suspicion of the contradictory reterritorialization of European identity and yet cannot be vindicated by it. And that it cannot be vindicated by it is because this
acquiescence raises the question as such, as the proper-improper
site of Europe’s difference from dogmatism, first of all against itself.
Heidegger’s people is, and is not, the people of National Socialism.
(52)
Heidegger’s conception of the Volk both ties him to, as well as signals his
distance from, National Socialism. Heidegger’s Volk exists, if anywhere, in
the intimacy of this distance. And so too does his thought. Heidegger is forever other than – between – however one may seek to judge him. As Phillips notes, “understanding between peoples neither levels nor codifies their
differences. It calls the identities of the peoples into question” (35). The major achievement of Phillips’ book is that it calls into question the very determinateness which 1933 so often imposes upon Heidegger’s thought.
Phillips’ study itself opens up this space “in between” Heidegger’s innocence and guilt, and allows his thought to once more dwell in that space
which is proper to it.
Monash University
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John Sellars. The Art of Living:
The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. ISBN: 0-7546-3667-4
Michael FitzGerald
It might be inferred, in either a receptive or a suspicious spirit, that the
main title of John Sellars’ book suggests an intention to provide the companion-piece to Alexander Nehamas’ hugely popular Sather lectures, of the
same name, on the figure of Socrates. Or again, an installation of the kind
of programmatic research in ‘technologies of the self’ proposed, at the beginning of the 1980s, by Michel Foucault. In fact, Sellars makes no immodest claims to intellectual patronage; he does share, however, with Nehamas the intention of turning to philosophy’s classical heritage in order to
widen and deepen contemporary perceptions of the discipline. As he summarises in the book’s opening and closing pages, the ‘technical conception
of philosophy’ which he argues on behalf of Stoicism would not be simply
an antiquarian relic, a naïf primitif, but the marrow of a counter-tradition taking in the humanisms of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Sellars is the
author of the entry on Neostoicism in the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy), up to the works of Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze.
The Art of Living is, then, as much an apology – for the coherence of a
certain conception of the ‘nature and function’ of the philosophical project –
as it is an admirable contribution to the literature on classical Stoicism. This
aim relieves it of some of the formal baggage of the history of ideas: it is
not structured in continuous, longitudinal section; it does not attempt to coordinate the intellectual data with their social, cultural and institutional milieu; nor is it presented as an exhaustive doxography of the movement.
However, the extent to which Sellars is able to adduce so many facets of
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the Stoic philosophical program, in a monograph committed to the exposition of just one of them, becomes an indirect testimony to the strength of
his claim for its centrality. The point made so forcefully here is that the lived
enactment of Stoic principles was not ancillary to those principles; their
whole validity was in informing this action, and they had to be appropriated
– or, in the figure which Sellars traces to Epictetus, ‘digested’ – in order to
perfect it. Because of this, The Art of Living is able to provide instructive – if
necessarily compressed – accounts of the more relevant theoretical interests of the Stoic school: its epistemology (154-64), its cosmology and psychology (124-6), adding considerably to the breadth of the book and its
usefulness as a survey.
In a significant but too brief section, Sellars presents the more explicit
point that the well-known division of the Stoic curriculum into a physics, a
logic and an ethics was “conceived as a division of philosophical discourse,
not of philosophy itself … merely a question of different teaching methods”
(79-81). The fact of multi-disciplinarity should at least be a pause in the
case for a unified doctrinal enterprise: the rather rarefied distinction which
Sellars adduces (even granted that it is only the self-understanding of the
Stoics that is being elaborated here, it is not made entirely clear how philosophy ‘itself’ would differ from philosophical discourse) might have been
problematised at greater length. It is only in a later section of the book that
Sellars brings into relief his key claim that the relation between ‘theory’ and
‘practice’ is reproduced within each of these curricular sub-units, rather
than between them. The Epictetan Stoic, in other words, practices a logic,
practices a physics; and does so, moreover, in a manner that is articulated
in an ascetics, a regimen of logical and physical ‘exercises’ directed not at
the rote-learning of concepts but at the transformation of behaviour. The
sustained reconstruction of the Enchiridion in which Sellars illustrates these
points (129-46) is both highly interesting in its own right, and the stuff of a
much more satisfying response to the question of disciplinarity than had
been presented earlier.
Only in one other section does Sellars undertake an equally frontal
and comprehensive reading of a philosophical text – again, an illuminating
analysis of Sextus Empiricus’ skeptical assault on the epistemology of an
art of living, drawing on both the Hypotyposes and the Adversus Mathematicos (88-100). It is here, also, that the reader catches a glimpse of the
tangled, eclectic ideological landscape of Hellenistic and later antiquity – in
which the Stoics’ purposive application to the philosophical life may have
been unique in degree and in elaboration, but not in kind. Sextus’ own indebtedness to this model does in fact square with Sellars’ stated focus on
the Stoics, for having most thought through – and not simply lived out – the
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meaning of “the relationship between philosophical discourse and one’s
way of life” (10) which all the schools, in one way or another, assumed.
For the most part, though, The Art of Living is organised thematically,
rather than by text or author. The book’s first half (βίος and τέχνη) contextualises the premium placed on action and biographical detail, as a constant of the professional environment for philosophers in the ancient world.
The two major sections here document the consolidation of a ‘technical’ –
rather than strictly theoretical – conception of philosophy, from its emergence in the teachings of Socrates to its uptake by the Stoics. A second
part (λόγος and άσκησις) introduces the problem of correlating theory and
practice within this conception, by setting out the interpretative controversy
between Martha Nussbaum and Foucault over the character of ancient
thought. Sellars’ response is to introduce, here as elsewhere in his work, a
terminological precision that neutralises the apparent differences in their
positions; the subsequent chapters devoted to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius substantiate what Sellars means, in fact, by the ‘technical conception of
philosophy’ – one neither exclusive of, nor structurally indifferent to, the
cognitive rationality which, Nussbaum charges, is missing from Foucault’s
picture.
The scholarly apparatus includes a Greek glossary as well as a complete index locorum, the latter of which indicates the amplitude and rigour
of Sellars’ scholarship. And it is ultimately as a work of classical scholarship, and as an access to the empirical ground of 2nd century philosophy,
that The Art of Living is most effective. As a ‘contribution to contemporary
debate,’ it is so closely wedded to that empirical ground as to bring into
play its own, sensible caveat against a notion of ‘return,’ and against the
tragic scheme in which philosophy has been, from its origin, a ‘forgetting’ of
that origin. Without seeking to lather up a manifesto from his material, Sellar’s limpid and direct text makes this an instructive and undemanding encounter with a historical other whose distance, and difference, is never understated.
Monash University
[email protected]
Juliana de Nooy. Twins in Contemporary Literature and
Culture: Look Twice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
ISBN 1-4039-4745-7.
Dimitris Vardoulakis
What is exceptional about Juliana de Nooy’s book on the twins is the
insight that, despite the fascination exercised by the twins since ancient
time, there appears to be nothing exceptional about them. Stories about
twins are not presentations of a curiosity or even an aberration. Rather,
narratives about twins highlight difference as the condition of the possibility
of culture. This difference comes to the fore because the image of the twins
ineluctably brings to mind the notion of sameness. However, as de Nooy
argues throughout Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture, sameness can never sustain itself: even identical twins are never absolutely the
same. Thus, the twins give rise to a critique of sameness and a philosophy
of difference.
De Nooy’s insistence upon difference links the image of the twins with
the post-structuralist movement. (Because of this emphasis on difference,
Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture can be seen as a continuation of the previous fine monograph by de Nooy, Derrida, Kristeva and Dividing Line: An Articulation of Two Theories of Difference, published in
1998.) Moreover, her analysis effortlessly traverses a large array of texts
across different media. She also pursues this with reference to “contemporary” texts, that is, work produced from the end of the twentieth century.
Thus, de Nooy’s book is not simply another anthological account of twinship, but an active engagement with the modern avenues that have been
opened – as well as closed – by the image of the twins. This is, then, the
great achievement of the monograph: it makes the twins contemporary,
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while at the same time investigating the notion of the contemporary by way
of the operation of the twins. This is a novel, valuable, and fascinating approach.
For this approach to be made possible without lapsing into a narrative
of the twins’ cultural mastery or domination, the difference allowed by the
image of the twins must be also ascribed to the twins themselves. De Nooy
is well aware of this point:
their [the twins’] meaning is not fixed, is always ‘up for grabs’ to a
large extent. They are just as available to reinforce traditional dichotomies as to undo them; they can serve to expose masquerade
as the exception or the norm, to argue for the overriding unity of the
self or its fractured nature, to support a dialectical resolution of conflict or insist on the indefinite deferral of any synthesis. Their importance, then, is as sites of contestation in the struggle to claim legitimacy for particular perspectives, and is what explains the cultural
energy they attract. (164-5, emphasis added)
The twins are not used to identify the “right” or the “true” kind of narrative.
Rather, the twins are shown to allow for a spacing of cultural values – including notions such as the “right” and the “true” – which are, nevertheless,
contestable. Instead of a final synthesis, there is the unfolding of contestation.
At the same time, not every site can offer the kind of resistance required in order for the aforementioned sites of contestation to remain open.
Instead, de Nooy chooses the topoi of gender and genre to demonstrate
the contemporary openness of the twins: “Rejecting the premise that there
is a single, underlying meaning to the appearance of twins in our storytelling, [Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture] proposes an analysis
in terms of particular conjunctions of gender and genre rather than treating
the twins as a unified thematic” (xiv). Therefore, every chapter shows –
from the perspective of genre and gender – the struggle between sameness and difference and how that struggle is enacted on a site that is culturally determinate as well as determining of culture. Thus, one chapter
shows how the image of “coupledom” is traditionally given two solutions in
twins stories, both of which have been expressed by E. A. Poe: either there
is an antagonism which leads to disaster, or even murder (“William Wilson”); or there is stagnation and sterility (The House of Usher”). Reading
works of the twentieth century, especially Michael Tournier’s Gemini, de
Nooy shows that a third alternative is possible: one that recuperates sameness so that it no longer excludes difference (45).
The next chapter engages the motif of female twins or sisters who are
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antithetical: the bad girl versus the good girl, the whore and the virgin – a
theme which was popular in Hollywood movies in the 1940s and which returned in the early 1990s. By showing that this distinction presupposes a
“myth of choice” (61-4), de Nooy concludes that both options – the good
versus the bad girl – can be rejected (65). No such sharp dichotomies operate in stories if the gender of the siblings is male. Even when the two
brothers appear to stand for good and bad, the division is less about their
opposition and more about the way in which such an opposition can undermine the received notions of masculinity, especially by feminising the
male body (69). This is particularly evident in the films about conjoined
twins which de Nooy discusses: a brother is carried by the other brother,
thus turning the fraternal to something maternal (87).
The next two chapters work to undermine foundational myths about
gender and nationhood. Chapter 5 tackles the debate about a “gay gene”
and shows how this is simply a reformulation of the older nurture versus
nature debate. Following Judith Butler in arguing that identity is not something essential, but a performative (105, 108), de Nooy shows that twins
undo the artificial distinctions which presuppose an origin: “as identical
twins they undo the hierarchy of original and copy, being genetic copies
without an original blueprint” (108). Further, as is demonstrated in chapter
6, twins undercut the foundationalism of myths about nation-creation because they challenge primogeniture. Identity is not something given by a
stable origin, but rather, it is always in motion (132, 135).
The final chapter unites the twins with the figure of the double or Doppelgänger. It is in this chapter that a possible limit of de Nooy’s book could
be discerned. As already intimated, de Nooy emphasizes the importance of
genre in stories about twins. Here, this emphasis comes to the fore, since
the guiding hermeneutical tool is the doubt about whether there is a twin or
a double in the story at all – e.g. in Nabokov’s Despair or Spike Jonze’s film
Adaptation. Due to this uncertainty, the generic determination is unstable,
and meaning is thereby produced. However, this line of argument ultimately
claims that genre produces meaning, while meaning also produces genre.
De Nooy constantly shows how the twin or the double is produced by this
ambivalence. However, there are a number of problems with this approach:
for instance, it is tautological, since every conceptual term can be shown to
undermine its genre – this is the prerogative of difference upon which de
Nooy insists; but it can also be argued that there are no conceptual terms
that can intervene in the mise-en-abîme of genre and meaning without disrupting this relation and hence cancelling themselves out as conceptual
terms. What is lacking is an explicit argument that the genre is also produced by the conceptual term – in this case, the twins. Of course, this
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makes genre impossible – an errancy of meaning. However, it can be argued that such a contention would have squared comfortably with de
Nooy’s insistence on the incessant movement of identity made possible by
the twins. It would also have avoided the essentialization of the generic in
the name of the unessentializing of the genetic. Even though de Nooy implies throughout her study that the generic and the genetic are mutually determinable, a strong argument to this effect still appears to be lacking.
Nevertheless, de Nooy’s book is a significant achievement. It demonstrates that narratives about the twins are contemporary, and should not be
consigned to history’s cabinet of curiosities. Twins can intervene in the unfolding of culture because they are not completely formed. Rather, they
persist in a state of transformation, ever to be elaborated. Thus, they are
the sites of contestation which are productive of modern history.
Monash University
[email protected]
Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw (eds).
Amy Lowell, American Modern. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 2004. ISBN: 0-8135-3356-2.
Ce Rosenow
From the publication of her first book, A Dome of Many-Coloured
Glass in 1912, until her death in 1925, Amy Lowell reigned as an important,
influential, and well-known modernist poet. She published eleven books
during her lifetime, edited three volumes of the Imagist anthology, Some
Imagist Poets, gave numerous well-attended readings and lectures, and
regularly contributed work to leading magazines such as The Atlantic
Monthly. She also helped to fund and contributed work to a variety of literary magazines including Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Lowell was a respected
contemporary of the poets most often associated with the modernist
movement, whether they supported her projects and ideas or whether, like
Ezra Pound, they openly expressed their irritation and frustration. In the
years just following her death, Lowell’s reputation continued to flourish with
the posthumous publication of her lectures and essays in Poetry and Poets
as well as with three additional collections of poetry, including What’s
O’Clock which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. Given her importance as
a poet, critic, and editor, the limited amount of critical attention she has received after 1930 and the fact that all of her books have been out of print
for decades seem to be a glaring oversight on the part of scholars and publishers. The editors of and contributors to Amy Lowell, American Modern
seek to remedy this situation by instigating a serious critical conversation
about Lowell and her work as well as by bringing many of her poems back
into print through a companion volume, Selected Poems of Amy Lowell
(2003).
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The editors, Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, use the lack of
Lowell scholarship and the published critiques and dismissals of her work
from the past as a framework for the essays in this volume. In their introduction, they acknowledge that there is no single explanation for the neglect of Lowell’s work and suggest a number of possible reasons for it, including homophobia and Lowell’s continuous poetic experimentation
among others. In response to this neglect, the editors and contributors undertake the monumental task of exploring “the varied contributions of
Lowell as a woman poet, as a modernist, and as a significant formulator of
literary debates about poetry and poetics in the early twentieth century. …
[T]hese essays demonstrate Lowell’s centrality to current critical and theoretical discussions: feminist, gay and lesbian, post-colonial, disability studies, American studies, and cultural studies” (xviii). In other words, after positing potential reasons for neglect, the collection then demonstrates just
how significant Lowell’s life and work are to many different areas of study
while simultaneously providing the basis for a continued scholarly discussion.
The essays cover important aspects of Lowell’s life and work, including her connections to Imagism, her literary friendships and correspondence, and her gender and sexual identity. Furthermore, they do so in a
way that clearly demonstrates the significance of Lowell’s work for modernist studies and for other fields. For example, they revitalize the overworked
topic of Imagism by considering it, in Andrew Thacker’s essay, in relationship to Lowell’s innovation of polyphonic prose. Margaret Homans’ essay
complicates Lowell’s extensive work on John Keats by exploring Lowell’s
designation of Keats as a forebear of the Imagist poets. Still other essays
turn to Lowell’s literary friendships and correspondence as a way to demonstrate her centrality to the modernist movement. Jean Radford’s consideration of Lowell and Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) and Bonnie Kime
Scott’s examination of Lowell’s letters to other modernists, including D. H.
Lawrence, locate Lowell as a key figure in a network of modernist writers.
Another group of essays considers Lowell’s poetry through the lens of lesbian desire and in light of her lesbian relationships. In the case of Lillian
Faderman’s essay, “‘Which, Being Interpreted, Is as May Be, or Otherwise’:
Ada Dwyer Russell in Amy Lowell’s Life and Work,” a version of an unpublished essay that had circulated privately among Lowell scholars and had
been cited in their work finally becomes available to the larger academic
community. Faderman demonstrates, among other things, how the fortythree poems in the “Two Speak Together” section of Pictures of the Floating World reflects Lowell’s lesbian relationship with Russell.
If there is one limitation to this collection, it is the omission of essays
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Amy Lowell, American Modern
on entire groups of poems. Specifically, Lowell’s dramatic monologues and
long narrative poems were for the most part excluded both from the selected edition of Lowell’s poems and from this collection of essays. There is
some justification for such omissions. The editors note in the introduction
that scholars have not determined how best to situate these poems, which
suggests that there is not any existing critical work available. By discussing
these omissions at some length in the introduction, the editors actually begin a conversation about Lowell’s dramatic monologues and long narratives
that may be pursued by other scholars. Even with this justification for omitting certain poems, the specific decision to leave out Lowell’s New England
narratives is still regrettable. The editors explain that Lowell uses a form of
dialect that would be difficult to understand by “contemporary readers unfamiliar with the New England accent of almost a century ago” (xv). This
claim seems at odds with the fact that other poems written in a variety of
dialects including that of turn-of-the-century New England continue to circulate and to receive critical consideration. The fact that Lowell’s New England narratives, as the editors accurately note, are difficult and time specific
is not a valid reason to exclude them.
Regardless of the one limitation mentioned above, Amy Lowell, American Modern is a significant and long overdue publication. Readers will find
it difficult not to see Lowell’s importance to the modernist movement. The
essays draw attention to the lack of scholarly work on Amy Lowell, foster a
critical conversation about Lowell by making available a number of insightful essays about her in one collection, and demonstrate not just how central
Lowell’s work is to modernism but to American poetry and to poetry in general. This volume, along with its companion volume of selected poems, will
hopefully and quite likely generate many more new and well-deserved studies of Amy Lowell and her work.
Clark Honors College, University of Oregon
[email protected]
277
A.L. McCann. Subtopia.
