Antigone: Sophocles' art, Hölderlin's insight 9781934542224, 1934542229

Introduction to the American edition -- Introduction to the French edition -- Antigone: young girl or queen? -- The war

1,158 90 1MB

English Pages xvii, 205 pages ; 21 cm [223] Year 2010

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD FILE

Polecaj historie

Antigone: Sophocles' art, Hölderlin's insight
 9781934542224, 1934542229

Table of contents :
Introduction to the American edition --
Introduction to the French edition --
Antigone: young girl or queen? --
The war for Thebes in the light of the risen sun --
Creon, and the formidable tricks of man --
Creon, Antigone, Ismene: the great debates --
Friends and foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon --
Tiresias, or "pure speech" --
Rhythm, language, and time in Holderlin 's remarks on Antigone and Oedipus.

Citation preview

ANTIGONE Sophocles’ Art, Hölderlin’s Insight

ANTIGONE Sophocles’ Art, Hölderlin’s Insight

Kathrin H. Rosenfield

Published with the support of PRONEX/FAPERGS-CNPQ “Lógica-Ontologia-Ética” Brazil

The Davies Group, Publishers

Aurora, Colorado

Copyright © 2010 Kathrin H. Rosenfield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means—electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Cover: Mark Rothko, Antigone, copyright © 1941, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation. By permission. Translated from the French by Charles B. Duff Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Rosenfield, Katharina Holzermayr. Antigone : Sophocles’ art, Holderlin’s insight / Kathrin H. Rosenfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934542-22-4 (alk. paper) 1. Sophocles. Antigone. 2. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843–Knowledge– Greek literature. 3. Antigone (Greek mythology) in literature. I. Title. PA4413.A7R67 2010 882’.01--dc22 2010012117

Printed in the United States of America Published 2009. The Davies Group Publishers, Aurora, CO 1234567890 iv

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction to the American Edition

ix

Introduction to the French Edition Chapter 1 Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

xiii 1

Digression: Whose Antigone? A digression on Hölderlin’s approach to translation

23

Chapter 2 The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

43

Chapter 3 Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

63

Intermezzo: The Beauty of Antigone Chapter 4 Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

87 99

Chapter 5 Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

121

Chapter 6 Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

149

Chapter 7 Rhythm, Language, and Time in Hölderlin ’s Remarks on Antigone and Oedipus

171

Bibliography

191

Index

207

v

vi

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Brazilian National Research Center, CNPq, for the financial and institutional support which has made it possible to write and publish this essay, as well as my colleagues at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul for all of their understanding and help. This book owes much to the exchange of thoughts and suggestions that occurred during the conferences, workshops and discussions with my colleagues, students and associated artists in the Nucleo Filosofia, Literatura, Arte (FILIA-PHILIA). I owe particular thanks to Lawrence Flores Pereira, whose Portuguese translation, both elegant and colloquial, contributed immensely to the success of the professional performance of the play in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2004 and 2005. The idea that Greek tragedy may have achieved its power by establishing a relation between dialogues and episodes of song and dance led to immensely enriching discussions with the director, Luciano Alabarse, and the cast of more than forty actors, composers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, stage-designers… not to mention audiences in more than twenty-five sold-out performances. The author and the translator learned a lot from the experience during the rehearsals, which obliged us often to translate into gestures, tones, and all sorts of emotional or almost bodily intensities the textual suggestions that cannot be expressed adequately in words. In preparing for this book I was particularly fortunate to have studied in Paris at a time when Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre VidalNaquet were revolutionizing the study of Greek literature and culture, and when Jacques Derrida was opening up new and valuable critical perspectives on literature. They introduced me to new worlds, and to worlds within worlds. I am grateful beyond measure to their memory, and particularly grateful to Jacques Derrida and André Major for publishing this book in French. In the past ten years I vii

Antigone

have had the good fortune of lively contact with a wonderful array of scholars and critics in the United States. Pietro Pucci and Frederick Ahl at Cornell, Allan Shapiro, Matthew Roller and Richard Macksey at Johns Hopkins, Glenn Most at Chicago, and Thomas Pfau at Duke. They have given me the chance to test my approaches to Hölderlin and Sophocles, not only on them, but on their colleagues and students in very fruitful discussions and seminars. The American edition of this book has benefited greatly from their suggestions. Last but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Neil Hertz and Charles Duff. Neil and Charlie believed in this book and devoted countless hours to the task of bringing it before the American public—Neil by opening the doors of American universities and championing the book with publishers, Charlie by translating the book entirely as a gift in friendship. It is a pleasure to acknowledge such friends.

viii

Introduction to the American Edition As I look back to the feelings and thoughts that provoked this little book ten years ago, I continue to wonder at the survival of a basic—and, I think, misguided—approach to Antigone and her tragedy. Somehow, in spite of the countless new approaches that literary critique has developed over the past century, we still read this play basically as Hegel did some two hundred years ago. Like Hegel, we see Antigone as a beautiful enactment highlighting the social and political tensions between the oikos and the polis.1 Consciously or unconsciously, however, we do more than this: we fit the story of tragic bravery into a mainly Christian pattern, casting Antigone as a martyr in accordance with the literary conventions of hagiography, and ignore Hegel’s genuine insights into tragedy and the ancient world. I began to think about Antigone because I was not satisfied with this simple and Christian approach to a drama that had always seemed to me complicated and pagan, and I began to write this book because I was excited to discover a very different and much more convincing view in the translations and critical remarks of Friedrich Hölderlin. But I gradually started realizing that I was doing an odd thing. Although Hölderlin is often considered the greatest lyric poet in the history of German literature, his translations from Sophocles have had either too bad or too enthusiastic reputations. From the time of their publication to the present day, readers have been startled by knotty thought and awkward diction, very different from the apparent clarity for which Sophocles has always been celebrated. And in spite of general praise, scholars of Greek and German literature paradoxically conclude that Hölderlin basically betrayed Sophocles’ spirit or intentions. Like Derrida, whose Glas makes us aware of the implicit psychological and erotic undercurrents in Hegel’s reading of Antigone, ix

Antigone

Hölderlin makes us aware of thrilling legal and psychological turns of the screw in Sophocles’ tricky text. Verse after verse, Hölderlin’s hints helped me to understand the more difficult and obscure Greek passages. Other translators have done a better job of harmonizing the hidden Greek dissonances under the (apparently) smooth elegant surface of Sophocles. But Hölderlin, again and again, got beneath the surface and touched the living heart of Sophoclean poetry, dissonance and all. This was the insight that made me return to Hölderlin’s weird translations in the late 1990s. Since then I have had the opportunity of testing his theories on stage, serving as dramaturge for a dynamic Brazilian production of Antigone that succeeded beyond anyone’s hopes. I had already cross-checked Hölderlin’s insights against the remarkable post-war scholarship, mostly French, that has brought the techniques of Anthropology and Structuralism to bear on ancient Greek literature, and I was delighted to see that his approaches pleased large audiences as much as they agreed with modern scholarly discoveries. What distinguishes great poets from other people? They see the world in images more surprising, they hear and give voice to sounds and expressions much denser than everyday understanding. To be sure, Hölderlin knew a remarkable amount about Greek history, but there was more: his sensitive insights into Greek poetry helped him to grasp (rather than understand) some very particular Greek details— mostly overlooked—in Antigone. Reading Sophocles with a poet’s eye, he saw a story much denser and more thrilling, much subtler and more ironic, than his contemporaries (and ours). Although Fifth-century Athens was very different from any modern world, the art of Sophocles has parallels in modern literature. Hölderlin himself is a good example of this; Robert Musil and Samuel Beckett are others; but more and more I come to think that the closest parallel may be Henry James, the master of unsettling suggestions. So often, James’ smiling figures have a disquieting potential to stir x

Introduction to the American Edition

faint desire, fear, and awe, without ever letting the precise contours of the truth appear to our vision or understanding. Reading Sophocles through Hölderlin’s eyes, we can discover that the Greek poet is the Master of Masters, and that the noblest of Classical heroines and heroes, Antigone and Oedipus, are fighting against the smiling malevolence of those who most appear to wish them well. It is time to discard our images of Antigone as a plaster saint and Creon as a cardboard villain. We can do this only through new critical evaluations and, eventually, new translations. Even the best modern versions of the play rarely avoid the all-too-rigid opposition of the saintly young girl and the cold, power-thirsty tyrant arguing about legal, religious or ideological abstractions. Hölderlin’s courageous dissonances, on the contrary, provide important clues showing how to make Antigone a gripping play. When I followed these clues, a new story emerged. The abstract contrast of innocent martyr and wicked tyrant gave way to challenging intellectual and intuitive action on both sides. Hölderlin restored the double-plot of the tragedy, revealed the sincerity of efforts on both sides, and unraveled the moral complexities and compromises not only of tyrannical Creon but also of rebellious Antigone. Creon, after all, changes his mind towards the end of the play, and Antigone goes to her grave with a surprisingly serene acceptance. Hölderlin’s poetic ear allows us to hear unspoken calculations and anxieties beneath the dry religious and political arguments. These unspoken things are really there, in Sophocles, but the stunning subtlety of Sophocles’ art requires an equal subtlety in an interpreter. Similarly, Hölderlin’s poetic eye restores a full and plausible psychological identity to both figures, firmly in tune with the spirit of Sophoclean enlightenment. Here Hölderlin’s historical and literary knowledge was invaluable; but it was his poet’s eye that showed him which historical facts, out of so many, bore on the story. There is a challenging thrill in the little details arranged in subtle constellations by the great poets’ hands. xi

Antigone

Antigone is a great drama, full of poetic density and subtle poetic trickery. It deserves to be read as all great poetry should be read, with a keen eye for detail and an ear alive to tone and overtone. The more we stop to see and hear the suggestive overtones of Antigone, the more we will feel the deep, dark thrill of tragedy. Hölderlin was the first to meet Sophocles on his own ground. He remains, as Nicole Loraux has said recently, “the best reader-interpreter of Sophocles.”

1. Hegel, 1970 , vol. 3, pp. 292-355; cf. Vidal-Naquet’s homage to Hegel, Sophocle, Tragedies, Gallimard, 1962, “Préface”, p. 22 s. xii

Introduction to the French Edition This book can be read in several ways—as a close reading of a Sophoclean tragedy, as an inquiry into the principles of translation, or as an approach to the thought of Friedrich Hölderlin. But it is still one book, held together by Hölderlin’s insights into Sophocles’ tremendously thrilling plot—a story much more thrilling than normal translations have permitted us to understand. Hölderlin was both a thinker and a translator. He believed that great poetry forms a unique connection between timeless truth and the complexity of actual human life, and he tried, as a translator, to rebuild that connection where it had been eroded by changes of time, place and custom. On enthusiasm and hysteria, seriousness and irony In the room the women come and go, Talking of Michelangelo. —T.S. Eliot

When a certain kind of person speaks to me of his feelings, I want to say: “Wait, let’s get an abacus. We’ll see it all more clearly.” —Robert Musil Is there a secret in Sophocles’ Antigone? We all think we know the story of the pious young girl who defies the powerful king and pays with her life. But is there a deeper story, hidden beneath the bright, rational surface of Sophocles’ dialogue? Hölderlin thought there was. His translation of Antigone has often been called “obscure” because he attempted to translate more than the words on the page. xiii

Antigone

He tried to bring the whole story to life, as an Athenian audience would have felt it, by adding references to important historical and religious practices that Athenians understood instinctively, and his own readers did not. The best way to show the affinities between Hölderlin and Sophocles is to reverse the standard approach of Hölderlinian studies. Instead of beginning with Hölderlin’s theories, let us begin with his poetry and translation. In a close reading, let us see what he actually does with the words of Sophocles and the story of Antigone, and whether his supposed “faults” as a translator are not actually sophisticated poetic techniques that bring the story to life and reveal the poetic logic of Sophocles. This book began in a moment of personal surprise. I had not expected a famously awkward translation to move me, or to raise the kind of literary issues that we think of as modern or post-modern; but Hölderlin’s translation of Antigone did both. I found myself wondering what emotions Hölderlin and Sophocles were arousing in me, and what these emotions had to do with Greek thought. Was Hölderlin right to talk of a “higher connection” above the level of rational thought, some reality that could be guessed or “divined” through certain feelings? And what exactly did he mean by “inner intensity?” He did not mean that a great work of art operates like an attack of hysteria, depriving us for a time of our rightful senses, but found in Sophocles’ tragedy a more subtle mixture of ancient and modern, of myth and classical enlightenment: from Plato’s ridicule of Ion’s “ecstasies” to the fear, common from Nietzsche and Baudelaire to Eliot and Musil, that something about modernity had frozen and hardened the free-flowing imagination that once found expression in ritual and drama. Was I coming up against the ancient idea that a state of enthusiasm or inspiration can lead to a revelation—of the divine, or of some “other state” that becomes visible in moments of intense clairvoyance? Was it true that these instants, placed outside the ordinary world of time and space, so different from long-lasting xiv

Introduction to the French Edition

psychological states, could reveal the foundation of our thoughts and actions? It was clear to me, and welcome, that philosophical thought is intrinsic to Hölderlin. His theoretical writings—exploring concepts that he calls “rhythm,” “higher connection,” “inner intensity,” and “calculation”—recall Plato explicitly, even though they deny Plato’s theory of forms. Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles complete these philosophical sketches and show, concretely, what he meant by “poetic logic:” the concrete connection (not metaphysical, esoteric, or sentimental) between ordinary thought and a different order of knowledge. And I was continually impressed by similarities of thought and approach between Hölderlin and Robert Musil—a novelist who thought about the mathematical precision of the imagination. Despite great and obvious differences, both writers had similar ideas about the influence that an “other state” (anderer Zustand,) different from quotidian reality, could exercise over human understanding. Like Plato, Hölderlin and Musil used irony seriously to show how strange are the foundations of our notions of the sublime and beautiful. They made enthusiasm a subject for anthropologists. Even if Hölderlin recognizes the primacy of reality, the network of material things and imaginative patterns that structure human understanding, he demands a place also for what he calls “calculation,” by which he means rational operations. The role of calculation is to reveal, or set, the limits of the real, and to show, on the horizon of ordinary perception, the “other state,” the realm of the sacred and the beautiful. Despite the density of his philosophical sketches, Hölderlin did not weave German “idealistic” fantasies around the ancient text of Sophocles. His extraordinary sensibility opened the ancient imagination to him, and his translations aimed to bring it all back to life: politics, religion, thought, the whole texture of life and imagination in a vanished world.

xv

Antigone

Indifference and Enthusiasm: the two poles of “poetic calculation” Although Musil hardly ever speaks of Hölderlin, the two writers share a central preoccupation. Both try to fill the gap between systematic philosophers like Kant or Descartes, with their orderly intellectual machinery, and the sprightly insights of intelligent poets like Nietzsche or Kafka. Both demand mathematical precision in literature, and this lays upon their critics an obligation to investigate ideas that rarely appear in imaginative works. Hölderlin’s “calculation” and “poetic logic” are good examples. I became more and more convinced that a proper criticism would free Hölderlin from Schiller’s charge that he had subjected Sophocles to his own over-wrought fantasies: I find myself, once for all, in the desperate situation of trying to tell whether other people are worth something, and if they can become something [….] I want to know if Schmidt, Richter, Hölderlin will remain, consistently under all circumstances, so subjective, so eccentric, so obstinately partial; whether this is part of their nature or comes only from a lack of aesthetic nourishment and from the influence of the outside world, which has a nasty habit of contradicting their beloved ideals.1 Interestingly, although no one today thinks of Hölderlin as a simple madman, many critics repeat Schiller’s charge that he took undue liberties with Sophocles’ text. I have come to disagree with them. As I have compared the different philological interpretations of Antigone and Oedipus Rex, the two tragedies that Hölderlin translated, and even more as I have considered the modern scholars who have thrown the lights of Anthropology and Structuralism onto the societies of ancient Greece, I have come more and more to xvi

Introduction to the French Edition

think that Hölderlin had a truly uncommon gift. He was uniquely able to grasp the essence of Sophocles’ art and of his social context. Holderlin’s translations are a splendid introduction to the Greek imagination. If his text seems strange to us, well, it is time we realized that ancient Greece was a very strange place indeed.

1. Letter to Goethe, 15 August, 1797. “Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Schiller,” in Gedenkausgabe, éd. Ernst Beutler, vol. 20, Zurich, Artemis Verlag, 1950, p. 398 et seq.

xvii

Antigone

xviii

Chapter 1 Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

The status of Antigone in the myth and in Hölderlin’s translation The story of Antigone still has mythic power for us in the modern world. We tend to remember it when we are dealing with difficult ethical issues, particularly situations in which we are confronted with contradictory laws or incompatible obligations. Because the story is alive for us, we see it through the prism of our own ideas and concerns. The great translators of Sophocles have emphasized the moral dimensions of the story (family v. state, gods of Olympus v. gods of the underworld, etc.) because these are concerns that recur endlessly in human history. Hölderlin does this too—no competent translator can avoid it—but he does more: he aims at a “higher connection” that unites the conflicts of the tragedy in a cosmic order, and he reaches that higher connection in an odd way, by appearing to pull back from the general to the particular, emphasizing that the story of Antigone is a public story of a particular political conflict, not just a personal drama about universal ethical dilemmas. Hölderlin finds in the tragedy of Sophocles a piece of a larger and even more fundamental drama, the foundation myth of Thebes, a story that poses basic questions about the human journey from disorder to order, from chaos to culture, from Hobbesian savagery to community. To bring out the political dimension of the tragedy, Hölderlin shows how Sophocles mixes elements of his own culture, customs that his audience would have taken for granted, into certain parts of the Theban legend. Holderlin’s historical knowledge,

2

Antigone

his remarkable prefiguring of historical anthropology, allows him to spotlight the very unusual political situation in which the protagonists quite suddenly find themselves. He begins with the obvious fact that Creon is not a hereditary monarch but a regent and a military leader who has attained the throne by an unlikely series of accidents. Less obvious, however, is Holderlin’s next step: that Creon is attempting, on his first morning in power, to establish his family as a new royal dynasty.1 And that brings Holderlin to Antigone. Antigone is the eldest child of the last king, Oedipus, and the heiress of the legitimate dynasty, the Labdacids. In this context, the name of Antigone—in place of or against (anti) legitimate descent (gone)—takes on a very specific meaning: Antigone will champion the rights of the royal family—her family—against Creon’s usurpation. Hölderlin brings this out. Hölderlin’s Antigone is not merely a young girl who puts herself in the way of power. She is a young princess, the last of her line, who stands between a usurper and the crown. Sophocles’ Athenian audience understood this because it was part of their world. Fifth-century Athens had a law to cover a young woman in Antigone’s position. Sophocles did not need to stress the point, and his text does not stress it; he presents Antigone simply as a young woman engaged to be married to Creon’s son Haemon, without specifying the circumstances of her betrothal. Sophocles avoids the introduction of a visible anachronism, 2 though some details of the Greek text put Antigone in the position of a daughter who “follows the kleros (inheritance) of her father.”3 Under Athenian law, Antigone is not just a young fiancée’; she is an “epikleros,” a word whose standard English translation of “heiress” does not do it justice. An epikleros was subject to unique rules of marriage, and her son continued the line of her father, not that of her husband. Hölderlin grasps this and realizes, as other translators do not, that it is the key to the play. In his translation, a number of hints in the choral songs make it clear that the people of Thebes are hoping that she, their “epikleros,” will ensure the legitimate succession, that a son

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

3

of hers will continue the line of the Labdacids, the line of Oedipus.4 Hölderlin brings this out with an infinite subtlety of nuances, of things said and unsaid, to the end that his audience, far removed from the Athens of Sophocles, can understand or intuitively grasp the political relationship between Antigone and Creon and feel the emotions of a struggle that is political rather than merely personal. Which dynasty will rule Thebes? Hölderlin’s approach to translating Antigone is unusual, perhaps unique; it has repercussions on many other aspects of the tragedy, and of tragedy in general. Hölderlin pushes his analysis beyond the limits of discourse. He hears remote, almost homeopathic overtones. Most remarkably, he gives serious interpretive weight to non-verbal gestures and movements of the soul as expressed in inflections of the voice or in the tone and rhythm of declamation. He postulates an inner intensity (das Innige) as the aesthetic foundation of experience and knowledge. This inner intensity merges thought and feeling seamlessly, returning to the logical condition and to the “principle of distinctions in which we think and live.” (StA, VI, p. 211 and 223.) This inner intensity generates the poetic metaphors for that alternative reality in which thought and being coincide (as Kant says of the mind of God), allowing Hölderlin to think of tragedy as a “metaphor for intellectual intuition” and to give aesthetic experience a privileged role, independent of words and structured argument, in the total experience of tragedy. Hölderlin tests this approach in his translation of Sophocles. He attempts to present the play as an aesthetic whole in which the rhythm of thought and representation, of verbal color and atmosphere (Stimmung) assures the coherence of linked propositions.5 Hölderlin’s order is not exclusively discursive and logical; its coherence is not the coherence of mere formal argument. Rather, he depends on poetic and aesthetic perceptions and techniques to establish a “more infinite connection” that cannot be imprisoned in one signifier or one particular symbol. He values flux and a kind of

4

Antigone

poetic sfumato. Signifiers become less important than the dynamic relationships between them, meticulous expressions less important than a network of connections by which he can understand and transmit the density of the Sophoclean text. His method opens to him a surprising palimpsest of meanings included in the richness of tonal nuances that overdetermine the discursive statements, bending, refracting, and multiplying their meanings to an extreme degree. Hölderlin begins to approach Antigone—her challenge, her love, and her hate—by identifying and attempting to render a network of oscillations and nuances in which the tragic action evolves. His translation is (in)famous for its refusal to make meanings simple and immediate, but this is not a defect, it is the essence of his literary method, and it allows us to understand the stakes for which the characters are playing. The “oddness” and “loneliness” of the heroine, noticed by all critics and usually interpreted as a civic problem or a psychological weakness, appear in Holderlin’s interpretation to be features with a double meaning: they are both a subjective failing and an objective quality, all flowing from the unique symbolic and legal status of the epikleros Antigone. In fact, the Chorus speaks explicitly of “the hope attached to the sole remaining branch that can brighten the palace of Oedipus” (OCT, 599 et seq.) This hope for a continuity of the house of Ladbacus obviously makes Antigone a rival to Creon on the political level. The subtle handling of certain spatial and temporal relationships in Hölderlin’s translation reinforces the idea that Antigone could be more than a young girl ready for marriage, and that the title of “Queen” by which Hölderlin (not Sophocles) calls her (H, 978) is a reality for her. Antigone and Creon: two attempts at purification According to the “poetic logic” that Hölderlin finds in Antigone, the play has multiple layers, and each of the main characters

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

5

has at least two stories. At its most obvious level, the play is about the burial of Polyneices. He has attacked Thebes, and he and his brother Eteocles have killed each other in battle. How should he be treated after his death? Antigone argues from religious practice: Polyneices should be buried by his family, because he was a member of the family, a philos, a friend-relative, and his family has a religious obligation to bury him. Creon argues from political reality: Polyneices should be left to rot because he rebelled against legitimate authority and attacked and almost took his own native city. But Sophocles does not present these arguments in any cut-and-dried way. He is a tricky poet, and he makes his two protagonists present their arguments in cunning ways that carry meanings that refer to unmentioned and unmentionable possibilities within political and mythical practices. So the reader (or spectator) hears each story as two stories. Very different stories, too. When Antigone speaks of the kinship or friendship (philia) that she feels for Polyneices, what she says is usually translated as: “Beloved brother, I your loving sister will be buried with you.” That is the first story. But her words can also mean: “Beloved, I will lie down with you as a lover.” That is, in fact, how Ismene takes them, without any prompting from Holderlin, reproaching her sister with excessive “warmth.” As for Creon, he too is much warmer than is usually thought. He explains his decree by distinguishing between friends and enemies of the city, which sounds cool enough; but he then goes against religious practice in his orders for the bodies of both dead brothers. Although he describes them as “joint-mutual-suicides,” he decrees public honors for Eteocles—an unheard-of thing for a Greek suicide— and an equally unheard-of public humiliation for Polyneices. The treatment of Polyneices is unnecessary, inasmuch as Greek practice made provision for the burial of enemies and rebels: they were not buried with public honors, but were left outside the walls where their relatives would claim them and bury them quietly and without a

6

Antigone

funerary monument. It is more than odd that Sophocles’ Creon (who is praised by Tiresias—and will reappear in Oedipus Rex as cautious and conflict-averse) should not have taken the easy way out and allowed the relatives of Polyneices to bury him in accordance with religion and custom. He must have known that his decree against burial had a great chance of provoking defiance, since the relatives of Polyneices had a religious obligation to bury him. This strange vehemence, in a man normally peaceful and diplomatic, suggests that he too has a second story, a set of motives that he does not state explicitly. His decree may not, in fact, be about Polyneices at all, or about the burial of a public enemy. The ban on burying Polyneices may be less important than the penalty—death—prescribed for anyone who does bury him. In fact, the whole decree may be a trap for the person who has a religious obligation to bury him. His nearest blood relation. Antigone. That an easy-going statesman should concoct a diabolical plot against his own niece may seem odd, even incomprehensible. But Creon has quite defensible reasons, public and private, for wishing Antigone dead. As a father, Creon fears the extinction of his line. Creon’s only son is engaged to Antigone, and Antigone is an epikleros, an heiress. The Chorus understands what this means and sings of “the hope attached to the last-remaining offspring of Oedipus.” Or, as Vernant says, “the marriage of the nearest male relative [Haemon] with the epikleros [Antigone] is a religious obligation binding on the relative and imposing a serious renunciation upon him. The son of such a marriage does not, in law, continue his father’s line, but the line of his maternal grandfather…the daughter of the royal house is, in fact, legally her own father.” Creon is anguished at the thought that his line will die out as his son marries the epikleros. It is worth mentioning also that the husband of an epikleros is not a king, but a kind of Prince Consort, subordinate to his wife, and that Creon has a proper Greek horror of the subordination of any man to any