Carlton North: Vulgar Press, 2005. ISBN 0 9580795 6 0.
Jay Thompson
Subtopia is A.L. (Andrew) McCann’s second novel. The book initially
appears to be a standard ‘coming-of-age’ narrative. However, it quickly
transforms itself into a treatise on a broad range of issues: suburbia, sex,
politics, memory, death. The result is a dark and dense, but also highly
imaginative read that avoids clichés and provides its readers with some rich
(if at times troubling) food for thought.
The novel opens in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs circa 1977.
Julian is a particularly morose teenager: he is obsessed with carcinogens,
and his extended family’s happy façade conceals a disturbing incidence of
sexual abuse. Then he meets two individuals who might both be able to
broaden his depressing suburban existence. The first of these is Martin
Bernhard, a cigarette-smoking rebel who enjoys shooting model soldiers
with an air-rifle. The second is Sally, an academically gifted young woman
he meets at university.
As the novel progresses, Julian follows these two very different friends
to very different locations: St Kilda during the early 1980s, Germany during
the latter part of that decade, New York during the 1990s, and then back to
Melbourne. Yet it soon becomes clear that neither his friendships with
these people nor his globe-trotting will alter Julian’s morbid state of mind.
As time passes, he becomes more and more preoccupied with the fact that
(wherever one goes) suburbia will remain a “corpseworld” (81): that is, a
world of substance abuse and sexual gratification, unemployment and
premature death.
McCann is a literary scholar, and thus highly aware of literary genres
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vents Subtopia from becoming “one of those redemptive, coming-of-age
narratives in which a fuck-up protagonist finally accepts his mediocrity and
succumbs to the reality principle” (253). Instead, the novel’s protagonist,
Julian, is sketched as an extraordinarily contradictory and multi-layered
character. Julian is ostensibly apolitical, although (in one amusing moment)
he attempts to alleviate his post-university aimlessness by planning a master’s thesis on “(t)heories of working class representation” (111). He frequently avoids contacting his friends and family, although he willingly takes
advantage of Martin and Sally’s hospitality when travelling overseas. Yet, at
the same time, there is no denying that he also cares deeply about these
friends. For example, Julian seems genuine when he describes the “abandonment” that he feels after Martin dies, as well as the sense that his deceased friend “felt like everyone” (280).
Also, throughout the novel, McCann displays an exquisite eye for detail. This is sometimes used to darkly comic effect, for example, in his caricature of a New York diner as a nightmare world of “bull-necks, double
chins, burst capillaries and plump red faces…chewing away at mouthfuls of
sugar and fat” (216). However, also consider his more subtle (yet equally
evocative) descriptions of suburban Melbourne. These include the following
account of a train trip from the CBD to Moorabbin one late afternoon:
The railyards, the MCG, the platforms of Richmond station filtering
miles of track, giant steel tendrils reaching to the extremities of the
city … Then Toorak, Hawksburn, Armadale, Malvern, the Caulfield
racecourse, shopping strips, speeding automobiles … Lassitude,
boredom, a multitude of obstinate details crowding out thought at the
arse-end of the working day, lonely wage slaves trudging home to
the sluggish rhythyms of commerce, goods and services. (65-6)
I find descriptions such as this enthralling not only because I am familiar
with the geographical locations that are mentioned within them. Rather, I
find such descriptions enthralling because they really capture the sense of
banality, repetition and emptiness that characterises many a suburban existence. That is, they really do suggest the “corpseworld” that the fictitious
Julian is so unhappily familiar with.
However, I also wonder if the portrait of suburban life offered in Subtopia might ultimately be too bleak. In the publicity material for the book, the
author expresses his disdain for “the idea that literature exists to reveal the
beauty of the ordinary”. I agree with McCann in this respect, and so (undoubtedly) would many literary and cultural studies theorists. Yet, I am also
reminded of novels such as Leonie Stevens’ Nature Strip (1994) and Luke
Davies’ Candy (1997). These novels (both of which, incidentally, are also
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set in Melbourne) portray suburban and urban spaces as sites of ecstasy
and promise as well as disappointment, banality and morbidity. McCann
does not achieve such a balance here, thus making his vision of the
“corpseworld” appear slightly one-dimensional.
Additionally, I found the sexual politics of Subtopia to be sometimes
questionable. For example, early in the novel, the teenage Julian becomes
convinced that Martin has homosexual tendencies. The latter makes a sexual advance towards his friend, and Julian subsequently becomes “fixate(d)
on all the … men” who Martin “must have fucked and sucked off in the alleyways behind Fitzroy Street …” (59). Yet the question of same sexattraction disappears after this episode: Martin gets married, and Julian
provides numerous graphic accounts of sexual fantasies involving women.
How exactly we are meant to read all of this is unclear. Can we read Martin’s sexual advance as another product of Julian’s paranoid imagination?
Or has McCann opted not to investigate the homoerotic subtext of the
young men’s relationship, instead concealing it behind fantasy scenes that
could have been lifted from heterosexual male-oriented pornography?
Overall, though, Subtopia is a significant contribution to the field of
Australian literature. The novel’s portrait of the ‘suburban nightmare’ might
ultimately be narrow (and heterosexist). However, throughout the text,
McCann does provide some fascinating and beautifully written insights into
the bleaker side of everyday life. Also, he refuses to comfort his readers
with predictable plot devices or a cloying happy ending.
University of Melbourne
[email protected]
Clare Archer-Lean. Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Writings of
Thomas King and Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo).
Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. ISBN: 0-7734-5864-6
Carlo Salzani
Archer-Lean’s book is an analysis of representations and representativeness. The context is the post-colonial and post-modern end of the millennium in settler societies like Australia and Canada, where the traditional
Eurocentric notions of identity and representation are challenged by the rising voices of Indigenous discourses. Comparing two distant and apparently
diverse writers like the Indigenous Canadian Thomas King and the Indigenous Australian Colin Johnson, Archer-Lean pursues the similarities that
unite their projects in undermining the past representations of Indigeneity.
The differences between the two – cultural, thematic, stylistic – are thus
acknowledged but partially put aside, in an attempt to focus on the ways in
which both authors deal with the question of identity and the act of textual
representation. The cross-cultural analysis centres on in the two writers’
common focus on semiotic fields and meta-discursive and intertextual practices aimed at unmasking the colonial discourses. The works analysed are
mainly the novels of the two authors: whereas Johnson has written also
poetry and plays, and King film, television and radio drama scripts, ArcherLean limits her analysis to their novelistic production. Another self-imposed
limit is in the theoretical approach: whereas the analysis draws from a wide
range of theoretical sources, post-modern and feminist interpretations are
almost omitted, and post-colonial theory is used “critically” because of
King’s and Johnson’s similar scepticism about it; post-colonial terminology
like “rehearsal,” “hybridity” and “magic realism” informs the book but is revisited and re-appropriated.
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A few problems arise from this methodological positioning. First of all,
Archer-Lean is an Anglo-Australian scholar, a potentially problematic vantage point in a discussion of politics of Indigenous identity and representation. Cognisant of the risks of romaticisation and re-colonisation that a
white identity and an academic position entail, she chooses as interpretative strategy to eschew questions of “authenticity” and “correctness” and to
enter into a dialogue with the texts while acknowledging partiality and incompleteness. Another potential problem is the identity of Colin Johnson,
whose “Aboriginality” was contested in 1996. The book however does not
deal with biographical questions of authenticity and identity, but rather
analyses how these notions are challenged and undermined by the two
writers; the focus of the analysis are the texts, the textual identities established by the colonisers and the subversive textual strategies of the Indigenous authors. The central notion is thus re-presentation: the hyphen rejects, on the one hand, traditionally stable and fixed representations which
homogenise and prescribe identities, and, on the other, “the readers’ desires for the author to act as a ‘representative’ Indigenous person” (14).
The emphasis is on the dismantling and destabilising of hierarchies and binary oppositions (Native vs non-Native, for example) in favour of fluid, hybrid and contradictory textual expressions.
The central trope of both authors is identified in the need to “open up
the universe and, consequently, notions of re-presentation” (37). Political
subversion coincides therefore with the blurring of boundaries and their
meanings and with the consequent legitimisation of multiple and changing
Indigenous identities. King’s and Johnson’s literary oeuvre exist beyond
neatly defined genres – which are legacy of the West: their narratives embrace fluidity and thus reveal Indigenous realities silenced by the Western
construction of the Imaginary Indigenous. This “contamination” of the borders goes beyond a combative opposition and refuses to embrace simple
counter-discourses: the central concept is rather “re-negotiation” (44), a
creative enactment that both contests colonial conceptions and representations and operates within and beyond them. Process, border-crossing, continuous movement work as a “frame” that includes and dissolves representation: thus “Indigenous identity becomes a space that exists simultaneously beyond and within geographical place” (55).
King’s and Johnson’s works are analysed and compared by ArcherLean through thematic lines: first of all their common deconstructing and reframing of colonial texts. Both authors parody and re-write North American
and Australian classics like Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, the Lone Ranger
series and the Augustus Robinson Chronicles respectively: the image of
the indigene in the colonial narratives is identified as the foundational con-
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Cross-Cultural Analysis of Thomas King and Mudrooroo
struct, satirically explored and thus exploded and re-invented. Then ArcherLean shows how two colonial grand narratives, Christianity in King’s work
and Gothicism in the case of Johnson’s, are deployed and played with by
the two authors: Christian ideology and the Gothic “sub-conscious set of
images” (126) are unmasked as imperial tools perpetrating the colonisation
process, but simultaneously “incorporated,” de-authorised and reappropriated. “Incorporation” is here an important concept: colonial narratives are not merely negated, but rather appropriated in a process of resistive empowerment that is thus performative and not prescriptive. The following theme is the re-inscription of the notion of “loss”: in the negotiation
of contemporary identities in Canada and Australia, the “quest” for identity,
deployed within concepts of time and place, becomes a “non-teleological
process” (199) that eschews the idea of a destination. It is the quest itself
that matters, a re-presentation of identity as fluidity and role-playing. The
central part of the book is therefore the analysis of the trickster and of trickster discourse in the two authors: Archer-Lean deploys Gerald Vizenor’s
concept of the trickster to show how the trickster as playful, ambiguous and
changing character is a central figure in Indigenous writing, but also how
trickster discourse as disruption, creation, subversion and ambiguity informs and shapes King’s and Johnson’s projects as a whole. The trickster
is not representative of Indigenous life and is not involved in representation,
and as such works as a contesting and contrasting discourse against the
Eurocentric “fixation” (and “fixing”) of the semiotic field of the indigene:
chance, open-endedness, strategic repetitions abrogate any sense of closure and allow for the world “to be rebuilt endlessly” (260). The final motif
analysed is the postcolonial technique of “magic realism” as a means to
create a pan-Indigenous and multi-layered space able to free and empower
notions of place and time.
The thesis of the book thus leads the analysis beyond a simple comparative exercise: showing how re-presentation challenges representativeness in the work of two Indigenous writers, Archer-Lean does not merely
“compare” particular narrative strategies and thematic lines; the scope of
this book is not confined within the comfortable limits of literary analysis
and academic concerns. Rather, it opens up to the much more interesting
and actual issue of identity “in the border condition of the twenty-first century” (36): King and Johnson are not taken as “representatives” of Indigenous identities, or of Indigenous writers, or even of the post-colonial condition; rather, their works is read in the hope of opening up discussion and
debate about ways of re-presenting identities, about cultural, social and
textual exchange, about the politics of challenging the desire for stable,
fixed and neatly identifiable positions, genres and identities. The condition
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of the border and its “contamination” is shown as essential to the two Indigenous writers, but it is also the position from where Archer-Lean writes
and what she proposes as a different zone of understanding.
Monash University
[email protected]
Simon Featherstone. Postcolonial Cultures.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005. ISBN 0 7486 1743 4.
Barbara Ghattas
This book is an introductory text to postcolonial studies, with an emphasis on contemporary debates. The first chapter, “The Nervous Condition
of Postcolonial Studies,” clearly outlines the complexities of the field of
postcolonial studies. It emphasises the importance of moving away from
critical analysis from inside the academy, and instead turning to popular
culture for strategies and movements in this discourse.
Featherstone writes of the heavy reliance in universities upon the
works of a small number of major writers within the academy, and the need
for greater balance in this field by highlighting the contribution to postcolonial studies of popular musicians, dancers, film-makers, poets, performers,
orators and athletes. He makes the point that the current state of postcolonial discourse is hierarchical, and takes into account almost exclusively
voices that have emerged from within the academy. He cites Edward Said,
Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak as the most obvious examples of this. He
calls for postcolonial studies to take into account the current trends in the
arts and sport in order to move away from the emphasis on literature and
political theory that dominate the field.
The three chapters that follow deal with contemporary music, performance and film to discuss the benefit to postcolonial studies of movements
outside the academy. In the second chapter, Featherstone uses the example of sociologist Paul Gilroy, who has charted the development of African,
Indian and Caribbean music in Britain. The key postcolonial concept present in this music is hybridity – the ability of artists to fuse musical styles to
achieve a new sound that is representative of the diaspora in the First
World. He cautions against the academy simply selecting for analysis arttext theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
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ists who fit their arguments. Instead he calls attention to the need for the
academy to observe what is actually happening at the street level, and acknowledging that popular culture will for the most part resist academic
analysis by its constant change.
The third chapter, “Body Cultures,” discusses not only contemporary
dance but also sport as a site of discourse on the postcolonial body.
Featherstone states:
Body cultures of sport and dance perform the processes of postcolonial history. Although distinctions of aesthetic value in these
body cultures still persist, and although the recovery of their histories
remains difficult, the movements of social dance articulate intimate
and public cultural changes and exchanges. And whilst sport’s more
visible and commodified body cultures are in some ways limited in
their social narratives, particularly by their gender specificity, their
organisational histories, their mass appeal, and their accessible archives of photograph and film make them a valuable resource for
postcolonial studies. (94-5)
One of the positive aspects of this book is that for each of his arguments,
Feathestone is thorough in his analysis of how realistic, effective and useful
it will be to postcolonial studies. He prompts thinkers in the field to articulate how postcolonial texts are chosen and the rationale behind it. Featherstone demands in Postcolonial Cultures that we be more contemporary,
open-minded and genuine in our choice of postcolonial ‘texts’.
In the chapter devoted to film, Indian film-makers Mrinal Sen, Mira Nair
and Aditya Chopra are examined for their different explorations of diasporic
populations and the challenges of modernity. The chapter discusses how
film has the capacity to engage a wider and more global audience than
other mediums, and can be a very useful way to explore postcolonial issues such a political history and cultural tensions. Two New Zealand films,
The Piano and Once Were Warriors are discussed for their portrayal of indigenous populations and their use of narrative structure. Unfortunately for
Australian readers, Australian films are not included in this very brief chapter, but the discussion certainly creates interest in film as a potential way of
investigating postcolonialism.
The following three chapters of Postcolonial Cultures are nowhere
near as satisfying as the first half. Here Featherstone moves away from
contemporary culture to provide a basic run-down of literature, history and
land. “The Irrational and the Postocolonial” is a brief study of madness in
postcolonial literature, with specific reference to the seminal text Black
Skins, White Masks by Franz Fanon and novels by Jean Rhys, Bessie
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Postcolonial Cultures
Head and Erna Brodber. This chapter reads like a typical undergraduate
postcolonial studies reader, with its discussion of Rhys’ Wide Sargasso
Sea, a postcolonial revision of Jane Austen’s Jane Eyre that is usually set
as required reading in English courses. In this chapter Featherstone’s critique of Fanon and Rhys in particular is nothing new to the discipline. It actually serves to confuse his emphasis in the first half of the book on the importance of new mediums and the movement away from literature.
“Memory” looks at the re-writing of history from a postcolonial viewpoint with three interesting case studies: museums and public memory,
UNESCO’s promotion of information technology in developing nations as
source of recording cultural memories, and the post-apartheid Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. “Capitalised ‘History’ becomes
only one of a number of ways of telling a story that might take as its centre
a range of different social formations” (169). Despite an unoriginal introduction, the modern discussion of history and its issues are refreshing and
timely, and provide an objective view of the topic.
The following chapter on land is perhaps the most relevant to Australian postcolonial studies. In the first case study the history of land seizure
by Europeans in Australia and the Caribbean is discussed in regards to the
differences in the European and the indigenous ways of defining “space”
and “place.” The following case studies reflect more contemporary landscapes, the beach and the carnival. The beach is not only the first place of
contact between European settlers and the indigenous populations, but has
evolved into the romanticized tourist beach and the site of cross-cultural
pleasure seeking in the form of the sex-tourist. Featherstone does his best
work when he moves into contemporary areas of cultural studies and discusses sites of evolving significance for the field.
Despite the book’s emphasis on a movement away from the academy,
the second half is very much grounded in the mediums that postcolonial
studies has traditionally investigated. Featherstone may have done better
to avoid going over old ground and realise the potential of the first half by
devoting the book solely to contemporary movements. Then he would have
been closer to realizing his book’s aim of challenging the traditional mediums of postcolonial studies.
Monash University
[email protected]
287
CREATIVE WRITING
Writings from Turkey:
Rıfat Ilgaz and Sunay Akın
Introduction and translations by Burcu Alkan
Modern Turkish literature has produced much politically and socially
committed writing, with proponents such as Rõfat Ilgaz (1911-93) and Sunay Akõn (b.1962).
Rõfat Ilgaz was among the second generation of socially-committed
poets, following the internationally known poet Nazõm Hikmet (1902-63).
Unlike Hikmet, he was not interested in political ideologies like Communism. His social writings were born from his own experiences as a teacher
and a writer. While he was writing about the sufferings and inequalities of
the people, he was not aiming for the partisanship of any ideology. He
clearly states this in his semi-autobiographical novel Karartma Geceleri:
I do not know if I am exactly a leftist or not yet. If there is one thing I
know, it is that I am on the side of the oppressed people. That the
troubles people suffer exactly fit mine. And that I see my salvation in
the salvation of the people. If these little crumbs of ideas are enough
for me to be a leftist, I am not going to try and acquit myself at all. 1
Ilgaz is a humanist as well as a social realist writer. Both as a teacher and
a writer, he felt the repercussions of World War II and the 1960, 1971 and
1980 coups in Turkey. His literature, reflecting such difficult times in the
lives of people, made him a primary “criminal of thought” in the eyes of the
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police and the military – the exponents of the governing ideologies in Turkey.
Ilgaz’s poems presented here are taken from his collection of poetry,
Bütün Şiirleri 1927-1991 (Complete Poems 1927-1991). The first one is “In
Poetry” (Şiirde) in which he defines himself and sets his priorities. 2 Ilgaz
believes that his identity as a poet should come before anything else, so
that, for him, life can gain meaning in poetry. Poetry is used not only as his
way of expressing himself as an individual, but also as a catalyst of things
to come. His fight for a better world starts in poetry, while his sufferings, the
exiles and imprisonments, come as a result of it. And as a poet who is
aware of his responsibilities, he does not seem to complain much about
these sufferings – neither in the poems included in this study, nor in his
other works.
The second poem is his last ever written, dated November 19, 1991.
This very short poem is a farewell, hence the title “My Last Poem.” 3 Even
as a last poem, there is a wish to be good in something or for somebody.
The unselfish goodwill of a poet, who has spent his life striving for a better
future for everybody, prevails.
The case with “My Last Poem” was an interesting one. On the inside
cover of the book, the poems was rendered as:
Elime eline değsin
Isõtayõm üşüdüyse
Let my hand touch yours
Let me warm it if it’s cold
However, the original manuscript – published in the collection as a facsimile – reads:
Elime birine değsin
Isõtayõm üşüdüyse
Let my hand touch somebody
Let me warm him/her if s/he is cold
The Turkish language does not have gender-specific nouns or pronouns,
but gender specification is required for English. This problem arose in the
second version cited above. Thus, in the end, the version on the cover of
the book was preferred, in order to bypass the problem of the pronouns.
Sunay Akõn is one of the contemporary Turkish writers, who follow in
the footsteps of Hikmet and Ilgaz. 4 While his preferred genre, creative nonfiction, differs from his predecessors’, he maintains the same line of socio-
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Writings from Turkey
political writings. The 1980-coup in Turkey influenced him immensely as a
young man. In his poetry and prose, he criticizes any kind of fanatic ideology which takes away human rights. The politics of the United States is one
of the many themes that Akõn reflects upon in his works. His opposition to
the invasion of the lands of Native American people is the same as his opposition to what happened to the Africans, who were forced out of their
lands and brought to the Americas as slaves. His desire for fairness, equality and liberty made him a supporter of “the coloured men” against “the
white men.” Akõn’s reactions to political “mistakes” are not limited to those
of American political leaders. He is a political satirist who stands against all
real “evil-doers.” His humour and his poetical sensitivity put into question
conventional “truths.”
“Beating Around the Bush” was published in Onlar Hep Oradaydõ
(They Have Always Been There), a collection of creative non-fiction about
the Native Americans. “Beating Around the Bush” begins with an anecdotal
story about an old Native American’s lesson to a youngster and ends with
the attack on the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. 5
Kõzõlderili, the word used for “Native Americans” in Turkish, literally means
“red skinned,” and is, actually, a neutral term. Although, in the original, it
compliments the writer’s discussion of “white man vs. red man,” a translation without derogatory connotations had to be found. “American Indian” is
the most common term in English. However, in another story appearing
also in Onlar Hep Oradaydõ, Akõn sarcastically talks about the “mistake”
that Columbus made, calling the natives of the newly found land “Indians”
due to a geographical miscalculation. Therefore, the term “Native American” was chosen as the most suitable phrase, even though it is not colloquial English usage. One should also point out that the term “Native” better
fits Akõn’s ideas, since he strongly believes that “Natives” are the righteous
native inhabitants of those lands.
The title “Bush’u Bush’una Bir Savaş Daha” sounds in Turkish as if it
means “Another War in Vain.” The phrase “Boşu Boşuna” means “in vain,”
while the letter “ş” in the original spelling of “boşu boşuna,” is pronounced
as “sh.” So, the writer, instead of writing “Boşu Boşuna Bir Savaş Daha,”
preferred to write “Bush’u Bush’una Bir Savaş Daha,” referring to the two
presidents of the USA, George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush. How could
this little pun be translated without losing the context? After several trials,
“Beating Around the Bush,” a phrase that became a joke among friends at
Istanbul University after the doubtful election of George W. Bush in 2000,
was chosen. Literally, the idiom does not have a direct relationship with the
passage or title; however, it provides a pun similar to that used by Akõn.
“Beating Around the Bush” is a transformed version of “beating about the
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bush,” which literally means “not coming to a point.” However, we are coming to a certain point by using the words Bush and beating in the title, which
provides an idea of what is coming up in the text.
The translation of Ilgaz’s poems is published courtesy of Aydõn Ilgaz
and Çõnar Yayõncõlõk, Istanbul. The translation of “Beating around the Bush”
is published courtesy of Sunay Akõn and Çõnar Yayõncõlõk.
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Rıfat Ilgaz
IN POETRY
I loved the fight, in poetry first
The freedom word by word, in poetry
Line by line I loved to live
So I loved anger and bliss...
Your bright days,
My optimistic friends,
All, all in poetry.
Whatever I’ve lost...
Everything I’ve found, in poetry.
Is it our love only,
That precedes rhyme,
There’s also exile,
And imprisonment as well.
MY LAST POEM
Let my hand touch yours
Let me warm it if it’s cold
My last warmth shall not be wasted!
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Beating Around The Bush
Sunay Akın
The old Native American is sitting in front of his tepee watching his
dogs fight. He says, “Look, my boy” to his grandson who approaches him,
“the name of that white dog is Good and the black one is Evil.” And when
the boy asks which one would win, the old man replies, “Whichever one I
feed!”
Peace is the only garment that looks good on humanity. It has many
buttons: democracy, human rights, equality, fellowship... That’s why it can
not be slipped off like a shirt, from the body that wears it.
The United States of America is seen in this garment in the scenes of
the 1990s. The US, which becomes the apostle of peace and democracy,
takes off this peace costume with the attack on the Twin Towers of the
World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001… And suddenly
so, with no hesitation, in the blink of an eye! Actually, the garment is not
taken off, but wantonly abandoned. President Bush yells out: “We’ll find
’em, hunt ’em, shoot ’em, crusade ’em!”
The costume of Peace didn’t fit The Sheriff. The love of democracy,
peace and fellowship was too tight for the model that made the United
States what she is… The father of Bush was the same Bush who was enthroned president and whose first decree was to start the Gulf War…
From Father Bush to Son Bush… Basically it’s just another war drum
beating around the bush.
It wasn’t the first time, after September 11, that humankind faced a
war. But it was the first time a war was declared without knowing against
whom. The enemy could be anywhere the United States pointed. No one
could oppose that because the US was hit at home. The people of America, whose support couldn’t be counted on for the Vietnam, Korea and Gulf
Wars, said “yes” to the politics of war for the second time, after the bomb-
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Writings from Turkey
ing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Nevertheless, with the help of Osama bin
Laden, the servant of the USA in Afghanistan, they managed to portray all
the Asian Muslims as “terrorists.” And the Shari’a Organizations, who are
the subcontractors of the US, promoted this. The meaning of Bush in Turkish is “Çalõ.” So is the meaning of Laden. Apparently, at the outset of the
2000s, humanity is stuck between thickets… And we are a nation that
knows what to do very well behind the bushes!
Spit-shinin’ his badge, Bush doesn’t wait too long to show his first target: Afghanistan! However, before his presidency, this man called “Bush”
when asked on TV, where Afghanistan was, was not able to answer correctly!...
On the television screen, the scenes of the people hopelessly waiting
to be saved in the buildings that were hit by the hijacked Boeings and the
scenes of people talking about Turkey gaining importance merged into
each other. On one side there was the matter of life and death in the towers
that were attacked and, on the other side, there was the stock market…
The stock market was gaining value against the stock of humanity.
Imperialism advances across the whole world like moves on a chess
board. That’s why the outbreak of the economical crisis in Turkey before
the attack on the World Trade Center can’t be seen as a coincidence. The
ones who can’t figure out that bringing Kemal Derviş from the US and seating him as a minister is one of the moves that bound our arms, are the
ones that perceive politics as checkers rather than chess. 6
One of the documents that showed how Turkey was being sold to the
United States with the politics of 1950s was revealed in the Turkish Parliament on July 7, 1966, at 15:00, by Haydar Tunçkanat. 7 In the report, which
was written by an unknown “statesman” and given to Colonel Dickson, a
Representative of the CIA in Turkey working in the American Embassy, the
obstacles facing the exploitation of the country are itemized as follows:
“Tough One, by putting forward, as he used to do, annoying ideas like
Atatürk’s national policy, bilateral treaties, military bases etc., is increasing
his transgressions against the government.” 8
In his book, America within Turkey, Nevzat Üstün, after revealing that
the “Tough One” mentioned in the report is İsmet İnönü, adds the following:
“The traitor that wrote the report is shameless enough to describe Atatürk’s
national policy as ‘annoying.’” 9
The two skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York stood
behind the Statue of Liberty, who holds a torch in her hands. We witnessed
the US attack Asia after September 11. Everything that happened was written in a poem years ago:
A woman who lit the way for centuries
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Is ready to cry on the shore.
Anger on her cheeks,
Blood on her skirt,
Fallen off her waist
Her rainbow.
In a sunny clime
Skyscraper has closed its curtains.
A flag is fluttering
In a timeless tempest
That sweeps the Asian shores.
The tempest began
Even before the Books foretold;
Stars would fall
On a hopeless flag fold.
Let us listen to Orhan Kemal in order to learn who the writer of this
poem is: “I was with Nazõm. I was under his strong influence. Nazõm
shouted, ‘Find your own voice’, and showed examples from Rõfat Ilgaz and
Celal Sõlay…” 10 The person who wrote the poem about September 11 and
its aftermath in a way that would make Nostradamus jealous, whom Nazõm
holds up as an example, who with the honor like that of a Native American
Chief has never given up and from whose smiling photo we take our
strength is our valued teacher, Rõfat Ilgaz. The title of the poem is “Skyscraper” and the year it was written is 1968.
Exactly 40 years to the day of the attack, on September 11, 1961,
Nazõm writes his famous poem, “Autobiography”, in Berlin:
At thirty they wanted to hang me
At forty eight they wanted to give me the medal of Peace
And so they did 11
The United States’ attack on Afghanistan to catch bin Laden did not
convince any sensible person. The real target was the Middle East. And so
it happened. The Israeli tanks invaded Palestine with the excuse of “hunting down terrorists.” While I was watching the candle lit press conference
held in the shelter where the Palestinian leader, Arafat, was hiding, I had
the following question in my mind: if it weren’t for the September 11, would
the world leave Arafat, who had won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994,
alone and hopeless like this?
In the first years that White Man started to spread in America, a Native
American was killed in the market place where he brought the furs of the
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Writings from Turkey
animals he hunted. The others couldn’t understand the murder of their
friend whose furs were stolen. Why did the White Man do that? He came to
the market place to give his furs to the White Man anyway.
The market place is cursed and named “the place of the great
drunk”…
The name of that place in their language is “Manhattan,” the place
where the World Trade Center that was destroyed on September 11 used
to stand!
University of Manchester
[email protected]
NOTES
All notes are by Burcu Alkan.
1
Rõfat Ilgaz, Karartma Geceleri (Istanbul: Çõnar, 1999), p. 29.
2
Rõfat Ilgaz, “Şiirde”, ed. Aydõn Ilgaz, Bütün Şiirleri 1927-1991 (Istanbul: Çõnar
2002), p. 161.
3
Ilgaz, “Son Şiirim”, Bütün Şiirleri, p. 335.
4
Akõn looks up to, and often references in his writings, both Hikmet and Ilgaz. A
poem by Ilgaz, and a small part of another poem by Hikmet, appear in “Beating
Around the Bush,” Akõn’s piece translated here.
5
Sunay Akõn, Onlar Hep Oradaydõ (Istanbul: Çõnar, 2002), p. 48-52.
6
Former World Bank economist, he was invited to Turkey to become the Minister of
Economy.
7
Former Captain, member of the Parliament and writer, an important character of
1950-60s Turkey.
8
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-38) was the founder and the First President of Modern Turkey (1923).
9
Nevzat Üstün (1924-79) was a populist-realist writer and poet. İsmet İnönü (188473) was Atatürk’s close friend, soldier and statesman, the second President of the
Republic of Turkey.
10
Orhan Kemal (1914-70) was a populist-realist writer. Celal Sõlay (1914-74) was a
poet known with his mystic and philosophical style.
11
In 1950, Hikmet shared the International Peace Prize with Pablo Neruda.
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Blues for Allah
Ahmede Hussain
1
Shormi woke up from a long nap by the sound of a cat screeching.
The rain had just stopped and the curtains were tightly pulled. Bright
sunlight that fell on the mirror gave her face a raffish charm. There was a
small photo-frame on the bedside table. She looked much younger in black
and white, helping a toddler walk. The boy was holding a toy gun and was
staring at the camera with a menacing look. Both of them looked forlorn,
like the ice creams they consumed years ago on a holiday-trip to Cox’s Bazaar – long lost and forgotten.
The cat crawled in and sat at the windowpane; its shadow fell on the
Persian carpet and grew bigger as it walked past the room. Shormi got up
to her feet, staggered down the room to pick up the cell. She was wearing a
dainty yellow sarong and a white T-shirt; and there was something about
her uncertain manner, as well as her clothes, that suggested a moth. The
cat was gone when she returned: it started raining again. Shormi smiled
approvingly as she looked through the window – she expected it to rain.
It had been raining heavily too when she and Iftekhar got married fifteen years ago. On their way home, the windshield was so blurry that the
chauffeur could hardly see anything on the street.
But now it was only drizzling outside and there wasn’t any cloud in
sight; it should stop soon. She turned the cell off and lay down with only
text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/hussain.pdf
COLLOQUY
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half her body in the bed. It was getting dark outside; the yellow and red
lights from the billboard entered the room. Beams of light criss-crossed
over her face as she stared at the centre of the ceiling fan, large and overpowering. Small patches of silvery blue were coming out of the white centre. She turned her head left and saw the cat walk out of sight with a kitten.
Suddenly the electricity went off with a loud bang from a fused transformer;
the fan creaked shakily as it slowed down before coming to a complete
standstill.
The blind look went out of her eyes; she sprung up to fetch some candles. She could not see anything on the tea table at first, gradually things
started to get visible: an empty tube of hair conditioner, packets of used
matchboxes, a blue box and two upturned mugs. The box was wrapped
with an old newspaper. She forgot that she had stuck a safety pin on its
cover the other day. Blood spewed out of her finger when she rubbed the
surface. She licked it, fidgeted across and decided to give up the search for
candles.
The cell started ringing when she turned it on again. It was Nouman;
"Can I talk to Mrs Ahmed?" he asked in a girly tone.
She turned round and hobbled out of the room holding the phone to
her ear and said, "Yeah Nam. Did you get the mail I sent?"
"Mum I am at the airport," he said.
She knew that her son was on the phone; but she expected him to be
far away, in a remote place, in a private school in London or Chelsea.
Nouman had been in touch with her for the last three months, mostly by
email; she did not expect him to call her.
"Mum I am in Dhaka now. Are you home?" he asked.
"Yeah I am home. God why didn’t you tell me you were coming?" she
asked and then hurriedly added, "Nam, you just wait at the entrance and let
me pick you up."
"I have a friend with me mum. We will be staying at a hotel." he replied.
"But baba you know nothing about the country. You can stay with me, I
have spare rooms here," she pleaded.
"Don’t worry Mum; we will be fine," Nouman replied and added: "My
friend is calling, will catch you later.”
She lit a cigarette after having lunch. The electricity had come back an
hour ago; she reclined in the rocking chair and put the television on. Half
the news had been finished; it was time for Business and Sports: the
woman reading the Business news looks like an actor in an ancient farce.
The sound was off and she was constantly tucking strands of her hair behind her ears while staring at the audience with a bleak look. She pulled the
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T-shirt off and unhooked the black bra she was wearing. She wanted to
sleep now. She had not had a good night’s sleep for months. Whenever
she closed her eyes, she saw the same old dream; that meadow, that black
calf, that old woman and her shrill laughter.
A truck shrieked past the house. She placed a hand under her head
and switched the TV to video mode and stared at the blue screen. It was
her only way of getting sleep for the last eight years. Eight years, she said
aloud and laughed. The cat was still screeching shrilly and she knew she
would not be able to sleep while it wailed on like the impending sound of
the train that was coming across the neighbourhood. She got up and
opened the window; a gush of cold wave filled the room. The train came
into the horizon, chugging and wheezing, past the house, past the park,
past the mosque. She looked down at the passengers – at their fatigued
faces. A woman, a child on her lap, held her head out the window and vomited on the track. Those who lay on the roof of different coaches either
gaped at the star-less sky or at the glitzy life-size photo of Pierce Brosnan
on a billboard. She wondered how frail and feeble humans became on a
mechanised vehicle as she followed the train puff away, rattling on the
track. At the entrance to the mosque it turned, and twisted its middle like an
old man hunched by a bundle of twigs. From the back, it started to look innocent, wobbling like a baby. The cat, meanwhile, leaped up from the
parapet. As she closed the window and turned round, Shormi saw the cat
limp around with a broken leg. The cat did not resist when she reached
down and took it on her lap.
It was dark in the hallway; she had to hold the cat tightly to her breast
with one hand, pressing another hand on the wall as she walked by it. An
old way of walking perhaps: if you just follow the wall, you won’t bump into
anything. She proceeded further down the corridor and could now see the
mirror. Bunches of white flowers went up the frame of the mirror and there
was a cold reddish glow about the edges of their plastic petals. She walked
down further left; a yellow light from the lamppost reflected in the mirror,
like the nightlight she had always used when they had been together. Iftekhar would not sleep without the light on; she had always hated it, so the
low-watt lights were the only solution acceptable to both husband and wife.
Still lost in thought, Shormi opened the cupboard, took out the salve and
put it on the cat’s wound.
She had decided to name it Bobby. The television went blank after
thirty minutes and she did not want to turn it on again. She reclined on the
bed instead and lit another cigarette. The cat was lying on the tea table
now, its head shone for an instant in the dark, as if it were just being rained
upon. She stubbed the cigarette and lay on the bed. Another truck howled
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past the house; and as the sound faded away, she started to count back
from one thousand. Everything around her was gradually changing; she
looked up at the sun as a narrow line of white light fell from the sky. She
tried to change the course of the events now that the old woman started
heading towards her, silently, but with an amazing firmness in her every
step. The calf was seen in the horizon, too, looking much greyer in the
white light. The woman got closer, opened her toothless mouth and slowly
whispered something in her ears. She did not hear anything; her dreams
were always silent, except for the laughter that inevitably followed when
she walked her off through the meadow. Shormi, however, had not stopped
counting backwards, but could not reach zero. She heard the sound of a
car skidding off the street; someone hurled F-words at the driver. The
words were almost unintelligible, but high-pitched enough to suggest that
something grotesque was happening. She put both her hands down her
neck, then on her thigh. A loud bang was heard; something must have
gone wrong, she thought as she got up and looked down the window.