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

7

woman. (H, 703–705.) As we will see later, this was not what Creon had in mind when he betrothed Haemon to Antigone. Antigone, with two living brothers, was not then an epikleros, and Haemon, with his elder brother Menoeceus still alive, was not yet the last hope of his house. As the play opens, then, Creon is responding to a new situation, very disagreeable to him as a father, and a strong motive for his actions. Creon’s other motives have to do with the public good, and here, too, his concerns are far from frivolous. At the front of his mind is the pollution that befell the Labdacids through the incestuous marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta. Nor is he alone in worrying about this: as early as the Prologue, the Chorus speaks of incest as the prime reason for the fall of the royal house. When Creon speaks, then, of the need to end the fatal disorders of people who cannot distinguish between friends and foes, he is alluding to the curse of incest as it falls on the children of the incestuous marriage. (OCT, 187 et seq.) Creon derides the “useless sons” who provoke “the laughter of our enemies,” (OCT, 645–647.) Now that Eteocles and Polyneices are dead, Creon has a chance to give Thebes “pollution-free” rulers. But Antigone stands in the way. As a fruit of the incestuous marriage, she carries the pollution that has brought chaos and death to the city, and her marriage to Haemon, if it takes place, will only make things worse. As the daughter of Creon’s sister Jocasta, and of Jocasta’s son Oedipus, Antigone is more closely related to Creon than to her own grandfather. Besides, she is an epikleros. Because of the unique rules of the epiclerate, her children will rule Thebes as Labdacids, continuing the polluted line of Oedipus. And not of Oedipus only. Pollution was nothing new in the great families of Thebes, particularly in the royal house. According to the civic myths, they descended from the spartoi (seed-men,) monsters who sprang from dragon’s teeth planted in the ground, and then proceeded (all but five of them) to kill each other in a

8

Antigone

mad combat. The mutual slaughter of Eteocles and Polyneices, descendants of the spartoi, recalls this myth and threatens a continuation of savage behavior. The myths of the Theban cycle are fundamentally about the difference between savagery and civilization, and the great people of Thebes, descended from extreme savages, are always shown as threatening to slide back into savagery themselves—and also of being noble enough to desire to overcome these slips. This is the import of the incestuous marriage and the double fratricide, and who can say if Antigone is exempt? Creon is not at all sure: for him, the daughter of Oedipus seems to have too much in common with her father and her brothers. Even Ismene, in the first scene of the play, is so ashamed of her family that she fears the curse will touch everyone who is faithful to them (H, 57 et seq.) Although she is Oedipus’s own daughter, her fears are no different from those spoken by the messenger in Oedipus Rex (1224 et seq.) who advises the people of Thebes to shun all the descendants of the polluted line. It is not hard to understand how Creon, as an act of disinterested public spirit, might seek to break his son’s engagement to the young princess whose marriage will continue the rule of such a family. Bringing this out requires dense poetic thought. It raises ethical problems that appear, despite their apparent simplicity, in Hegel’s dictum, in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, that a true ethical conflict presupposes sincerity.6 When Hegel speaks of the problem of sincerity, in a passage on the difference between the reason that makes laws and the reason that tests them, he is doubtless thinking of the sincerity that Sophocles attributes to Creon (Oedipus Rex, 1517 et seq.) Creon is still sincere when he moves against Antigone. Hegel’s observation may serve to throw light on a little-noted aspect of this play, the obvious sincerity with which Creon imposes his decree. He shows neither the dark trickiness of a Machiavellian despot nor the stoic patience of an enlightened despot. Instead, finding himself suddenly in an unexpected situation after the death

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

9

of the two brothers, he makes a sincere attempt to meet both his public and his private duties, providing good futures for his city and his son. As an accidental head of state, he needs to consolidate power, if only for the sake of public order, and he tries to solidify a shaky peace by purifying the city of the hereditary pollution that everyone blames for the public calamity. This is the main issue that he faces. The pollution, the miasma, the shadow of an incestuous marriage, hangs over a victory in which the city has lost its legitimate ruler. Two royal brothers have killed each other, and their weird struggle seems outside the realm of civilized life or civilized warfare. What can he do? It all comes back to the marriage of his son Haemon with the epikleros Antigone. If this marriage takes place, the cursed house of the Labdacids will continue to rule Thebes, with results impossible to imagine. Moreover, the marriage will actually make matters worse; Haemon and Antigone are themselves too closely related for anyone but a professional genealogist to disentangle. No father could wish such children for his son. No ruler could allow so ill-omened a marriage to threaten the peace of the city. Sophocles traces the movement of Creon’s thought with exceptional subtlety. All his concerns—finding the cause of the city’s woe, setting the city on a course of peace and stability, making a good marriage for his son, founding a family—lead him to the same point: Haemon’s marriage with Antigone must not take place. He needs to free Thebes from the cursed line of Oedipus that has brought them little but war and pestilence. Creon’s frigid-seeming obstinacy is the stern “tyrannical sacrilege” of a desperate ruler who has no other way of re-establishing (or is it establishing?) a civilized order for the life of the people. What Creon does to fight the curse At the beginning of the play, an Athenian audience would have approved of Creon’s attempt to establish himself as a tyrant.

10

Antigone

The Athenians did not automatically disapprove of tyranny. For them “tyranny” was not our modern pejorative term for brutal and illegitimate one-man rule; it was a form of democratic or quasi-democratic power, power not inherited but won through “individual effort and achievement.” 7 As Creon is presented by Sophocles, he seems disposed to establish his tyranny in this kind of positive way: he founds a new dynasty to purify Thebes from the miasma of the family of Oedipus. Unfortunately, as Hölderlin and Hegel noticed, Creon and Antigone are making incompatible attempts to purify the city at the same time. The difference between the trajectories of the two characters lies, not in their fundamental aim, but in the different relationships that they form (or fail to form) with the chain of causation that the ancients called Destiny or Necessity. Creon’s main task is to purify the miasma by separating “friends” from “enemies,” “good people” from “bad people.” No easy task in a city whose people are descended from monsters! In fact, in the cycle of Theban myths, Thebes is a city in which order is always about to break down—rather, a city in which disorder is always about to break through. It is in the blood of all the noble families of Thebes—that of Creon as well as that of Oedipus—through their descent from the spartoi. And it is interesting to note what it is about the spartoi that makes them monsters: though men, they had no mothers or fathers and were not the fruit of any religious union of man and woman, but were planted in the ground and sprang up like plants. The Greeks believed that humanity required human relationships—first and necessarily within the family, then between friends, finally among fellow citizens. This humanity the spartoi biologically lacked, and they behaved accordingly, falling madly upon each other in an orgy of collective extermination. In the Theban myths, the basic weakness of these monsters without families seems to push itself from time to time into the life of the citizens, particularly

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

11

with respect to the transmission of power from one generation of rulers to the next. Oedipus failed to recognize his father, so killed him and took his place—from which point the generations begin to move forward and backward at the same time. Oedipus is Jocasta’s son and Jocasta’s husband, Antigone is Jocasta’s daughter and granddaughter, not to mention being her own father’s sister. The identities of Eteocles and Polyneices are equally confused; according to Sophocles, each kills both the other and himself. Where there is no clear line between “self ” and “other,” fratricide is suicide; and love, friendship and political alliances inevitably merge with hate. As if this were not confusing enough, there is always Tiresias. Always. Tiresias has a way of turning up at every crucial moment in the Theban cycle, from Cadmus and the founding of the city to the city’s destruction generations later. His strange life, outside the rules of time and space and mortality, is one of the signs that there is something abnormal—perhaps rotten?—in the state of Thebes. All the Thebans merit a word that Sophocles applies to Polyneices, “amphilogos,” ambiguous or double, both more than themselves and less. Time expands and contracts uncontrollably. Mothers are wives, daughters, sisters. Which brings us to Haemon. He is a young man in a tough spot. Whatever the Chorus may say about Antigone being the last branch of the Labdacids, Haemon has to face the fact that she is a much closer first cousin to him than is normal. And marriage with her would end his chance of ruling Thebes in his own name and founding a royal family. But, if he worries about these things at all, and the other disquieting facts about Antigone’s bloodline, he gets his worrying done before the play begins. In the play, he is her faithful lover from beginning to end. He sings her glory as a maiden would sing the glory of a hero after battle and sacrifices everything to his love for her—his father’s love, finally his own life in a suicide that Sophocles calls “the consummation of his

12

Antigone

marriage.” Although his love seems noble in the extreme, it is also another variation on the Theban tradition of deviant unions. It is easy to see why Creon wants to break his son’s engagement, easy also to understand his shock when Haemon refuses to go along. Does Creon then resort to an intentional trick to shortcircuit the marriage of Haemon and Antigone? There is no direct evidence, but it certainly looks as if Creon were weaving a net in which to catch Antigone. Consider his odd conversation with one of his guardsmen. A (too) long dialogue between a king and a guardsman The most obvious oddity in Creon’s dialogue with the guardsman is its length, 180 lines, including a brief interruption by the Chorus (H, 231–462, OCT, 230–457.) Then there is the tone of the conversation: critics have often noticed that Creon takes a very familiar tone and falls into lower-class speech, but they have not often asked why a ruler should lower himself, in public, to the level of a common soldier. Let us look at this odd, important scene. The action begins as the guardsman arrives, bearing the news that someone has buried the body of Polyneices in mysterious circumstances. He is convinced that he will be put to death for allowing the burial to happen and surprised when Creon does not accuse him of the crime. Creon does, however, accuse him of covering for someone else, and offers him immunity in return for informing. Creon is much kinder to the soldier than to his own niece Ismene: she is arrested and convicted of the crime despite proofs of her innocence, while the guardsman is let off with a warning despite Creon’s suspicion that he has been part of a plot. A series of turns of phrase suggests that the guardsman is not the simpleton he appears to be. He realizes quickly that the whole business is not about him, and he is the first to realize, in the course

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

13

of this long dialogue scene, that the guilty party is the heiress of Oedipus—either Antigone or Ismene, or both. So Creon offers a deal: help to find the guilty party, or face conviction on a charge of bribery and negligence. Hölderlin’s translation of this passage makes Creon and the guardsman sound like two gangsters: Da schaut ihr dann, woher man den Gewinn hohlt, Vermacht die Plünderung einander, und erfahrt, Dass alles nicht gemacht ist zum Erwerbe. Das weist du gut, durch schlimmen Vortheil sind Bergen mehrere, denn wohlbehalten. You’ll see where your profits come from. You’ll get your loot, and you’ll learn There’s more to life than swag. I don’t need to tell you that dirty tricks Do people more harm than good. (H. 326–330) Creon’s undertones (“I don’t need to tell you….”) bind the two of them in some kind of dirty dealing. This is not about justice; instead, Creon is moving towards a goal that he cannot reveal in public. And the guardsman, surprised not to have been arrested and accused, or even executed, seems to divine Creon’s secret intention quickly, replying ambiguously: Giebst du, was auszurichten, oder kehr’ ich so? Do you have orders for me, or do I go away like this? (H. 331)

14

Antigone

Creon’s reply suggests that he knows the guardsman has understood him: Weisst du, wie eine Quaal jezt ist in deinen Worten? You know, don’t you, that there is torture in your words? which provokes the guardsman to insolence: Sticht es im Ohre, stichts im Innern dir? Is it just an earache? Or is your chest getting tighter? Creon lets it pass and replies with a weary sincerity: Was rechnest du, wo sich mein Kummer finde? How could you guess about my woes? Creon’s question has two meanings: “Who are you to know anything about my problems?” or “What can you know about my problems?” Creon seems to recognize that fate has painted him into a corner. He can do very little, if anything, to assure the happiness of his city and his son. But the guardsman spares him no sympathy. Secure in his involuntary complicity, he indulges in the pleasure of speaking truth, coarsely, to power: Der Thäter plagt den Sinn, die Ohren ich. The criminal tortures your mind. I just hurt your ears. Note that Hölderlin’s noun “Thäter” lacks the moral judgment of the English “criminal.” “Thäter” (the one who does the deed) is

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

15

a neutral term, somewhere between accusation and admiration. Hölderlin’s Creon realizes that the people may admire the person who buried Polyneices, and that his strategy may backfire. He is slow to come out of his moment of sad reverie. Rather than punish the guardsman’s insolence, he groans under the weight of the guardsman’s dire-sounding perspicacity: O mir! welch furchtbarer Sprechart bist du geboren? Ah, me! What awful speech I must use and endure! Only when the guardsman goes too far So ists, weil ich nicht in der Sache mit bin. There you have it. It’s over my head. does Creon recover his presence of mind and renew his attempts at blackmailing the guardsman: Du bists! um Geld verrathend deine Seele! You know, I’m going to tell the whole world you sold your soul for money. So ends the first dialogue of the ruler and the guard. On the whole—and much to his own surprise—the guard has had the better of it. He seems accustomed to mischief in high places. After the famous “Hymn Polla ta deina,” the guardsman takes up the discussion again. He is still half-cynical, half-sentimental, as if he were an outsider in the drama but familiar, at the same time, with the internal logic of the game that he and Creon are playing. Like a servant who knows his master’s weaknesses, he speaks to

16

Antigone

Creon in an open and offhand way, accusing Antigone of the crime on the assumption that Creon not only shares his opinion, but has known it all the while: Die hat den Mann begraben. Alles weist du. She buried the man. You know everything. (H, 418.) Creon deftly turns the conversation in a new direction : Weist du und sagst auch recht, was du geredet? You’re sure that you know and speak truly? Or is it just chatter? This may mean: “You know whom you accuse? (that is, a princess,)” or “Watch your insolent tongue and don’t tell what you know (that is, that I am out to get her.)” The guardsman answers for the last time in his ambiguous manner, then, realizing that Creon wants to move on, gives him what he wants: Begraben sah ich die den Todten, wo du es Verboten. Hinterbring’ ich klares, deutlichs? She’s the one. I saw her bury the dead man In spite of your decree. Is that clear enough for you? He speaks as if he were already used to the idea of his complicity and indifferent to the outcome of the case. “What’s all this? Why so much formality? You know that she did it and I know that you’re after her. Aren’t you ever happy?” After this last bit of insolence, the guardsman returns to discipline and gives a formal statement of the facts.

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

17

Action and recognition Antigone confirms the guardsman’s story, giving Creon two lines of attack. The first is the transgression itself: Antigone has broken the law (OCT, 481; H, 500.) This is a capital offense in and of itself, and it could be enough for Creon, but he goes further. After a long bout of patience with an insolent guardsman, Creon suddenly finds the insolence of his niece intolerable. Antigone catches his drift with a mixture of irony and sadness: Willst du denn mehr, da du mich hast, als tödten? Now that you’ve got me, do you want more than my death? (H, 518.) It is precisely this intelligence, this detachment from a crushing reality, that Hölderlin admires in Sophocles’ heroine. She realizes that Creon is feigning anger, at least to some extent, and that he is trying to distract attention from what really matters to him: his anxious attempt to free himself, and his city, from the “last heirs” of the royal house of the Labdacids. Certainly this is why he condemns Ismene, whom neither Antigone nor the guardsman has implicated in the crime. Creon hides his excessive eagerness behind a mask of anger that serves as a psychological pretext for a logical non sequitur, which Aristotle would have called a fallacious anthymeme. Creon and the guardsman were speaking of Antigone’s guilt, and there was no other suspect. If Creon had continued to speak calmly, he would never have accused Ismene. But the heat of anger confuses and hides a change in Creon’s approach; suddenly he turns against Ismene, calling her “crazy” (H, 523; OCT, 492)—not very convincingly, considering Ismene’s quite sane attempts to hide her sister’s plan (OCT, 84–85; H, 86–87.)

18

Antigone

By this time, then, Antigone is right: Creon wants more than her death. He wants to end the miasma tied to the Labdacids. But this is not a desire in the usual sense of the word. At least, he cannot come out and say, in public, that he is fighting a doomed battle against the destiny of Thebes. So he answers Antigone’s question with a crisp rhetorical denial: Not at all. With it (your death,) I have everything. (OCT, 498) or, in Hölderlin’s translation: I don’t want anything. When I have it (your death,) I’ll have everything. (H, 519.) For Creon, then, it is a straightforward matter of “all or nothing.” He thinks that he can purge the impurity of incest by doing away with the last descendants of Oedipus. Only too late will he realize how much he has left out of his calculations. Antigone, however, seems to have the whole picture. She seems fully aware that her story and her fate—and Creon’s, for that matter—are bound up with those of their respective families. She realizes, as well, that her marriage with Haemon is far from a solution to the problems of the city. That is why she must concentrate on the simple gestures of honoring the dead Labdacids. Looking past the mistakes that Creon and the Chorus are making, she seems to find Necessity—an almost comforting thing, a meaning for her doomed young life—in the story of her ancestors. This is where neat parallels between Creon and Antigone shift, bringing out the difference of Antigone’s tragic beauty. Unlike Creon, who is anxious to justify his actions through an appeal to the law and the needs of the here-and-now, Antigone subjects herself to the logic of images and stories. Hölderlin found her “dreamlike

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

19

and innocent” and called this quality of hers a “metaphor for an intellectual intuition”—a poetic image suggesting that she understands the whole endless network of connections that tie her to the very beginning of everything. She can see, with her intuition, the sterile fertility of a city self-created and self-destroying. In the images of Niobe, of Oedipus and Jocasta, of Polyneices and Eteocles, she sees the truth of her own origin as the fruit of the “self-begetting embraces” of her incestuous parents: “koimenmatat autogennet emo” (OCT, 862,864.) This is what Hölderlin attempts to capture in his particularly daring translation of line 875. He stresses the connection between the fatal “self-begetting” (autogennet) and the heroic trajectory that allows Antigone to achieve, not just the burial of her brother, but self-knowledge (autognôtos.) Hölderlin sees a gradual unfolding of her self-knowledge as the center of the play. She discovers the fate of her ancestors in herself, and she takes it upon herself though she knows it will destroy her: Dich hat verderbt das zornige Selbsterkennen. Your mad self-knowledge has destroyed you. (H, 905 sq.) “Se d’autognotos oles orga” (OCT, 875) means literally: “Your temper/vigor for knowing itself has destroyed you,” or “Your temper/vigor for knowing yourself has destroyed you.” Hölderlin is right to translate the Chorus: “Your passion has taken advice only from itself, and so has destroyed you.” And he is right to note, and to make use of, the insistent repetition of the prefix “auto-“ (self-) in this play. Sophocles uses the prefix to show a short-circuit in human relationships, a failure of reciprocity, a focus on self at the expense of others and other-ness. This is Thebes, after all, where people can be their own brothers. In such a place, who can tell where “self” ends and “other” begins?

20

Antigone

Antigone’s sense of family, then, a cosmic connection that has little to do with pride in any conventional sense, is her first motive for burying her brother. As the daughter of Oedipus and the sister of Polyneices, she defends her family’s honor against Creon’s attempted abasement and usurpation. But not in any simple way. Unlike her duller-sighted uncle, she does not fight to win. She knows that the blow she strikes for civilization will probably miss its mark, like the blows of her Theban ancestors. But her heroic glory, the heritage of her royal and tragic house, is her very being. Hölderlin is magnificent here. He elaborates Antigone’s fight for being as the drama topples towards its end. His Antigone, trying to come up to the level of her ancestors, arrives at a kind of special revelation in which the great people of Thebes, Niobe and Oedipus and the whole doomed heroic lineage, are revealed in their glory and also in their nothingness. In the recognition scene with the Chorus, Hölderlin makes it possible to understand this union of being and non-being even more clearly than Heidegger, who interprets the Hymn Polla ta deina in this sense, emphasizing the difference between the modern conception of thought (rational, discursive operations) and pre-Socratic thinking (noein understood as a specific form of thought, which swiftly grasps remote connections between images, metaphors, sounds and rhythms). For Heidegger, Antigone does not “think” in the modern sense, by reflecting on a determined object; rather, she “recognizes” and “understands” as if she were listening and examining (vernehmen, Vernehmung,) accepting (hinnehmend) as thought what her sensibility has gathered (Vor-nehmen) and what is hidden and revealed there. The Greek word autognotos, which Hölderlin translates as Selbsterkennen, corresponds exactly to Heidegger’s idea of the noein of Parmenides: “Vernehmung als das hinnehmende Vornehmen (in der) das Seiende als solches augeschlossen wird und so in die Unverborgenheit her-vor-kommt.”8

Antigone—Young Girl or Queen?

21

Although Antigone’s thought-processes are not what we normally think of as thought—that is, they do not rely primarily on analysis. They are thought, poetic thought, pre-Socratic thought; these modes of thought do what thought does, and serious philosophers have taken them seriously—Kant, for instance, in paragraph 49 of the Critique of Judgment, and Aristotle, in Chapter 6 of the Poetics. Kant advises that aesthetic expression consists in an unfolding of a great richness of thoughts (we would call them associations) which amplify the concept, but which, from the fact of their multiplicity, cannot be clearly named through a philosophical concept. Kant’s “aesthetic idea” recalls thus a kind of nebulous signifier “enveloping” a conceptual axis but not reducible to it. Aristotle offers an analogous idea, discretely, distinguishing ethical character (ethos, the stable elements of personality) from the aesthetic character of a hero in a play. Aristotle notes that the great heroes of tragic drama do not start with their ethical characters defined; they reveal their characters through the apparently random layering of their actions: “Characters are drawn (sumperilambanousin) through actions,” (Poetics, 1450 a 20.) In other words, a formal and rational approach to thinking misses a large part of what makes great poetry and great poetic characters. Poetry is a “metaphor for intellectual intuition,” offering a quasimystical grasp of the cohesion of apparently unrelated actions and events that “embrace” (sumperilambanousin) an invisible center, the poetic construction that we call a hero or heroine. In creating the character of Antigone, in helping her to reveal her character through word and action, Sophocles brings pre-Socratic thinking to life with poetic power and subtlety.

22

Antigone

Notes 1. Francis Vian, Les Origines de Thèbes. Cadmos et les Spartes, Paris, Klincksieck, 1963, p. 187–193. 2. Cf. P.E. Easterling, “Anachronism in Greek Tragedy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 105, 1985, pp. 3–9, also Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985, p. 61. 3. On the legal status of an epikleros daughter, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et Pensée chez les Grecs, 2 vol., Paris, Maspéro, 1981, vol. I, p.144 (Vernant, mp). 4. Pierre Roussel, “Les fiançailles d’Hémon et d’Antigone,” Revue des études grecques, 35, 1922, pp. 66–82. 5. Cf. Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewusstsein. Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795), Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1992, p. 519. 6. Cf. G.F.W. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Francfort-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1970, vol. 3, p. 320. 7. Bernard Knox, Word and Action, Essays on the Ancient Theater, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, p. 91 (hereafter Knox, wa). 8. Cf. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1966, p. 127 : “Apprehension (Vernehmung) as welcoming enter-prise in which being as such is opened up, so that it can come forth into the nonhidden [sphere].”

Whose Antigone? A digression on Hölderlin’s approach to translation

…. He can always help himself. He faces no future helpless —Wyckoff Pantoporos/Aporos —Sophocles, OCT, 360 Allbewandert, unbewandert —Hölderlin Roublard, couillonné —Lacan

Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles were part of the tragedy of Hölderlin’s own life. He was a young and soulful poet, and he took on the task of translating Sophocles, in part because he had been overwhelmed by the beauty of Voss’s translations of Homer. Holderlin put everything he had into the work—poetic sensibility, historical knowledge, theoretical insight—and he was crushed by the public’s response. Worst of all was the ridicule heaped on him by Voss’s son, a friend of Goethe and Schiller whom Hölderlin had wanted for a long time to meet. Voss’s cruel words may have pushed Hölderlin into the madness that subsequently engulfed him. Even today, Voss’s review makes gruesome reading. Voss slices away at Hölderlin with the sadistic calm of a surgeon in the age before anesthesia. We now know that Voss’s understanding of antiquity and antique literature was deeply flawed—he subscribed to standard Enlightenment beliefs about the simplicity and rationality of Greek art, and assured his readers that the Attic tragedians dealt only in “clear” and “rational” thought and drew characters “with clear outlines” and personalities

24

Antigone

that anyone with “common sense” could immediately grasp. But Voss spoke with the voice of his age, and he drowned out Hölderlin. It is not surprising that Voss failed to understand Hölderlin’s translations. Voss was an entrenched member of the neo-classical establishment, and Hölderlin’s approach was revolutionary. In place of common-sense simplicity, of bodies with clear outlines and thoughts that anyone could grasp, Hölderlin found in Greek tragedy a vibrating web of far-reaching relationships. Tragedy, for him, had its proper logic, a logic larger and more complex than discursive or formal logic. It had historical value as a window into a lost human world, and philosophical value as a grasping of universal issues, but it also had a nebulous and nameless value as a bridge between normal experience and “something else” (Etwas), the unnamable “higher connection” of the cosmic whole. Hölderlin explicitly denounces the “clumsy outlook” (RA, 3) from which our different “modes of representation”1 grasp the world-spirit; and he presents this clumsiness as insurmountable at the level of representation and of understanding. A literal translation, then, is bound to miss what matters. In place of turning individual Greek words into individual German words, Hölderlin attempts to recreate the whole constellation of tunes and rhythms, allusions and atmospheres, resonating between the lines and the words. The meaning of the tragedy determines the meaning of the verse, not the other way round. Hölderlin calls this the “live meaning,” and seeks it in the narrative “rhythm” of the entire play. If the job of a translator is to capture rhythmic balance, obviously he will take liberties with words and phrases (many of them, with our limited knowledge of life and language in Sophoclean Athens, untranslatable anyway.) But he will need to use caution, because the individual words are the only actual evidence for the relationships that he must bring to life. So the translator needs to approach the poem and the poet in two ways at once: first, with passive openness and humble deference, second, with an extraordinary confidence

Whose Antigone?

25

in his own creative power. He must, in fact, believe that he is as good as the poet he is translating; only thus can his imagination integrate the details of words and phrases into a living whole. This double approach—negative and positive capability—is the most outstanding thing about the young Hölderlin. Here, at age twentyfive, though still in thrall to Schiller and professionally dependent on him, he proclaims himself the equal of Sophocles and the champion of a new approach to poetry—indeed, to thought itself. Bold stuff for a delicate and penniless young man. And it is this boldness that rings and vibrates in his translation of the hymn Polla ta deina in Antigone. Man, in Hölderlin’s words, is not only “marvelous,” but also “terrifying” and “blocking out the sun.” “Resourceful and resourceless….” (OCT, 358 et seq; H, 375 et seq.) Hölderlin, of course, was a Romantic. Despite his admiration for Herder and Schiller, Goethe and Voss, he had no truck with the smooth and rational surface of Enlightenment neo-classicism. His idea of ancient Greece was full of passion and tension, leading him to use the words of Herder and Lambert in quite original ways. For instance, he understands Durchgangigkeit (integration) and Vollstandigkeit (completeness) to mean the coherence of an entirety in a system. Hölderlin believed that he was returning to the true poetic thought of the ancients. He wrote of the “plastic and athletic spirit” of Sophocles, and he saw Sophoclean poetry as a search for a balance of nature and art, joining rational understanding to a different order of knowledge.2 This is why he intentionally opened himself to mythic thought. Myths work by setting concrete opposites against each other. They offer people and gods and actions in and of themselves, and they combine form with content, avoiding explicit judgment and interpretation. Hölderlin’s translations of Greek tragedy were the opening gun in his campaign to restore ancient poetic thought to life. He was not merely following his taste; he was attempting to justify enthusiasm

26

Antigone

and aesthetic appreciation as valid tools for literary investigation. In his Remarks on Antigone, he reveals the “outlook” that allows him to recover the “rhythm” of the whole play—that is, the tensions that hold concrete elements in a unified system and give them the value of categories of thought. Time and Space as an “oblique perspective” on Antigone The Hymn to Danae, to Lycurgus and to the Phineides (OCT, 946– 987, 981–1024) Hölderlin believed that the differences between the ancient and modern worlds were so great that ancient words could not have precise modern meanings. Literal translation, then, was impossible. “We cannot avoid obliqueness,” he writes, “in trying to capture the spirit of nations and of the world.” (RA,3.) Because literalness was not available, he tried to understand the differences between ancient and modern outlooks and to embody that understanding in his translation. Hence the anachronisms that abound in his work. These are quite deliberate, and he uses them to translate one world to another. Consider, for instance, the next to last choral song. Antigone has just left the stage for the last time. The Chorus reflects on her destiny with a cool objectivity, recalling the myths of Danae, Lycurgus, and the sons of Phineus: Fourth Stasimon (hymn to Danae, Lycurgus, and the sons of Phineus) Danae suffered too She went from the light to the brass-built room, chamber and tomb together. Like you, poor child, she was of great descent, and more, she held and kept the seed of the golden rain which was Zeus. Fate has terrible power.