The pavement in front of her house was dark and desolate. Under the
lamppost two young men were hitting the windscreen of a car with hockey
sticks, their other friend, a third, pointed a dagger at the owner of the car, a
young man with a face that looked vulnerable in the yellow light. Her eyes
moved to the car; its front window had so far put up a fierce resistance, but
soon it would break into pieces.
When they were done, two of them walked closer to their friend – who
was now spinning the dagger – and whispered something in his ears. He
laughed and walked down the footpath towards the owner and repeatedly
thrust the dagger into his belly. The man's torso stooped as he put both his
hands on his bleeding stomach. Blood continued to ooze out from his raw
flesh. And when he turned and twisted before falling on the grass by the
pavement, she recalled seeing his boyish face before. In the newspaper
maybe or on the university campus, where she taught literature; he could
be one of her students she guessed. She looked at him more intently, while
the attackers, now forming a circle, kicked him on the butt and shoulder.
The man screamed and asked for help in a piercing voice but she stood silently in the shivering cold, now hands crossed over her chest, in a
Christlike calm. The cat strode to the window and stood at her legs, looking
fixedly at her dreary face with its glowing eyes, as if trying to understand
from it what had gone wrong.
They gave up their brutal ritual when the mosque nearby started calling the faithful to the morning prayers. She turned round and looked up at
the grandfather clock, standing tall on the floor; it was nearly dawn. When
she looked down again, the men were striding north, now forming a hori-
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zontal line, she realised she had not noticed that all three had been wearing prayer-caps all along. The golden brocade on one of the topis glittered
even from distance. They were getting smaller as they walked further down
the crossing towards the mosque. She waited for them to disappear, put on
her shalwar-kameez and hurriedly went down the pavement.
She saw that the flesh across his belly was hanging open in a loose
flap. Blood flowed in a sheet trickling into the man’s eyes too making his
light brown hair glisten; it dropped onto the pavement, it was everywhere.
She did not know blood could be so dark, so thick, so heavy. He muttered
something when she walked closer to him; his eyes seemed to come out of
their sockets with desperation as he moved his blood-soaked lips. Shormi
went down on her knees and put his head on her lap. Above them, a
branch of a mango tree was suspended solemnly; in the tree, a group of
sparrows were lazily declaring the breaking of another noisy dawn. A blade
of grass fell from their nest, hovered in the air for a while, and finally rested
on the dark stain of the man's nose; she carefully picked it up with a trembling hand and called the hospital from her cell.
***
Shormi was hungry when she got back home late in the afternoon.
The doctors would not touch the man without a No-objection Certificate
from the police; "It's caused by a sharp knife, I think," said a pale mouthed
doctor staring at the man's wounds.
Another doctor, who knew Shormi before, said, "Ma'am you don't know
this guy and neither do we. He could be a serial killer or a mugger. What if
he turns out to be one of the people who had thrown grenades at that
meeting? Just imagine what the police will do to us if he gets away after
treatment and they find it out."
She looked back at the man's chapped lips; he had been trying to tell
her something in the ambulance. But his voice was so stifled that she had
to tell him not to talk. A familiar sense of responsibility, which she had at
times found tiring during her three years old marriage, grasped her. She
stared at the wall from which hung a long piece of cloth, "Be it a boy or a
girl, one child is enough,” it urged its viewer. The pale mouthed doctor
meanwhile continued chattering with a nurse, Shormi turned round and
said to the other doctor, "Mizan, you know me, right?"
Mizan nodded and tried to say something but stopped suddenly in the
middle of his sentence as Shormi continued, "I know this man well and in
case the police turn up or anything goes wrong I will take the responsibility.
Now please take him to the emergency before he bleeds to death.” And her
words worked like magic.
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Eighteen stitches were needed to close up the wound; the man cried
out every time Dr Mizan put the needle into his flat stomach. She could not
recall the last time she had seen a grown man cry. The doctors said, in a
reassuring tone that all doctors had, that he would get well in three weeks.
She felt relaxed when she walked into her room after taking a long
shower. A strong smell of fried chicken and French-fries, which she had
bought on her way home and had put on the dining table, was wafting in
the air. She got dressed and smiled at Bobby, curled up on her bed, coiled
like a big rope. The window was wide open; sunlight that came through it
and fell on Bobby's white fur had given the room a blanched look. She put
a French fry into her mouth and sat on the bed to inspect Bobby's leg. The
cat hissed and kicked her hand with its hind legs, but she did not let go of
Bobby; upon close scrutiny, she discovered that the wound had healed a
lot, but she also noticed that one of its paws was badly bruised. She rubbed
some antiseptic around its injured claw. The cat groaned and clutched the
white linen with its other paw.
It was early in the evening when she decided to go for a walk. She
was typing her class-lectures on the PC and then, as soon as the grandfather clock struck five and she had just typed "fantasies inability to overcome reality,” as if to follow a long drawn-out ritual, the power went down.
She closed the book and pressed her hand on the stain on the flapper of A
Streetcar Named Desire. A blob of faded red made by either ink or wine.
When she had decided to start afresh and join teaching, the book was in
her mind. The Head of the Department was somewhat surprised, first at her
sudden decision to join the department again and then at her choice of text.
He was a short middle-aged man, who had to incessantly scream to get
things done. "Shormi, I don't know what to say," he tried his best to hide his
surprise; "You were a very good teacher. I was quite shocked when you
decided to quit the varsity.” He welcomed her back, but it took her a while
to make him register that she was serious about teaching Streetcar. He
frowned, yawned (he was getting late for his regular afternoon nap),
smirked and after a brief cajoling budged.
As she kneeled on the pavement where the man was stabbed, she noticed that the place had been hurriedly washed away. Drops of water on
blades of the grass were shining in the fluorescent lights like the yellowy
teeth of the attackers. She looked down the street where those three men
had melted away into the fog. A large group of people was walking down
the narrow ally to say their evening prayers; some had sat at the reservoir
for their ablutions. She looked up to see the white minaret of the mosque
and glanced further up to two blue loudspeakers suspended from the tall
slender tower.
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Her cell rang as she remained lost in her thoughts; it was from the
hospital, the man wanted to talk to her.
"Ma'am," he said, "Thanks for saving my life."
As his words came through the cell, she mused that the man had
pulled through quite quickly considering the viciousness of the attack.
2
Power was still out when Shormi came back home after a long walk.
Bobby sat idly on the bed watching her put on the white shirt. As she finished doing up the buttons it lost interest and leaped up to stretch lazily.
She had changed the quilt while going out; Bobby strode down the hibiscus
pattern on it and stood between the pillows. She walked to the bathroom
while thinking about all that had happened a while ago. Immediately after
she had finished talking to the man, Nouman called.
"Mum, I am fine. Can we meet tomorrow?" he asked excitedly.
Shormi was buying some candles in the street; trucks howled past the
makeshift-shop and she had to put a hand on the other ear to hear properly. She asked, "Where are you Nam?"
There was a silence on the other side, a muffled voice in English,
probably of Nouman’s friend’s; for a moment Shormi thought she had lost
the line.
"Nam, God, say something," she screamed.
The other voice, meanwhile, argued with Nouman in a furtive manner;
the boy seemed to have agreed to do something and said to Shormi, "We
are staying in a hotel mum, we are fine, don’t worry."
"When do you want to meet? You and your friend can stay at my
house," she said.
The vendor put the candles and the cigarettes in a package and
hunched forward to give it to her. She paid the man and walked briskly to
cross the road. Silence, meanwhile, resumed on the phone again; and as
the whispering got louder and became almost audible it sounded more and
more like Ifthekhar’s voice. She knew it could not be him. Funny she had
been thinking about Ifthekhar for a month or so, especially since Nouman
had started contacting her through email. In her mind, she had pictured Ifthekhar in London working for a multinational bank, happy and content. So
far, Nouman had deliberately avoided talking about his father, which
Shormi found rather amusing. Her eleven-year-old son had been growing
up and, unlike the Ifthekhar she knew, had learnt not to poke at a healed
wound.
She crossed the street; Nouman replied after a brief pause, "We are
fine mum"; "Can me and my friend come to your house in the evening to-
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morrow?" he asked.
Shormi smiled at the street urchin who offered her a bunch of dahlia.
"Of course you can. Will your friend be there too?" she tiptoed on the street
to avoid empty potholes.
"Yeah, sorry for that. So, tomorrow, at six mum?" he asked.
"No problem," she replied.
"I’ll call you in the morning then," Nouman said.
Later that night when she had finished typing the class-lectures,
Shormi got up and randomly picked up an old-newspaper. She sat on the
rocking chair and sipped at her tea: Muslim Fanatics Raze an Ahmadiyya
Mosque; Alleged Outlaw Lynched by Mob; EU Leaders Trumpeted Historic
Constitution; Girl Raped in Kushtia. Her eyes fixed on a news piece; sandwiched between the news of a rape and the EU constitution lay the man’s
smiling photograph. She stared pointedly at the photo and smirked; now
she knew where she had seen him before; he looked strong and macho in
a short spiky beard. "Young Writer Gets Death Threat,” said the heading.
She read on:
“Young writer Nasser Hussein received a death threat today from religious zealots. In a letter sent to Nasser’s home in Banani, Shaukat Osman,
leader of a little-known group Harkat-ul-Zihad Al Islam Bangladesh
(HZAIB), wrote: ‘Your days are over; get ready for the final day of judgement.’ The twenty-seven-year old writer, in fact, earned the wrath of the fanatics, when his first book In the Name of Allah was published this year.
The book depicts the story of a Muslim man who falls in love with a Hindu
woman and gives her shelter when riots break out.
“Little has been known about the HZAIB and its elusive commander
Osman who is also known as Sheikh Farid. The group is thought to be an
umbrella organisation for radical Islamic groups that operate in the country.
“Meanwhile, sources in the home ministry said extra police force had
been deployed in and around Nasser’s home. Different political and cultural
organisations condemned the threat describing it as an attack on free
speech. Attack on intellectuals is on the rise after a small member party in
the ruling coalition government tabled a blasphemy law in the parliament.”
She reclined further and put both her hands on the arms of the chair.
The electricity went out with a loud bang; the cat, disturbed by the sound,
sprung up and scurried to and fro on the carpet. Shormi lit a cigarette, took
a long drag and closed her eyes.
***
When she went to the hospital to visit him, Shormi found three policemen standing at the cabin. She peeped into the room; Nasser was lying on
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the white bed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. A nurse stood at the bed
and leafed through a stack of papers. Neither of them noticed her presence; she turned round slowly and saw Dr Mizan walk down the corridor
with a file. He said Nasser was doing well and would be able to leave the
hospital soon.
She thanked the doctor and followed him into the cabin.
Nasser was awake and smiled at her. Sunlight came through the white
curtains in abundance; a grey shadow of the grille fell on bunches of flowers put idly on the bedside table.
Shormi smiled back and sat on the chair; "So," she said, "How are
you?"
Dr Mizan was talking to the nurse in a low tone while browsing through
the pile of papers, which the woman was holding when they entered the
room. He did not take his eyes off them and said, "He is fine ma’am."
Nasser smiled embarrassingly, first at the doctor then at her; she was
wearing a purple sari and a blue blouse. "The room looks pretty clean," she
said and looked at the apples on the table at the side of the flowers.
The comment, it seemed, had made Dr Mizan uncomfortable; he gave
the papers back to the nurse, waved her to go and said, "The minister
came to visit Nasser sahib last night. She brought the apples."
Shormi laughed and said to Nasser, "You have become quite famous;
do you like apples?"
He got up smirking and drank water from a plastic bottle. Mizan came
forward with the file in hand and put the back of his other hand on Nasser’s
forehead.
"The fever has gone," the doctor said and told Shormi that he would
be back in an hour.
She got up, thanked him again and said, "Nasser, he says you will be
able to go home after two days."
Shormi was thinking about Nouman, who had called early in the morning when she was getting ready to visit Nasser. "Mum, we are coming to
your flat in the afternoon" he said.
Shormi was surprised; she said, "But, baba, you don’t know where I
stay, let me go there and pick you up."
"My friend knows you well," he replied and continued, "don’t ask me
who he is, but he knows you pretty well."
Shormi smiled and said, "Is your friend a Bangladeshi?"
"Yeah mum. Don’t cook for us, we will have lunch before coming,"
Nouman said.
Shormi stared at her watch; she was getting late. Nasser, meanwhile,
was staring at the flowers, he said, "The minister has assured me full police
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security. But what I really don’t get is why these people have been trying to
kill me."
Shormi looked up and saw Nasser get down to his feet, fumbling. "The
book is only an excuse; religion is a mere pretext," he whispered as if talking to himself.
Shormi got up; somehow, she felt a strong affinity with Nasser. In his
eyes, she had seen a sense of vulnerability, which she was so familiar with,
though she did not know the source of it. But she said, "Nasser, I have to
run; getting late for an appointment."
He turned round, holding an apple, and said, "Oh I am sorry."
She patted his shoulder and said, "Don’t be. I will be back."
When she entered the room, there was no sign of Bobby. But the cat
came back later in the afternoon when Shormi was having lunch. It was
limping badly and dragging itself on the floor. She got up, half way through
her food, and walked closer to Bobby, but as soon as she reached down to
grab the cat, it sprung up the window and sneaked away through the grille.
Shormi sat down on a cane-stool in front of the dressing table and
looked in the mirror. While talking to Nouman in the morning, for a moment,
she thought her son had been talking about Ifthekhar. Shormi opened the
drawer at the side of the table and looked down at the things: a small red
box, full of her earrings; a big make up box; an Omega watch, a gift from
Ifthekhar on their second anniversary and a small revolver. The gun was licensed and it was licensed under Ifthekhar’s name; he had never used it,
all the bullets were still in the chamber, unused for eight long years. Shormi
had never thought of renewing the gun-permit and had not deposited the
gun to the nearby police station either. She smiled and put on a pair of
clay-earrings. A shrill cry came through the window, she got up and looked
down; it was Bobby. The cat was lying on the sunshade, licking its paws.
The doorbell rang; Nouman was standing at the door hand in hand with Ifthekhar, who was smiling coyly.
Shormi did not know what to say or do. An inexplicable numbness, it
seemed, had grasped her as she stammered and ushered them in. Both of
them followed her to the hallway and sat on a big sofa bed in the drawing
room.
She smiled meekly at Nouman and said, "You look much taller than
you did in the photo you sent. I have some baby-pictures of yours... I want
you to take them; remind me to give them to you." Then she added, staring
at Ifthekhar, "I forget things quite easily now-a-days."
He looked around the room, as if trying to find what had gone missing
since the last time he came here. An uneasy silence followed before Nouman broke it by saying, "Mum I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to hurt you."
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She said, "Never mind, Nam."
Ifthekhar suddenly stopped scanning the room and asked: "How’s your
teaching going on?"
That was the last thing she expected to come out from his mouth; she
could not help smiling. "Fine," she said and hurriedly added, "My maid
hasn’t turned up today; let me go and fetch you some tea."
Nouman got up and said, "Mum, we will have tea some other day,
when we come to take the photos perhaps."
She smiled and looked at Ifthekhar; he got up and was staring at
Bobby through the door. The cat was standing at the window of the bedroom and one of its hind legs was badly infected. Sensing human attention
it screeched and jumped to the ledge.
"Didn’t know that you liked cats," he said and smiled.
"Its legs are badly bruised, probably the cat has got gangrene," she
replied.
When they were both gone, Shormi looked down the window to see
Bobby. The cat was standing on the ledge and croaked weakly after seeing
her. She looked at its gangrened legs – one of Bobby’s limbs was completely decayed and the cat had to put its back on the wall for support; the
other limb had started to decompose and Shormi could smell it rotting. She
called the cat but it only gave out a high pitched cry.
Shormi did not realise that her maid had come and was standing at the
window, gripping the grille. "Something bad will happen madam; I am quite
sure about it. When cats cry, bad things happen. They come to know about
bad things beforehand and start crying," she said ominously. She was in
her mid-twenties, and was wearing a yellow Shalwar-Kameez.
Shormi turned round and said, "Don’t be silly Hasna. Cats are silly
animals, even sillier than you. How will they know about the future?"
Hasna did not look at all convinced as she continued, "You know
madam, a cat was crying near our shanty the day Karim was killed."
Hasna had had numerous paramours and Shormi had caught her going out with different men on various occasions. She had once introduced
Karim to Shormi; he himself had told her that he had been a petty thief.
Karim was beaten to death by a mob after being caught pickpocketing near
the shanty. Hasna had watched the mob pin Karim down on the street and
beat him with bricks and blunt machetes. But Shormi was not thinking
about it any more; Bobby was having a painful death and she blamed herself for it. She put her hands into the grille and called the cat again; Hasna
joined her, but Bobby did not respond. The cat only looked up the window
and cried shrilly. Shormi turned round, gripping a bar and said, "Hasna I
can’t take this any more.”
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Shormi saw tears rolling down the girl’s eyes. She held Hasna’s hand
tightly and said, "If the cat doesn’t die by tomorrow night I will kill it with the
gun.”
Hasna started weeping. Shormi put her hand on her shoulder and
said, "Listen, silly girl… I just want to relieve it of the pain." Then she
added, "Just look at the way Bobby is crying… look…"
The two women then wept, holding each other. Shormi held Hasna’s
head to her neck and said, "Silly girl.” The cat screeched even louder as it
staggered around to lie on the other side of the ledge.
***
Power was out when Shormi woke up in the evening. Bobby was still
crying. She put on a pair of pyjamas and a short-sleeved shirt and drank a
glass of water from the bedside table. Warm sunlight came through the
mango tree and fell on Bobby’s decaying body. The cat looked up and tried
to leap up the grille. Shormi clasped the grille as Bobby missed it and fell
on the garden below the sunshade before bumping on the edge of the façade wall. She ran down the stairs, almost toppling over the white banister,
and found Bobby still alive. Blood spewed out of its neck and both of the
cat’s front legs had almost come out of its body. Bobby tried to get up to its
feet when it saw Shormi walk down further towards the flowerbed. But the
cat could not get up to its feet; it tumbled down and staggered on the thorny
surface with its chest. She reached down, picked Bobby up, and took her to
the house.
Shormi waited for Hasna to come before taking any decision about
Bobby. She had placed the cat on a rag and it had not moved since.
Meanwhile, she paced around the room, holding both her hands together,
praying. She was born in a Muslim family, but had abandoned the faith as
she grew up. The bell rang and, to her surprise, she found Nasser standing
at the door. He had grown a beard and was wearing a white T-shirt and
blue jeans.
"Hey," she almost screamed and said, "come in.”
Shormi looked at him more closely. The long strips of thin white fabric
that had been wrapped around different parts of his body were gone. Nasser sat down on the sofa bed and as if to give a reason for the visit said, "I
was passing by and thought you might not dislike it if I drop in.”
She smiled at his innocence. Bobby’s cry came out before she could
say anything. She strode down the flat, ushering him in, and sat down on
the floor. Nasser followed her; and when he reached Bobby, said, "God…
how did it happen.”
Shormi did not reply; she looked pointedly at the cat’s eyes; she
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thought the cat had been pleading to save it from its agony. Cats did not
shed tears, she knew, but she somehow felt it was telling her, begging her,
with its green eyes, to rid it of the pain. She looked at Nasser, who was
staring morosely at Bobby.
"Nasser, I want to kill it. Do you think it will be wrong if we kill it now,
instead of let it suffer?" she asked.
Nasser did not take his eyes off the cat when he replied, "No. But I
don’t know how we will do it."
"I have a gun," she slowly got up and took the gun out of the drawer. "I
don’t know if it will work or not. It’s my ex-husband’s but he never used it,"
she said while leaning on the wall.
"Do you want me to do it?" Nasser looked at her and asked.
"Nah," she replied and walked down slowly to the rag.
Bobby stopped crying and stared at her eyes when she pointed the
gun at her head. She could not fix her aim as her hands were trembling. It
was almost dark; the electricity had not come yet and Shormi had forgotten
to light a candle. Beams of red, yellow and blue light came through the
window from the billboards and fell on the two impassive human faces.
Nasser came forward and put his hands around hers to help her aim.
Shormi turned round, surprised, and said, "Thanks.”
Nasser, now holding her hands, could hear their hearts pounding.
Shormi looked at Bobby for the last time, closed her eyes and pulled the
trigger, but the thirteen-year-old lever failed to fire the gun. Bobby cried
shrilly as she tried again; the gun did not let her down this time, blood
splashed out of the cat’s head and fell all over the blue rag. Shormi, eyes
still closed, turned round, hugged him tightly and sobbed.
They dug a hole at the giant trunk of the mango tree to bury Bobby.
Both of them cried when she wrapped the cat in a dark chador and put it in
the hole. Nasser replaced the soil and walked back to the house with the
shovel in hand. Shormi followed him and said, "You need to take a
shower.”
Shormi almost walked up to him when Nasser replied, "I should go
home now.”
"What a day for you…" she opened the main entrance and said, "But
your home is far away from here…"
"I will take a cab, don’t worry," he entered the house, following her,
and said, "But I need to wash my hands first.”
"Go straight and then turn left," she said and replaced the keys on the
windowsill.
She put on a sari after having a shower while Nasser washed his
hands in the bathroom. Electricity had come back; she went to the kitchen
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to make tea. Nasser, meanwhile, came back from the bathroom and stood
in front of the bookshelf; he carefully pulled a book out of the rack and
leafed through it absentmindedly. A print of Jackson Pollack’s “Moon
Women” hung on the wall of the bedroom, just above the dresser. He
looked through the door, still holding the book, and gazed at the painting.
A soft clatter of pots and spoons came out of the dining room, as he
went back to the book. Shormi called Nasser and told him to have a cup of
tea.
"Were you reading something?" she asked, sipping at her tea.
"Not really," Nasser replied, "I was just browsing through a book."
"Which one?" she asked, smiling; she was half-sure he had already
forgotten the book’s name.
"God… I forgot," he smiled meekly and sat besides her. "I feel really
sad for the cat," he continued.
Shormi had cried continuously the whole evening and the bath could
not take the signs of it away from her face: her eyes were still blood red;
and there was a pinkish glow about the edges of her nose. She crossed her
legs and sipped at the tea again. Nasser thought she might start crying
again; he put a hand on her hand and patted softly.
Shormi put the cup down, looked at him and said, "Thanks."
Nasser stared back at her watery eyes, held her hand and said, "You
look good when you cry.”
She smiled, a teardrop rolled down her cheeks and fell on the saucer,
and said, "I know that.”
Nasser laughed and said, "Let’s go for a walk."
She went to the bedroom and opened a drawer at the side of the
dressing table. As she was rummaging through it to find a lipstick, Nouman
called. He was sorry, he said; he should have informed her earlier that dad
had been with him, he continued. But Shormi stopped him and said it was
ok. She also said that she was about to go outside with a friend, so she
would not be able to talk now. Nouman was surprised and he could not
hide it; he said sorry twice before hanging up.
Shormi looked at Nasser’s face as they walked down the narrow
streets. He was tall; almost six feet, she presumed; she had to move her
head up to have a look at the mole on his chin. It was almost late in the
evening; the traffic on an otherwise busy street had thinned down significantly. There were hardly any passers-by, and those who were still there,
waiting in queue for the last bus to come, tired and exhausted, did not even
look at the woman in a purple sari walking by holding the hand of a man
younger than her. When she was putting on her clothes she had thought
about it too; if it was in the morning or in the early evening people would
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have ogled at her; she could not rule out the possibility of something more
obscene happening. A truck loaded with baskets-full of vegetables and
dried fish shrieked past them. She held his hand firmly and said, "Dhaka
kills me.”
He stared at her and said, "You studied in England, right?"
"How do you know that?" she was somehow surprised.
She playfully punched on his chest; his eyes only grinned through his
horn-rimmed glasses in reply. "Oi," she said, "tell me how you know this."
He continued laughing, now wholeheartedly, put his arm around her
waist and whispered in her ear, "You are so beautiful."
"Hmmm," she replied.
Just then a cab slowed down at them; a middle-aged face came out of
the window and said to Shormi, "Get in the cab honey; I will give you
more."
Nasser chased the yellow taxi as it speeded past them hurling more
abusive words. All of a sudden a group of men crept up on her and started
asking questions. One of them was the little boy who had sold her flowers
that day; Shormi recognised him as he came out of the throng and shouted,
"Madam, what are you doing here?"
Shormi could not answer; she was shivering violently. Realising that
nothing was wrong, the mob, disappointed, scattered away.
Nasser was panting heavily when he came back; he said, "Bastards!"
That pinkish glow about the edges of her nose-tip returned, though
she had put a hand on her mouth in a dazed way; both her hands were still
shivering, she still did not know what to say. Nasser held Shormi gently,
stroked her back and said, "Let’s go back home." But she did not respond.
Shormi, in his embrace, seemed to have shrunk. She felt relaxed; that
overwhelming sense of insecurity that had been eating at her all these
years melted away.
Nasser kissed her forehead and muttered, "Let’s go back baby.”
She smiled, looked up and said, "Oi! I was seven-years-old when you
were born."
Nasser looked surprised; he tucked a strand of her hair behind her
ear, stroked her chin with his long fingers and asked, "How do you know
my age?"
She put her head on his chest and said, "I read it in the newspaper
that you were twenty-seven. ‘Twenty-seven year old writer gets death
threat from zealots’ or something like that."
"Hmmm… So?" he grinned and asked, taking his mouth closer to her
earlobe.
She pushed him away, laughing and both of them started walking back
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home.
3
The azan had just started when Shormi woke up early in the morning.
She looked at Nasser; curled beside her like a baby. He turned and muttered something as she raised his head up from her shoulder blade and
gently placed it on the pillow. She turned round too, hugged him from the
back and stroked the mole on his chin. Shormi wanted to wake him up;
Hasna might come at any moment for her housekeeping chores and she
did not want the maid to find Nasser here. She rubbed the sleep from her
eyes and stared at his face again – at his nose, jawbone and neck.
Hasna did not turn up at work that day. Shormi, meanwhile, had
watched television, and later stood at the window to look at the ledge
where Bobby used to sit. She made breakfast, lit a cigarette and when the
clock struck past twelve, woke him up. Nasser smiled and looked across
her face.
"I am so sorry," he said and smiled.
Last night when they got home Shormi gave Nasser one of Ifthekhar’s
T-shirts and a pair of shorts to wear. It had been there in the chest-ofdrawers for so many years; but they still bore his smell. She did not know
why she had kept his clothes for so long; Shormi had never thought that
Iftekhar would come back. A common friend had been updating her regularly about Ifthekhar’s whereabouts, which mostly covered how he had
emigrated to England and got married again. The latter was illegal as
Shormi and Iftekhar had not been divorced; they, in fact, were still officially
married.
She had been surprised by Ifthekhar’s behaviour that day. Contrary to
what he had been in his last days with her, Iftekhar looked benign and mellow. Those hysterical outbursts of anger were gone, replaced by a docile
expression. She was amazed that he did not reproachfully stare at her exposed navel. She remembered how during the last few days he had frantically talked about sins and atonement, and had blamed her for ruining his
life.
Shormi recalled Nasser had said something. She smiled and said,
"Get up."
Iftekhar called when they were having lunch. "Something bad happened to me Shormi," he said in a laid-back voice.
"I am having lunch Iftekhar," she replied and asked, "How is Nouman?"
"He is fine. I am just screwed up Shormi," he said, faintly trying to add
up bits of emotions in his voice, "Laura left me three years ago. I quit my
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job."
"I don’t know what to say Iftekhar," she replied. Then she added, "And
I don’t know what you want from me."
Nasser leaped up, came across and put a slice of watermelon into her
mouth. Shormi gave him a playful poke in the ribs; Iftekhar, meanwhile, replied, "I want to meet you Shormi… Please meet me once… Please.”
Nasser came closer and whispered, "I am going down to fetch the
newspaper."
Shormi nodded and said on the phone, "I don’t see the point of meeting you."
But Iftekhar insisted, "I just wanted to see you once. Please don’t be
so cross."
Shormi hated the idea of seeing him again, but she agreed. "All right. I
will meet you for the last time. But don’t expect anything from me," she
said; then added, as if to mock him, "Please don’t expect much. Things
have gone too far."
When she went back to the bedroom she found Nasser sitting on the
rocking chair, absentmindedly holding the newspaper. He did not finish his
lunch and within moments he seemed extremely worn out. Shormi came
round and asked, "What happened?"
He looked up and said nothing; as she got closer her eyes caught the
headline of the newspaper – "Zealots Declare Bounty on Young Writer’s
Head," it said in a black-and-white numbness. She picked up the newspaper; Nasser did not look up, he just stared blankly at the red Persian carpet.
“In an anonymous letter sent to all the major newspaper offices yesterday, the so-called Harkat-ul-Zihad Al Islam Bangladesh (HZAIB) has declared a bounty of Tk 10,000,000 ($16,66,666) for young writer Nasser
Hussain’s head. In a fatwa issued by Shaukat Osman, the militant outfit’s
chief, the group said, ‘We, on behalf of the Muslims in the country, in the
name of Allah the most beneficient and merciful, declare writer Nasser
Hussain an apostate. It is now the duty of every Muslim to kill him as our
beloved religion tells us to do so’.”
An otherwise coloured front page of the Star ran a black and white
portrait of Nasser, probably to make the news look grimmer. Newspapers
crave for and bank on morbidity, Shormi thought as she read down further:
“The HZAIB, which is believed to be an umbrella organisation for all
religious extremists groups working in Bangladesh, in a previous letter sent
to the dailies, had told Nasser to publicly apologise for his writing. The
group had also called the beleaguered writer to reconvert to Islam; Nasser
had denounced the call and had urged the group to shun the path of terrorism.
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“The writer was attacked last week by a group of young men on the
Dhaka University campus; though the police have blamed it on ‘unidentified
muggers’, many suspect the hands of HZAIB in the incident.
“Nasser could not be contacted for comments, as he was not home.
“The home ministry has beefed up security in the Banani area of the
city, especially around the writer’s home. But when contacted last night, the
police headquarters had refused to give us any detail of its plan to reign in
on the extremist group, which is blamed to have carried out numerous terrorist attacks in the country.”
Shormi stopped reading, looked down at Nasser and caught him looking at her face. She put her head on his lap. He bent down, kissed her and
said, "Baby I am so scared.”
Shormi did not say anything; she kneeled on the floor, cupped his
head and kissed him. As they made love, a roaring locomotive snaked
through the rail-line that had curved past the mosque. Inside the room, on
the CD Sting sang on:
There's a little black spot on the sun today
It's the same old thing as yesterday
There's a black hat caught in a high tree top
There's a flag pole rag and the wind won't stop
It was National Revolution and Solidarity day today, a public holiday; her
Uni was closed, but they did not go out. Nasser lay down on the bed while
Shormi cooked. When she was done, Shormi walked up to the bed and
said to Nasser, "I haven’t read your masterpiece.”
He smiled and said, "Don’t. You might try to kill me after reading it.
Even political parties that deplored the stabbing, in the same statement,
said I wrote something regretful."
She laughed and said, "You don’t know…"
"It’s really funny, you know," he continued matter of factly, "Even the
so-called liberals believed that the government did a pretty good job when
the book was banned. Suckers!"
She had been thinking about this while cooking. The big political parties needed general people’s vote to win the elections; and, Shormi had
thought that they could spare one or two Nassers or Humayun Azads to go
to power. If public opinion ran swiftly against Nasser – which she believed
was going to happen – no one would give a damn about his plight. Votes
were all that mattered to Bangladesh’s political establishment; the socialists, she mused, were ready to make an alliance with the HZAIB if it meant
a few seats in the parliament.
It was late in the evening; a grey light sneaked into the bedroom.
Shormi stared intensely at Nasser, who was reclining on the bed, fidgeting
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with a jigsaw puzzle. Shormi heard the sound of another rail wagon coming
through as she leaped up and sat on his lap. He tried to get up to kiss her;
but she pushed his shoulder down, put her head to his ear and softly said,
"It’s my turn now to forget everything.”
The Police’s “The King of Pain” was on repeat-mode; Sting was saying:
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain
I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
But it's my destiny to be the king of pain
The song was rhythmic and steady, and shortly they had forgotten it, the
sound no more of an interruption than the consistent rain.
And it poured heavily all night. She almost freaked out when someone
called up and asked for Nasser. She wanted to say no one with that name
stayed here; but a sense of urgency in the caller’s tone had forced her to
ask back, "Who has given you this number?"
"Ma’am I am sorry. Dr Mizan of the Dhaka Medical gave me your
number. My name is Inam; I am a reporter, I work with the Star. I want to
interview him," he continued, "Dr Mizan thought you might help me out."
Shormi held him gently from the back while Nasser talked to the reporter on the phone.
"Listen… there are people out there in this country who will kill anyone
who does not subscribe to their version of the religion. Who the hell are
they to call someone a murtad or an apostate or whatever it is when the religion itself prohibits it?" he said; anger glinted in his eyes, Shormi came
forward, holding out her hands, telling him to cool down.
The sound of another locomotive raging across the rail-line was heard
and it started to vibrate in the room when it closed by and passed through.
"Listen man," the reporter said gingerly, "this would not help your
cause. They want you to apologise in public and they said that would do…"
"Oh come on! Why should I make an apology? And for what?" he
asked defiantly, shaking with fury.
Shormi put both the hands on her hip; frustrated, like a schoolteacher
faced with a transgressing pupil.
Nasser continued, "If I had written anything against Islam, I would
have apologised to Allah. Since when have these idiots started playing
God?"
"God! Why can’t you be reasonable?" the man replied; he sounded
disappointed; "I don’t know you, Nasser bhai, but I loved your story. And I
want you to be alive to write more," he went on.
"I don’t see the point," Nasser said, "I didn’t write anything wrong. Hin-
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dus are being systematically repressed everyday in this country. This is a
fact. They are robbed of their freedom only because they belong to the minority, only because they are Hindus. What is wrong if I write it?"
"No one is saying that," Inam replied. "The fanatics have popular support you see and are taking advantage of your callowness," he gave a
pause and then asked, "Are you happy with the way the government is
handling the crisis?"
"Why are you calling it a crisis?" Nasser shrieked on the phone, "It is
not a crisis. It can never be called a crisis. Some faggots want to kill me
because I have exposed something in the eyes of the world that they want
to hide. And you call it an emergency? Today it’s me; tomorrow it can be
you. If you want me to feel sorry for writing a book, everyone who believes
in free speech should apologise to these faggots."
Inam swore loudly in exasperation.
Shormi sat on the rocking chair and stared at the ceiling fan in a vacant way; she knew what was going to happen. Nasser slouched against
the door and stared at the teeming rain through the window. For a flickering
moment she thought of Bobby: what had the cat been thinking when they
had both raised the gun in unison at its decomposing body?
A month ago she was reading Coetzee’s Age of Iron, the story of a
lonely old woman in apartheid South Africa dying of cancer. In an extended
letter to her daughter Mrs Curren expresses her anger, shame and frustration. What do the dying think before they breathe the last?
What goes on in a killer’s mind before he raises a blunt machete on a
fellow human? When the terrorists lobbed those grenades at that meeting,
for a flashing moment, did they look at the people – all of those who would
be killed by those fruit-like bombs? Did any of them want to stop the direction of the objects they had just thrown – midway in the air, falling smoothly
in a line, like Cupid’s bow? What did they do after seeing the charred body
of their four-year-old victim – eyes wide open, surprised by the ferocity of
pomegranates?
***
Silence fell as they ate supper; Nasser did not have much, all through
the meal he fiddled with the fork and knife like a nervous schoolboy would.
As she leaped up from the chair and walked into the bedroom, she knew
she did not have any word of comfort for him. But she wanted to be by his
side till the end and for that she decided not to meet Iftekhar.
A narrow line of light came into the room through the bedroom door.
Nasser was still awake. She sat to email Nouman.
"My dear Nam," she wrote and hunched over the table to abandon
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herself, first to a quiet, decent sobbing, then to long wails without articulation, emptying the lungs, emptying the heart.
She could not write more; an inexplicable numbness, it seemed, had
grasped her body. She got up, sat on the rocking chair and skimmed
through the newspaper. A train of thought shuffled on, badgering her with
an uneasy feeling. She knew something bad was in the offing, something
grotesque and grisly. She stared vacantly at the sheets of paper she was
gripping so tightly. The small print from the newspaper hurt her eyes; she
rubbed them and looked at the newspaper. Everything was a blur.