Whose Antigone?

27

You cannot escape it by wealth or war. No fort will keep it out, no ships outrun it. Remember the angry king, son of Dryas, who raged at the god and paid, pent in a rock-walled prison. His bursting wrath slowly went down. As the terror of madness went, he learned of his frenzied attack on the god. Fool, he had tried to stop the dancing women possessed of god, the fire of Dionysus, the songs and flutes. Where the dark rocks divide sea from sea in Thrace is Salmydessus whose savage god beheld the terrible blinding wounds dealt to Phineus’ sons by their father’s wife. Dark the eyes that looked to avenge their mother. Sharp with her shuttle she struck, and blooded her hands3. Wasting they wept their fate, settled when they were born to Cleopatra, unhappy queen. She was a princess too, of an ancient house, reared in the cave of the wild north wind, her father. Half a goddess but, child, she suffered like you. (EW, 946–987) Unlike most critics, Hölderlin does not begin by interpreting the myths. Instead, he starts with the tone of the choral song as a part of the overall rhythm of the play. What strikes him is the apparent coldness and “neutrality” of the Chorus in this hymn. So that becomes his starting point, “the most appropriate vantage point” (RA, 2.) from which the reader can see the drama unfold, and he comments quickly on the surprising transformation that he works

28

Antigone

in the first verses of the stasimon. Instead of translating the words literally—Danae, pregnant by Zeus despite her father’s watching, “held and kept the seed of the golden rain which was Zeus”— Hölderlin introduces a glaring anachronism: She counted for the father of time The strokes of the hour, golden strokes. In the Remarks, he cites this verse as an example of the kind of transformation he feels free to make: In place of “she managed/administered for Zeus the fate which runs/flows like a flow of gold. (This) is not how anyone today would say it. If you think seriously about it, it is better to write: “father of time” or “father of the earth…” (RA, 2.) Hölderlin certainly understood that there were no clocks to strike the hour in ancient Greece, and that his translation introduced a flagrant historical “fault.” His remark explains why and, almost incidentally, shows how he applies his critical standards to the translation of a specific passage. He starts from this song, then goes from this song to the problem of time and space (Zeus— father of time/of the earth.) Whether or not Hölderlin’s approach is “good,” it is at least coherent. In fact, he quite consciously establishes a coherent perspective that works, he thinks, for all parts of the tragedy. Hölderlin was the first (though hardly the last) to say that his attempt to introduce modern interests made for a superficial “obliqueness” in his translation, but he was sure that he had found a way to reveal the relationships that tie the play together, and he was proud to have found criteria that would work for every part of the play, for dialogues and choruses alike. He thought that he had made a real advance over earlier translations

Whose Antigone?

29

and earlier interpretations, which had treated dialogue in one way and choral song in quite another. As Hölderlin interprets and translates this choral song, he is above all conscious of the ongoing relationships between men and gods. The chorus believes that these exist and should exist, but Hölderlin is concerned to show that some relationships are good and others bad. The three myths in the song become, for him, examples of success and failure in these relationships, and they illuminate what is for him the central issue in the tragedy of Antigone, the failure of men and gods to form good relationships throughout the history of Thebes. First is the story of Danae. Hölderlin begins his interpretation of the song very subtly, with the measurement of time. In his view, Danae offered Zeus more than a child; rather, she assured him, against her father’s will, that men and gods would continue to join in ritual exchanges—and people the world with heroes. Ephemeral heroes, of course, whose lives, generation after generation, form the chain of time. Second is the story of Lycurgus, a Theban king who broke up the revels of the Bacchantes and denied Dionysus his due. Hölderlin sees his sin as the model of the failure of Thebans to form good relationships with the gods. Lycurgus’ transgression was rooted in a lack of aesthetic sensitivity: he failed to recognize that the inversion of the city’s social hierarchy in Bacchic revel served, in fact, as a necessary safety valve and confirmed the order that it appeared to overthrow. Nor was he the only Theban ruler to make this mistake. Pentheus, made famous by Euripides in The Bacchae, attempted the same repression with disastrous results (and threw in, for good measure, the recurrent Theban misogyny.) For Hölderlin, then, Lycurgus is the paradigm of disorder in space and time (shown in problems of descent and succession,) provoked by sin against Dionysus (son of the “father of earth/time.”) Third among the space-time myths is the story of the sons of Phineus. Members of the royal house of Thebes, they were blinded by

30

Antigone

their stepmother, but Sophocles is less interested in their misfortune than in the irregular alliances that preceded it. Their grandmother was a descendant of Erechtheus, the founder of Athens, whose name was synonymous for an Athenian audience with the ideal of civic order. But his granddaughter was carried off by Boreas the north wind as she walked (significantly) outside the walls of the city, and her daughter embodied this more-than-human disorder. She was raised “as a young mare, to jump a mountaintop.” (OCT, 85 et seq.) Her children by Phineus suffered cruelly for their savage origin, blinded and killed by their father’s legitimate wife. In Hölderlin’s interpretation, these three stories all address breaches in the order of time and space. They speak of disruptions in descent, succession, and legitimate government. Hölderlin uses his translation to emphasize this. His “alterations” reestablish the logic of a tragic myth whose scope is far greater than the burial of a particular person,—is, in fact, nothing less than the position, actual and ideal, of the living and the dead in the physical and symbolic space of the city. Seen from this point of view, ideas and concepts from fifth-century Athens can be overlaid on heroic legends without anachronism. In this case, the overlay reveals a question: to whom does the palace of Thebes belong? Does it belong to Creon, a new king and the founder of a new royal line? Or does it belong to a future son of the epikleros Antigone, and thus to the old royal line of Oedipus? Although Sophocles does not speak of this explicitly, certain details (the handling of personal pronouns, for instance, and imagery like “last roots”) suggest that Creon and Antigone are competitors for the hearth/palace, the symbol of royal power. To speak of the Athenian institution of the epiclerate4 in heroic Thebes is anachronistic, but an audience in fifth-century Athens would not have noticed or minded the anachronism any more than Italians in the Renaissance objected to anachronistic clothes and cityscapes in devotional paintings. For Sophocles and his contemporaries, trained in political thought and

Whose Antigone?

31

action but with no means of learning the history of their own social institutions, Antigone was simply an epikleros. They all knew that her son would continue her father’s line, and that she herself would incarnate the hearth of her father’s house, not just inhabit the palace of the Labdacids. In spite of all this, Antigone’s fate takes her from the palace and shuts her up in a tomb of stone. Most curiously, she is dispatched to an out-of-the-way place that Sophoclean Athens would have reserved for suicides. Such treatment might have been expected for her brothers, whom Sophocles describes as “joint suicides,”5 but this is Thebes, after all, where nothing ever goes according to rule. One suicide brother gets a state funeral, the other is left to rot or be torn by dogs, so why not treat an executed sister as if she had killed herself? As Heidegger says, “To pose questions, that is the piety of thought.”6 That is also the basis of Hölderlin’s approach to translating the Antigone of Sophocles. “Oblique perspectives” and “Higher Connections” Hölderlin did not believe that modern languages had words or even concepts that were directly equivalent to anything in ancient Greece, and he took enormous liberties in translation as a way of unlocking the real meaning of words that had lost their meaning. His historical understanding and his translation were a radical break with the common beliefs of his time. His liberties were dismissed as “violences,” and his attempt to show the differences between his own time and ancient Greece now throw as much light on Germany in his day as he attempted to throw on Sophoclean Athens. But he was right, and his critics were wrong. His liberties and violences really do throw light on the differences between modernity—his or ours— and the sensibility, the imagination, the modes of representation (Vorstellungsarten) of the ancient Greeks. His translation includes information and insights that are not in the text as an attempt to

32

Antigone

give a modern reader the actual experience of an Athenian spectator, and he treats all these differences as manifestations of a unified world that he can bring back to life, like the mad scientist in Jurassic Park. Hence his commitment to a unity of language between the dialogues and the choruses. Only thus can he assure the formal possibility of seizing and presenting various relationships between the unthinkable density of poetry (his “higher connection”) and the thinkable dimension of discourse (representation, feeling, or rational argument determined by a particular context.) Certain fundamental feelings make such relationships intelligible and actually palpable. Gratitude is central here, so also is aesthetic pleasure in the presence of beauty; these serve to weld together sensory experience and the impalpable evidences for a “higher connection” and an “inner intensity,” which make knowledge possible.7 This theoretical position allows Hölderlin to grasp the double face of poetic thought and, in particular, the virtuosity of Sophocles as a dramatic poet. Looking within the apparent clarity of the Greek verses, he sees obscurities and gaps and a rich set of poetic overtones that make room for a kind of interpretation that is not merely different from the smooth surface meaning but quite definitely opposed to it. Far from setting limits to the meaning of the drama, the words of Sophocles blast open an intentionally limitless range of suggestions and reflections. Some readers of Sophocles, particularly young readers of conventional translations, have felt sooner or later that they were reading long lists of commonplaces. Hölderlin was determined to avoid this. He aimed, instead, to create long melodic and rhythmic lines that could tie together unexpected words, or apparently unrelated things and actions, secretly. Instead of trying to reproduce the fine surface nuances of Sophocles, he temporarily disassembled the brilliant rational surface of the Greek text, broke it up into bumpy and jarring fragments, and fitted the fragments,

Whose Antigone?

33

like stones in a mosaic, into the larger design that he envisioned in the submerged infrastructure. His translation, then, has two different effects. On one side it prevents a premature hardening of the reader’s interpretation; on the other, it frees the reader to see each thought evolve in a limitless and harmonious unity of relationships and combinations. This is why Hölderlin insists, in his unfinished theoretical works, on the importance of what he calls “swift intuitions,” (rasches Begreifen, literally quick graspings,) which he had already worked out in the immense periods of his philosophical fragments. As his Amazonian sentences roll inexorably on, they seem at first to be bearing his thoughts along like mere flotsam. Even when the consistent pattern of his thought emerges, he does not show the kind of consistency that comes from systematic philosophical treatment. Hölderlin was not incapable of systematic thinking; he deliberately renounced it and let his thoughts come and go within the larger boundaries of poetic logic. When, not much later, he went mad, his enemies were quick to dismiss his philosophical works as the advance-guard of lunacy. Hölderlin was not mad when he wrote his philosophical fragments, or when he translated Antigone. He was trying to seize in a single breath the overall coherence of different thoughts, of aesthetic intuitions, and of the multiple cross-connections between discursive thought and aesthetic constellations. Hölderlin’s principle of “swift intuitions” guides both his Greek translations and the Remarks on Oedipus and Antigone. Everything depends on rhythmic balance—poetic thought, theoretical thought, the interaction of thoughts through the images of poetry and the actions of characters, finally an elasticity of sensory and intellectual intuition. When rhythm is in balance, and the balance is felt, the reader can approach the text with physical and mental self-confidence. He can follow the long melodic lines of the drama and form in his understanding the relationships that hold the drama together.

34

Antigone

This is the principle behind one of the most controversial of Hölderlin’s rhetorical techniques: asyndeton. Sophocles does not make heavy use of asyndeton, and Hölderlin’s reliance on it has traditionally been stigmatized as one of his more lamentable departures from the smoothness and clarity of the Greek original. Sophocles is certainly smooth, and asyndeton is intrinsically rough, so the criticism is fair as far as it goes. By eliminating customary conjunctions, Hölderlin foregoes the chance to make his translation look and feel like the original Greek. But he gets more than he gives up. His repeated asyndetons throw light on certain secondary or even merely implicit nuances; what makes his translation great is that these nuances are significant. They reveal each sentence, each paragraph, each scene as a small cosmos of possible orders and meanings. Strings of words suddenly become problems in permutations and combinations, with different meanings legitimately arising from each shift of focus like the patterns in a kaleidoscope. Antigone and Ismene: community of head? of blood? or of action? It was Hölderlin’s misfortune to work in a particularly conservative literary field—ancient Greek history and literature— at a time when the field was even more conservative than usual. The dominant figures were men who loved the pure white Greece of Winckelmann. Hölderlin’s Greece could not have been more different from theirs. And there was no diplomacy in his approach. He hit them with unheard of boldness in the very first verses of Antigone. At a time when everyone thought of Antigone as a tragic story of “the law of blood” versus “the law of the city,” and when almost all translations began in more or less the same way: “You are my blood, my sister, Ismene, my dear,” Hölderlin launched the play in a very different direction with a very awkward piece of language, at once baroque and modern. The first word of his Antigone is a bizarre neologism, “Gemeinsamschwesterliches…Haupt” (Shared-sisterly…

Whose Antigone?

35

head.) This did not exactly charm the contemporary ear, which had been trained quite differently by Goethe and Schiller; and it is still strange. Hölderlin knew the risks that he was taking. He took them, in these first words, to draw attention to the problem of community, or of things that are common to more than one person. He was already prefiguring what was, for him, the central question of the play: what is the founding principle of the family or clan community (koinon)? He did not find this question stated explicitly by Sophocles, but it was there, buried in a network of Greek terms belonging to an imaginative structure now lost with its historical setting. Antigone, for instance, in her opening words, wavers between two kinds of community: biological (using Ismene’s head as a metonymy for the union of the two sisters) and another type of community established by individual action. She does not even think that the biological connection is sufficient to establish family ties. Here she speaks to Ismene about Creon’s decree: They say good Creon has proclaimed it to you And to me, since I speak also of myself.” (H, 33–34.) Even before Ismene opposes the burial, Sophocles points out that there is a difference between the two sisters, and that Antigone sees herself both as united to her sister and as separate from her. Antigone states explicitly that Ismene will have to prove that she is “well born,” that she actually belongs to the noble house of Labdacus: (…) And you’ll soon have to prove If you are well born, (or) if you are bad among good (H. 39–40.) As the Prologue unfolds, Antigone makes community depend on the bond of working together on the burial: regardless of her birth (which no one doubts,) Ismene cannot be her sister unless she acts

36

Antigone

with Antigone in fulfillment of ancient dictates. Sisters are supposed to bury their brothers; therefore, if Ismene will not help to bury Antigone’s brother, she is not Antigone’s sister. In the twentieth century the German translator Schadewaldt grasped the importance of Hölderlin’s intuition and incorporated it into his translation8 with a result as unusual as Hölderlin’s: Gemeinsames, der eignen Schwester, o Ismenes Haupt! Shared (Head,) of a true sister, o head of Ismene! Schadewaldt’s asyndeton picks up Hölderlin’s suggestion that the sisters were appendages of a single body with a single head. Hölderlin translates as if he were thinking of the myth of the three Gorgons, who shared one eye and one tooth and passed these “appendages” from one to another as they watched out for their victims. In the case of Antigone, the common “head” has an obligation to plan a rational action that can restore the damage that Creon, by his decree and by the illegitimacy of his rule, has done to the virtues of community, honor, and rectitude in Thebes. But Ismene will not join this “common” effort. She will be fearful and wavering, and Antigone will threaten her with hatred from beyond the grave. From the very first lines of the play, then, Hölderlin takes the kind of liberties that his contemporaries derided as “violences.” But his liberties are all with individual words; as for the meaning of scenes, the personalities and motivations of characters, he discovers and reveals marvelous depths and relevant aspects of the Greek original. Antigone’s opening speech, as he translates it, is no longer a simple stubborn defense of the “law of blood”9, but an extraordinarily complex set of thoughts and feelings, a subtle oscillation between extremes, somehow put into a tiny number of words. Reading Hölderlin’s Antigone is not easy. Hölderlin requires his reader to stop at the end of each line, sometimes after each individual word, to listen for an unexpected range of meanings, to reflect on

Whose Antigone?

37

them, to compare them, finally to pull them all together into a new and consistent interpretation. There is no prettiness or lazy pleasure. Not until the twentieth century would authors require their readers to do so much work. He invites his readers to step outside the conventions and beliefs of their generation and confront a work of art that is irreducibly but magnificently strange. Holy Vileness (Hosia panourgesasa) What is the meaning of Antigone’s action? Why does she say: “I will do a holy thing by committing a vile crime”?10 The formula “hosia panourgesasa” expresses the paradoxical linkage of the most saintly nobility (hosios) with a dark and degrading villainy. Hölderlin avoids a literal translation of Antigone’s phrase, substituting a network of suggestions, part sisterly love for a brother, part carnal passion: I will lie down with/by you as a lover with a lover When I have done the holy deed. (H, 75–76) In German, the sonorous repetition of “lieb-lieg-Lieb” (lovinglylie down-lover) suggests a physical and amorous intensity that has little to do with “holiness.” A few verses later (H, 90) Ismene calls her sister on this; she accuses Antigone of feeling too warmly for “the cold ones” (the dead.) Here, however, Hölderlin follows the Greek words in linking the adverb and the noun in paradoxical association: “Warmly your soul suffers for the cold ones.” (H, 90.) Antigone reacts violently to her sister’s insinuation. The world of the living is no longer for her; she is now entirely on the side of the dead. She claims to value the good opinion of the dead more highly than that of the living, and she pushes her sister to explain her worries with respect to a mixture of representations, feelings, and decisions that are plainly inadequate. Instead of using the neutral formula of the Greek original, “you seek the impossible,” Hölderlin

38

Antigone

transposes Ismene’s objection into a moral register: “you attempt improper things,” and “we cannot pursue improper things.” (H, 92 and 94.) By this slight modification—by turning “impossible” into “improper,”—he recovers the moral connotation of hosia panourgesasa in the Greek original. Here is Hölderlin’s method in a nutshell. Faced with a choice between imitating the graceful surface of the Greek original at the expense of its depth of meaning, and trying to capture the wide range of suggestions instead of the clear surface, he goes for the suggestive complexity and depth. And what a lot of allusions and meanings there are! The rebellion of a disgraced princess and the love of a sister, the proper feelings towards the dead and the respect for the laws of the city, incestuous madness and religious piety - this is an incomplete list of Antigone’s motivations. All of this Hölderlin tries to render, sometimes by words, sometimes by odd and unclassical language, and sometimes - often in fact - by the manipulation of tone and dissonance. Hölderlin’s poetic ear leads him to depend on tonal color to an unprecedented extent. In the opening scene alone, he needs to express, in order: an emphatic affirmation of family ties (the koinon), keen intelligence, courage and haughty contempt for Creon by Antigone; then, by Ismene, ignorance and impotent despair, withdrawal, fear, shame, and resistance against her sister’s plan; then, by Antigone, determination and nobility, but also passion with incestuous and necrophilic overtones, annoyance, and, finally, indignation. Duality without the Greek dual11 Just as Hölderlin felt free to change the meaning and structure of sentences, so he felt free to change the structure of whole scenes as a way of bringing out their meanings. To show the tensions that fracture the sisterly union of Antigone and Ismene, Hölderlin emphasizes certain untranslatable elements by moving them to

Whose Antigone?

39

another part of the text — for example, when he moves connotations of a line of Antigone’s into a speech of Ismene. He also puts a great deal of effort into recovering the feel of the Greek dual, a middleterm between singular and plural that has no equivalent in modern languages. Hölderlin was convinced that Sophocles had used the dual to suggest subtle nuances of unity and division, and to express the intimate association of two beings melted together (by blood, circumstance, or participation in a joint effort) into a single thing or a single principle. And Hölderlin was right. Sophocles has his characters slide constantly between the dual (which establishes a kind of inseparability between two terms) and the plural (which separates and distinguishes between terms.)12 Hölderlin interpreted these dual/plural nuances accurately, but his language, German, without a dual, required him to render them in a completely different way. Hölderlin’s answer was to transform the nuances into subconscious moral feelings that unite the sisters and divide them. He translates the untranslatable by performing unclassical acrobatics with syntax and images. A good example appears in the entrance song (parodos,) where Sophocles uses the dual to suggest that the two enemy brothers are, in fact, a single person with a double aspect. After the Chorus speaks of them in the dual, emphasizing the connections between them, Creon stakes out a hostile position by using the plural to emphasize the differences between them. Hölderlin needs to bring this opposition to life without the benefit of a dual. His equivalent is a series of syntactical artifices that depend on the masculine singular pronoun (he, him.) Unlike Sophocles, Hölderlin uses this pronoun as a consistent drumbeat, tying apparently different things together. First it designates the Argive warrior brought to Thebes by Polyneices, a metonymy for the Argive army. Then it refers to the double (or dual) monster that loomed up threateningly above the city of Thebes. Then the monster becomes the city itself, the “maw of seven gates,” destroying itself in a titanic struggle and a bacchic

40

Antigone

revel, still with the same pronoun. The two brothers, like the chaotic city, are both sinned against and sinning. They are friends, lovers, and enemies, all at once, tied together by a recurrent pronoun. As critics have said from the beginning, Hölderlin’s translation is a tough read. But Hölderlin knew what he was about. He was a good scholar, a serious thinker, and a great Romantic poet; and his achievement repays the effort of reading. Let me emphasize that he was a Romantic poet. He had an intuitive feel for misty atmospheres and “clouds of meaning.” He found dramatic significance in the rhythm of words. He felt the surcharge of meaning condensed in Sophoclean phrases, and thrilled to find a bubbling and throbbing of ethical problems far too subtle for neo-classical notions of Common Sense. He never tried to define Antigone as a drama with a clear conceptual framework (like the conflict between the family and the state.) Clear prose was not for him. Instead, he felt, and tried with desperate seriousness to reproduce, the density of poetic thought, worked out in specifically poetic ways, with a richness of associations and over-determinations, with ironies, puns and jokes, all serving to thicken the texture of his verses — and of the characters who speak and sing them.

Whose Antigone?

41

Notes 1. The expression is Goethe’s ; for Goethe’s influence on Hölderlin, see Eckart Förster, “To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again”: Hölderlin and the “Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism,” European Journal of Philosophy, 3 (2), August, 1995, pp. 174–200. 2. Beda Allemann, Hölderlin et Heidegger, Paris, PUF, 1959, p. 39 sq. 3. For an interesting discussion of the breaks within the stophes and the intensification of images of violence, see M.  Lossau, “Hölderlin’s Sophokleschöre,” Hölderlin-Jahrbuch, vol. 30, 1996–1997, pp. 255–256 et p. 262 sq. 4. Der Kleine Pauly. Lexikon der Antike in fünf Bänden, Munich, DTV, 1979. 5. For the reciprocal and reflexive meaning of kat’ hautoin see LorauxMazon, p. 129). 6. M.  Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen, G. Neske, 1954 (“Fragen ist die Frömmigkeit des Denkens”) and Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question, Paris, Galilée, 1987, p. 25. 7. Cf. Dieter Henrich, “Gedanken zur Dankbarkeit,” Festschrift für Robert Spaemann, Acta Humaniora, Weinheim, 1987. 8. Sophocles, Antigone, translated and edited by Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Frankfort-am-Main, Insel Verlag, 1974. 9. Loraux-Mazon, p. 2, note 1. 10. P. Mazon : “C’est ainsi que j’irai reposer près de lui, chère à qui m’est cher, saintement criminelle.” “It is thus that I will go to lie close to you, dear to one who is dear to me, a holy sinner.” 11. Jean Humbert, Syntaxe grecque, Paris, Klincksieck, 1960, p. 15–18. 12. OCT, 13–14, 21, 55–57, 143–146, 264, 557–558, 561, 770, 989, 1345.

42

Antigone

Chapter 2 The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

Rhythm.—I believe in an “absolute rhythm,” a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable. —Ezra Pound, Credo

It is dawn. Although Antigone has heard of Creon’s decree forbidding burial, and discussed it in darkness with Ismene, the old men of Thebes do not yet know of it. As the Sun rises, they give voice, in the Parodos, to their hopes and fears on the day after an unsettling and unsatisfying victory. Yes, they are glad to have escaped conquest and pillage, but the double fratricide of Eteocles and Polyneices has tainted the city with a new pollution—a stain so horrible that it probably contributed to the retreat of the besieging host. The old men express some of their concern, but not all of it; there is too much for them to deal with, and they end by recommending reverence and stillness. They little know that Creon, who is about to appear, intends to create more turmoil. The old men enter, saluting the newly-risen Sun and singing of the night’s combat. This is a central theme of Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, and Sophocles makes effortless use of his predecessor’s ambiguities and paradoxes; but he develops them and makes them denser. His verses, apparently simple, contain multiple layers of meaning, and the story he has to tell is much more complex than the fight between Polyneices (the eagle) and Eteocles (the serpent.)