She waddled across and lay on the bed. Nasser was awake but he did
not move. Shormi held him from the back and touched his eyes; his eyelids
fluttered. He grasped her hand and sighed.
She closed her eyes and saw Bobby walk lazily on the rag with a kitten. It was drizzling outside and would soon start pouring heavily. She
could see a wisp of cloud shading the skyline. The sun was at its low,
though it was early in the afternoon; neither of them could see anything.
She and Nasser were wading through what looked like a hill of sand; the
cat followed. Then the path grew musty and it started to rain heavily. They
looked up at the sky; suddenly a flash of light came across and they had to
close their eyes, dazed and startled. When they opened their eyes an oasis
was on the horizon. They thought their steps were so light that it was possible to fly; it was possible to be both body and spirit. Then just as suddenly
it had come into being, the oasis dissolved into a dune. Without even knowing where to go; where to hide themselves and from whom, a man and a
woman along with their cat walked through. They walked days and nights
and at times when day and night looked and felt the same. They did not
feel sleep; neither could hunger touch them. They ate everything they got
on their way; they peeled the bark of dead trees and ate beetle-grubs, and
burped after having grasshoppers.
They did not stop when they reached that elusive oasis. They did not
cross the path of any humans; neither did they see any living being. The
yellow mosque that they came across was empty of any human presence;
she saw the dead, shrouded in cerements, waiting for the funeral party to
arrive.
They sped out of the mosque and ran through the desert. They ran as
if there was no tomorrow. As if nothing but their existence was true.
[email protected]
Extract from Frank Schätzing’s
Tod und Teufel (Death and the Devil)
translation Rhiannyn Geeson
Frank Schätzing was born in Cologne, Germany. He is a Creative Director for
advertising companies and co-founder of an advertising agency in Cologne. The
best-seller, Tod und Teufel, (Death and the Devil) an historical crime novel, is his
first work, published in 1995. Since then, he has published six books, the most recent of which is Der Schwarm (The Swarm), published in 2004.
Tod und Teufel is set in medieval Cologne, at the time of the construction of the
Cologne Cathedral. The protagonist, Jacob ‘the Fox,’ petty thief and idle trickster, is
the only – and unintentional – witness to the murder of the Cathedral’s master
builder, and is consequently hunted by the assassin, Urquhart ‘the Wolf’. Jacob is
then drawn in to the intrigue and politics surrounding the death, and, with the help of
newly-won friends, attempts to spoil the plot of some of the richest families in Medieval Cologne, and survive the hunt of the Wolf.
The excerpt below follows the exploits of the hungry Jacob, as he raids the orchards of the Archbishop. It is as he finds the finest apples that he witnesses the
murder, and is himself noticed by Urquhart. Jacob runs, and, thinking he has escaped, meets with his ailing friend Tilman. They both then visit Maria, a prostitute
with whom Jacob is friends, to share the spoils of Jacob’s raid. The excerpt ends
with the seeming success of Urquhart’s hunt.
(This translation is published courtesy of Hermann-Joseph Emons Verlag.)
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/Geeson.pdf
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BY THE CATHEDRAL
It was, of course, an insane idea.
But it was set in Jacob’s head to have the most illustrious apples of all
Cologne in his grasp – those belonging to Konrad von Hochstaden, his
Eminence, Archbishop of Cologne, Warlord by Friedrich’s grace, and, at
the same time, mentor to the opposing King, Wilhelm von Holland: in short,
an extremely powerful and unpleasant person.
Obtaining the apples required a visit to the Archbishop’s orchard and
vivarium, which lay between Konrad’s palace and the new, soaring Cathedral choir: or, more precisely, a little behind the two. Naturally, the grounds
were surrounded by a wall and locked. In Cologne, the most bizarre stories
were told about the animals behind the walls – that Konrad kept lions, and
even an animal steeped in legend: an ‘elephantus’, with a devilishly long
nose and feet like tree trunks. In reality, peacocks and pheasants lazed
amongst the heavily laden fruit trees; birds that were not only beautiful, yet
also found their way into the ecclesiastical stomach when required. That,
other than a few dozen squirrels, encompassed the entire wonder.
The only way into Konrad’s private paradise led over the wall, and the
only place one could venture into it was through ‘Great Pinchpenny Lane.’
The name was entirely inappropriate. The lane was tiny, almost a wormhole between the Cathedral grounds and the garden. Its only reason for existing seemed to be to connect Cathedral Close to St Maria ad Gradus and
the Convent of St Margaret, both of which stood behind the apsidal chapel
of the Cathedral. The lane was lined on both sides with walls so high they
could not be climbed without a ladder.
Yet there was no defence. Not against Jacob the Fox.
Here, a few ancient, imposing apple branches projected far out from
the Archbishop’s garden, over the lane and the bordering construction site.
The higher branches stretched tall towards the cathedral; underneath,
gnarled boughs drooped down low enough into the lane that one could
reach up with both hands and effortlessly pull oneself up.
He did not really have to enter the garden. On the other hand, Nature
in her malice had arranged it so that the most succulent fruit were only
available to those who could climb skilfully. A few tried repeatedly, but the
majority then hung from the branches like bats, unable to find a firm hold
before the guards or the Archbishop’s henchmen plucked them down
again. The theft of apples was therefore limited, and shortly beforehand,
Konrad had set drastic punishments for many more offences. Since then,
absolutely nothing had happened.
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
Jacob thought to change that.
He stood under the branches and waited. By then, it was after seven,
and the sun was setting. Although a black cloud-bank was closing in implacably, there was sufficient light left in the evening sky. A gusty wind sprang
up. At the building site, workers laid down their tools and made their way
homewards. It was pointless to continue in fading light: one would only
make mistakes and have to start over again the next day. Suddenly, between one moment and the next, the lane was as empty as if it had been
swept clean.
Jacob flexed his muscles, bent lightly at the knees and propelled himself upwards powerfully. His hands encircled the lower bough. Without
pausing, he brought his body up, further and higher, straddled a branch,
and sat, in the next moment, in the middle of a forest of leaves.
No-one had seen him. He grasped above him and made his way, hand
over hand, up to the second storey and was totally invisible.
But Jacob saw even more, and the outlook made his heart beat faster.
Around him, Nature flaunted her sumptuous abundance. Nothing in
the world could compare with these apples. He grabbed greedily; his teeth
split the firm, green skin and ripped the fruit apart. Juice spilled over his
chin. The apple disappeared as if into a grinding mill; a second followed a
moment later, then the stalk still remained from a third.
Jacob belched loudly then stared, shocked, through the foliage to the
grounds below.
No danger.
He would have to suffer terrible stomach cramps, he knew: his body
had nothing but acid to work on. But stomach cramps stopped eventually.
Now, after his first hunger had been sated, he could turn to stowing further
spoils into his new and thankfully capacious cloak.
He thought of Tilman, and of Maria, under whose roof he occasionally
found quarters if her business allowed, or winter bit too deep. After taking
into account his own need, and laborious counting on his fingers, he arrived
at the sum of three times ten apples.
Best not to waste time!
For the sake of simplicity, he picked the best within his reach first.
Then he saw only smaller, inferior apples within his grasp, before he had
gathered even roughly enough. He slid carefully a little further along the
branch, now hanging directly over the middle of the lane. While he held
tightly to the branch with his left hand, his other busied itself here and
there, serving him handsomely. Whole families could feed themselves on
the bounty growing here.
The most enticing apples were even further away, yet he could only
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reach them by venturing even further forward. He considered, for a moment, being content with what he had already plundered. But if he sat in the
orchard of the Archbishop, he would be satisfied with nothing less than that
which Konrad himself would demand.
He screwed up his eyes and crawled a little further forward. The
branch was noticeably thinner, and projected over the grounds of the cathedral’s construction site.
The foliage separated here, allowing a glimpse of the cathedral choir,
penned in by scaffolding. Not a soul could be seen: in the morning, at
cockcrow, the surrounding area would shake with lively bustle, cries, hammering and booming, but now the area lay in an unusual, peaceful reverie.
For a moment, Jacob was astonished by how close the semicircle of
the steeple’s soaring windows and pillars appeared. Or were his senses
deceiving him? Was it simply the enormous height that lent the marvel
presence – as if one could simply reach out and touch it? Yet it would be
even taller, more than double its current height, even without the towers!
Unbelievable.
And, at the moment, not important. Jacob turned his attention back to
the apples. As Maria had said, you can’t fill a belly looking at a cathedral.
Precisely.
In the same instant his fingers closed on a truly magnificent apple, a
figure appeared suddenly, high above on the scaffolding. Jacob started,
and huddled closer to the treacherous bark. Better to withdraw! But that
could lead to danger. Best simply to stay still for a little while. The leaves
overcast him with shadow so that he could see everything, but could hardly
be seen. His eyes followed the man’s progress along the planks curiously.
Even from a distance, it was clear the man was expensively dressed, his
cloak exhibiting an opulent fur trimming. He walked upright, in the manner
of one familiar with command. From time to time, he shook the beams of
the scaffolding, as if to make sure they held together. Then he laid his
hands on the parapet again, and simply stared into the depths.
Even though Jacob was only an idle trickster, whom nobody other than
those of his own kind knew, he recognized the man up there inspecting his
work. Everyone knew the cathedral’s master builder. The rumour that he
had called on the devil for his plan had preceded Gerhard Morart. Stonemason by profession, since his memorable appointment, he had risen to
become one of the most respected and most influential citizens; he had
been presented with a plot of land by the cathedral chapter, on which he
had erected a magnificent house of stone, very much in the manner of the
noble houses. He associated with the patrician families of Kone, and of
Overstolz, from Mainz. His advice was requested, his work admired and
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
simultaneously feared – just like the man himself. He had already become
a legend in his own lifetime, and there were not a few who believed that,
with the help of the devil incarnate, he would complete the impossible work
before his death, to then travel straight from the highest point of the cathedral to hell; the pompous, vain Konrad as companion.
However, it appeared more to Jacob that the cathedral was less the
result of dark treaties, but rather more that of hard work.
Meanwhile, Gerhard Morart had climbed the highest level of the scaffolding. His massive silhouette stood out blackly against the remaining light
left of the day. The wind tore violently at his cloak. Jacob felt the first drops
of rain slap down, and shivered. Gerhard could spend the whole night up
there, if it suited him. It was time to fill his pockets and disappear as quickly
as possible.
At the same moment, a second figure appeared on the scaffolding. It
seemed to Jacob that the figure had appeared as if from nowhere. The
newcomer was far taller than Gerhard. He manifested himself so close to
the master builder that their shadows momentarily appeared to melt together.
Then a shrill cry rang out, and Jacob saw Gerhard plunge through the
air; past his scaffolding, pillars, and capitals; his struts and piscinas, walls
and plinths. His arms flailed wildly, and, for one terrible second, it appeared
as if he were waving to Jacob in his apple tree. Then there was a muffled,
dull thud as the body struck, rose up again as if seized by a giant fist, then
lay facing upwards.
Jacob stared at the motionless master. It was impossible that he could
have survived the fall. Hastily, Jacob began to push himself back, but came
not a meter further. There was a ripping noise as the branch gave way under his weight. As if on a broomstick, he rode the brittle wood downwards
and landed in a chaos of leaves and splintered bark. Struggling, he attempted to free himself from the confusion and gasped desperately for air.
Bless the Lord and all the saints! He had fallen into the cathedral’s
construction site. Still gasping, he rose to his feet. The fall had ripped the
hat from his head. He slapped the shapeless thing back on and looked
around wildly in all directions.
Away, said a voice in his head. Away, while there’s still time. It was the
same voice that had warned him at the market that morning.
Away from here!
His gaze wandered to Gerhard. The bent body lay not even fifty paces
away from him. Had he deceived himself, or had a groan sounded from
over there?
He looked closer.
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Gerhard is dead, said the voice.
Jacob clenched his fists and felt the sweat break out. There was still
time to depart discreetly.
Then he saw the movement. Gerhard’s arm had only twitched a little,
but there was no doubt that the man was still alive.
A memory welled up in Jacob. It forced him back.
Vanish, Fox!
“Brainless cretin! Won’t you ever learn?” whispered Jacob. In long
strides, he hastened across to the choir, while the increasingly heavy rain
hit him in the eyes, and fell on his knees next to the body.
Gerhard stared up at the sky with glassy eyes. Water ran over his face
and through his thin hair: his fur-trimmed cap lay next to him. He did not
look at all like someone who had made a pact. It was a gentle face with
delicate features. Or better, it had been. Now the shock of nearing death
marked his features.
The chest of the master builder heaved convulsively. His lips trembled.
Jacob stroked the wet hair from his forehead and bent over him.
Gerhard appeared to be aware of his presence. With infinite effort he
turned his head and looked at Jacob. Again his lips moved.
Had he said anything?
From the other side of the cathedral, voices and footsteps approached, possibly people who had heard the cry. Jacob hesitated, then
brought his ear close to Gerhard’s mouth and closed his eyes.
It was three words that Gerhard spoke, and with each syllable he
breathed out what little life remained him.
Instinctively, Jacob clasped the hand of the dying man and pressed it.
A thin thread of blood ran out of the corner of Gerhard’s mouth.
He was dead.
For heaven’s sake, move, so you can get away, pressed the voice.
From above came peculiar scraping noises. Jacob stood up. Something was coming down the scaffold. He tipped his head back and looked
up.
His breath faltered.
The big, black shadow drew nearer over the various levels. But it didn’t
climb, rather, sprang down with eerie agility, leaping deftly over the planks
like an animal. A comet’s tail of hair encircled its head.
It was nearly there.
Who or whatever approached, Jacob had not the least desire to further
the acquaintance. He turned and ran, as fast as he could. Over the courtyard of the cathedral, people were running around, calling and gesticulating. Jacob darted sideways, scurried into the shadow of an adjacent build-
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
ing shed, and managed to mix into the crowd from behind.
Everyone was talking at the same time; someone cried out the grievous news, and soon others carried it across the cathedral and out into the
streets.
No, no one had seen him – with the exception of the shadow.
Curiously enough, in this second Jacob thought of the apples. His
hands delved into the pockets of the cloak. Several were still there, had not
rolled out in his fall from the tree. Good!
More saved than sheer life.
As inconspicuously as possible, he strolled over the courtyard and
through the Dragon Gate. As he turned round once again, there was nothing more to be seen of the shadowy creature from the scaffolding.
Somewhat relieved, he quickened his pace and went further along Becher Lane.
THE SHADOW
Urquhart followed him at a distance. He had pulled the cloak over his
hair and was, despite his height, little more than a phantom between the
busily hurrying people, black and inconspicuous like the falling night.
It would have been simplicity itself to kill the fellow there at the building
site. Urquhart knew that he had witnessed the murder. And yet Gerhard’s
death must look like an accident. The master, crushed, and next to him another corpse with a crossbow bolt in the chest? – not at all the point of the
task. Nevertheless, he must quickly eliminate the disagreeable witness who
fell so unexpectedly out of the tree, and obviously a goodly piece away
from the cathedral: somewhere where there were not so many people
about. The crossbow under his cloak was cocked, and yet the bustle of the
market quarter offered no opportunity for a clear shot. Again and again the
head of the hurrying man disappeared between passers-by going home or
to Vespers, while he moved hurriedly away from the town centre.
What had Gerhard whispered in to him? Had he actually said anything,
or only oozed out blood between his teeth before he died? If he had spoken, then this fellow now carried a secret around with him. It could hardly
be expected that he would keep it to himself.
He could ruin everything in a single blow.
Urquhart moved faster, while his mind sought, with every step, to find
out more about the other. Observations pooled together like coloured glass
in a mosaic. The man was a redhead. With the fall from the tree the hat had
been ripped from his head. Urquhart had seen his shock of hair flaming in
the late light, before he had run to Gerhard. He appeared to be in excellent
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physical form, certainly a quick runner. He would have to be. Whoever
hung around in the apple trees of the Archbishop these days was, without
doubt, a thief, and thieves either ran like hares, or swung from the gallows.
This thief was, moreover, clever. The way in which he had mixed into the
crowd showed intelligence, as did the fact that he had immediately struck
out into the busiest street, where it would be hard to follow him.
But not for Urquhart the Shadow.
There were still too many people in the streets. At the moment he
could only observe the redhead. With a little luck, and if he carried his
spoils under his cloak, he would seek out his cache, possibly the place
where he slept. Such places were isolated. Thieves sought solitude out of
fear of their own kind.
Unless he had a bed in a monastery. The foundations and hospitals
were hard to access. To follow him in there was more difficult.
That meant there was no more time to waste.
Urquhart reached under his cloak and laid his finger on the handle of
the crossbow. They were now in the Street of Minorites, just before the
corner of Drusian Lane. On the right lay the cloister enclosure of the Minorite brothers.
And suddenly, from one moment to the next, by chance, all the people
disappeared into one or another of the house doorways. Only occasionally
could anybody be seen scurrying here and there over the slippery ground,
cowering before the rain. Then, for an instant, the street was deserted, except for the hastening figure wearing the felt hat, one who had seen too
much and heard too much.
Urquhart raised the arm with the weapon.
And let it sink back quickly. Too late.
From a tavern across from the monastery came four men, all extremely disreputable. One of them greeted the redhead with a loud hello.
The others circled round the pair, and Urquhart saw only shoulders and
backs.
He slipped into the shadows of the walls surrounding St. Minorite and
waited within earshot.
“Tilman!” cried Jacob. It was his friend from the duck wallow teetering
out of the pub. Jacob was pleased. He had steered towards “The Hen” in
the hope of getting hold of Tilman before the supplies ran out. He also
needed to talk to someone: the shock had shaken him greatly.
Tilman grinned. He did not look any better than two hours previously,
but now his eyes had a feverish glaze: the effect of the alcohol was plain.
The others were also beggars. Jacob knew them only by sight, except
for one, who shared the status muri with him. He was an unpleasant tub of
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
lard, with whom he had occasionally exchanged a few words, though nothing which he would remember.
Which was understandable, since, in the language of the streets, that
indicated nothing more than that, so far, none of the cronies had bashed
another on the head over a few bites of food. Others, perhaps. The fat one
tended towards that type of violence, whenever they stole something. Of
late, it was said that he had become careless. Jacob did not even give him
half a year before his head would roll at the feet of the executioner.
The brew house “The Hen” was one of those taverns that did not
automatically toss anyone out if they came dressed in rags. The poor were
tolerated – as long as they could pay. Many beggars led an absolutely
honest, God-fearing, and correspondingly short life, which was why there
was no reason not to allow them to share in the blessing of the artistry of
Cologne’s breweries.
Over time, however, the clientele had admittedly fallen so low, that respectable people no longer frequented the establishment. The publican
saw himself subjected to hostility, especially from the Minorites, whose
monastery lay directly opposite. Furthermore, the official prostitutes also
accused him of supporting a corner trade for the illicit whores, outwardly
respectable female burgers, who negotiated their services with well-to-do
gentlemen for good money – in secret, naturally. This deprived the official
prostitutes of their trade, which again brought down the anger of the city
executioner, to whom the working girls were subordinate and paid taxes.
There had been repeated threats against “The Hen”, and since then,
the publican had become careful. In Cleves, a master brewer had recently
been accused of witchcraft and had been burned at the stake. In the same
night, the venerable Minorite brothers had smeared the word ‘Cleves’ on
the door of the publican’s house in pitch. The merchant families of both the
greater and lesser proud houses of Wasserfass, considered loudly a complaint to the Holy Inquisition, after their children had seen black cats running out of “The Hen”, while inside, the demons Abigor and Asmodius, in
the shape of indecent women, shrieked blasphemous obscenities while simultaneously emitting a sulphurous stink. Jacob asked himself how the
children knew that it had been, of all things, those two particular demons,
where there must be – how many of them was it? – at least ten – ten devils,
he remembered; either way, it did not bode well for “The Hen”.
That was apparently why they had been thrown out, Jacob learned
from the tub of lard. “Rubbish,” Tilman whispered. “The money was gone.
You’re too late.”
“Thrown out!” squealed the fat one, who had overheard, and was apparently the generous host.
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Tilman broke into a long fit of coughing.
“Whatever,” he gasped. “I’m going back to the wallow.”
“Yes, lie down and die,” laughed one of the others and slapped him on
the shoulder. It was not a pleasant laugh.
Jacob felt his disappointment rising. Why had the business at the cathedral had to happen to him, of all people! The opportunity to drink something other than stinking water would not come by again in a hurry.
Then he remembered his apples and Maria.
“Come,” he said, and pulled at Tilman’s arm. The beggars cursed,
since their money had not been enough to get properly drunk, and made
their way in the other direction.
“Have you got the apples?” asked Tilman breathlessly.
“Here.” Jacob pulled one out. Tilman bit into it as if nothing had passed
his lips for days, which might well be the case. Behind them a late cart
rumbled across the lane.
“So where are we going?” he wanted to know. The last syllables were
drowned by a new fit of coughing.
“Maria’s.”
“See you tomorrow.” Tilman started to move away. Jacob kept hold of
his arm and increased his pace.
“You’re going nowhere. Firstly, I have to tell you and Maria an unbelievable story.”
“You and your stories. Since when have any of them ever been true?”
“Secondly, you aren’t well. If you don’t find somewhere dry tonight, you
soon won’t need any more apples.”
“You know that Maria can’t stand me,” Tilman objected unhappily, still
keeping pace with Jacob.
“I know that she doesn’t want to give every poor dog shelter. But
you’re my friend, and who can say, perhaps tonight her heart, thanks to a
lucky stroke of providence…”
“Forget your lucky stroke of providence!”
“You’re coming with me!”
“Yes. Yes, all right.”
The oxcart clattered out of Druisian lane and blocked Urquhart’s sight.
As the redhead and his companion again appeared before him, they were
already quite some distance away. A couple of Minorite brothers were evidently returning from Neumarkt to St. Minorite, pulling along behind them
thin wooden battens on a hand cart. Urquhart avoided them and made up
some ground, but now people were again coming out of the adjacent alleys.
He would have to be patient.
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
Urquhart pondered. The meeting with the gang of beggars had been
too short for the redhead to have told them anything. The one who had
gone with him was a different matter entirely. With every breath, the risk increased that Gerhart Morart’s last words would find a wider audience.
Of course, it was just as likely that the master builder had said nothing,
simply rattled and groaned, only to die. That was possible. Yet Urquhart
preferred to believe otherwise.
After a few minutes, the pair turned right into Berlich, a coarse, thinly
populated area of Cologne that was known primarily for its piggeries – and
for the corresponding odours. But some still lived here.
Were they going to the girls?
Urquhart stole past the small, dark, shabby houses. Further ahead, he
heard someone quietly call out “Maria!”, then a door opened a crack. The
redhead and the other man squeezed inside.
They had managed to give him the slip. For the time being.
He considered, for a moment, the possibility of going in after them,
thus solving the problem in one fell swoop. Then he decided against such a
move. He did not know how many people lived in the house. It was a small
building, obviously a brothel, perhaps run by a procurer. Someone staggered out and shuffled in his direction. Not one of the ones he had followed. Evidently a merchant, richly dressed and too drunk to notice Urquhart. Mumbling to himself, the man disappeared behind a couple of sties.
He looked after the man, then turned his gaze back to the house. On
the first floor, a light flickered, and then someone shut the shutters with a
bang.
They would have to come out at some stage.
Urquhart melted into the darkness. He could wait.
BERLICH
It was indeed a whorehouse. The proprietor was called Clemens Brabanter and was a thickset, good-natured character. It was his wont to care
for his customers, so to speak, with four gills of wine as entrée, from which
he served only three. Below burned a peat fire, covering with soot the
shabby room which took up the whole ground floor. Clemens himself slept
behind a greasy curtain. Over the fire, fat, gristly meat was grilled, usually
burnt black, apparently so that a few of the guests would bring along something better. Then, Clemens sat near the fire and turned and flipped the
delicacy attentively, so that it suited the guest’s tastes. The girls only got
something at the guest’s invitation. Because Clemens was, at heart, committed to morals and justice, he did not exclude himself from this rule, and
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thereby held the respect of the girls – when he refrained from hitting them.
The same went for the wine. In general, Clemens served the “wet
Lodewig”, the name in Cologne for the result of bad harvest, a sour nothing, without body or finish, that one could hardly taste, yet must pay for with
considerable heartburn. On the other hand, there were guests for whom
Clemens would climb into his cellar and draw wine of a completely different
quality. In this knowledge, certain gentlemen from higher circles visited
again and again, and Clemens’ costliest asset, the three women on the first
floor – with the exception of one, whom the Lord God had punished with
skinniness and a squint – looked uniformly voluptuous and inviting.
As well as the business, two of the whores, Wilhilde and Margarethe,
were married. Their husbands worked in the business houses on the Rhine
as packers. Between four and six of them were needed to hold open one of
the large sacks to be filled with salt. As a packer, one earned next to nothing, though one needed be able to do next to nothing. In the end, there was
just enough to get by, and, together with the earnings from the whoring,
there was at least enough to live rather than die.
The third in Clemens’ band was generally regarded as the most beautiful in the whole Berlich area. Her name was Maria. She was twenty-one,
although the rings under her eyes and the absence of a few teeth spoiled
the picture a little. Nevertheless, Maria had wonderful, silky hair and eyes
as green as a cat’s under curved, Madonna-like brows. Her mouth was a
flower; a canon who crept in occasionally had recently stammered drunkenly in her ear, her breasts were the temple of delight and her lap, purgatory!
In view of this, no one wondered that Maria had grown more and more
proud, and had often spoken of leaving Berlich at some time, and to wed a
well-to-do man, with whom she would lead a life pleasing to God, in an attractive, solid house, without the smell of pig dung and the cries and groans
from the neighbouring sties.
Her relationship with Jacob suffered from this. At the start, she had
taken pleasure in every gesture, every souvenir, simply in Jacob himself.
Often enough, when there were no more callers for the night, he had slept
with her in a bed. He brought her provisions, whatever he had managed to
grab, and so did not have to pay, or leave afterwards. Clemens, whom
Jacob cleverly never forgot when he divided his spoils, permitted the arrangement, just as he did with the other two girls. Only business came first!
If anyone knocked on the door late at night and desired the sins, one could
be as married as he liked, Clemens still threw him out implacably.
In the meantime, the fire between them had burned a little low. Maria
strove to higher things, and there was always trouble, since Jacob, for
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
some inexplicable reason, felt responsible for Tilman and always towed him
along to Berlich. Occasionally, all three slept together in the tiny chamber.
Tilman did not get a turn. He could not bear Maria, and Maria would never,
not even for all the money in the world, sleep with Tilman, provided that it
amounted to less than a silver coin. These days, she flew into a rage when
Tilman was even mentioned. Jacob knew that their association was nearing
its end.
Perhaps that was why he had decided, so abruptly, that Tilman should
come with him. If he and Maria were going to argue in any case, it should
at least be for a good purpose. With the way Tilman looked, it would need a
wonder for him to recover from the terrible, bloody coughing, but Jacob
wanted at least not to find him dead by the stagnant waters of the duck wallow one morning, besieged by ravens tearing at him and tugging apart his
scrawny, cold body.
It was hazy in the parlour. Clemens again had something unidentifiable on the fire and sat in front of it, warming his hands. There was a terrible draft from the crannies in the window shutters. Jacob noted that the
procurer was becoming more stooped daily. Soon his hands and feet would
meet in a perfect circle, and he could be rolled into the stream. On the
bench near the door sat Margarethe, and observed the visitors in her
squinting way, so that it was said that she was always on the lookout for
two men simultaneously, and consequently saw none.
Apart from that, the parlour was empty.
“Hello, Jacob” growled Clemens.
Jacob gave Margarethe a fleeting smile and dropped himself down
onto one of the roughly joined stools. Only now could he feel how painful
the bruises were from his fall. His whole body appeared to be one whole
bruise “Is Maria here?”
Clemens nodded grimly. “Can you afford her?”
“Here.” Jacob reached into his cloak and laid three apples on the table. Clemens’ eyes opened wide. He heaved himself up from his place by
the fire and crept over. His clumsy fingers stroked almost tenderly over the
smooth skin.
“Where did you get these then? There’s nothing like these to be found
at the market!”
“They fell from heaven. Come on Clemens, can we go up?”
“Well –“
Jacob sighed, delved into his pocket and brought out another apple.
“Certainly, Jacob.” The apples disappeared into a basket. “The customer has just left, as you saw.”
“Rich?”
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“Not poor. But stingy. He paid the lowest rate, and for that I gave him
the Lodewig to drink. God damn me, but it seemed to satisfy him.”
“And Wilhilde?”
“Has a visitor.”
“That’s good. Smells good, by the way, what you’ve got there on the
fire.”
“Yes, that’d suit you, wouldn’t it!” snapped Clemens. “It’s not for you!
You can be glad I don’t shove your lousy apples up your arse!”
Jacob was already on the steps up to Maria, Tilman at his heels.
“If you say that once more,” he called, “you might make the
Archbishop mad!”
Clemens raised his eyebrows and looked over at the basket.
“And don’t get her pregnant!” he called after Jacob.
Tilman shook his head, unnerved, and followed Jacob to the first floor.
His body shook with suppressed coughing.
“Can you try not to cough for a while?” begged Jacob.
“Very funny!”
“All right.” He pushed open the door to Maria’s chamber.
She stood at the window, a formerly white shawl around her shoulder,
and was in the process of lighting a new candle. Clemens provided well for
candles. As Jacob and Tilman entered, she set the light down near the bed,
reached for the window shutters and slammed them shut.
The room was hardly furnished: a low table, two stools. A bed, roughly
cobbled together, filled with straw, on it a matted cover, in which, as Jacob
knew, lived as many lice as there were inhabitants of Cologne. Under the
window was a chest, in which she kept her belongings. There was a dress
inside, which a man whom she really liked had presented to her a few
months before. For the most part, he usually only talked when he visited
her. One day he had brought her the dress, left, and never appeared again.
Maria didn’t even know his name. But when she put on the dress for
church-going, it appeared to Jacob that she was more than comparable to
every other one of the respectable ladies, and he couldn’t bring himself to
be seen by her side. Then he was suddenly convinced that she would outsmart Fate, and would actually find a pious and respectable man.
Now the dress lay in the chest and the lid was shut. If it went the way
of the great, holy Berthold von Regensberg, she would never be able to put
it on again anyway. He had, in a thunderous sermon against the dreadful
state of affairs with regards prostitutes, ordered them all to dress themselves in yellow and thereby reveal themselves to public scrutiny.
An empty pitcher stood on the table, and an upset beaker. The drunkard had not let her take part in his carousal.
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
“Have you brought something?” she asked without any further greeting. Jacob nodded mutely and laid down the apples that were left near the
pitcher. She smiled and took him in her arms, without drawing him to her
properly.
She did not look at Tilman. The invalid shook himself and crept over to
one of the stools, where he lowered himself down as noiselessly as possible.
“Something peculiar has happened to me,” said Jacob and dropped
himself onto the bed, so that the slats grated alarmingly.
“And?”
He stared at the ceiling.
“The cathedral master builder is dead.”
She sat down next to him on the edge of the bed and stroked a hand
though his hair, her gaze directed at the door. Then she looked at him. The
rings under her eyes were even darker than usual, but perhaps it was simply the scanty flickering of the candle that furrowed the valleys in her features. And nonetheless, she was beautiful. Too beautiful for this life.
“Yes,” she said gently, “he fell headlong into disaster.”
Jacob sat up and looked at her thoughtfully.
“How do you know that?”
She raised her hand and pointed with her thumb at the wall. Behind it
was Wilhilde’s room.
“Is that what the man in her room said?” questioned Jacob.
“He came shortly before you, a linen-weaver. He’s often with Wilhilde.
He began with it straight away. Had also only heard it from others who saw
Gerhard take a false step. Perhaps the only one in his life.” She shook her
head. “Yet God called him before his throne for that. And how many false
steps do we take? Sometimes I don’t know why we’re on this earth.”
“One second.” Jacob sat up. “Which others?”
“What?” Maria appeared bewildered.
“You said others had seen Gerhard take a false step.”
“Yes.”
“Which others?”
She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “Well, the others, full
stop. The people.”
“Which people?”
“Heavens, Jacob! What’s so important about that?”
Jacob wiped his hands over his eyes. The people –
“Maria,” he said calmly, “so there are witnesses who saw how Gerhard
fell to his death through his own carelessness. Is that right?”
“Well, yes!”
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Schätzing / Geeson
░
“No!” Jacob shook his head vigorously and sprang from the bed.
“That’s not right.”
“What are you implying?” asked Tilman, who had to cough again, and
attempted to suppress it, causing terrible sounds in his innards.
Jacob laid his fingers on his temples and closed his eyes. In his mind’s
eye, he lived through it all again: Gerhard’s cry, the shadow, the fall and his
last words, that were as if burnt into his brain.
“That’s not right,” he repeated. “The cathedral master builder, Gerhard
Morart, as far as we mean the same man, did not meet his death through
carelessness, but rather, was murdered. And no one saw it other than me.
There was no one.” He paused, breathed deeply, and opened his eyes
again.
Both Maria and Tilman were staring at him.
“I thought I was drunk, not you,” remarked Tilman.
“Gerhard was killed,” said Jacob, agitated. “I was there! I was sitting in
this accursed apple tree, as this black thing appeared on the scaffolding
and pushed him over the edge.”
Still there hung a breathless silence over the chamber.
“Damn it, that’s how it happened!”
Maria began to giggle.
“You nut!”
“What will you come out with next?” coughed Tilman. “That the devil
came for him?”
“Shut your face!” Maria shouted at him. “You have absolutely nothing
to say here, you puking spook!”
“I–”
“Not here!”
Jacob heard their voices as if through wadding. He had reckoned on
everything, but not that they would not believe him.
“– didn’t pull myself here to sit round in your whore chamber” Tilman
was yelling. “That was Jacob’s idea! Before I take anything from you, I’d
rather–”
“–Jacob wouldn’t have let you, but you’ve sucked him in with your ridiculous coughing!” yelled Maria, now enraged.
“What you call ridiculous will be the death of me!”
“Yes, the sooner the better, but really, you’re healthier than all of us.”
“Lord save me! Jacob, I’m going. I would rather die than let myself be
bawled out by your whore–”
“Don’t call me a whore!” screeched Maria.
“Even though you are one!”
“Not you. I may be one, but before I spread my legs for you, I would
░
Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
rather drink out of the sewer!”
“That’d be a good idea, there would be lots for you to do there, you
toothless piece of shit, you debauched attempt at temptation–”
“Just don’t sprain your tongue!”
“Miserable hag! I don’t want to hear any more, and nothing of this
story of the devil!”
Tilman jumped up and stormed over to the door, where he abruptly fell
to his knees. Jacob hurried over and grabbed him under the arms.
“Throw him out!” ordered Maria.
“No.” Jacob shook his head.” “He is sick, can’t you see?”
Maria crawled onto her bed and cowered there.
“He should go.”
She was close to breaking into tears.
Tilman wheezed heavily. An ice-cold sweat shone on his upper lip.
“He’s sick, Maria,” repeated Jacob gently.
She stretched out both arms and spread her fingers like talons.
“Then go, for all I care! Piss off!”
“Maria–”
“I don’t want to see you any more!”
She threw her hands in front of her face and began to sob.
“Maria, I –”
“Out!”
Jacob bowed his head.
URQUHART
In the meantime it had begun to pour with rain. All activity in Berlich
had come to an end. Here and there light penetrated through the cracks of
the closed shutters.
Urquhart waited.
Suddenly the door to the whorehouse opened, and a man stormed out
and along the street in the direction of the old wall. He drew his shoulders
high against the terrible weather, appearing to consist of only felt hat and
cloak. But Urquhart had meticulously committed the clothes of the red-head
to memory.
It was time to end the tiresome business. Without particular haste, he
set himself moving and followed the hurrying figure
The figure tripped over its own feet every second step, although still
managed to set an astonishing tempo. Urquhart decided to follow behind
for a while, until he came to rest. At some stage he would stop running at
this speed and make a halt.
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Schätzing / Geeson
░
It was more relaxing to kill him when he was moving less.
Cloak and felt hat crossed the stagnant duck wallow and made its way
over a narrow path through the fruit gardens and vineyards. It was so dark
here that one could hardly see a hand before one’s eyes. With the exception of Urquhart: he could see, even in pitch black. His senses were like
those of a predator, registering every movement of the runner in front of
him. He noted with satisfaction that the pace of the man was becoming
steadily slower. All the better. It would soon be over.
He asked himself how much the red-head could have spread the
news. There was the companion, whom he had dragged into the whorehouse, apparently a friend. It would be no trouble to track him. Urquhart
had memorised his features, as he followed them to Berlich, and the
whores would give him further hints. It was not, in principle, necessary to
take further steps in this matter. Only the actual witness was dangerous. A
beggar with an unbelievable, second-hand story could nearly be forgotten.