44

Antigone

This is an opportunity tailor-made for Hölderlin. He is wise to Sophocles’ tricks and eager to try some of his own. Consider, for example, a strange piece of syntax that he introduces into the first lines of the second strophe. The Greek poet had used Greek means to blur the line between Argive aggressors and Theban victims. Earlier German translators had avoided this, but Hölderlin attempted the same blurring with German means, by leaning again and again on the pronoun “he.” At first, “he” is the eagle who attacks from above and opens, at the same time, the “maw with seven gates” of the city below. Editors of Hölderlin consider this to be an error on the part of their poet, but it is quite intentional: Hölderlin is using this neutral little pronoun deliberately to convey the impression that the two rival brothers are a single hybrid monster. The eagle of Polyneices and the serpent of Eteocles merge into a flying dragon that eats itself in a religious rite that is both suicidal and incestuous. Does Hölderlin over-interpret Sophocles? Many have thought so, but they have not considered the depth of Hölderlin’s knowledge of antiquity. Most members of an Athenian audience would probably have picked up the references to Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, which was well known when Sophocles was writing Antigone. Moreover, Sophocles could afford to write difficult language because he was one of the first writers who could plan on having readers. Probably more than Aeschylus, he had the freedom to write things that required re-reading, things that no audience would comprehend fully on first hearing. As recent studies have shown, Sophocles made conscious use of the paradoxes that he found in Aeschylus, deepening them and making them more intricate. Where Aeschylus had seen the combat between the two brothers as a sacrilege, Sophocles speaks of it as a sacrifice, even a purification, by which the two brothers free the city from the madness that they embody.1 Hölderlin picks this up readily. In the carnage of battle, he sees a Dionysian sacrifice, which abolishes

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

45

social identities (citizen, stranger, ruler, subject…) and enhances the natural indeterminacy. His translation tries to reproduce the formal details of the Greek text (movement, appearance, rhythm, etc…), which express (implicitly) the logic of the god, Dionysus, whose power it is to make all beings equal, melting them together in a unified cosmos. Hölderlin called his approach “poetic logic.” It operates on three levels. First, he uses personal pronouns (he, him, this one) to confuse identities, evoking an anonymous warrior (perhaps even the category “warrior”) instead of naming the two warring brothers. Second, he elaborates the Bacchic context of the third strophe: the “warrior” falls and dies in a Bacchic trance. Finally, he seizes the difference between the frenzied reunion of the two brothers with the civic and military alliance of the other seven princes. Here is the Parodos with the ambiguous “he” pronouns in italics: Gaze of the Sun, O you most beautiful, Who long have shone over seven-gated Thebes, You appeared once, O light, O wink of the golden day, You crossed the rivers of Dirce, And the white shield, him of Argos, The man, come with arms and armor, The fugitive who bolts, You have given him a bridle of steel, him, With whom Polyneices rose Over our country In struggle doubly sharp. Like an eagle, He cried and flew, His wings white as snow, Terrible, with many weapons, And helmets with horse-mane plumes.

46

Antigone

And above the palaces he rose, and showed Full of spears, all around The maw of the seven gates; But he went away, Even before he had Bathed his jaws in our blood, Even before the torches of Hephaestus Had caught the crowns of the towers. And thus, the tornado of Mars broke Over the enemy’s back, becoming An obstacle to the dragon. For Zeus hates the chatter Of big tongues, and when he sees them, Just when they swagger up, Purse-proud, in their vain horizons, With brands of fire he hurls them down, when one of them From the summit that he has gained, is already chanting The joyous song of victory. But on the hard earth he falls, Drunk with love, he who, with a frenzied horde Advanced frothing, bacchic In the blasts of contrary winds. But he found something else; Someone else’s something Doles out the spirit of battle, when sternly He stirs up, with the skillful man, one at hand. Seven princes, drawn up before Seven gates, equals against equals, Left their iron arms to triumphing Zeus, Except for the two tremendous ones, who, born of a father And a mother, raised the double spears

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

47

Against each other and inherited Both of them, a common death. (H, 102–152) This is so different from the original that it is worth quoting Elizabeth Wyckoff’s translation in full. Italics indicate passages where Hölderlin’s translation is substantially different: Sun’s own radiance, fairest light ever shone on the gates of Thebes, Then did you shine, O golden day’s Eye, coming over Dirce’s stream, On the Man who had come from Argos with all his armor Running now in headlong fear as you shook his bridle free. He was stirred by the dubious quarrel of Polyneices. So, screaming shrill, like an eagle over the land he flew, Covered with white-snow wing, With many weapons, With horse-hair crested helms. He who had stood above our halls, gaping about our seven gates, With that circle of thirsting spears. Gone, without our blood in his jaws, Before the torch took hold on our tower-crown. Rattle of war at his back; hard the fight for the dragon’s foe. The boasts of a proud tongue are for Zeus to hate. So seeing them streaming on In insolent clangor of gold, He struck with hurling fire him who rushed For the high wall’s top, To cry conquest abroad.

48

Antigone

Swinging, striking the earth he fell Fire in hand, who in mad attack, Had raged against us with blasts of hate. He failed. He failed on his aim. For the rest great Ares dealt his blows about, First in the war-team. The captains stationed at seven gates Fought with seven and left behind Their brazen arms as an offering To Zeus who is turner of battle. All but those wretches, sons of one man, One mother’s son, who sent their spears Each against each and found the share Of a common death together. (EW, 100–147.) First Strophe: the warrior bridled by the Sun Hölderlin condenses the first strophe and antistrophe in a single sentence. In the Greek original, the Chorus hails the rising Sun and credits the Sun with their victory. The Sun, they say, looked at the enemy with its eye, and the Sun’s gaze acted like a bridle in the mouth of a horse, turning the enemy’s attack into headlong flight. The word for bridle (oxytero khalinoi) marks the end of the first sentence. Hölderlin gives this sentence an unusual twist. In his translation, the Sun is not only an eye that looks at the enemy; instead, the Sun’s gaze seems to be a divine force acting like a bridle on the “warrior.” The gods seem to have foreseen and decided that the city’s aggressors must be subjugated (and, in fact, the Theban destruction does not only come from the outside, but from both warrior-brothers). This is what the Chorus imagines when he identifies with the Sun’s gaze, interpreting last night’s battle through the Sun’s all-comprehending eye.

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

49

Hölderlin runs the first sentence into the second and launches a gigantic period twenty lines long. Other translators break this material into two shorter sentences. Their translations are clearer and easy to read. But Hölderlin gives us something more than ease and clarity: as his images crash around us with edgy and roughlycoordinated metaphors and with deliberately paratactic metonymies of violence, he draws us up into a kind of trance. It is a remarkable moment. Although Holderlin’s aggressively startling translation is somewhat different from the Greek original, it raises us up out of ourselves as the original does—and as conventional translations do not. The difference is that the Greek, and Hölderlin’s translation, give us the full feeling of the weird and uncanny things that are going on in Thebes and between the brothers, not a simple just-thefacts report. Hölderlin also grasps an ambiguity, likely intended by Sophocles, that other translators miss.2 He realizes that the Parodos, early in the play, is designed to balance the Exodos, at the end; and that the two large choral songs together define a position somewhere between the joy of victory3 and the anguish of impending death. As the Sun rises, the old men of Thebes have just looked death in the face; they are afraid, moreover, that the wars and catastrophes of Thebes will go on forever; and they seem to be seeking, and finding, a hope that can balance their terror and keep it under control. It is a muted hope, but it holds; and the Chorus carries it through the multiple disasters that unfold in this play. Digression: the Theban war and the logic of foundation myths in the Athenian imagination Hölderlin’s Parodos presents things from a super-human point of view, as if the old men of Thebes had seen the events of the preceding days with the eye of the Sun itself. They imagine that the Sun saw, the Sun willed, the defeat of the Seven and the death of

50

Antigone

the brothers. They hope that the gods have willed the lifting of the cause of the conflict, the miasma. But, at least, the war has ended, and the old men can close their hymn with an invitation to join in reverent celebrations. The old men are glad to pretend that the miasma has burnt off like an innocent mist in the warmth of the morning Sun. Hölderlin captures this ephemeral moment of bliss with the German word Augenblick, which signifies both “wink” and “gaze” (“Blick der Sonne”, Augenblick H, 102, 106,) for the old men’s happiness will be ephemeral. They will soon learn that the pollution is still, and always, there. The blood of two brothers sullies the ground, and Thebes is always a city whose leaders fail in their duty to the gods and to each other—marrying their mothers, killing their fathers and brothers, shutting up their nieces in rocky prisons, and heaven knows what else. But, for now, it is a comfort to celebrate the end of a war. An Athenian audience, nourished on Homer and Hesiod, would have heard the resonances of mythic conflict in the lines about anonymous warriors, or a monster armed with lances and multiple beaks which nonetheless obeys the Sun like a horse in harness. The force of the images suggests a connection between the anonymous warrior, or warriors, and the spartoi, the men born from the earth, the not-quite-human founders of Thebes, or even with the Giants who sprung from the seeds of Jason. As the Chorus sings, the night battle of the two brothers takes on the disturbing and magic (khalkeos) brilliance of the “bronze men” who “shine like a constellation in the winter sky” (Vernant, MP, I, p.25,) and whose end promises a new and better beginning.4 It is not hard to see a parallel between the hubris of Sophocles’ warrior(s), lost in his bacchic trance, and the hubris of Hesiod’s bronze men (Theogony, v. 713–735.) Vernant has shown the complex connections between the men of the five ages.5 If we look only at the two intermediate ages, those between silver and bronze, we find that they are neither as pure and pious as their predecessors

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

51

nor as violent and full of hubris as those who come after them. There are basic analogies between the bronze men and the Cthonian monsters and the giants, but their horrible condition is not merely the outcome of a steady degeneracy towards injustice and disorder. The chaotic madness of the Age of Bronze seems to point towards a return of the Age of Gold, albeit at a very high price. The bronze men must redeem themselves by a kind of self-sacrifice, preparing the new Age of Gold by destroying the monstrousness and hubris that is in them. As Hölderlin sees it, the Chorus understands that the battle between the brothers is just one more piece of the foreordained story of Thebes. When they evoke the cyclic return of the Age of Gold, the old men transfigure the pollution of fratricide into a founding sacrifice, a mythic conquest, something that can give the community self-respect. Eteocles and Polyneices are no longer dangerous madmen, threatening the life of the community, but heroes whose sacrifice will atone, at last, for the original sin of Thebes’s founding and usher in a peaceful Age of Gold. The Titans too showed hubris when they piled Pelion on Ossa and sought to overthrow Zeus, but they became, in defeat, the pillars of the heavenly order. The old men of Thebes hope for a similar transformation. The second strophe: attackers and defenders change roles, and the serpent of Thebes rises (again) The monstrous attack of the warrior, or warriors, continues into Holderlin’s second strophe, almost without interruption (thanks to a comma in Sattler’s edition.) Watch the personal pronoun, he : And above the palaces he rose, and showed6 Full of spears, gaping all around The maw of the seven gates,

52

Antigone

“Und über Palasten stand er…” says Hölderlin. But who exactly is he? Polyneices is the obvious choice, the he who threatens his hometown with a mortal blow, but Hölderlin is after something else. That odd comma, and the ambiguous meaning of the second verb “and showed” blur the distinction between attacker and defender. Thanks to that comma, these three lines depict the eagle rising and showing both his beak and the maw of the seven gates— as if the city held the warrior in its maw. There is an intentional confusion here between “from” and “back,” top and bottom: the city’s protective wall has become a “maw” and an abyss. Hölderlin’s verb for “shows” is weisen, a verb with two basic meanings: it can mean “to show one’s own lances as an animal shows its fangs” or “to point to the fangs of another.” This is an unusual choice. Ordinarily, the Greek verb amphikhano (gaping wide, or surrounding) suggests the German umgähnen (literally “gaping or swallowed all around.) Sophocles writes: He rose Phonosiaisin murderous

amphikhanon kukloi logkhais heptapulon stoma showing/gaping a ring of around the sevenlances gated maw (OCT, 117)

In this sentence, then, a single subject (he) governs two verbs of action (“rose” and “showed/gaped.”) The second verb (show his fangs in open jaws) serves to evoke two monstrous bites at once: both the warrior/horse/eagle (from the outside) and the warrior/dragon (inside the city) destroy their home-town. The dragon is not a protector but a self-destructive seven-gated maw. Thebes is no innocent victim. The city of the miasma turns upon itself its own fangs and lances. Its attackers are its own rulers. It fights against itself. Through its symbol of the dragon, it finally devours itself. This is Hölderlin’s tragic and paradoxical understanding of the full cycle of Theban myths in Sophocles’

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

53

re-creation; these myths are, for him, for them, stories about a city where society and government never become fully human, with disastrous consequences in every generation; and Holderlin works to bring out his understanding in what might otherwise be a very particular image, taking advantage of the ambiguity that is inherent in a simple verb, weisen: “show oneself,” or “point to someone else.” A daring approach. By contrast, Friederich Beissner notes that Hölderlin “slips a double-edged meaning” into this line by misreading the Greek verb altogether, turning “gaping wide” 7 into “showing.” Beissner goes on to say: “Polyneices does not show the besieged city a seven-gated maw, but he threatens, ‘gaping wide,’ the seven gates of the city.” Most editors have joined Beissner in disagreeing with Hölderlin’s interpretation. They give the line a single meaning: Polyneices is like an attacking eagle, bloodthirsty, opening his great beak to devour Thebes. But Hölderlin notices something that they seem to be missing—how else to explain the strange epithet “seven-gated maw” that Sophocles gives to the city? A victim-city does not sound so much like Scylla. The image fits nicely, however, with the origin of Thebes. After all, the first Thebans, the spartoi sprung from the planted teeth of a dragon and christened the new city with each other’s blood. The city is a voracious maw. This image is not Hölderlin’s invention. It is Sophocles who slips in the theme of the origin of Thebes, with its blurring of the lines between human and non-human. It is in Sophocles that the original hubris of the spartoi makes them as bloodthirsty as the mythical dog Phonax. It is Sophocles who says that Thebans seem to be possessed by the Dragon: Hölderlin only makes the point more clearly, saying that the Dragon watches over the sheepfold— that is, over the fragile barrier that protects civilized Thebes from subhuman barbarism. Hesiod, again, had described the men of bronze as falling into the mythic category of the not-quite-human,

54

Antigone

self-devouring in their hubris and incapable of meeting the basic test of humanity by forming themselves into proper cities. Thebes carries the scars of the dragon’s fangs—also the lances of the spartoi—as a collective birthmark. The dragon does not come to Thebes from outside, in the form, say, of the Seven Champions and the Argive army, but from within, from the bowels of its civic being. There is nothing the Thebans can do about it. It is their original sin. Whatever they do, the dragon watches over their sheepfold, its fangs like the spears of bronze warriors. This is the double meaning of the phrase “all around the lances,” (kukloi logkhais.) How can Thebes be both victim and aggressor? Put bluntly, Thebes is a place where people always have too much self, too little otherness. Descended from the spartoi, beings not fully human and generated a-sexually, the people of Thebes always have what we would call too little genetic and imaginative diversity. Inbreeding and incest are related concepts and, not surprisingly, weave in and out of the Theban myths. Friends are enemies, love is hate, victims are aggressors. Subtle imagery suggests this: the fangs of the dragon become the lances of the spartoi (Aristotle, Poetics, 1454 b 19.) This is why, whenever Thebes was in danger, the citizens threw a descendant of the spartoi down from the walls.8 At these moments the soil of Thebes becomes a literal maw, swallowing up its own children. Only such a victim, bearing the mark of the lance, synonymous with the original hubris of the spartoi, could calm the wrath of the dragon, or of Ares. The active role that some of the Olympians play in this hymn about the war of Thebes—Hephaestus, Ares, Zeus, and Dionysus—turns the battle into a kind of rite, and the strange death of the brothers into a human sacrifice. Not that the gods take sides between the brothers;9 rather, the gods work against the madness, the hubris, of Thebes itself. This is why Hölderlin rejects the conventional identification of Eteocles with Thebes and the dragon, celebrating them as victors in battle. Wyckoff, for example,

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

55

translates this line as: “hard the fight for the dragon’s foe” (EW, 122.) Hölderlin will have none of this. He stresses the delirious ride—Ares and Hephaestus seem both to mount the warrior and to possess him, driving to doom the monster who threatens the civilized polis. Holderlin, then, makes the dragon a symbol of cosmic disorder and madness, and the allies of Zeus take up arms against it:

And thus, the tornado of Mars broke Over the enemy’s back, becoming An obstacle to the dragon. (h, 128-130.) Toios amphi nôt’ etathê patagos Areos, antipalou duskheirôma drakontos. (OCT, 126–128.)

Ares brings the madness of battle, the madness that engulfed the spartoi at the founding of Thebes and Eteocles and Polyneices the night before the action of the play. The German “Getümmel” captures the crash and terror of a tornado quite marvelously. Possessed by Ares and Hephaestus, the brothers rush senselessly on each other in martial hubris. Finally, they destroy each other, and thus put a stop to (become an obstacle to) the voracity of the “Dragon.” The Chorus earnestly hopes that their joint sacrifice will end the self-devouring madness of the city, the “seven-gated maw,” and bring peace at last. It was natural for the brothers, says the Chorus, as descendants of the spartoi, to be taken up into the tornado of Mars; but their sacrifice has achieved a deeper end, making them “an obstacle to the Dragon.” It is significant that the Greek “patagos Areos, antipalou/ duskheiroma drakontos” emphasizes the opposition between the “tornado of Ares” and the “dragon/serpent.” Antipalou can mean both “opponent” and “one who counterbalances in value and

56

Antigone

greatness.” These are very different meanings; taken together, they suggest either that Ares and the serpent may be equally powerful and their struggle a serious contest, or that Ares has entered the fray directly against the serpent. Either way, the victory of Ares frees Thebes from the weight of its ancestral curse. Sophocles is Hölderlin’s match for subtlety. Hölderlin connects Sophocles’ strange poetic diction and a mythical logic that is, perhaps, less evident than the precise analogies with the tragedy of Aeschylus. Aeschylus, for instance, presents the victory song of fire-bringing Capanaeus, whom Zeus then strikes with a thunderbolt. Hölderlin pursues the repetitive signs of reflexivity and malign self-reference, as Loraux would do, two centuries later, at the level of the lexicon built around the theme of “the same.”10 Without overestimating the analogies between isolated images, we should be able to see, in the depths of the text, the rhythmic organization that gives these images very oblique meanings. Even if it is true that Sophocles “seems frequently to have thought of the Aeschylean trilogy, of which Seven Against Thebes was the final play,” it is better not to import precise and isolated projections from Aeschylus into Sophocles. Sophocles, dubbed “the supreme ironist” by Winnington-Ingram, loved to work out the paradoxes and ambiguities that he found in his great predecessor; this is probably why, in Antigone, the syntax of the Parodos is considerably clouded and thickened by a strange movement, reciprocal and reflexive, which multiplies the layers of meaning. In the second strophe, where Hölderlin exploits the ambiguity between one warrior and a group of warriors, his language speaks less of a group than of a single monster mounted and ridden by Hephaestus, Ares, and Dionysus. They seem to drive it to a divine madness that causes it, and the plural warriors, to sacrifice themselves and each other. In this perspective, it is easy to see why the Chorus finishes its song with an exhortation to honor all the gods, not just Dionysus (although he merits the privilege of the

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

57

aegis.) Not, perhaps, unconsciously, Sophocles recalls the great reconciliation between the Olympian gods and the gods of the underworld that ends Aeschylus’s Eumenides. Third Strophe: from martial to bacchic union By intensifying the exalted tone of the first chorus, Hölderlin emphasizes the holy madness that has seized the brothers and given them an uncanny and ghastly fate. Why? Because their death purifies and re-establishes the right order between humans and gods in Thebes. As Hölderlin interprets it, the “warrior/s” is/are driven mad by the combined efforts of Ares, Hephaestus, the Sun, and Zeus. The Sun bridles him/them, and the “gaze” of the Sun plays off against the “vain gaze beyond” of the warrior/s. Zeus himself tires of his/ their sterile greed, the “brilliance of big tongues,” and brings their madness to an end. The third strophe marks the end of their frantic gallop;11 they collapse in drunken ecstasy, as in a bacchic thyasos:12 But on the hard earth he falls, Drunk with love, he who, with a frenzied horde Advanced frothing, bacchic In the blasts of contrary winds. (H. 138–141.) There is in this choral song a sense of labored flight that recalls certain dreamlike or pathological states in which individuals feel that they merge into the things around them. Hölderlin makes martial madness merge into bacchic trance. He does this by using the sound and rhythm of several verbs to suggest the breathless fury of the gallop; thus tanalotheis becomes hinunter taumlend in Hölderlin’s rendering, bakkheuon epepnei becomes Hinschnob, bacchantisch. Nor does he shy from thoughts of erotic fire and raging folly; thus purphuros…mainomenai…ormai becomes

58

Antigone

liebestrunken…mit rasender Schar. Hölderlin knew Greek and German well enough to know that liebestrunken, “drunk with love,” is an incorrect translation of purphuros, “fire-bearing.”13 He may have wanted to avoid too obvious a reference to Aeschylus’s epithet “fire-bearing” for Capanaeus, and he may have had another good reason for what he did. Purphuros can, in certain circumstances, refer to the fire borne by Eros, and Hölderlin is concerned that love and desire have operated perversely throughout the history of Thebes. Here he seems to have felt that Sophocles was twisting the Aeschylean image to fit a new context. As N. Loraux observes, Sophocles uses “innumerable occurrences of ekhtroi (enemies) and philoi (friends,)” as well as the effort of the protagonists to “divide the whole of humanity into people they love and people they hate” to suggest that stasis (civil war) is “the essential modality of their family relations.”14 This is where Eros comes in. The Chorus will later claim that Eros raises up “violence between relatives” (neikos xunaimon). True, the Chorus is speaking there of the love between Haemon and Antigone; but, as Nicole Loraux remarks, “it is possible that, beyond the explicit intention of the Chorus, its words suggest that, within families, there is at best a blurry line between eros and neikos.15 This is the context for the erotic connotations that Hölderlin finds in the unlikely location of fratricidal war. Later, when Antigone speaks of the “unhappy marriage” (duspotmon gamon) of Polyneices, he will hear references both to the marriage of Polyneices with the daughter of Adrastus and to the bloody union of the brothers with each other; and he will realize that the two brothers, possessed by gods, are acting out a new version of the drama of their Theban ancestors, down to the expiatory sacrifices. They cannot escape the monstrous origin of their city and their line. They can only die to atone for it.16 A place where war can be erotic is, again, a place where moral lines are too blurry. Love and hate are too closely joined, and

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

59

Hölderlin realizes that the brothers are blinded by a bacchic frenzy as they lock in mortal combat. The two of them are set apart (as willing scapegoats) from the princes who are to take care of the seven gates of the city in the future. These seven surviving princes (Eteocles was not counted in their number) were not caught up in a bacchic frenzy or in self-destructive rage. They survived, one for each gate of the city; and their symbolic number indicates that they have a vital role to play in the future of the city. They are fully human, and they will guide the foundation of a new, human, order in Thebes. This is why the Chorus speaks of them as sacrificing “their bronze weapons to conquering Zeus,” (EW, 142, H, 148,) while it describes the two brothers as sacrificing themselves to Dionysus. The Chorus hammers home this distinction between the self-sacrifice of the savage princes and the legitimate sacrifice of the human princes by an insistent repetition of marks of otherness: But he found something else; Someone else’s something Doles out the spirit of battle…. Fratricide is a horror, but Hölderlin understands that it is not a unique horror among the Labdacids. The whole history of the family is shot through with horrors, as is the history of the city. Both Thebes and its royal family are doomed to work out the monstrous inhumanity of their birth. Hölderlin thought it very important that the Chorus should have begun its song by putting itself into the place of the Sun. The old men do their best to interpret the unspeakable death of Polyneices and Eteocles as an event with religious meaning and cosmic significance, a kind of Dionysiac version of the battle between Zeus and the Titans. Hölderlin is always aware that Athenian tragedy is specifically a rite in honor of Dionysus. Here, in the first extended choral song, he is at pains to emphasize the traits

60

Antigone

of a new, Dionysiac, religiosity, quite different from the competitive spirit of the official rituals of the polis. This not to say that Dionysiac religion was “interior” in the modern sense, or that Hölderlin thought it was; rather, its ecstatic rites balanced and, by balancing, confirmed the emotional order of the classical city. The Chorus is seeking a religious solution to the problem that faces Thebes. The old men stake their hopes on “the dissolution and recomposition of social categories…that the most eminent Greeks considered to be the principal contribution of Dionysus to the religious and social life of the classical Greek city.”17 Creon has other ideas.

The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun

61

Notes 1. Cf. Bernard Mezzadri, “Étéocle pris au piège du cercle,” Les Tragiques grecs, Revue Europe, January-February, 1999, p. 235–000. 2. Cf. Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Hellas und Hesperien, Zurich, Artemis Verlag, 1960, p. 260. 3. On the ambiguity of Dionysus in the first and last choruses, see R.P.  Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles-An Interpretation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 110 sq., (Winnington-Ingram). 4. Vernant, MP, 1, p. 25. 5. Vernant, MP, I, p.  27 and François Vian, La Guerre des géants. Le mythe avant l’ époque hellénistique, Paris, Klincksieck, 1952 also Vian, OT, (“Avant-propos,” p. 5–16). 6. Liddell & Scott translate the verb amphikhano as “gaping wide,” Hölderlin seizes the ambiguity of “weisen”. 7. Cf. Liddell et Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. 8. Vian, OT, p. 206. 9. Mazon, BK, p. 126, note 1. 10. Loraux-Mazon, pp. 105–145. 11. On the “savage hunt” of the entourage of Dionysus—half parade, half wolfpack—see Henry Jeanmaire, Dionysus. Histoire du culte de Bacchus, Paris, Payot, 1985, p. 281 sq., 12. Louis Gernet et André Boulanger, Le Génie grec dans la religion, Paris, La Renaissance du livre, 1932, p.  122  sq.  ; A.-J.  Festugière, Études de religion grecque, Paris, Vrin, 1972, p.  110–113  ; Vernant, MP, I, p. 81 et seq.; also Marcel Detienne, Dionysus mis à mort, Paris, Hachette, 1998, p.  152–153. The thyasos realigns the spatio-temporal limits and the socio-political distinctions of the polis. Individuals come together in an undifferentiated mass, more like brute nature than like any human society. 13. Cf. F. Beissner : “Liebestrunken  : Dasselbe Wort wird sonst buchstäblicher durch feuerbringend oder zündend wiedergegeben.” (StA, 5, p. 487) 14. Loraux-Mazon, p. 122. 15. Loraux-Mazon, p. 123. 16. For a smilar thought, see Plato, Symposium, 192 b and e. There

62

Antigone

Hephaestus realizes the secret desire of all beings to be melted into one with their lovers in “a common death … down below, in Hades.” 17. Louis Gernet and André Boulanger, op. cit. pp. 110–113.

Chapter 3 Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

Creon’s Proclamation The old men may hope for a religious solution to Thebes’s problems, but Creon, entering at the close of the Parodos, is thinking of practical politics. His first words break the almost sacred spell that the Chorus has woven around the two dead brothers, uniting them in a common destiny that can assure Thebes’ happiness. He will have none of this. For him, one brother attacked the city and was evil; the other defended it and was good. Creon is vigorous and decisive. He will bring peace to Thebes, end the city’s curse, and found a new order with a new royal family. His. He knows that he is on shaky ground. The first part of his proclamation is focused entirely on proving his legitimacy. He treats the old men with extreme [political] prudence and respect, summoning them to a private audience (ek panton dikha, Hölderlin’s aus dem Gesammte) and creating a narrative in which he praises their support for the former rulers of the city. He speaks of Laius as “the holder of power and the throne,” of Oedipus as “the man who saved the city, then ruined it.” Finally, he praises the fidelity of the old men after the fall of Oedipus, when they supported his sons. Nothing odd so far. Creon understands that the old men—more likely a proud Senate or a Council of Elders than the groveling oldsters of some modern productions—played a decisive role in supporting the three previous rulers, and he wants to make sure that they will support him. Then, suddenly, he seems to strike a false note. After buttering up the old men by praising their fidelity to the Labdacids, he

64

Antigone

speaks of the death of Polyneices and Eteocles as “shame” and “pollution.” The brothers, he says, “have killed themselves in the shame/ miasma of their own hands” (plegentes autokheiri sun miasma ti for Sophocles, Geschlagen in der eigenhandgen Schande for Hölderlin .) This is strong language, all the more so after the smooth flattery of his opening lines. To say that the descendants of Labdacus have brought shame, (i. e. religious pollution,) to the city is to claim that they are unworthy either to rule the city or to be praised. To say the very least, Creon has chosen a strange way of eulogizing the last men of the family. But he has not come to praise the Labdacids. He links the two brothers, the good one and the evil one, in shame, in miasma, in religious pollution; and he uses this linkage to convince the old men that Thebes needs a new royal family, a family free of Oedipus and Laius and Jocasta, a family free of shame. In a world that believes in direct relations between gods and men, Creon’s concern with shame and pollution makes perfect sense. There is nothing metaphorical about the miasma of the family of Laius and Oedipus. It is all very real. The royal house of Thebes really does carry a curse. Horrible things really do happen in the palace in every generation. The problems of the rulers of Thebes really do bring pain and suffering, over and over again, to the city and its people. The old men have tried to whitewash all this, hoping in a misty-eyed way that the mutual sacrifice of Eteocles and Polyneices will somehow set everything to rights in a moral economy whose laws are too complex for understanding. Creon is firmer and more practical. The problem, he says, is the house of Labdacus. The solution is a new dynasty, the house of Creon. Hölderlin seized eagerly on the sharp contrast between the attitudes of the Chorus and their new ruler. But what does this contrast mean? Why did Sophocles put it there? Hölderlin gives strong hints in his Remarks on Oedipus. At the beginning of Oedipus Rex, he says, Oedipus faced a challenge like that facing Creon at the beginning of Antigone. Both rulers confronted clear evidence of

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

65

divine displeasure and looked for a way to purify the city from its shame, its miasma. And up to a certain point, according to Hölderlin, Oedipus and Creon failed in similar ways—although Oedipus bears his tragic task into a kind of glory, while Creon tries to shirk his and ends in distress). Oedipus sought an answer for the Theban plague, and Hölderlin thought that, up to the middle of the play, he erred by conceiving of the answer in a manner “too infinite.” What Hölderlin means by this strange locution is that Oedipus hoped to set things right in his lifetime, that he tried to realize the absolute in its concreteness, obliging his fellow-citizens to translate the oracle into the language of finite human understanding. His successful effort to force his way into a past whose workings were almost beyond human understanding subjected him to sufferings almost beyond human strength. Oedipus attains heroic status “where the second half begins,” because he faces humiliation, shame, violence and abandonment without breaking down. Creon falls into a variation of the same error. He is right to be tired of the moral ambiguity inherent in a cursed city. He wants to be able to distinguish friends from enemies, as the Chorus has avoided doing. Like Oedipus, he imagines that purification can be concrete, and he fails by setting human will against a superhuman thing, the miasma, whose ramifications he cannot understand. Again, like Oedipus, he particularizes the general (at first in a seemingly appropriate way) in a search for scapegoats who can bear the city’s shame. First, he turns on both of the sons of Oedipus, whom he describes as “useless.” Then, the scapegoat is Polyneices, whom he demonizes as a public enemy and seeks to humiliate after death. Finally, there are the daughters. Through it all, he betrays a strong, suppressed resentment against Oedipus and his children. There is more than simple legalism in his profanation of the corpse of Polyneices and his persecution of Antigone and Ismene. Hölderlin compares him to the Inquisition.

66

Antigone

This is evident from Creon’s first speech. From the explosion of the word “shame/miasma,” Creon works to turn the old men against the royal family. At first glance this would appear unnecessary. The royal family, after all, has run out of sons. Creon has taken power, and his son will succeed him. But that is to reckon without Antigone and the epiclerate. The royal family has not run out of daughters, and Creon has a duty, under the only law that an Athenian audience would have known, to marry his only surviving son to the elder of them. Sophocles, of course, is too subtle to hang out a banner for the epikleros daughter or “Queen Antigone,” but the Attic tragedians, and Sophocles in particular, liked to weave the laws and customs of their own Athens into the texture of life in the Heroic Age. His cultivated audience would have grasped at once Creon’s predicament. Just when he thinks he is free of the miasma, the institution of the epiclerate drags him back into it, and all Thebes with him. Creon cannot imagine any less desirable bride for his only son than Antigone, and Antigone is suddenly the only possible bride. This is why Creon’s first acts as ruler of Thebes are full of anger towards her and her family. Her marriage to Haemon will wreck his fine plan to establish his dynasty on the throne and to make a better future for the city. Worse, such a marriage will compound the incest—Haemon and Antigone are more than first cousins—and risk new pollution. Creon is forced to become a formidable man. Where the Chorus recommends a vague and general piety, he chooses action. He moves boldly to break the hold of the Labdacids over the city.1 His decree establishes purification as a legal basis for getting rid of the surviving children of Oedipus, and, as Winnington-Ingram notes, he takes complete control of the public agenda.2 His first orders deny the principle that the children (to be born) of Oedipus’ daughter will be the city’s legitimate rulers, and he shows that he is not afraid to be ruthless in pursuit of his goals. Sophocles here

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

67

gives him little greed for money or lust for power.3 His only purpose is to restore order to the city by founding a new, uncursed, royal family. To some extent, he could say, as the Athenian ambassadors in Thucydides said to the Spartans, “I did not take power by force. The men of Thebes bestowed on me the burden of leadership.”4 His situation, however, is less simple than his desire. Although Creon has no particular drive to wield tyrannical power (as Sophocles later pointed out in Oedipus Rex), his need to rid the city of the Labdacids pushes him into tyrannical action—establishing his family on the throne, insulting and threatening the innocent princesses, finally exposing one of them and pushing her into death. Like many a usurper, Creon has convinced himself that the good of the city and the good of his family are the same thing, and nothing could seem worse to him, in either respect, than the thought of Antigone the epikleros reducing his son to a cipher in another man’s polluted family, prolonging the miasma of that family, and placing a grandson of Oedipus on the throne of Thebes. It is worth noting that democratic Athens did not automatically stigmatize the title tyrannos. Both tyranny and democracy denied the hereditary principle and bestowed power as the reward of merit, and Knox is right to point out the intentional parallels between the primacy of Athens in Greece and the primacy of Oedipus in Thebes. As he says, “In his reactions and typical capacities, his strengths and weaknesses, Oedipus is a microcosm of the Athenian people in the age of Pericles.”5 Thus, it is appropriate for Creon to present his decrees with pride and self-confidence. As he speaks of the “friends” and “enemies” of the city, he speaks also of a “relative” (and perhaps he is already thinking of Antigone) whose excessive love for her family will make her an enemy of the city: And as for the man who thinks his dearest relative more important Than the city, I consider him worthless. (H, 198–199.)

68

Antigone

With prophetic clarity Creon describes the kind of enemy he and the city should fear most. And who is this man? Who thinks his dear relative more important than the city? Well, the man is a woman. Creon knows that Antigone and Ismene are the only two people in all Thebes who have a religious obligation to bury Polyneices, even in the face of a legitimate decree by a legitimate ruler. That is why he makes no effort to distinguish between the two sisters when he is accusing them of burying their brother. He jumps to the conclusion that the two of them colluded in the burial, and, when confronted with the obvious fact that Ismene is too timid to have done such a thing, he blandly says that she must have “taken leave of her senses.” He accuses both of them of breaking his new law because, in his mind, they are both guilty of an even greater crime, the crime of prolonging the cursed rule of the Labdacids. With all this conviction, Creon is becoming a fromidable man. In response to the mild counsels of the old men, he snaps that the real world demands clear moral values and decisive action. If you aren’t for us, you’re against us. No wonder the Chorus falls back into a worried coolness. Balancing their intuitions against the commands of their new ruler, trying to consider all aspects of the situation, they wind up without opinion, will, or feeling. They are not cowards; they are just up against objective threats of superhuman origin and strength. Only a hero, a sage, or a god could face these threats and prevail. For a while, at least, the old men are open to the notion that Creon may be the hero they need. His take-charge certainty seems to promise a competent strategy; and, though they do not understand him, they think that the fault may be theirs. Their strongest feelings, under these circumstances, are ambiguous. Commentators have long noted the vehemence with which they speak of “light” hopes, saying that these are sometimes useful, but sometimes inconsistent and vain. But it is not clear

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

69

whether they mean Creon’s illusions of grandeur and purity or their own rather desperate hopes at the dawn of a new day. They cannot trust their own instincts. By the middle of the second stasimon they dismiss their own hopes as “vagabond” and their own desires as “scatterbrained,” (poluplagktoselpis, kouphonton eroton) (OCT, 615, 617.) They understand that there are no easy answers for the problems that confront Thebes, and they take comfort in Creon’s businesslike, high-energy realism. Polla ta deina—the hymn and the formidable aspects of mankind The first stasimon follows Creon’s proclamation. In it, the old men reflect on deinon, the uncanny and elating sides of existence and of Man. They call Man the most “formidable” of all things on earth, and speak of his “marvelous” exploits, his “terrible” excesses, his crushing failures. The thoughts are matchlessly deep and rich, the poetry incomparable. Most readers are surprised to find so much penetration in the words of a Chorus that has just accepted Creon’s harsh decree in docile silence. This is a misunderstanding of the role and function of the Chorus in this play. The old men are not spineless. They are, rather, open to the full range of events, actual and possible, in a world where gods and men meet face-toface and anything can happen. They know how much they do not know, and their openness gives them the freedom to stand back from the action and reflect deeply, bringing to bear all the points of view available in the agonistic classical city. 6 Despite their sympathy for Antigone and the Labdacids, they observe a strict neutrality as they examine all the possibilities. Thus, while they accept Creon’s decree (H, 219 et seq; OCT, 211 et seq.), they refuse to take an active part in its execution (H, 224; OCT, 216); and they suggest, whenever the occasion arises, that the gods demand the burial of the dead Polyneices.7

70

Antigone

What does Hölderlin make of this? In keeping with his method, he considers the first stasimon in relation to the entire mythic history of Thebes. He understands how big and strange is the world that the old men are attempting to navigate, a world of endless catastrophes where human justice and mere common sense are plainly inadequate. In his Remarks on Oedipus, Hölderlin compares Thebes to Europe in the time of the Inquisition. In both places, he argues, a series of crises—religious, economic, and political—leads to a pervasive instability, both moral and physical, and the slightest spark can start a conflagration. Hölderlin sees the people of Thebes as worn out by suffering, haunted by “prophetic nightmares” (Wahrsagergeist,) and looking for scapegoats. (Here is another of Hölderlin ’s deliberate anachronisms, akin to his overall belief that Sophocles mixes legends of the heroic age with the daily realities of life in democratic Athens.) Hölderlin has a certain ironic respect for the old men and the stance that they adopt. Their “cold neutrality,” as he calls it, is really a kind of safe space where the two extremes of man’s helpless nature, his cold head and his warm heart, can meet and recognize each other. The Chorus is neither right nor wrong; it is both, and is thus a summary of man’s nature (the normal man, that is, as distinct from the hero.) Their “neutrality” allows them to give voice to thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain mute or suffer the distortions of advocacy. In the safe space between heart and head, recognitions rise and sink again into the unsuspected depth of the matters in question; the deeper the old men delve, the farther they are from a firm bottom of certainty. They can never find a platform from which to view the facts objectively. Hölderlin does not blame them for their failure. He does not think that ordinary human knowledge can ever plumb these depths, and the old men of Thebes lack the ability to “divine” (ahnen) the connections between things visible and invisible. Their knowledge is ordinary and human. Though they do the best they can, their best is a blend

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

71

of deep insights and laughable blindness, and they become for Hölderlin the exemplar of man’s strangeness and alienation with respect to himself. Hölderlin emphasizes man’s helplessness from the very first line, using the adjective ungeheuer (astonishing, mighty, monstrous, overpowering) to intensify the Greek deinos.8 The effect of this is to accentuate a kind of pessimism about knowledge and mastery, something that Heidegger would later take up in his commentary on the fragility of human nature with respect to language and knowledge as expressed in this chorus: Man shows his embarrassment, his clumsiness, his rootlessness by his boast that he invented both language and understanding, the ability to make buildings and poems…. How could man ever have invented the very things that sustain and permeate him (das ihn Durchwaltende,) precisely the things from whose depths he arose?.... The word edidaxato does not mean “man invented,” but “he abandoned himself to his surroundings (er fand sich in) and found himself within them ( fand darin sich selbst): the power of the thus active.9 Hölderlin does not content himself with bringing out these universal dimensions of the stasimon. He also sketches in the first faint outlines of the tragic complex that is beginning to come together deep in the play. Once the old men have reflected on the general trickiness (mekhanai) of mankind, they move on to the specific trickiness of Creon. They seem to have some inkling that Creon is up to something, though without grasping the consequences of his actions. Among all the “arts” that they list (from seafaring, farming, and hunting all the way to governing,)

72

Antigone

Creon’s plot may well merit special mention. The Chorus is worried that his plan to found a new royal line is in fact some kind of trick to deprive them of their legitimate rulers. What he sees as purification, they see as potential injustice, and they worry that his motives are more selfish than he says. He is, they fear, too eager, and they seem to ask whether he is, as he says, a saving hero, or whether, perhaps, he is yet another monster in the Theban ruling circle.10 Hölderlin sees that these doubts about Creon trigger the doubts that the Chorus expresses about Man. This glorious stasimon is full of ambiguity. “Formidable” Man can change the very nature of things, but he is always unleashing powers that are too great for him to control them.11 Every great achievement of civilization is based on tricks and traps that can backfire at any time, and often do. Brilliant reflections these, with the universality and depth of great religious poetry; but they are not merely universal. Although this stasimon stands on its own as poetry, and has often been set to music on its own, it is also an integral part of the play of Antigone. As the Chorus sings about Man in general, it is pondering a particular man, Creon. A mixture of eulogy and reproach Hölderlin accentuates the Chorus’s doubts from the first line. “Polla ta deina” becomes “Ungeheuer ist viel”—and both the Greek and the German are hard to translate. Throughout the first strophe of the Greek text, the Chorus sings Man’s praises. Many things are fpomidable (or astonishing, mighty, monstrous, or overpowering,) but nothing is more formidable than Man. Sophocles is here recalling the main theme of Hesiod’s Works and Days, where settled agriculture and the meticulous work of farmers are celebrated as the foundation of civilization, but Sophocles goes much further. His old men begin their song with the praises of seafaring, something that no Greek would have thought of as a settled or traditional activity.

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

73

Sophocles is also going far beyond Aeschylus here.12 As the first strophe continues, Man’s boldness seems limitless. Man is praised for challenging cosmic forces on the sea, on the land, and in the air— daring even the sea monsters that had daunted Aeschylus—as he hunts, traps, and tames the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. But Sophocles is a tragic poet, not a wide-eyed panegyrist. His idea of tragedy, moreover, centers on a notion of Necessity that cannot be challenged with impunity. So, when the Chorus praises Man for challenging the natural order of the world, and uses words like “trick” and “trap” to describe Man’s efforts, we are meant to see warning signals; and all the more so as the Chorus makes human progress—and the creation of the city, Man’s preeminent achievement—depend on these unnatural acts. Hölderlin plays with idiomatic structures to suggest, in German, what Sophocles suggests in Greek. A good example has to do with Man as a hunter. Where Sophocles uses the straightforward amphiballo, Hölderlin writes bestricken, a much more loaded term with meanings like “lure,” “enchant,” “seduce,” to suggest a mysterious and disquieting dimension to this aspect of Man’s achievement.13 The German word is inseparable from connotations of dark magic, and Hölderlin seems to have felt that, for the Greeks, infinitely more than for modern Europeans, hunting was an aspect of the big trick that Man played on Nature to establish a dominion that is fundamentally unnatural, and thus precarious. Critics have often accused Hölderlin of exaggerating the split between Man and Nature here, of introducing ideas that Sophocles and his Chorus did not have. The German wild, which he uses for Greek words that means game or prey, can also mean savage or wild beast (agraulou theros;) and the relation of Man to his passive prey is very different from his relation to a wild beast that can hunt him. But the context bears Hölderlin out. Sophocles describes hunting as an advance against the agrion ethne (the “wild people” of animals,) suggesting that hunting is something akin to warfare

74

Antigone

among humans and implying that animals, like the other side of a human conflict, will fight back and occasionally take the offensive. There are many suggestions in Sophocles and other Greek writers that non-domestic animals are fundamentally other with respect to Man; not just that Man belongs to one species and they to others, but that they belong to a different order of creation, and that their order is demonic. No wonder, then, that Man’s bold attacks against them should require so many strange tricks, and should so often, nonetheless, backfire. Taking advantage of the fact that he is writing for readers rather than spectators, Hölderlin emphasizes the two-sidedness of civilization by eliminating the break between the first strophe, which celebrates Man’s triumphs, and the second, which is darker. Taken together, as he insists that they be taken, the two strophes describe the processes of civilization as inherently paradoxical. He stresses that language and thought (and, in particular, the art of governing cities) are more than an extension of earlier mekhanai, and throw the clearest light on the paradox that lies at the very base of the human condition. Here is the second strophe as rendered by Hölderlin . His alterations are shown in italics: And the ethereal Thought and the boldness to govern cities He has learned, and how to flee The wet breath of distressing hills And its unhappy darts. Full of answers. Without answers. He gets nowhere. The place appointed for the dead, That alone he cannot flee, Nor can he devise a cure For incurable diseases. Having some bit of wisdom and more Technical skill than he can hope for,

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

75

He sometimes achieves good, sometimes evil. And he wounds the laws of the earth and twists the faith That he swore to the powers of Nature. All civilized, he gets nowhere, Uncivilized, when beauty Is with him and with insolence. The man who acts thus, Let him not enter my house, Or my thoughts. Here Hölderlin , with a mastery of subtle accents, exposes the relationship between the unstable and volatile character of “word” and “ethereal thought” and the “light winged world” of the “songbirds” caught in the nets of hunters. Word and thought, then, are revealed as weak reeds that fail Man when he leans on them for support, leaving him to his fate.14 Creon has argued that madness and excess are the great threats that hang over the city. The Chorus is more subtle, less blackand-white, more pessimistic. For the old men of Thebes, the great threat is the paradox that underlies all human achievement. Every triumph involves tragedy. “Full of answers. Without answers. He gets nowhere.” Hölderlin ’s translation intensifies this sense of instability. Under his care, the hymn becomes an epitome of tragic reversal. W. Binder found this intensification excessive.15 But Binder mistook intensification for falsification. Hölderlin says nothing that Sophocles does not say. It is Sophocles who builds a sense of pessimistic irony from strophe to strophe and from hymn to hymn. Hölderlin ’s language is different, to be sure; that is his whole method, founded on his exquisite sense of the difference between the Greek and German languages, and between ancient and modern life. Consider how he handles the Greek image “the light world/ winged by songbirds,” which he transforms into “airy thoughts/

76

Antigone

light as the wind,” and which reappears in the second stasimon as “fleeting and restless hope” and “light desires/senses.” (H, 638, 640) The function of these hopes and thoughts is to seduce the mind of man and to hide the inevitable sadness of mortal existence— the life of “ephemeral beings,” as Sophocles says. Sophocles forges a semantic association between songbirds (kouphoneon ornithon I, 346) and human desires (kouphonon eroton I, 648,) by way of thoughts (anemone phronema I, 357) and hope (poluplagktos elpis I, 616.) Vain desires, hopes, thoughts, delusions, all these he links to birds flying high in the sky, or perched on rooftops, out of our reach. Such is human desire. In fact, Hölderlin ’s emphases and intensifications here give more force to the borrowings that Sophocles made from Aeschylus—the images of Prometheus and his tricks, which make the human enterprise seem exciting and endurable. “I have delivered mortals from the knowledge of their impending death,” Prometheus explains to the Power (Kratos) that has chained him in agony to the rock. When the Power asks, “What have you found that can cure them of it?” Prometheus answers, “I have given them blind hopes.” (Prometheus Bound, 248-250.) The paths, turns, and seductions of formidable destiny Hölderlin heard the echoes of these other myths as he translated the polyptoton “pantoporos—aporos (OCT, 360 et seq; H, 335 et seq.) Most translations make these words purely triumphal—Wyckoff, for instance, who writes: “He can always help himself./He faces no future helpless.” (EW, 358-9.) But Hölderlin was sure that the correct reading was pessimistic: “Full of answers. Without answers. He gets nowhere.” He even insists, in the two successive polyptota of this hymn, on the refrain: “He gets nowhere.” The second occurs ten lines further on, where Sophocles writes “hypsipolis—apolis (OCT, 370.) Wyckoff translates this as, “High

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

77

indeed is his city; but stateless the man/who dares to dwell with dishonor.” Hölderlin, pessimistic again, sharpens the contrast: “Highly urbane—inurbane.” (H, 386.) Hölderlin insists, in the two successive polyptota of this hymn, on the refrain “He gets nowhere.”16 By dwelling on this, he brings out their parallels: Pantoporos—aporos Hypsipolis—apolis Hölderlin sees a lapidary juxtaposition of two antithetical Greek words (pantoporos—aporos.) But he also hears it. It is not only the meaning of the words, or the relatively vague connection between them, that determines the meaning of the sentence; it is also the sound of the words, the inflections of the speaking voice, the rhythm of the phrases. If a speaker lays stress on the first polyptaton (pantoporos—aporos,) the idiomatic meaning (full of answers— without answers; or, ready for anything—totally unready) fades a bit, and the literal paratactic meaning begins to sound through: “ready for anything, (he is nonetheless) totally unready for what the future throws at him (and) gets nowhere.” (ep’ouden erkhetai to mellon, or “he arrives with nothing in the future.”) This kind of approach is as unusual in our day as it was in Hölderlin’s. Modern philologists tend to maintain that the verses of Greek tragedy were written to be intoned in a loud and static way before an enormous open-air audience, with no room for the subtleties of vocal inflection that private reading makes possible.17 And rightly. But Hölderlin is also right, because he understands that Sophocles wrote for an audience of readers and re-readers, not just for the crowds at a single performance. The sociology of his work was very different from that even of Aeschylus, and it is reasonable to suppose a sizeable and perhaps socially important readership that read and re-read these words in a “modern” way. The two polyptota

78

Antigone

have their own rhythmic structure, a rhythm of images, of ideas, and of sounds. The Sophoclean hero: “human, all too human,” and caught in his own trap As the play moves forward the pessimism of the Chorus is, of course, justified. Creon’s energetic effort at purification blows up in his face and leads to a catastrophe both private and public. Hölderlin keeps Prometheus in mind as he translates the next lines, remembering how much human misery comes from the combination of trickery and hope, and from their twisted relationship with knowledge: Man’s connection to wisdom is complicated; art and trickery often bring him “more than he can hope for”—or endure. Having some bit of wisdom and more Technical skill than he can hope for, He sometimes achieves good, sometimes evil. In other words, Man’s relation to wisdom is limited, at once insufficient and excessive.18 Hölderlin notes this understanding as part of a mythic context that articulates the tricks of “art” and “the pride of ruling cities” and posits an ineluctable conflict between man and “the laws of the gods of earth” (khthonos theon (H, 384; OCT, 367)). Man’s tricks “wound” (kränkenä) the “laws of the earth and twist the oath sworn to the powers of Nature” (H, 384 et seq.) From Aeschylus on, as Hölderlin knew, the tragic poets of Athens tried to work out the tough and unsatisfying connections between the purity of divine law and the limited understanding of mortals. Hölderlin ’s treatment of the second polyptoton (hupsipolis—apolis”) is designed to illuminate this theme:19

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

79

And he wounds the laws of the earth and twists the faith That he swore to the powers of Nature. All civilized, he gets nowhere, Uncivilized, when beauty Is with him and with insolence. This is very deep pessimism indeed. The basis of man’s rapport with the divine order is, in Hölderlin ’s interpretation, transgression. It is by transgressing against the divine order that Man gains access to it. As for the laws of the polis, they are “a bit” of the divine order established on earth, and no man ever obeys all of them all the time. As Hölderlin suggests elsewhere, this notion came to him directly from Sophocles. The Greek verb pareirein, which Hölderlin translates as kränken (wound,) has the literal meaning of “insert” or “introduce.” Wyckoff writes: When he honors the laws of the land and the gods’ sworn right, High indeed is his city But Hölderlin hears threatening overtones. For him, “insert” carries the connotations of “insert in an improper or illegitimate way,” He hears the word as it is defined in Schneider’s German dictionary of 1819, 20 where kränken has a range of meanings that lead up to “twist,” and thus to “mix up,” as Hölderlin hears it—an idea taken up recently by Lacan.21 For Hölderlin , this “twisting” is equivalent to the Christian concept of Original Sin, though historically independent of it. Aeschylus had dealt with these issues in a similar way in the Oresteia. There Apollo had broken ancient laws by tricking the gods of the Underworld, and only the intervention of Athena had averted cosmic disaster. Hölderlin hears an intensification of these concerns in Antigone. The city of Thebes traced its foundation to

80

Antigone

trickery and law-breaking; that was its ineradicable birthmark, and that is why, for Hölderlin , the laws and customs that appear to be “civic” and honest are shot through with moral ambiguities. Most translators have heard it differently. They have translated Antigone as if Thebes had a morally pure foundation, and simple adherence to the laws of Thebes could guarantee justice. The French translator Paul Mazon, for instance, writes: Qu’ il fasse donc dans ce savoir (de gouverner et d’administrer la cite) une part aux lois de son pays et a la justice des dieux, a laquelle il a jure foi! Il montera alors tres haut au-dessus de sa citie, tandis qu’ il s’exclut de cette cite le jour ou il laisse le crime le contaminer par bravade. Let him only remember, in this knowledge (of governing and administering the city,) the laws of his country and the justice of the gods, to which he has sworn allegiance! He will rise very high above his city, while excluding from the city the day when he lets crime defile him by impiety. This brings us back to hupsipolis—apolis. Hölderlin gives it a degree of syntactic firmness that amounts to an interpretation, perhaps an over-interpretation. Mazon thinks the latter. In his note on line 368, he observes: “The basic meaning of the verb pareirein is insert. Here it means to introduce civic and religious morality into the realm of human knowledge.” Bailly and Schneider agree with Hölderlin , citing precisely this line as an example of pareirein meaning “mix up,” “confuse,” or “wound,”—just the family of meanings that allowed Hölderlin to make explicit the meanings that he read between the lines. In Hölderlin ’s reading, the old men of Thebes describe Man as doing what Apollo and Athena did to the positive law of the Erinyes, and the Erinyes howled at the treatment: “They were struck to the heart, to the liver, as if a coachman had