But certain was certain.
They were now in Plack Lane, a connection between St Gereon and
Eigelstein, which ran parallel to the city wall. The name was all it had in
common with a lane: along its entire length, there were fewer than a halfdozen farm buildings, otherwise trees and rows of fences lined the way,
and it had now become a dangerous slide of mud and gravel. The surrounding lands mainly belonged to the rich Klockring lords, who also possessed various toll houses along Weiden Lane, where Plack Lane ended.
The red-head apparently celebrated the status muri.
Now his pace had become dragging. He braced himself with effort
against the lashing, wet wind, and Urquhart was surprised that he had
judged the physical strength of the figure incorrectly. The willows bowed
before of the black, driving clouds, as if wanting to pay homage to the
forces of nature. There was still not a house to be seen. Not long now, and
the man would not be able to set one leg before the other.
In the next moment, he skidded and fell in the mud. Urquhart stopped
moving.
The felt hat and cloak of the sitting man covered his figure so completely that he could have been mistaken for a large stone. Then he moved,
tried to get back up.
He had almost managed it.
He coughed.
With a few paces, Urquhart was close behind him; he raised the
crossbow, pointed it at the man’s neck and pulled the trigger. The bolt
penetrated with such force that the body was hurled forward, fell hard to its
knees, collapsed, arrested in a grotesque pose, as if he were praising the
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Tod und Teufel / Death and the Devil
Lord.
Urquhart contemplated him without particular emotion.
He was neither proud of his work, nor did he regret the murder. He
found it incomprehensible that some of those who committed similar acts
would moan, or else brag afterwards. Death was unique, the end of this
man’s story. There was nothing there to change. Nothing about which it
was worthwhile to think further.
He turned, and walked back in the direction Berlich.
Behind him, the corpse merged with the night to a shapeless mass
without name or consequence.
Monash University
[email protected]
337
NEW EDITION
FATTYS’
Cyclopaedia
WRITING FAT BODIES
An Encyclopaedia of Fat Theory
A concise overview of thirty
years of critical writings
about weight issues, tracing significant intersections
and disputations
WITH CROSS-REFERENCES
[
VANESSA RUSSELL
COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University.
www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue11/russell.pdf
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Fattys’ Cyclopaedia
INTRODUCTION
This volume is a compendium of influential fat theorists from the
past three decades. I use “fat theory” as a unifying term for those writers who have in common a critical investment in articulating the psychological, social, political or medical signifiers within overweight bodies. My selection of texts is based on the work’s importance upon the
field, and of those fat theorists who have shaped and challenged this
emerging critical discipline.
Fat theory is eclectic and consists of writers with backgrounds in
academia, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sociology, feminism and political activism. The intellectual diversity has created a field of everexpanding and often contradictory ideological positions that continually
redefine the conceptualisation of ‘fat.’
Fattys’ Cyclopaedia traces the history of fat theory and its everchanging critical landscape. It summarises each writer’s arguments
then cross-references to intersections or disputations within the field. I
trust this web of ideas will provide a solid background to fat theory,
amply tracking the shifting sequence of historical positions that have
informed contemporary ‘fat’ thought.
THE EDITOR.
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Vanessa Russell
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WORKS
Braziel, Jana Evans and Kathleen LeBesco (b. 1967 and 1970), Assistant Professors. Eds., Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression
(2001).
A collection of essays that question the ideological bases for the
construction of fatness, in particular, the discourses that symptomatologise fatness and prevent a celebration of corpulence (2 and 8).
The collection “sees fatness as constructed, and reconstructs fatness as “the concept of obesity” (2) then interrogates this historical
concept by “resisting the dominant discursive constructions of corpulence” (1). They argue that the “concept of obesity” has been constructed by overdetermining contradictory discourses, together with
the stereotype of the fat body as a measure of excess, and the psychological discourses that pathologise fatness (8). These discourses
have contained the fat body, whilst simultaneously erasing it, preventing true fat acceptance.
The essays include historical accounts of the obese, such as
KLEIN’S “Fat Beauty” chapter from Eat Fat; a carnivalesque construction of the fat body in Sharon Mazer’s article on Helen Melon, the “fat
lady” at Coney Island’s sideshows, and Le’a Kent’s study of the abject
‘fat’ body through zines and fat activism.
The essays combine to provide a divergent, yet rich, indicator of
fat theory’s contemporary positioning, where the concept of the fat
body is to be celebrated and no longer erased through discursive
medicalisation and commodification. Yet, by dismissing all that preceded them, Braziel and LeBesco risk dehistoricising their position and
alienating the fat theory that founds their deconstructive theories.
Bruch, Hilde (b. 1904), Psychiatrist. Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia
Nervosa, and the Person Within (1973).
Bruch’s work is based on over forty years of case studies, and is
the first intimate investigation of the psychological rationales grounding
obesity. Her influential study challenges the “eat less, exercise more”
(121) dieting myth, and argues that dieting can cause emotional problems, including depression.
Bruch’s studies find that a disordered relationship to food is related to family life (3). She argues that obesity has its origins in a disturbed mother–child relationship, an argument that profoundly influences ORBACH and CHERNIN (66).
Her studies find that obese patients cannot identify hunger be-
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Fattys’ Cyclopaedia
cause they distance their consciousness from their bodies (50). Bruch
warns that no cure for obesity can be achieved without a widespread
“correction of the body-image misconception” (90).
Bruch co-pioneered the “physiological weight” concept, that is, a
person’s ideal weight is the stable weight at which one feels “well and
healthy” (Bruch 113): a liberating hypothesis that greatly informed fat
activism.
Chernin, Kim (b. 1940), Psychological Consultant. The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (1981) and The Hungry Self: Women,
Eating and Identity (1985).
The Obsession articulates the binge-eater’s secret life. Eating
disorders are the “hidden emotional life of a woman” (1) reacting
against the cruel contradiction that gives women power whilst simultaneously taking it away (99). This book is most famous for introducing
the phrase “the tyranny of slenderness,” a phrase that no selfrespecting fat theorist fails to introduce by page four.
The Hungry Self introduces the idea of “the hunger knot” (xiv), a
psychoanalytic concept which reads overeating as “mother-rage”
(118); an anger aimed at the mother for not providing the daughter
with “instructional mythical guidance” (52). The daughter’s relative
freedom, as compared to the limited options of her mother, induces
guilt at having been given the opportunity to surpass her mother and
translates into overeating (49).
While useful for those who fit into the demographic Chernin creates, this argument standardises the reader into having had a generic
baby-boomer childhood, and ignores the larger social forces controlling body image.
In The Beauty Myth WOLF critiques Chernin:
The many theories about women’s food crises have stressed
private psychology to the neglect of public policy, looking at
women’s shapes to see how they express a conflict about
their society rather than looking at how their society makes
use of a manufactured conflict with women’s shapes. (Wolf
189)
Like ORBACH, Chernin’s psychoanalytic-based work has been sidelined by contemporary theories, but marks the beginning of experimental risks taken in developing and establishing fat theory as a legitimate
field.
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Hesse-Biber, Sharlene (b. 1950), Professor of Sociology. Am I Thin
Enough Yet? The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity
(1996).
Hesse-Biber dispenses with psychoanalytic reasoning and focuses on the covert cultural, social and political needs for fatness. She
argues that the diet industry relies on fatness and is heavily invested in
ensuring that people remain fat while pushing the rhetoric of thinness.
This creates an industry that relies on the weight loss and gain cycle
where consumers pay for access to weight loss programs and exercise equipment, then lose weight, then put the weight back on, then
pay for access to weight loss programs and exercise equipment, and
so on.
Hesse-Biber’s conceptualisation of the “cult of thinness” has been
promoted by the diet industry that manipulates people to rely on consumerism to ‘save’ them from fatness: “Many women believe that in
order to lose weight they need to buy something, whether it be a pill, a
food plan or membership in a self-help group” (39). By depicting fat as
profane, society – with the help of fashion and advertising – produce a
climate where weight loss is “not just a personal responsibility; it is a
moral obligation” (11). Hesse-Biber writes: “As long as a woman
viewed her body as an object, she was controllable, and profitable”
(25).
Concurring with SEID and WOLF, Hesse-Biber states that society’s
authorities in health, medicine, government, religion and education
have reinforced the cultish imperative to be thin, “until the concept became so self-sustaining, so internalized that no reinforcement was
necessary” (28). BRAZIEL AND LEBESCO disagree, claiming that writers
such as Hesse-Biber have ignored “the power and politics underlying
the social and capitalistic constructions of corpulence and the fat body”
(Braziel and LeBesco 6), which consequently, according to Braziel and
LeBesco, ultimately erases the fat body (Braziel and LeBesco 7).
Klein, Richard (b. 1941), Professor of French. Eat Fat (1996).
Klein’s prophetic soothsaying and “scandalously wonderful”
(Braziel and LeBesco 237) history of fat aims to create a healing
“mandala” that triggers a reveneration of fat. He uses fetishised and
aroused language to inscribe fat with sexiness (49):
It’s not easy to change your image of what is beautiful and desirable, especially if those images have been programmed by
your personal history, reinforced by the social environment,
and manipulated by the cynical media. (63)
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Fattys’ Cyclopaedia
Comparing his work to the comprehensiveness of SEID, he justifiably
terms his brief historical survey “superficial” (115) and argues that history demonstrates that fat-vilification is a fashion that will reverse when
scarcity reoccurs.
Klein attributes the modern abundance of fat to the immobility of
modern life and the self-fulfilling hatred instilled by medical practitioners and dieticians: “Obesity may be an iatric disease – that is, one
caused by doctors, nutritionists, and health and beauty therapists”
(13). The medicalisation of fat has made fat “murderous” (162) to all
but those who are feasting off its revenue.
Following HESSE-BIBER, capitalism is invested in fat, which relies
on consumers bingeing then rectifying their ‘sins’ by buying diet products: “Dieting is the most perfected form of consumption under conditions of advanced capitalism, ensuring the greatest amount of business for everyone all around” (194).
Klein’s work expands the work of fat activists such as WANN, but
moves into fetishism, and his work, although dazzling, is underscored
with female objectification. It moves perilously close to ‘chubby chasing,’ where sexual attraction is focused on the body’s ‘fat’ rather than
the actual person.
Millman, Maria (b. 1939), Sociologist. Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in
America (1980).
A socio-anecdotal study that uses interviews with attendees of
American weight loss groups such as the National Association to Aid
Fat Americans (NAAFA), Overeater’s Anonymous (OA), and a fat
camp for children. Through the voices of the “fat,” Millman constructs a
critique of these organisations and of the dominant social attitudes towards fat.
The interviewees’ anonymity – they are given false names – provokes content that is honest and often raw. One interviewee, “Laura
Campbell,” succinctly sums up the contradictions in the NAAFA: “Most
of the people in NAAFA are not really happy – we would prefer to be
thin if we could but NAAFA has helped me to learn how to manage”
(14). “Campbell’s” comment suggests that fat acceptance groups are
under-scored with fat-hatred, a paradox that the work of WANN seeks
to rectify.
Such compelling anecdotes are widely used as the basis for other
studies, such as SEID and CHERNIN, and demonstrate the depth of fatvilification in late twentieth-century society.
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Orbach, Susie (b. 1946), Psychoanalyst. Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978).
Orbach’s work politicises compulsive eating and identifies unresolved emotional difficulties as its source. Her psychological approach
directly influenced CHERNIN, and was among the first to theorise the
benefits of fatness.
Building on the studies of BRUCH, Orbach argues that fat is a
physical indicator aimed at non-verbally expressing anger towards the
mother (36 and 16). Women feed themselves to compensate for the
“inadequate emotional feeding” (41) that they feel has been denied
them from their mothers.
Orbach broadens her argument to include the psychological benefits of fatness, which are based in protest against a woman’s objectified, subservient positioning in modern society (35). She writes: “Every
‘overweight’ woman creates a crack in the popular culture’s ability to
make us mere products” (44). Overeating is a political means for a
woman to consume more than her allotted social space: “We want to
look and be substantial. We want to be bigger than society will let us.
We want to take up as much space as the other sex” (35).
Orbach’s work has suffered under contemporary fat theory, as
have most psychoanalytic discourses, but remains a historically influential text that was important in removing the blame of overeating
away from the ‘fat,’ and also in reinscribing the traditionally maledominated psychoanalytical field with feminine signifiers (Cooper 87).
The collapse of the psychoanalytic model is, according to BRAZIEL
AND LEBESCO, that it collapsed the fat body into “the traumatised body”
(Braziel and LeBesco 4). Contemporary theory has a more constructive view of the fat body and aims to “understand corpulent bodies
without seeking any internal causal agent” (Braziel and LeBesco 4).
Fat activists, such as Charlotte Cooper (1998), concur, and argue that
treating fat as a disease prevents its ‘patients’ from reconciling fat as
an everyday, normal experience (Cooper 91).
Seid, Roberta Pollack (b. 1945), Historian. Never Too Thin: Why Women
Are at War With Their Bodies (1989).
A historical account that plots the changing social ideals of the
female body, from antiquity to the end of the 1980s. Gathering data
from diverse sources (medical journals, fashion magazines and parallel academic works), Seid assembles a history that is antipathetic towards populist hegemony yet curiously anti-feminist.
Seid argues that the “pervasiveness of the weight-loss imperative"
(15), manifests in fashion, food fetishism and the “health ethic” (166),
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Fattys’ Cyclopaedia
contribute to a “diet-induced obesity” (32). She also argues that “feminism,” advertisements, and an impossible body ideal based on aristocratic aesthetics (131) encourage women “to search for perfection and
to feel dissatisfied with what we have achieved” (254).
Thus, launching an argument that WOLF strenuously counters,
Seid attributes the rise of (a singular) feminism in “inadvertently” contributing to a congruent rise in eating disorders (275). Feminism, according to Seid, brought about the rise of the individual that in turn encouraged personal attributes of instability and selfishness. According
to Seid, in feminism “the realistic commitment was to the self” (254).
Further, Seid displays a curiously misogynist attitude and suggests
that women have been confused by media representations of themselves as strong and confident: “Women quickly, and probably unconsciously, began to imitate the strong, confident gait, gestures, posture,
and movements glorified by film stars and the women’s magazines”
(259).
This focus on the media’s responsibility for inducing gender-role
confusion was continued in further fat theorists, particularly WOLF, with
the anti-feminism rectified. Seid argues that women accept their bodies in all their differences, firmly placing the solution to fat-hatred, and
the cause in women’s hands.
Wann, Marilyn (b. 1969), Fat activist. FAT?SO! <www.fatso.com> (1994).
FAT?SO! is a fat activist’s website and quarterly zine that challenges social attitudes towards fat and actively subverts notions of
shame. Launched in July 1994 by editor Marilyn Wann, its streetwise
tone is part educational and part left-wing rhetoric that establishes a
forum for anyone to add their material and “break the taboo around fat”
(Wann, Are You a Fatso??).
FAT?SO! does not define the concept of ‘fat’ in terms of weight
and overweight – “Anyone who can pinch an inch has a story to tell”
(Write for Fat?So!) – but states that fat is a state of mind. FAT?SO!
thus inadvertently contributes to the all-pervasive body ideal, where
everyone who can ‘pinch an inch’ is classified as fat, but in Wann’s
configuration everybody is proud of their inch.
FAT?SO!’s subversion acknowledges the contradictions of fat
pride, which is often based upon self-hatred, but as Wann writes, it is
all about attitude:
The fatso life takes attitude, it takes existential credentials (the
kind that come from being an outcast and fighting self-hatred
at the same time). It takes laughing at Jenny Craig commer-
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cials and voting for the fat Elvis and still for some reason lying
about your weight on your driver's license. (Wann, Zines and
E-Zines)
FAT?SO! does not offer a fetishised view of fat like KLEIN, but one
where all people are encouraged to be politically conscious of fat discrimination and subvert the dominant view of a society that is attempting to shame them.
Wolf, Naomi (b. 1962), Feminist Scholar. The Beauty Myth (1991).
Wolf argues that the rise of the women’s movement was concurrent with an increase in eating disorders because threatened males
constructed new ways of reasserting dominance through promoting
thinness as the cultural ideal (17). Women have been indoctrinated by
the cultish techniques of brainwashing through manipulated media images (73) which commodified the female body (49) and advocated the
“beauty myth” (121).
The beauty myth is “a cultural fixation on female thinness,” which
Wolf asserts is “not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience” (187). Female obedience is enforced
through diminished energy, time and opportunities due to the efforts of
upholding the new beauty standard of physical fitness and eternal
youth.
Wolf asserts that mind control has long-term consequences in that
it physiologically changes the workings of the brain: “The fear-of-fat
aspect actually changes the way the brain works. Women caught in it
are subjected to classic, long-established forms of thought-control”
(121). HESSE-BIBER’s work develops this hypothesis of internalised
control.
Wolf’s theory assumes that women suffer from low self-esteem,
an assumption that is contradicted by fat activists such as WANN and,
according to BRAZIEL AND LEBESCO, Wolf’s argument inhibits the celebration of fatness.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braziel, Jana Evans, and Kathleen LeBesco, eds. Bodies out of Bounds:
Fatness and Transgression. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001.
Bruch, Hilde. Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person
Within. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity. New York:
Times Books, 1985.
___. The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. New
York: Harper & Row, 1981.
Cooper, Charlotte. Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size. London: The
Women's Press, 1998.
Hesse-Biber, Sharlene. Am I Thin Enough Yet? The Cult of Thinness and
the Commercialization of Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996.
Klein, Richard. Eat Fat. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.
Millman, Maria. Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1980.
Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. 1978. Second ed. London: Arrow
Books, 1988.
Seid, Roberta Pollack. Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War with Their
Bodies. New York: Prentice Hall, 1989.
Wann, Marilyn. Are You a Fatso?? 2002. World Wide Web Page. FAT?SO!
Website. Available: http://www.fatso.com/quiz.html. Accessed: 23
April 2005.
___. Write for Fat?So! 2002. World Wide Web Page. FAT?SO! Website.
Available: http://www.fatso.com/write.html. 23 April 2005.
___. Zines, E-Zines: An Interview with the Creator of Fat?So! 2002. World
Wide Web Page. FAT?SO! Website. Available: http://www.zinebook.
com/interv/fatso.html. Accessed: 23 April 2005.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Vintage, 1991.
Melbourne University
[email protected]
347