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

81

whipped them…. Thus did the new gods treat them…. Thus was founded the bloody throne” on the trickery of Apollo and Athena. (H, 155 et seq.) If there is a conflict between the laws of old and new gods, Aeschylus is not sure where justice can be found, but he thinks that agreement between the two generations of gods is possible, and he in fact dramatizes it. In Aeschylus, the treaty between the chthonian gods and the Olympians founds, or re-founds, the city, and justice is possible among men. But Sophocles is less sure. Despite his proverbial serenity, Sophocles abandons his heroes to their own ideas of the world, imperfect as they invariably are, and to the awful things that befall them as a result. There is nothing about the city, the polis, to make justice any easier or any more certain. Curiously, Hölderlin establishes a relationship between citydwelling and citizenship, the beauty and the insolence that reveal how weak and inadequate is man’s dominion over nature through the arts of farming and political life: All civilized, he gets nowhere, Uncivilized, when beauty Is with him and with insolence. Heidegger will explore the same relationship a century and a half later. (EM, p. 116.) As often in Hölderlin’s translation, the reader is struck here by his insistence on a literal translation for all the expressions that have something to do with “the beautiful.” The Iuntina edition of Sophocles, which Hölderlin used, is responsible for one interesting example, the transformation of me kalon (not beautiful) into men kalon, which still emphasizes its relation to “the beautiful” and reinforces Hölderlin’s idea that there is a fundamental connection between transgression and the process that brings law and punishment together into political systems. Seen from this angle, the zeal to “govern cities,” the desire that pushes man toward the

82

Antigone

beauties of urban life, appears as a kind of rashness, perhaps courage, perhaps insolence, perhaps, indissolubly, both. This rashness, courageous and insolent, is the essence of tragedy. The tragic hero pursues “the beautiful” at the price of transgressing some fundamental law. His failure—and he always fails—makes it possible for the rest of us to see the difference between “the beautiful” and “the not-beautiful,” to which we too would otherwise be blind. The hero (or heroine) is brave enough to pursue “the beautiful” into the land of madness, beyond the realm of positive law, into the depths of fundamental transgression. Hölderlin seems to have wanted to take into account the ambiguity of a founding act that opposes chaos and disorder (the pollution of Thebes, for instance) by arrogating to itself—in man’s character as a being “highly urban”—an “un-urban” power that no human being can wield in his capacity as a human being. The hero’s too-complete pursuit of beauty and urbanity leaves him, at the end, un-urban, unfit for the society of his (or her) fellow citizens.22 It is morning in Thebes. Creon has spoken. He has issued a harsh decree in a good cause, and the elders of Thebes are considering the situation. This is the context for their thoughts and their song. Is he brave? Is he rash? Is he—who knows?—mad? The elders are alive to every possibility. All the indications are that Sophocles has made the elders say more than they knew. They are worried, subconsciously, about their new ruler. Thus their terrified exclamation when Antigone appears (daimonion terras, “Divine prodigy.”) (OCT, 376.) Hölderlin is uniquely aware of all this. He seems to understand that they are beginning to realize, in spite of themselves, that Creon, under the guise of strength and pious reason, is staging a stunning power-grab. He has caught Antigone in his nets. As Hölderlin says, she is “bestrickt,” (“rolled up” or “hypnotized,” or “enchanted,”) in such a way that she falls into a fatal transgression. And, in fact, when the guardsman speaks of Antigone as a mother bird who cries

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

83

for the loss of her chicks, is Antigone not like the “songbirds” in the song of the elders, the prey of the strong hunters? Antigone thinks only of the honor of her family, seeks only to spare her brother from the humiliation of impure mutilation, and thus reacts violently and fatally against Creon’s decree. It seems indeed at times that Creon has turned the art of the hunter into the art of the ruler; his “zeal/ boldness to govern the city” (astunomos orgas) demands that he catch the “bird,” Antigone, in his nets. It is hard to say whether this is a conscious design or just an unhappy coincidence; but Creon, the “formidable” man, has obviously put himself outside the normal limits of the human community. He is operating in the shadowland between gods and beasts.

84

Antigone

Notes 1. For the question of Creon’s political status, whether tyrant or king, see Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et Tragedie en Grece ancienne, 2 vol., Paris, La Decouverte, 1972 and 1995. (Hereafter MT,) p. 183. See also Knox, WA, p. 91. 2. Winnington-Ingram, p. 125 3. Ibid, p. 170.. 4. Thucydides, I., 75-76. See also Knox, WA, p. 91. 5. Knox, WA, p. 87 et seq. 6. For “the triumph of the collective values of the democratic city,” see MT, I, p. 7; also Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Prèface,” in Sophocles, Tragedies, Paris, Gallimard, 1962. 7. H, 262 et seq., 278 et seq. 8. Hölderlin had used the adjective gewaltig (immense, violent) in his first attempt to translate this hymn. See Bernhard Böschenstein, Frucht des Gewitters. Zu Hölderlins Dionyos als Gott der Revoluion, Frankfurt-am-Main, Insel Verlag, 1989, p. 37 et seq. 9. Heidegger, EM, p. 120. 10. Charles Segal, La Musique du Sphinx, Paris, La Decouverte, 1987, p. 130. 11. On the metadiscourse that has grown up around Hölderlin ’s translation, see Böschenstein, op. cit. p. 40 et seq. 12. Segal (op. cit. p. 131) notices here an inverted echo, in the Antigone, of ll. 583-601 in the Choephoroi. 13. Böschenstein (op. cit. p. 44) shows the ambiguity and the illusory aspect of the vocabulary of ropes and nets. 14. The ambiguous and dangerous status of mental devices, “air” or “fire,” fits well with Hölderlin ’s idea of sunlight. Böschenstein (op. cit., p. 55) singles out Hölderlin’s line “…Fate. That is,the whip and reins of the sun,” which he compares to the image of the son which “holds the bridle” of the warriors in the Parodos. 15. W. Binder, Hölderlin und Sophokles, Tubingen, HölderlinGesellschaft, Turm-Vortrage, 1992, p. 132 et seq. Binder emphasizes the “ecstatic” tendency of Hölderlin ’s translation, noting that it sometimes leads to the revelation of important relationships in the original text but sometimes loses contact with it.

Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man

85

16. Jacques Lacan proposes the same translation, probably under the inspiration of Hölderlin . See Le Seminaire VII. L’Ethique dans la psychanalyse, Paris, Le Seuil, 1986, p. 320 (hereafter Lacan.) 17. Thrasybulos Georgiades, “Musik und Rhythmus bei den Griechen,” in Zum Ursprung der abendlandischen Musik, Hamburg, Rowohlt (no date.) Also “La langue comme rythme,” in Philosophie, 12, Autumn, 1986, pp. 73 and 82 (hereafter Georgiades, LR.) 18. Heidegger (EM, p. 116 et seq.) follows Hölderlin in speaking of being in the shadow of non-being, and of appearance: “We will have a chance to penetrate the appearance of the “fearful” only if, at the same time, we experience the power of appearance and the struggle with/ against the appearance in its essential [double] solidarity with being present.” 19. Lacan, p. 319 et seq. Lacan’s dependence on Hölderlin is clear. 20. Johann Gottlob Schneider, Griechisch-Deutsches Worterbuch, Leipzig, 3rd edition, 1819. Schneider defines “pareiro” as “push… in Sophocles Antigone 369 pareiron is explained as something that wounds…. Bailly’s Dictionnaire grec-francais (Paris, Hachette, 1950) gives the same meaning. 21. Lacan, p. 321, et seq. 22. See Vidal-Naquet’s Introduction to Claude Calame, Thesée et l’ imaginaire athenien, Lausanne, Payot, pp. 9-13.

86

Antigone

Intermezzo The Beauty of Antigone

…it is thus that we must speak of her beauty, in the superlative. —Hölderlin

There is some kind of fascinating beauty in Antigone, but what is it? Surely nothing physical; no one—in the play or outside it—ever describes any aspect of her appearance. Is it the devotion of a young girl to her dead brother? If so, is it religious devotion or madness, agape or ate? And where does she get her dauntless courage? Creon and the elders pay little attention to her when she argues about traditional piety, but their ears are sharp enough to catch some false notes in her pleading. Artistic beauty is different from moral excellence. To get a sense of Antigone’s beauty, we must learn to hear between the lines as the other characters speak, and sing, about her. Antigone really is “raw,” as the Chorus says of her, or inhuman; yet the Chorus loves her, and she has represented for generations of readers the highest point of humanity.1 They see her beauty, hear it, find it, where Sophocles planted it, in nuances of his text. To a great extent her beauty consists in her embrace of paradox, as when she insists on burying her brother, not just as a sacred duty, but also as an act of vile servility. At first sight, the reader slides over these paradoxes without noticing them, because Sophocles presents them so nonchalantly. But they build up, and they are one of the great props of our love for Antigone. Or is this too simple? The art of writing plays usually depends on the creation of convincing action and of characters that move us,

88

Antigone

not on intellectual extravagances, and the great playwrights are the ones who can tuck important secrets into the crevices of normalseeming life. As Robert Musil said: “The government clerk in the cheap seats finds Hamlet ‘natural,’ while Goethe thinks about Hamlet his whole life without understanding why it works.”2 The more subtle a problem is in drama, the simpler the characters need to seem; the deeper the problem, the more a dramatist needs to give it the camouflage of superficiality. No outward show of thinking, never a thought that could find a conceptual expression, just a gesture here, an offhand word there, a sentence that ends oddly and is forgotten. These subtleties turn banality into drama. They haunt us like ghosts, and the great dramatists are those who know how to bury them deepest inside us. Antigone is a case study of this principle. The more we feel the haunting power of dramatic richness in the play, the more we concentrate on the simplicity of our first impressions, on the noble young heroine who sacrifices herself for a pure and worthy principle. This is not enough, but it is so hard to escape that it has been enough for many people, even for some of the greatest dramatists and sharpest-eyed readers in history. Schiller, always a moralist, chided Sophocles for “bantering about the most serious things,” and Goethe decided—with no outside evidence—that Sophocles must have had a solid rhetorical education; otherwise, where would he have got his “drive to find all the causes, true and apparent” of the dramatic action—a drive that he disguises behind the “banter” of language apparently simple and natural? Thus the apparent simplicity of Sophoclean language produces its opposite, as the sedimentary piling of simple layers gives the play a depth belied by its surface. This is why critics who try to explain the whole play by talking about the ethical positions of its two protagonists usually bog down in the nuances of words and phrases, in implicit meanings and the ambiguities that give a shimmer to simpleseeming language. (Loraux-Mazon, p.119.) They end by splitting

Intermezzo–The Beauty of Antigone

89

Antigone into two irreconcilable personae, a Christian martyr and a fearsome heroine, neither of them sufficiently supported by the text. They endow her with a paradoxical beauty, a fleur du mal, a glorious purity that springs from dark places within her, from depressive tendencies, contempt and hatred for others, from chafing at the laws of the city. Such interpretations, says Knox, seem to be “purely personal.”3 They lead to a picture of a goody-two-shoes Antigone lost in inversions of values—social, political, religious, emotional—that turn the normal love of a sister for her brother into incest and necrophilia. In short, she ceases to be a heroine altogether and becomes merely a case-study of obsession. Critics who approach her in this way eventually realize that they risk destroying the play, which depends on a strong heroine; and, since the text does not support their approach, they typically emend the text. Even Goethe does this. In his conversations with Eckerman, he says that we can preserve the moral excellence of Antigone only by monkeying with the text, and he cuts verses and whole scenes without a qualm.4 Hölderlin does none of this. He is willing (as Lacan would later be) to take his heroine whole, the cruelty with the sweetness, the bold resistance with the passive submission. He sees her with equal eye when she seems to lose herself in the obsessive contemplation of a detail and when she blazes forth with painful irony, so grounded, so “there,” that a casual spectator fails to notice the difference. And he gives perhaps unique weight to verbal sound and to layers of nuance which form, for him, a “rhythm.” Restoring this rhythm is the key to his restoration of Antigone. Beauty, Cruelty, Heroic Solitude: Art’s Incalculable Secret In the theatre, of course, performance precedes interpretation. We need to see what we see and hear what we hear before we can fit theories or apply knowledge. All the “themes” of

90

Antigone

Antigone—her love for her brother, her challenge to the king and the city—come through to us only as we hear the words of the characters and see their actions. Hölderlin says that human beings are “systems of representation,” and that drama is the presentation of their interactions. Tragedy, he says, shows “the means by which representations, feelings, and reasoning develop” by “reaction,” or “reciprocal action.”5 In other words, as a play unfolds, the “feelings” of the characters do not appear as if they had an independent existence. They are not described or imitated. Rather, they reveal themselves through words and actions that are apparently insignificant, though noticeably well constructed. Theatre, more than any other art, depends on convention. As a social art, it needs to represent society in recognizable stylizations; otherwise, the feelings of the characters lack social significance. Thus, Sophocles “places” Antigone by putting her feelings into categories that were familiar to classical Greece: feelings between relatives, feelings within families and social categories, feelings between humans and the gods. Thus, he is able, in the prologue, to suggest that Antigone’s love for her brother is the only thing that can hold a shattered family together. Not only does Antigone rise up to defend her dead brother’s honor, she also fights for the community of the dead, a community that holds the living together in memory and ritual, particularly in royal dynasties. The Greeks buried their dead, and burial of one’s kin was a duty and a sign of love. When Antigone asks Ismene to help her bury Polyneices, she presents the burial as a piece of ordinary good behavior, an indispensable and civilized way to maintain the reputation of their family. But when Ismene demurs, and Antigone argues—an inarguable point, advanced at first quite rationally— that the dead and their gods demand the burial of corpses, a vehement feeling suddenly blazes forth from within her. Reason and ordinary good behavior cannot account for so much emotion, nor can anger and outrage account for so much rationality. She can

Intermezzo–The Beauty of Antigone

91

make political, legal, and religious arguments, but the sounds of her voice betray overdetermination. She is in the grip of something, perhaps more than she is herself aware of. When, for instance, she brushes Ismene aside, claims the “holy crime” for herself, and speaks of rejoining her family and lying beside her brother, we do not know—and does she?—whether she dreams as a sister or as a lover. Ismene grasps the issue instantly, wondering that she should feel so much warmth towards “the cold ones,”6 but Antigone waves her worries aside. Her purpose is fixed; she would rather die heroically, now, than live, like Ismene, until “a death that is not beautiful.” 7 Hard words for a sister to utter—but even they do not represent everything she feels. As the Prologue ends, Ismene reaffirms their love for each other, and Antigone does not contradict her. The “living” meaning of the scene, taken as a whole, does not depend, then, either on arguments or on outbursts, but on the rhythmic integration of action, feeling, and reasoning in a unique totality. Poetic rhythm brings this into being, and analysis cannot reduce it to constituent elements. Perhaps the best way to think of Ismene’s kind words at the end of the Prologue is to imagine that they are the final chord that resolves a piece of tonal music. They confirm the tonality of the scene, which begins and ends with evidence that Antigone is lovable and loved, despite the harsh cruelty of her words and actions. Antigone is lovable. Yes, and beautiful. And she knows it. She is sure that the Chorus supports her,8 and she is not surprised when Ismene changes her mind and offers, in public, to die with her. But Antigone is not moved. As all commentators have noted, she holds herself apart from other people, even though almost everyone— Ismene, the Chorus, Haemon, even the guardsman—loves her. Deaf to their words—or perhaps taking them for granted, or bored with their affection, as beautiful people learn to be—she refuses to seek their aid and becomes, in Lacan’s fine phrase, “so terribly voluntary a victim.”9 Creon is not the only one who accuses her of being “the

92

Antigone

only one” in all the city who disobeys his decree;10 the Chorus too emphasizes that she “lives her own life,” a “unique” person.11 And she herself never tires of proclaiming her solitude, outside the world of the city and the interests of the living; she will die, she says, “without tears, without friends, without husband.”12 Holderlin emphasizes her isolation by giving a cold objectivity to the last verse of her lament: “No one weeps…for my fate.” A literal translation would say “none of my friends and relations”; he says, simply, “No one.” This is odd, considering how many people have wept for her: Ismene, Haemon, the Chorus. But there may be method to it. He may be opening a new, atypical perspective, at least slightly different from the ordinary exegeses of Antigone. Hölderlin’s translation shows a heroine who is stubborn and self-centered, no plaster saint but a flawed and magnificent human being. Her feelings for the dead, especially for Polyneices, appear as an idiosyncratic passion rather than a moral lesson, a very personal inversion of the will to live. This is what gives a bitter irony to one of her noblest-sounding phrases: Zum Hasse nicht, zur Liebe bin ich. I was not born to hate, but to love.13 Perhaps. But what of Loraux’s observation that “when we would expect a shared love, Antigone chooses to be alone?” And everything in the text, both in Sophocles and in Holderlin, seems to reinforce this choice of solitude. What this suggests, then, is an a-political heroine who follows her personal passions without a political purpose or concern. Critics have long admired the balance of love and politics in Haemon’s feelings and disparaged Antigone’s cold detachment; many have found in her behavior a prod, even a justification, for Creon’s very Athenian misogyny. But is there really nothing political in this?

Intermezzo–The Beauty of Antigone

93

When Creon warns Haemon that “an icy embrace” is all Antigone will ever give him, does he mean only the frigidity of a woman who will not submit to marriage? Is he saying that Antigone is like Atalanta, for instance—sexually mature but hostile to marriage? If so, he is wrong. Antigone is not anti-aneira (“mannish” and “man-hating”) like Atalanta.14 Antigone does not preserve her independence by hunting her suitors instead of marrying them. Even if her words are sometimes cruel and harsh—as when she says that she would not have risked her life to bury a husband, or her own children, since she could always replace them, while her brother is irreplaceable, since their parents are both dead—they remain words, hypotheses, never confirmed by action or worked into the texture of the myth. Nor is Antigone exactly like the Persian princess in Herodotus who chooses to save her brother, born “of the same blood,” rather than her husband and children, who are put to death as the result of her choice.15 If Antigone were so nasty, why would anyone love her? And what is her hubris, what is the excess or madness that drives her to a tragic end? Surely it is nothing simple. Aristotle was prudent to speak of it merely as “a certain fault.”16 Is Antigone cold-hearted? It is true that Antigone never speaks of Haemon, or of Eteocles. It is as if her fiancée and her “good” brother, celebrated by Creon as a paragon of justice,17 simply did not exist. She also rejects her sister Ismene, who has shown deference and affection to Creon. And that is the key. Antigone is not opposing men. She is not opposing marriage. She is opposing Creon—“our good Creon,” as she mockingly calls him, before zeroing in and calling him “a tyrant.”18 Although she may not be a “man-hater” in general, she certainly hates one man in particular. As for her “mannish” language—and she certainly speaks in ways that are unusual for a woman—she simply uses the language of command, the political language of kings and other rulers. She is, and considers herself to

94

Antigone

be, a political person, a princess, a ruler. She resents an upstart, and she goes heroically into an unequal struggle with him. Her name is Anti-gone—guardian of a legacy—and she takes the place of her ancestresses Jocasta and Niobe even as, in some points of view, she opposes them. Although critics have emphasized how physically small she is, how much she resembles a mother bird who mourns her lost chicks with ugly cries19 and add that she “forgets” that motherhood was Niobe’s dominant concern, there is no support for this in the Sophoclean text. Sophocles does not establish a false analogy between the childless maid and the wife of Amphion, mad with pride in her fourteen children. What he does is to compare Antigone’s jouney towards death with the metamorphosis of Niobe; and that analogy rings true. Niobe cares too much about being a mother “rich with life” and is transformed into a sterile rock, while Antigone, the hopeful “root” of a new dynasty in Thebes, will die sterile in a rock-hewn tomb. Here the lucidity of Sophocles caught Hölderlin’s eye: Antigone’s “living death,” the terrible neither-nor of her subterranean “life” in the cavern, contrasted with Niobe’s “stony growth,” (petraia blasta,) her “richness of life” turned into a “wilderness.”20 As so often happens, Hölderlin is at odds with most modern interpretations, and superior to them. He restores the balance of Antigone’s character by accepting her breadth and complexity. She is both marvelous and terrible; brutal yet surpassingly beautiful, with something about her that is “lovable, comprehensive and intelligent under misfortune.” The rich nuances of Hölderlin’s interpretation restore the ambiguity, the “sublime irony,”21 of the Greek text. Irony presupposes distance and requires a certain flexibility of mind and heart. Hölderlin’s Antigone maintains such a distance from her own desperate situation, and he is not wrong to call her heroic coolness “beautiful.”

Intermezzo–The Beauty of Antigone

95

Antigone: Friend and Enemy, Child and “Queen” Hölderlin cannot pin this beauty down, although it is, for him, Antigone’s distinguishing mark. He brackets it with adjectives: “lovable, intelligent and understanding, dreamlike and innocent.” What do they tell us about her? Antigone is certainly not “innocent” in any ordinary sense, and yet part of the power of her beauty is the childlike freedom of her intelligence, still uncontaminated by habit, compromise, or practical calculation. Creon is the only character who speaks of her as a “woman” (gyné.) To the Chorus she is always either “child” or “maiden” (pais, koré, nymphé’, neanis.) All these words place the heroine in the transition zone between adolescence and full adulthood, a moment delicate and powerful, shot through with conflict.22 Antigone occupies two symbolic spaces at opposite poles from each other. On the one hand, she is a child; on the other, she is the dominant woman, really the dominant person, in Thebes. Hölderlin milks this paradox dry, lurching like the young Beethoven from violence to sweetness. The anti-political child who acts against the ruler of Thebes and the interests of the living will end with a speech that is completely political, and Hölderlin will call her “Queen.”23 Sophocles, of course, does not call her “Queen.” Changing the meaning of the Greek (ten basilda from its ordinary meaning of “child of kings” or, perhaps, “princess,” to “Queen” is to take a large political liberty; princesses who get themselves called queens tend to die young. This is the kind of thing that has led two centuries of scholars and critics to dismiss Hölderlin as an uncontrolled Romantic, full of subversive irony, burning with ill-digested revolutionary notions, hopelessly undisciplined with respect to basic facts and the plain meaning of words. But consider the actual political situation in this play. Antigone is, in bald fact, the legitimate heir to the throne of Thebes. There is a normal legal mechanism, the epiclerate, for ensuring an orderly succession, and

96

Antigone

that mechanism is working smoothly in the betrothal of Antigone and Haemon. Isn’t there an irony in the Greek text when Sophocles shows us the evolution of “raw” Antigone into a woman serene and majestic, beautiful and fearless and stunningly eloquent, taking her leave of Thebes, and of her life, calmly and without so much as an ill word? Instead of loading Creon with curses—as any audience would expect her to do—she approaches her unjust death unselfishly and with absolute elegance. Her last words are for the public good, not her own (it is too late for her,) as she asks the Elders to think about the law that has condemned her for doing what she should have done under the basic rules of piety and tradition. Isn’t this the enigma of Antigone? Isn’t this why so many people still love her? Isn’t this, in a word, queenly? Worlds meet in Antigone. She occupies a space between the savage and the civilized, moving freely among men and gods and beasts. She is kin to everything—human, super-human, sub-human; she is, in fact, too much kin to them—that is, it is too easy for her to move between realms of being that ought to remain distinct. And in this she incarnates her city. Thebes is a city that was cursed at its founding. The very name of the city suggests that its problem is fundamental: the root of Thebes is “dhe,” meaning “to place, fix, found, or establish.” Thebes is defined by the circumstances of its birth.24 A city whose people, born of the earth and the dragon’s teeth, have never been totally human. Thebans never made the firm distinctions on which civilization depends, between mothers and fathers, between parents and children, between ancestors and descendants. In the tragedy of Sophocles, Antigone takes all of this on herself and offers herself as a sacrifice of purification.

Intermezzo–The Beauty of Antigone

97

Notes 1. Knox (HT) and Perrota (Sofocle, Milan, 1935) emphasize the “challenge” posed by this “awe-inspiring heroine.” Karl Reinhardt (Sophocles, tr. H. Harvey and D. Harvey, Oxford, Blackwell, 1979) and G. Muller (Sophokles’ Antigone, Heidelberg, Carl Winter Verlag, 1967) consider the excellence of her goal; by contrast, Lacan (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60, tr. Dennis Porter, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992) wonders how an “inhuman being” can be morally good or bad. 2. Robert Musil, Diaries, 1899–1941, tr. Philip Payne, New York, Basic Books, 1998. 3. Knox, HT, pp. 107–115. 4. April 1, 1827. Goethe, J. W. von. [SW] Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurt, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, vol. 39, Gespräche mit Eckermann, vol. 39 5. Hölderlin , Remarks on Oedipus 6. Creon will refer to the dead in a similar way later, when he worries about the “cold embraces” that Haemon will receive from his bride, Antigone (H, 90, 675; OCT, 88, 650.) 7. H, 98-99. 8. H, 530. 9. Lacan, p. 290. 10. H, 682. 11. H, 849-850. 12. H, 898. 13. H, 544. 14. For the conversion of frigidity into an excess of sexual desire in the myth of Atalanta, cf. Marcel Detienne, op. cit. 15. Herodotus, Histories, III, 19. 16. Aristotle, Poetics, 1453 a 10. 17. Creon claims Eteocles as part of his own legitimacy. For a fuller treatment see Knox, WA, p. 91. 18. BL 31; H 33. 19. Cf. Charles  Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 120, et Lacan, p. 307 20. H, 852 et seq. 21. RA, vol. 2

98

Antigone

22. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter, Baltimore, Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1986. 23. H, 978 24. M. Detienne traces the ups and downs of the root “dhe” in the Greek imagination. See Apollon le Couteau a la Main, Paris, Gallimard, 1998, pp. 22, 105 et seq., 151 et seq., and 175 et seq.

Chapter 4 Creon, Antigone, Ismene The Great Debates

Antigone and Creon: the Two Faces of an Insoluble Conflict

Who is right, Antigone or Creon? The case appears to be closed. Goethe thought that Antigone was a sublime heroine with a hateful uncle,1 and a review of the critical literature shows that almost everyone has followed Goethe’s lead. No one today bothers to prove (as Schadenwaldt still felt obliged to do) that the two protagonists “are not equivalent in their essence and their value.”2 Whatever the critics may disagree on—Jebb and Knox, Segal and Vidal-Naquet, Loraux and Nussbaum—they agree on this. In the 1960s, when Müller and others were turning Antigone into a saint,3 even Lacan, no hagiographer, synthesized the principal interpretations to show “the riddle” of Antigone, an “inhuman being” whose splendor fascinates us by the encroachment of death into life.4 And, shortly afterwards, Derrida himself noticed her surprising role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit: “this incredible relationship, this powerful connection without desire…capable only of overturning, paralyzing, or going beyond a system and a story, of interrupting the life of a concept…of sustaining it even unto the grave.”5 Before we join the parade, let us pause for a moment to ask if this is how Sophocles works. Sophocles is, above all, enigmatic. He unites the reasoning power of a dialectician—as Nietzsche says of Euripides—to the ability to seize and represent emotions and intuitions in all their obscure intensity. His apparent simplicity is deceptive. It is not like him to make a plaster saint and a cardboard

100

Antigone

villain. Nor are his protagonists likely to give up their secrets to any critique based on only one approach—psychology, say, or law. Besides, as Aristotle says, tragic poetry represents “men in action,” not characters, and gives more importance to the drive of the plot to reversal and catharsis than does modern character-based drama. Hölderlin has his own understanding of reversal. He makes it out to be a reversal of values, a measure of a paradoxical duplicity of representations, feelings, and chains of reasoning. For him, the tragic paradox demands that signs and symbols reveal a dimension that understanding cannot reach, a meaning, or a Necessity, that passes human knowing. Such a definition of tragedy puts Antigone and Creon on the same level and weaves a surprising web of analogies between them. Hölderlin says, “My Zeus,” and raises the question of subjectivity This is why I have disobeyed the decree: My Zeus did not proclaim it to me. (H, 477–8.) Hölderlin sees tragedy in two ways, as a paradox and as a rhythmic pattern of contradictions. This double view plays out, in his translation, as a painstaking elaboration of confusing character traits, linked, somehow, to apparently contradictory words and movements of the characters. He works hard to show that apparently incoherent attitudes actually hang together, as when, in the opening lines of the play, he tries to link Antigone’s love for her sister and her dead parents to her bitter rejection of the same sister and life itself at the end of the scene. He finds the same kind of oscillation in the dialogue between Antigone and Creon. Antigone comes onstage with her head humbly bowed and confesses her law-breaking with a minimum of words. Then, all of a sudden, bursting out of her self-

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

101

imposed restraints, she lets fly with a long and self-centered speech that replays much of the prologue: how can it be that she, no ordinary person, is limited by the ban on burial? Here Hölderlin inserts a possessive pronoun that does not appear in the Greek. He writes “My Zeus did not proclaim it to me.” His addition is designed to show that Antigone believes herself to be above everyone else, even in her relationship with Zeus—as a result of which she appears haughty and egocentric. Thus, it seems surprising that, at the end of the episode, Antigone should answer Creon’s tirade with an affirmation of love.6 All the more so that, in the next dialogue, she will treat her sister so harshly. But there is a logic in these dissonances. They are part of a network of details and connections that Hölderlin discovered and endeavored to put into words. Faced with the difficulty of catching the hidden order in so many apparent inconsistencies, Hölderlin begins with the status of the characters and the arrangement of the symbolic space of the stage. He is willing to introduce altogether new material, even anachronisms like “my Zeus” (as if an ancient heroine had a modern subjectivity), and most readers of Hölderlin have abused him for this without trying to find out where it leads. If they had done so, they would have found that his unclassical approach brings him very close to tragedy and politics as the Greeks thought of them. Let us review the arguments against him. F. Beissner, whose point of view is strictly philological, is right to say, “To find a translation adequate and philologically legitimate which introduces a possessive pronoun (my Zeus) against the plain meaning of the text, and even puts it in italics, so that it takes over the line and changes its meaning, is to miss what is truly Hölderlinian in it.” 7 For W. Schadewaldt, Hölderlin’s translations “do not represent an ‘adequate’ reproduction which would ‘bring Sophocles back to life’ in German,” but a “spiritualization and an interiorization… by comparison with the original.”8 And Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe speaks of “the radical transformation of the text [by Hölderlin,]

102

Antigone

which changes the whole meaning of the play.”9 But none of these critics notices a second change of the same kind a few lines on, when Creon speaks of “my hearth,” using another inserted pronoun. From the point of view of the rhythm that organizes the poetic structure, it is absolutely essential to see the relationships that are established, not only between Hölderlin’s inserted pronouns, but also between his alterations and the normal Sophoclean way of using pronouns. In spite of Hölderlin’s great editor, whose authority has sufficed to condemn Hölderlin’s interpolations, it is worth looking again at Hölderlin’s text. Hölderlin is trying to recover the spirit and language of Sophocles, but Hölderlin does not believe that a literal translation can do that. When he praises “the language of Sophocles rightly understood,” and his way of giving objective form to “the understanding of man who is moved in the unthinkable,” Hölderlin cites precisely the first lines of this dialogue. How does he approach the inner logic of the Sophoclean text by giving Antigone a modern subjectivity? And how do we reconcile his alterations with the spirit of Greek tragedy? Let us recall that, in the Prologue, Antigone is scandalized that Creon’s decree should apply to her, to Antigone. Sophocles supplies his own italics here by making Antigone repeat “me” twice. Hölderlin is not inventing Antigone’s sense of unique and personal superiority. It is there in the original, and Hölderlin is just trying to find a modern equivalent for the Greek words that put it there. His solution is the possessive pronoun: “Here is why I broke your law. My Zeus did not proclaim it to me.”10 Before showing the mythic stakes that give a precise meaning to these pronouns (in the text of both authors,) let us review the exchanges in recent years that have reinforced the idea that Hölderlin modernized and changed the spirit of Sophocles. In his commentary on Hölderlin’s translation of this passage, Jean Beufret starts with Reinhardt’s German translation of the same passage, literally translated into English as:

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

103

Zeus did not decree this to me, Nor Dike whose seat is among the gods of the underworld. This human law does not come from them.11 He then re-translates these lines from Reinhardt’s German into French: Surely Zeus did not trumpet to me to do what I have done, Nor did Dike, whose seat is among the gods of the underworld, Fix among men the laws that I have made my own.12 Here he introduces a complete change from Reinhardt. Antigone is no longer refusing to obey Creon because Zeus and Dike oppose Creon; rather, she is claiming a strange kind of originality, proclaiming that she acted on her own, without prompting by Zeus or Dike. It is not easy to see what he means by this. In his own words: “Neither trumpeted from above, nor founded below, but coming from the center itself, such, then, for Antigone, are the laws.” To be sure, Beaufret insists that “Hölderlin does not read the Sophoclean text in this way. But it could be that he arrived at his own interpretation, at least in part, through meditation on this one.”13 Perhaps influenced by Beaufret, Lacan shows a similar tendency. He observes that Antigone “breaks solidarity” with the gods and becomes an embodiment of the death wish: She says clearly: “You have made laws.” But what does this mean? Translated literally, it means: “Since it was not Zeus who proclaimed these things to me.” Naturally, we understand what she wants to say (the ban on burial,) and I have always told you that not understanding is the key to understanding: “It is not Zeus who gives you the right to say that.” But this is not what she says. She rejects the

104

Antigone

notion that Zeus commanded her to act. Nor dike, who is the companion and assistant of the gods of the underworld. Precisely, she breaks solidarity with dike.14 Lacan and Beaufret translate the pronouns by circumlocutions that confuse Antigone’s reference to the decree. They leave the impression that Antigone denies all connection with universal laws or a higher sphere (the law of Zeus or the dike of the infernal gods) and is left in the peculiarly modern solitude of a person with no moral defenses against the death wish. These ruminations are obviously very far from any fidelity to the text of Sophocles or any other ancient author. But Hölderlin’s approach is different. It is founded on his poetic sense of the rhythmic equilibrium of textual subtleties, and it comes much closer to the anthropological reality of Sophocles. Hölderlin ’s paradoxical pronouns Returning to Hölderlin’s translation, we find that he adds “my,” not once, but twice. The first speaker is Antigone: This is why (I have disobeyed the decree.) My Zeus did not proclaim it to me. Nor, here in this house, the law of the gods of death, Who have set bounds to the law of man.15 The second is Creon: Although she [Antigone] comes from my sister and closest relatives and from the god of my hearth….16 After making Antigone personalize Zeus, Hölderlin has her say that the gods of death have their seat “here, in this house.” Then, he

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

105

has Creon speak of the Theban palace as “my hearth.” Of course, in a literal translation, neither character personalizes any of this; but Hölderlin has to make a modern reader grasp something that an Athenian spectator was much closer to, the competing claims of the two characters to ownership of the same physical, political, and religious space; and he uses interpolated pronouns to do this. When Antigone claims “her” Zeus, she is not describing a religious life based on a personal relationship with the god. She is speaking of the god who has protected the house of the Labdacids for generations, and she is claiming this god, and her hearth, as a part of her royal inheritance. Ancient polytheism worked by particularizing the absolute in its various aspects,17 and the insertion of the personal pronoun shows that Antigone feels herself protected by specific divinities and their specific justice—not by Zeus only, but also by Dike, as Antigone adds in the next line (with Hölderlin ’s second alteration.) She speaks and acts in the name of her father’s house, in the palace where her family has reigned up to that very day. Hölderlin ’s Creon understands what she is up to and counters her move. In Hölderlin ’s third alteration, Creon claims ownership of the house of Oedipus and separates Antigone from it: Although she [Antigone] comes from my sister and closest relatives and from the god of my hearth, Even so, she is ungrateful and takes no care to avoid a bad death.18 Hölderlin’s Creon claims that he is the head of the family. As for Antigone (and Ismene,) they are dependent on him and have no hope of reviving a Labdacid dynasty. The Chorus understands this and notes that the condemnation of the two sisters extinguishes the Labdacid line.19 We are watching, in short, a veiled argument about power. Hölderlin’s three alterations emphasize this. Moreover, the fact that

106

Antigone

both protagonists claim the same house as their own, with straight faces and clear consciences, reinforces the sense that Theban houses and families are not the same as houses and families in normal cities. The house of Oedipus and the house of Creon actually do coincide; each lineage actually does have a claim on the building, on power, even on the god of the palace. Isn’t this reason enough for Creon to try to stop the marriage of Haemon and Antigone? The two young people are related to each other in too many ways, and this family—this one family—has had too much intermarriage already. The spaces within this house are already too narrow, and this next unnatural marriage will constrict them still further. What is true of space is true of time as well, because the incestuous marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta has tangled generations. As the son became the husband, his daughter became her mother’s granddaughter. The generations moved forward and back in the same motion; times and spaces blended and blurred— and Antigone and Haemon, however attractive as individuals, will continue the horror unless Creon can stop them. The stage is set for a serious man to meet his tragic destiny. Hölderlin, extremely aware of the symbolic dimension of space,20 seems to have been the first to grasp this aspect of the archaic and classic imagination. In this context, it is natural for a royal princess—an epikleros at that—to speak of her Zeus as a way of claiming her right to the house, and throne, of her fathers. To this house she will bring her husband; in this house she will give birth to the heirs of her father. In Hölderlin’s eyes, she has a right to the possessives with which he endows her. Creon, on the other hand, has less right. When Hölderlin has him say “my house,” we are meant to hear a false note. Although sincere, he is wrong, and he is using self-confident language to hide a slick piece of trickery. Mazon has an interesting view of this moment. According to him, Creon’s concern for possession of the house and leadership within the family stems from his fear of offending the household god

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

107

(Zeus Herkeios) by putting Antigone to death. But, if he can make good his claim to the house and the leadership of the family, he can get away with murder by condemning Antigone and Ismene as ungrateful guests who have abused his hospitality and insulted the household god.21 By now the reader is beginning to suspect that Creon is using a verbal trick to turn the rhetoric of hearth and home (oikos, the center of family and religious life) against the rightful owners, Antigone and Ismene. This is why he attacks Antigone’s insolence, her disobedience to him as head of her household, before he attacks her crime against his decree.22 Ismene, too, is arraigned first for treason against her house: You! who watch for me, here in the house, like a viper, My ward, to suck my blood!23 Creon insinuates that the two sisters are perversely and scandalously ungrateful to the head of their family—him—and that their insolence has polluted the family hearth and betrayed its gods. Warned by the correspondences between Hölderlin’s changes, the reader is led gradually to see the secret springs of these rhetorical tricks. While Creon is accusing Ismene of sin against the gods of his house, Antigone is turning the same weapon against him by stressing the threat of his usurpation against the honor of hers. She has public opinion on her side; the Chorus will soon proclaim her and her sister the “last roots” of the royal line, with the clear hope that they will maintain the legitimate succession: And now on the last Root the light falls In the halls/hearths of Oedipus.24

108

Antigone

Not to mention the epiclerate. In this context, Creon’s rhetoric is not as “simplistic” 25 as it is often thought to be. It is a high-stakes trick to justify his usurpation in the presence of his legitimate and blameless rivals and in the teeth of public opinion. He needs to get control of the agenda, and he does it, as statesmen often do, by changing the subject. Not his usurpation, but Antigone’s rebellion, must be the crime punishable by law. Not he, but Antigone, is the horse that must be tamed. 26 Zealous to purge Thebes of its miasma, which he identifies with the incest of Oedipus and Jocasta, Creon sincerely hopes that the death of the two girls and the extinction of their line will allow him to re-found Thebes. He is aware that the execution of Antigone will offend Zeus Herkeios, the household Zeus; and his desire to keep the city from a new pollution is why he will later commute the punishment of stoning prescribed in his decree. But, in the end, his desire to lift the curse of the Labdacids, their hereditary miasma, is so strong that he will run the risk of offending Zeus himself. Antigone and Creon: the Tragic Bond As Loraux and Mazon observe, it is hard to see the good in Creon.27 Nonetheless, he is a full-scale tragic figure, and it is he who drives the play. No one understands this better than Antigone. She is aware—as Ismene apparently is not—that Creon is implacably determined to kill them. Hölderlin remarks that Antigone becomes more “understanding” (verstandig) with respect to her uncle. In her first exchange with the Chorus, she says nothing against him, and speaks of him, in fact, with a notable sweetness. Sweetness is not her only feeling, of course—she first rages against him and his civic values; but, suddenly, in the two last lines of her conversation with the Chorus, she changes. Suddenly, she sees a strict equivalence between her acts and those of her uncle. In Hölderlin :

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

109

Nonetheless, if you (the Chorus) Think that I have been mad to do what I have done, Perhaps I owe a bit of madness to the madman.28 Why does Antigone suddenly give this little self-deprecatory smile? Why does she admit that she might be mad after all, and mad like her uncle? It isn’t self-doubt: she is more certain than ever of the justice of her action. What connection is she making? In Greek, she uses the verb moraino (to be mad, to be an idiot), which is sometimes used as a euphemism for illicit love. Hölderlin’s German words toricht and Tor (mad, madman) carry connotations of bible stories about lapses into sin, particularly sexual sin. Does this mean that there is a connection between Creon’s legalism and a mad passion for one’s dead relatives? Antigone seems to have grasped intuitively that Creon is interested in more than the burial of Polyneices, that he is passionate about something rather than being merely a cold authority figure. He does, in fact, go on a bit too long about concern for one’s relative. And Antigone seems to sense that he too has a relative to defend: his son. His motives, she feels, are as pressing as hers and give his action a heat of madness that his cold legalism cannot conceal. Behind his platitudes about his philia for the city, she seems to hear a note of fear that touches his philia for his own family. Such is his concern for his son that he forgets, as Antigone forgets, that there are countless connections between love of city and love of family. He no longer feels that philia is the agent that binds people together into families and cities. He is, in that, mad. We are, however, in Thebes, a topsy-turvy city whose origin and original sin have so much to do with the lack of normal humanity and human relations, both personal and political. Can a person be sane in Thebes? Antigone’s little smile has two faces, one ironic and playful, the other serious and sincere. It says: “We are both making the same

110

Antigone

attempt, each in our own way—somehow to restore order and love and legitimacy to a cursed, crazy world.” From here on Hölderlin gives her words a tone of detachment. She stops arguing about laws and gods, or trying to convince her adversaries, or parrying her uncle’s thrusts. She begins to speak as a being outside time and space. Hölderlin says that she becomes “dreamlike and naïve.” Her speech finds a place where distinctions of thought lose their importance, and where she can see and feel, more than she realizes, numberless connections between people and destinies that seem very different. Her answers lose their earlier edge of defiance and hatred and take on instead a tone that mixes delicate irony with gentle reproach—even with Creon, her mortal foe. In the tonal relief of her words Hölderlin sees a condensation of implicit thoughts and an intuitive understanding much fuller and quicker than step-by-step reasoning. Here also Hölderlin finds in Antigone’s words echoes of a problem in logic and philosophy that was very dear to him: how can we justify positive law? Moreover, he realizes that this question brings up another one: how do we get access to the knowledge of the law? To the law understood as an ultimate knowledge (as opposed to the  imposition of an alien, outward necessity), as the supreme link assuring the contact of the individual with the cosmic order? Earlier, in one of his philosophical fragments, he had pondered the real basis of law, the Realgrund, considering it as something distinct from the laws of the state and the sanctions deduced from experience and shaped by understanding.29 This is why Hölderlin pays strict attention to the slightest details of Antigone’s words and actions. In a pioneering piece of close reading, he endeavors to find modern words for the nuances, ambiguities, and connotations that overdetermine her words and actions. He is convinced that the meaning of the play—the meaning of her tragedy—is there. Antigone now deals with the rhetoric of the polis and the string of democratic virtues that Creon has proclaimed.30 Her death, she

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

111

says, will bring her to a fuller community than any city; and, in an interesting bit of calculation, she argues that she should obey the gods of the underworld since everyone is subject “longer” to the gods of the underworld than to the gods of heaven. There is no place in Creon’s Thebes for such an argument. Neither, of course, was there any place for it in the Athens of Sophocles and his audience. Hölderlin creates his own nuances and ambiguities as he translates this scene with the aim of revealing an unexpected complexity in the actions of the two protagonists. Several non sequiturs weave a web of silent speech around the obvious and stated conflicts. Thus, when Creon accuses Ismene of participating in the burial,31 the attentive reader of Hölderlin discovers that Creon accuses Ismene even though he is fully aware of her innocence.32 Stranger still is what Creon says after Antigone proclaims: “I am for love, not hate.” He growls: “As long as I am alive, no woman will rule.”33 Critics routinely dismiss this as mere Athenian misogyny, but Hölderlin suspects more, and, little by little, he introduces the theme that the two girls, whatever their virtues or charms, are not all right; they are Labdacids, the “last root” of an accursed house; and the epiclerate, which applies to Antigone while she is alive, will descend to Ismene when Antigone is dead. Hölderlin stresses the violent and sudden rage that seizes Creon when Ismene accuses him of executing his own son’s fiancée, suggesting thereby that Creon knows he cannot solve his problem with only one execution.34 At the height of his fury Creon snaps that “such marriages” belong in Hades and commits both girls to his guards to await death. Digression: Reversal as “Rhythm” and Tragic “Paradox” At first blush, the abstraction and generality of Hölderlin’s Remarks seem remote from the spirit of Sophocles and the ideas of the classic age. No ancient writer would ever have used words like “rhythm” or “paradox”35 in a discussion of drama, much less

112

Antigone

spoken of tragedy as “a metaphor for intellectual intuition.”36 Hölderlin seems to be at his anachronistic tricks again, applying a modern theory of tragedy to an ancient work and endowing ancient heroes with an interiorized consciousness and a fully modern subjectivity.37 In fact, however, Hölderlin is paying strict attention to the ancient words and the ancient thoughts behind them, and his interpretations seem modern because they were, and remain, original and prophetic. Hölderlin’s attempt to capture the specificity of Greek in German, a less specific language, went against the grain of German usage. His translations are odd and obscure, not because he is trying to make an ancient language do modern things, but because he is trying to make a modern language do ancient things. This is what Georgiades means when he says that ancient Greek resisted “natural speech,”38 and that “Greek does not care whether the speaker, through the act of speaking, can produce a dynamic union of sound and sense. The connections [between words] are often so complex that speaking cannot do them justice.”39 By comparison with modern languages, Greek tends to blur the expression of a speaker’s subjective intention. Hölderlin knew that modern readers could not read as the ancients read, but he wanted them to learn and feel what the ancients had learned and felt. He concluded that there are two kinds of connections between the meaning of Sophoclean words and the truth behind them. The first of these connections is objective, established by the Greek language itself and suggested by the static beauty of Greek rhythm. The second is subjective and “Hesperian,” or modern, expressing an active self whose particular feelings and understandings turn isolated words into a coherent whole. Hölderlin cares a good deal about this distinction and emphasizes (against the learned opinion of his day) the difference between Greece and Hesperia with respect to the importance of rhythm in spoken language. In Greek drama, the rhythm of speech is set impersonally, in rigid metrical patterns of long and short syllables. There is no

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

113

metrical difference between the speech of one character and the speech of another, and the demands of the meter are powerful enough to overwhelm any personal touches of phrase or expression. Greek actors could not control or personalize a text as modern actors can. The language had a great deal of autonomy within the performance. Hölderlin understood this. He tried to explain it in critical writings, and he tried to make it apparent to modern readers in his translations. In his Remarks on Oedipus and Antigone he argues that a tragic poem contains two processes, one a process of “calculable” poetic technique (mekhané) the other “incalculable.” At the level of mekhané, Hölderlin finds phenomena accessible to consciousness and explanation. But, as he adds immediately, “it is necessary to see how the content relates to it [calculation]” before one can grasp the “living meaning.” What brings meaning to life is, for him, an aspect of meaning that cannot be fully understood through historical knowledge or domesticated by close reading. No amount of conscious effort or research can get to “living meaning.” It can be grasped only through sensations and feelings that are beyond conscious knowledge. On one hand, then, in Hölderlin ’s view, tragedy is the elaboration of human “calculation.” On the other, it is something less definable that seems to support human understanding and human time without depending on them. The living meaning of tragedy is found in the rhythmic ordering of these two incommensurable movements. The rhythm of the spoken language reveals “the play itself,” independent of the will of the actor.40 Hölderlin’s concept of rhythm transposes the rules of metrical versification, with their order of syllables in each line, onto the reality of the action in all its complexity of thought and feeling. What he calls the “poetic logic” of the play evolves from the relationship between the subjective rhythm of individual thought and feeling and the objective rhythm of the language and its impersonal verse structures. Hölderlin believes that the objective power of ancient versification was much

114

Antigone

stronger than any modern equivalent, and his appreciation of this difference underlies his theory of tragedy. In ancient Greek, the rhythm of a sentence depends much more on static nouns than on dynamic verbs. As Georgiades says: “The words of a Greek sentence are placed side by side in isolation. They stand there like sphinxes, as if frozen in place. No effort of dynamic speech can connect them.”41 Much of what seems strange in Hölderlin stems from his effort to render the specific experience of a speaker of ancient Greek as he tries to push his individual thoughts and feelings through a thick and resistant language. Greeks…felt their own language to be an independent power beyond their control…. No specific instance of speaking could exhaust the possibilities of the language. Something was always slipping away: whether it was the autonomous rhythm of the verses, or the “full time” of syllables and words…it did not let itself be smoothed out or absorbed by the ability of an individual person to turn the words into sound; it was always there, whether men wanted it or not…. A Greek must have felt that it was not for men to give names to things, but for things to proclaim themselves to men.42 Faced, then, with an ancient language so different from his own, Hölderlin cannot recover the essence of tragedy without finding a way to bring this double structure—subjective versus objective, personal versus formal—to life. He must show the action as something that can be “calculated” or “shown” or otherwise explained in conscious terms, but also as something—his living meaning—that cannot be reduced to cognitive and intentional manipulation. Understood in this second way, meaning is something that rises up like the Freudian unconscious, with or without the consent of individual consciousness and social rules.

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

115

Hölderlin explicitly calls it “the spirit of the savage and ever-living world” that escapes the rule of consciousness.43 It is significant that Hölderlin, unlike Hegel and most modern critics, does not focus his analysis only on the tension between Antigone and Creon. As he explains in his Remarks, the choral songs and the sacred utterances of Tiresias have as much importance for him as the dialogues. Misunderstandings of this key observation have much to do with the idea that Hölderlin brings an anachronistic subjectivity to Attic tragedy. Hölderlin’s view of Tiresias is instructive. In Hölderlin’s translation, the speech of Tiresias is unlike that of the protagonists. While they attempt—fruitlessly—in their dialogues to outdo each other in the kind of understanding and mastery that come from calculation and conscious knowledge (gnome’,) he speaks in a way that is outside time, and his “pure speech” introduces a counterrhythmic movement into the play. He does not try to argue with the characters. He merely speaks. What he says is impersonal, a-temporal, sacred, and enigmatic. The others try in vain to lure him into their game of argument and are left, in the end, to take him or leave him. For Hölderlin , tragic myth is more than a conflict between the public faces of men and women. For him, a hero is tragic to the extent that he confronts a dimension of language and meaning that remains beyond his control. In this perspective, it is no longer important to decide whether Antigone or Creon is right, since the hero’s decisive struggle takes place on a level above the visible conflict of one protagonist with another. The hero is also confronting the “living meaning” of language, in a strange landscape without communication or moral judgment. Perhaps this is why Hölderlin compares the conflict between Antigone and Creon to a “race” on a course perfectly parallel and balanced,44 where the competitors eventually find that their true adversary is Time itself, which tires them, wears them down, and finally kills them. We will return to this.

116

Antigone

Meanwhile, let us pause to note again Hölderlin’s two kinds of meaning: one the additive product of conscious and rhetorical argument, the other the “living meaning,” the true essence of tragedy, which suspends the moral judgments and the endless titfor-tat of dialogue. Whatever the reader may think of Antigone and Creon, the important thing about them, for Hölderlin, is that their fates converge in a dimension that is other and beyond their control, in the region of marvels and terrors that the Greeks called the deinos and Hölderlin the ungeheuer. This dimension is present from the beginning of the play and visible in many small, strange signals, puzzling and dark, that collectively form a “something” (Etwas is Hölderlin ’s word) that is beyond understanding. Although this “something” is never explicit in the text, poetic nuances allow it to rise out of the text like the glow of an invisible city at night. The dialogues between Creon and Antigone and between Creon and Haemon dramatize a dispute over the legitimacy of several supposedly fundamental modes of action and belief. The intervention of Tiresias shows that they are weak foundations indeed. In both his theory and his practice, Hölderlin the translator attributes great importance to nuances of tone and rhythm. They overdetermine the content of our knowledge and cause us to become aware of another dimension beyond our understanding, the proper terrain of tragedy. This old idea, present in Plato and Aristotle,45 touches on the progressive differentiation of modes of expression with respect to truth—first myth, ritual and poetic, overwhelming reason with sensation and arousing an enthusiastic response; later rational discourse and argument, giving voice to consciousness and calculation and dismantling little by little the mythic inheritance. Hölderlin, in fact, believed that his “New Letters on Aesthetic Education” took Plato’s Phaedrus as their starting point and moved from there to an “enlargement” and a “simplification” of Kant’s analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.46 His citation, in the

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

117

Remarks on Oedipus, of a passage from the Suda that calls Aristotle “Nature’s scribe,” shows that he was probably thinking of Aristotle as a connector who would allow him to introduce an aspect of Platonic idealism into Kant’s aesthetics, and thus advance “a step beyond” the narrow limits of contemporary criticism.47 He was looking for some work of literature that would show, clearly and precisely, the working of the two levels of thought and experience, and he found it in the art of the subtlest and most ambiguous of the classic poets. His work as a translator of Sophocles allowed him to test and confirm his hypothesis, first advanced in his fragment Uber Religion, of a “more infinite connection,” a principle of language and mind in which the different kinds of historical knowledge and the practices of different cultures become “modes of representation” and, despite their connection to specific times and places, can speak to each other and understand each other.

118

Antigone

Notes 1. Conversation with Eckerman, April 1, 1827. 2. W. Schadenwaldt, Hellas und Hesperien, pp. 260–261. 3. G. Muller, Sophokles’ Antigone, 1967, p. 11. 4. Lacan, op. cit., pp. 301–306. 5. Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris, Galilee, 1974, p. 187. 6. H, 544. 7. StA, 5, p. 494. 8. See Hölderlin’s Ubersetzung des Sophokles in Uber Hölderlin, Aufsatze von Th. v. Adorno, P. Beissner, etc…., Frankfurt, Insel Verlag, 1970, p. 289. 9. Hölderlin, L’Antigone de Sophocle, translated by Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, Christian Bourgeois, Paris, 1978/1998. 10. Eigentliche Sprache des Sophokles (…der) des Menschen Verstand, als unter Undenkbarem wandelnd zu objektivieren (weiss). (RA, 2.) 11. We shall see that this does not radicalize her obstinacy or attribute a modern subjectivity to a classical person. Cf. M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 163; B. Williams, Shame and Necessity, pp. 86 and 197. Both follow Bernard Knox. 12. Karl Reinhardt, Sophocle p. 84 (hereafter cited as Reinhardt, S.) 13. Ibid, p. 37 14. Lacan, op. cit. pp. 323–324. 15. H, 477–479. 16. H, 507. 17. The idea of a network or system assured by an intrinsically “unthought” matrix is omnipresent in Hölderlin ’s theoretical writings. See Urheil und Seyn, StA, 4, p.216 et seq., or the systemfragment,StA, 4, p. 234 et seq. 18. H, 507; OCT, 487. 19. H, 539 and 580 s.. EW 575 and 600s. (“…a bloody knife cuts the remaining root”). 20. On Hölderlin ’s “geopoetique,” see J.-P. Lefebvre “Les yeux de Hölderlin ,” in Hölderlin , L’Herne, number 57, 1989, p. 426 et seq. 21. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1401 b 4-6, on the “fallacious enthymemes” that create “the impression that the accused is guilty.” 22. H., 501 et seq.

Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates

119

23. H., 552; OCT, 531. 24. H, 620 et seq. The original is: Eskhatas oper/rizas e tetato phaosen Oidipou domois. (OCT, 599 et seq.) 25. M.C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, “The Antigone: Conflict, Vision, Simplification,” p. 65 et seq. 26. H, 491, et seq. 27. Loraux-Maxon,, p. IX. 28. H, 486-488. 29. On the Concept of Punishment, DKV, p. 499 et seq. 30. On the rhetoric of civic democracy, see J. Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysos? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 237–270, particularly p. 260 et seq. See also B. Goff, History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1995. 31. H, 510. 32. H,682. 33. H,546. 34. P. Roussel, Les Fiancailles d’Hemon et d’Antigone 35. DKV, 2, p. 561 36. DKV, 2, p. 553 37. W. Schadewaldt, Hellas und Hesperien, op. cit., p. 247 et 275 ; id., “Hölderlins Übersetzung des Sophokles“, p.  289  ; also W.  Binder, Hölderlin und Sophokles, p. 159 et seq. 38. Georgiades, LR, p. 82. 39. Ibid, p. 84 40. Hölderlin , op. cit. 1 41. Georgiades, op. cit. p. 81 42. Ibid, pp. 84-85 43. Hölderlin , RA, 2 44. “Both of them, to the extent that they are opposed—not like National and Antinational, that is as the results of training and education, like Ajax and Ulysses, nor, like the free spirit Oedipus (who opposes) the men of Greece, traditional piety, and human nature itself—(they, Antigone and Creon, oppose each other on an equal footing) perfectly balanced and distinct only in relation to time, in such a way that one loses because he had a head start, while the other wins by following.” And later: “Their struggle, in Antigone, is like a foot race in which the

120

Antigone

runner who pauses first to catch his breath bumps into the other and loses the race, while the struggle in Oedipus is like a boxing match, and that in Ajax is like fencing.” RA, 2. 45. See Klaus Düsing,  “Aesthetischer Platonismus bei Hölderlin und Hegel,” in Ch. Jamme and O. Pöggeler (eds), Homburg von der Höhe in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte. Studien zum Freundeskreis um Hegel und Hölderlin, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1981; for the connections that Hölderlin makes between Kant and Plato, Fichte, Reinhold, and Herder, see Ulrich Gaier (ed.), Hölderlin Texturen 3, Hölderlin Gesellschaft, 1996, p. 114. 46. Hölderlin , letter to Neuffer, DKV, 3, p. 152 47. roe, 3; Hölderlin changes the citation from the Suda. He transforms eis noun into eunoun. Thus “That Aristotle was Nature’s scribe, dipping his quill into meaning” becomes “…dipping his well-disposed quill.”

Chapter 5 Friends and Foes Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

It is proverbially hard to like Creon, and that is just as well. What is not well is that critics for more than two hundred years have allowed their sympathy for Antigone and their revulsion from Creon to distort their, and our, understanding of Sophocles’ play. They have not paid adequate attention to the dense network of love and hate, or of friendship and enmity, that arise from the too close kinship of Antigone and Haemon. Creon pays great attention to it, and his consciousness of the unnatural closeness of his son and his niece is one of the things that motivates him. He is not a cardboard villain. There is some right on his side. If we can separate ourselves from our natural sympathy for damsels in distress, we will find that the morality of Creon’s position comes to seem less important than what he does about the incest that Antigone and Haemon are about to perpetuate. If we look closely at Creon, his words and the thoughts behind them, the play as a whole will come into focus, including the odd secret of Antigone’s beauty. Here, too, Hölderlin points the way, though with the dim light of a very obscure passage in his Remarks on Antigone. At the beginning of the second part of the Remarks, Hölderlin holds up a small number of lines as having central importance. He uses a series of quick questions by Creon and answers by Antigone to sketch a comparison of the two characters, and he seems to suggest that there is a qualitative difference between them. Creon, he says, has a tragic “weakness,”1 visible in his inability to “bear” or “hold himself up to” tension (aushalten, sich halten,) while Antigone has a “tragic virtuosity” and a “superlative” beauty. But Hölderlin does not stop

122

Antigone

with a sketch. By the end of this section he is appearing to deny any clear opposition between the two protagonists, and he supports this unusual interpretation by emphasizing the “neutrality” of the Chorus, defining its function as making sure that the two characters “are presented impartially.” He ends by finding a perfect parallelism between them and a balance between their fates, and suppressing his own faculties of moral and psychological judgment, so that Antigone and Creon are equal partners in the creation of their joint tragedy. Hölderlin does not deny that Sophocles “favors” Antigone, and his own feelings run the same way. Antigone is for him the summum of beauty: “And we must speak of beauty in the superlative, because her bearing and attitude are founded on the superlative of the human spirit and heroic virtuosity, among other things.”2 What Hölderlin demands of his readers, in the end, is the double duty of recognizing the equivalence of the two characters while adoring Antigone for her nobility and beauty. This is not the kind of thing that most readers can do without guidance, but, fortunately, Hölderlin proposes a useful approach by describing the movement of the real hero’s trajectory as an arch, in an aesthetic architecture. This arch, stretching all the way from life to death, with many and varied events along the way, is perceived as heroic beauty. Creon might become a tragic hero in another play, but in this one, his arch is interrupted too soon. This is why Creon´s trajectory is not glorious. Both external circumstances and his own character deprive him, temporarily, of the strength that he needs to move his plot forward or to bear (aushalten) the tensions of his tragic conflict with Antigone and, eventually, everyone else. In fact, his trajectory is not unlike the first half of Oedipus’, while the Theban king still hopes for a happy outcome. Hölderlin compares Creon’s position with the moments of Oedipus’ “moments of sublime weakness” (hohe Schwache,) where the powerful hero stands revealed as a man still prey of hope, as “pitiable…stupid…worthy of compassion.”3

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

123

Hölderlin is practically the only critic in history who does not appear to despise Creon. As much as Hölderlin loves Antigone, he never degrades Creon by contrasting the two directly. Rather than make Creon into a cardboard villain, he seems to think that Creon, like Oedipus, is a victim of “sublime weakness.” If we look again at the difficult passage in which Hölderlin reveals the crucial moments of the plot (verses H 466–468 and 541 et seq., ) we find a sharp repartee between Creon and Antigone: Creon

How do you dare to break such a law?

Antigone

My Zeus never spoke such a law, Nor the rights of the gods of death, certainly not in this house, etc…

Here Hölderlin writes: The boldest moment in the course of a day, or in a work of art, is that in which the spirit of time and nature, the celestial thing that seizes a man and the thing he pursues, opposes him in the most savage manner, because the object, to the extent it can be perceived by the senses, covers only half, while the spirit wakes most powerfully where the second half begins. Then it is that a man finds out what he is made of, and then his character is most exposed to view. That which is tragically moderate and weak in comparison with time, whose object is not properly sought from the heart, follows in the wildest way the spirit of torrential time; and this seems savage, it spares not men like the spirit of a single day, but it is pitiless (schonungslos,) like a spirit of wild chaos and of the world of the dead —worlds eternally living and unwritten.

124

Antigone

And again: Creon But, you can’t equate evils with goods. Antigone Who knows? Things may be different down there. Hölderlin writes: Lovability, intelligence in misfortune, naïve innocence. Here is the true language of Sophocles. Aeschylus and Euripides, for all their excellence in representing suffering and anger, could not equal him in the representation of human intelligence, vague as it is and not reducible to thought.4 Hölderlin’s second paragraph is very difficult and reminds us that we are dealing with a poet rather than a scholar. What does he mean by “That which is tragically moderate and weak in comparison with time, whose object is not properly sought from the heart, follows in the wildest way the spirit of torrential time”? Most translations make these words a reference to “epochs without tragic glory,” as the French translator F. Fedier says. But this is to ignore the context —the mention of “man” exposed in his “character” at the culmination of the trajectory of tragedy, also the “interest of the heart” in the second paragraph; all of which suggests that Hölderlin is thinking of human agents, of tragic heroes. Such an interpretation squares with his Remarks on Oedipus, where he speaks of the “moment(s) of weakness” in the course of the “trajectory” of the hero, the momentary exhaustion that makes the hero cling to life that is so different from his moments of strong, brilliant energy when he nobly faces the bleak horizon of death. Hölderlin cites Haemon and Oedipus as examples of these moments of weakness,

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

125

of forgetfulness, and of “a categorical reversal of time” that shatters a man’s equilibrium: “Thus does Haemon conduct himself [i.e., with ugly resentfulness and despair] in Antigone. Thus Oedipus himself in the middle of the tragedy of Oedipus”. The lines that Hölderlin cites from the dialogue between Antigone and Creon seem to have been selected to show the difference between the crucial moments of their respective trajectories. They show the supposedly strong Creon suddenly weak, and the supposedly weak Antigone calmly strong. Here, perhaps, is the explanation for Hölderlin’s unusual sympathy for Creon. He feels for Antigone the sympathy that every reader “naturally” feels for her, but this does not blind him to the gap that Sophocles makes between the trajectories of the two heroic figures, perfectly parallel and balanced, but “distinct with respect to time.” Antigone “begins” the heroic defense of her inheritance and pursues it steadily to death; Creon, according to Hölderlin, “follows after” ( folgt nach,) and the end of the tragedy coincides with a moment of “extreme weakness” (hohe Schwache) like the moment that makes Oedipus, briefly, a “pitiable” character. Unlike Oedipus, Creon is denied time to recollect himself and face his fate in a noble and beautiful way. What is the temporary weakness that overcomes Creon? He is, in Hölderlin’s word, matt —that is “tired,” “used up,” “dull” before the powerful signs of “torrential” time. He is up against forces so much stronger than he is, as the divine powers of nature (fratricidal war, plague, incest) confront him at the moment of his tragedy. His error lies not in his action, but in his way of justifying his action. What he does is assume the heroic burden of re-founding Thebes, and he believes that he can assure the city’s well-being by establishing a new royal line. So far so good : the re-founding of cities was a conceivable thing in Greece, not outrageous per se, and would become common in the centuries after Alexander the Great. But his way of justifying his action undermines his new foundation from the outset. Creon, who has been ruler for only a few hours, and whose legal status

126

Antigone

has not yet been formally determined, speaks as if his new decrees already had the force of law. He does not foresee the repercussions within Thebes, and, indeed, within his own family. He lacks, in fact, what Antigone abundantly has, an “innocent” instinct for remote and utterly complex connections, an “intelligence in misfortune,” through which a person can vaguely foresee or “divine” relationships beyond the realm of reason and justification. Hölderlin attributes Creon’s dullness to a “lack of interest” in “the sensible object:” Creon does not concern himself with the corpse of Polyneices, or with Antigone, but with the grand intangibles of purifying the city and founding a new dynasty. But the corpse and the defiant princess are really there, and, by ignoring them, he conveys the feeling that his heroic re-foundation is just a bit of routine political trickery. It would have been better for him to remember the paradox of his “boldness in governing and refounding the city,” the tragic wager, the terrible and marvelous deinos, as the Chorus has presented them in the first stasimon. He might, then, have realized that he was dealing with the backwash of radical transgressions. But he has no sense of the tensions buried in concrete things, like the double status of Polyneices; so he blunders ahead without the kind of insight that Antigone skillfully deploys, and fails to take advantage of the things that are beautiful and paradoxical, manifest at the level of simple ambiguity through the aid of what Hölderlin calls “daimonic” powers. It is these powers that “snatch” men from their self-centered orbits and project them towards a world radically strange, the “savage world/chaos of the dead.” Creon is not viscerally in his act. His decree is not firmly anchored in “the sensible object,” —in this case, to the corpse of Polyneices and the dark, multi-generational legacy of the Labdacids. He goes off in a flight of facile optimism, thinking that a brisk decree can undo countless generations of inbred error. The livid corpse of his nephew becomes, for him, merely an instrument of abstract reasoning, a subject for moral discourse, an excuse and justification

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

127

for a new regime. Antigone, by contrast, acts and speaks in complete concreteness. Her brother’s dead body is, for her, just that —her brother, his dead body, a sensible object. For her, everything flows from that. The Error of Wanting to Deduce the Heroic Act Reducing political legitimacy to a simple affair of visible good and evil, Creon catches himself in a vicious circle. Because the sons of Oedipus died in shame and pollution, he assumes that he can sweep away the “last roots” of the Labdacids and put another bloodline in their place. This accounts for his curious tone-deafness in his debates with Antigone, whose magnificent nuances Hölderlin exalts as “the pinnacle of the human spirit and of heroic virtuosity.” Creon

But, you can’t equate evils with goods.

Antigone

Who knows? Things may be different down there.

Creon makes a simple moral distinction between good and bad, which he has just introduced through a nice piece of rhetoric. Antigone steps around his trap with adolescent impudence: there might be —who knows? —other “customs” in the land of the dead. She is open to other realities. Hölderlin praises her “loveableness,” calling it “innocent and naïve,” equating it with intelligence in misfortune, and making it the source of her power to stand up to a dangerous upsetting of the moral values and the modes of representation that govern civic life and individual understanding. In Hölderlin’s view, Antigone represents “human intelligence, as a thing that moves in the unthinkable.” She is not trying to attain any practical goal, even to save her own life. Instead, naively, speaking as it were in a dream, she creates metaphors

128

Antigone

for a link between her world and a world beyond, whose existence, whose intangible concreteness and full reality she somehow divines. Creon’s speeches, by contrast, seem flabby and detached. Like many a stereotyped politician, he moves in a world of abstractions and platitudes. With purely deductive arguments he blames the dead brothers (and their Labdacid ancestors) for the city’s pollution, and justifies, with eerie detachment, the transformation of his normal feelings for his nephews (what Hölderlin calls “interest in the sensible object”) into disgust and contempt. His thought process sparks a reaction in his feelings, transforming the bond of family (philia) according to an order of reasons —conformity to abstract categories of good and evil, friend and foe —and the foundation of these feelings, which he has confidently presupposed, turns out to be unnatural, that is, cut off from the natural springs of philia. Forced nonetheless to do something, as a new ruler with all eyes upon him, Creon uses a rhetorical artifice to introduce a moral criterion. According to Creon, the “normal” feeling of men, for example the solidarity that unites close relatives like Antigone and Polyneices, necessarily breeds resentments strong enough to replace solidarity with repugnance. In short, he is justified in killing his niece and profaning his nephew’s body because excessive familiarity breeds contempt. This is what Hölderlin means by Creon’s lack of interest in the sensible object, the corpse of Polyneices. Something is missing from Creon, something basic and human, and it is in vain that he tries to fill the void in his sympathies with a nervous quest for “celestial things,” for pure law, for justice so far beyond human comprehension that anyone who tries to grasp it is sure to be overwhelmed and cast into the abyss by the “torrential time” of the gods. Creon’s sincere belief that reason and positive law can lead to purity opens a window onto his character, and his character, here, is his fate. This is Creon’s moment of “high weakness,” like the moment when Oedipus still clings to hope and denies the power of oracles.

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

129

Walter Benjamin extended Hölderlin’s thoughts on fate, law, and punishment in an interesting way. Noticing that the identification of law (Recht) with justice (Gerechtigkeit) is equivocal at best, he blames the confusion between them for the continual supremacy, throughout history, of positive law over justice: The order of law, which is a straightforward survival from the “daimonic” age of human existence, when established laws (Rechtssatzungen) governed both human relations and the relations between men and gods, was preserved beyond the time of victory over the daimones.5 Benjamin is building on Hölderlin’s observation that the moment of tragic weakness can transform a hero into a “spirit of wild chaos and of the world of the dead —worlds eternally living and unwritten.” Creon’s anxiety —perfectly comprehensible in the perpetual chaos of Thebes —pushes him to improvise clear, rational criteria, free from dirty complications like incest and hereditary curses; the tragic irony of his situation is that this effort to be clear and rational makes him more and more violent and more and more macabre. Such in fact is his anxiety that power corrupts him very quickly, and he is full of good statesmanlike reasons for murdering his own nieces in cold blood. A whirlwind of secondary feelings is raging within him —secondary in that they are based, not on the deep and organic feelings of philia but on the unnatural reasoning that he uses to overcome his own natural feelings; Creon can no longer be a “daily spirit” who “refreshes” the lives of men. Instead, he has talked himself into playing the role of the abyss of time, the “chaos of the world of the dead.” It is significant that, even before Haemon praises the “beauty” of Antigone’s action, Creon shows particular irritation when Antigone says that she has buried her brother because the action was “beautiful.” Her words enliven an intuition already shared by

130

Antigone

the guardsman, the Chorus, Haemon, and Ismene and begin to bind them in a union with each other and with her. This public sympathy for her “beautiful” deed is precisely what angers Creon. After this, he changes his approach: henceforth he maintains that Antigone is a traitor to “beautiful things” (kallunein) and accuses her of presenting as “beautiful” what is in fact “ugly or bad” (kakois tis.) Sophocles alerts the reader to this change of argument through the answer that Antigone gives to the new charge. She meets his rhetoric with her own: “Now that you’ve got me, do you want to do more than kill me?” In fact, he does: he wants to eliminate the house of Labdacus. “Sublime Weakness” is not moral abjectness Creon’s words differ from Antigone’s as step-by-step stubbornness differs from the flowing and elastic intelligence of a dream that recomposes the themes of real life. It is not that one of them is right and the other wrong; they are operating on different planes. Many of Antigone’s replies are not even arguments, but associations that illuminate relationships or intuitions more or less independent of the ostensible legal discussion. Free from immediate necessity, her words come out in a way almost playful and with the power of spontaneous intuitions. Creon’s justifications seem constrained and hidebound by contrast, and this contrast is the key to Creon’s failure. Most critics find Creon’s failure in his tyranny. Reinhardt, for instance, says that Creon errs in identifying his personal judgment with the laws of the polis, and his view seems to have led Winnington-Ingram to conclude, with Tiresias, that Creon’s only goals are “money and power.” But the evidence is wanting to support such claims, both in Creon’s back-and-forth with Tiresias and in the program of government that he explains to Haemon and the Chorus. It is not what he says that makes us think of him as a tyrant. It is his excessive effort to give his actions a solid foundation of conscious argument. His protesting too much robs him of heroic glory.

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

131

Aristotle says that a tragic character must be “a man who is neither outstanding in virtue and righteousness, nor is it through wickedness and vice that he falls into misfortune, but through some flaw.” No one has ever claimed that Creon is outstanding in virtue and righteousness, but most critics have believed that he falls into misfortune through wickedness and vice. They tend to quote the curses that Eurydice lays on him before she kills herself, denouncing him for the murder of their two sons, and creating (as we know from the myth, treated more fully in Euripides’s Phoenician Women,) a parallel between the death of their son Menoeceus and the sacrifice of Iphigenia. But Iphigenia’s death, and the blame that Clytemnestra lays on Agamemnon, do not deprive Agamemnon of heroic status or make him an unfit subject for Aristotelian tragedy. In fact, by surrounding him with shadows and ambiguities, they fit him for a tragic fate. And so it is with Creon. The great tragedians do not allow any mortal to have the last word, even (perhaps particularly) an angry wife; and Creon remains free to fail through “some flaw.” In Hölderlin’s more nuanced view, Creon is a person who cannot find the right balance between the sensible object (the dead Labdacids and the two surviving sisters) and the ideas that he defends. He is unable to seize and hold ( festhalten) the middle ground between the concerns of this world and those of the next; nonetheless, he believes that it is within his power, by some forceful and practical deed, to make good his decree as if he were fully free to act. He “forgets” and ignores what Antigone represents: the need for the understanding to picture the unnamable other than through voluntary action. The absolute is not a pure fiction, a simple illusion that we can create or abolish at our whim. It has its own existence. It is, Hölderlin says, “something” (etwas) and it has a firm base in the real world, a reality both intellectual and tangible whose metaphor is the tragic poem. From this point forward, Creon begins to fight against the truth that is revealed in beautiful things. He forgets the terms of his own decree. No longer does he pursue anyone who disobeys him. He is

132

Antigone

now on the track of an imaginary impiety committed against the palace, the symbolic seat of sovereignty. Without any evidence, he accuses both sisters. The Dialogue between Haemon and Creon: the meaning of beauty Creon’s unstable anger next falls upon his son, Haemon, whose kindness, honesty, and courage have always moved readers and spectators deeply. The docility of Haemon’s first words brings a refreshing coolness to the overheated stage: Haemon’s filial confidence says as much about the son as about the father. Haemon seems to think his father reasonable and just, as the first words of Tiresias will later confirm. And the very name “Haemon” reminds us that he is a xun-haimon, a close relative —all too close within this incestuous family. For he too, like his relatives, is touched by the fatality of his race, the destiny of a family polluted by the curse of Thebes and the specific violations of incest. The next scene will show that he is not only the “close relative” of his father, but the all-too-close relative of Antigone. It is interesting to listen to him defend Antigone’s “reputation”; he sounds more like a brother, anxious more about the family escutcheon, than a fiancée, and he is strangely silent about the rights, conjugal and legal, that he might already claim over his future wife. And, in the Exodos, the burden expressed by his name will be too much for him. The nice young boy who respects his father and speaks for the people will come almost to blows with his father. He might have murdered Creon before he kills himself as he embraces Antigone’s corpse. There is something monstrous about his death, a touch of the macabre that is different from Romeo dying with Juliet, something that recalls the mutual murder-suicide of those other all-too-close relatives, Eteocles and Polyneices. Is Haemon a tragic hero? He seems to meet Lacan’s definition in that he acts according to his inner desire, unmodified by

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

133

social pressure. Antigone’s “rawness” is paradigmatic of this, and Lacan’s interpretation has become classic, inspiring Loraux and many others. But is Lacan right? His definition makes it hard to distinguish between Antigone and Haemon, and it leaves out an element that the greatest theorists of tragedy, from Aristotle to Hölderlin and Hegel, are unanimous in considering essential. For them, tragedy requires a substantial foundation, not just a powerful intuitive passion. The realization of raw desire must show some real basis for ethical action. By this standard, Haemon is not on a level with Antigone. Although he almost attacks his father and quite dramatically kills himself, his words and actions lack something that is obviously present in Antigone. His words and actions — whether loyal, angry, or suicidal —refer to nothing beyond himself and his situation. Antigone’s rawness, by contrast, condenses her tragic essence as the incarnation of all the contradictions of her lineage, grand and royal but laden with curses from generation to generation. But none of this is apparent as Haemon comes onstage and meets his father. Their scene begins in an atmosphere of trust and affection. Creon reminds his son through numberless veiled suggestions of the hereditary curses that dog Antigone’s family and uses them as reasons to break his engagement. He obviously expects his son to think of the miasma that shrouds the house of Oedipus and Jocasta; and he expects his appeal to miasma to win over his son as it has already won over the Chorus, despite the elder’s proverbial loyalty to the house of Labdacus. But Haemon is not won over. Haemon begins indirectly; instead of saying “no” to his father, he rhapsodizes over Antigone’s “reputation” and “honor.” He hides his feelings for Antigone, and makes them seem objective, by using conventional rhetoric in praise of the democratic virtues: not Haemon, but “everyone,” praises Antigone; Haemon is merely the mouthpiece of a democratic consensus, and he urges his father to listen to the appeal of his fellow citizens (homopolis leos.)

134

Antigone

Creon is unmoved. He urges the power of hereditary pollution and says that Antigone would be the worst possible wife —both for Haemon, and for Thebes. Haemon remains unconvinced, and his rebelliousness (one senses that Creon is not used to contradiction from his son) angers Creon. Even so, Creon keeps his temper for a long time. His anger takes up only twenty percent of the 140 lines in this scene, and it breaks out only after Haemon has insulted him directly and called him a “woman.” Haemon’s much-praised moderation may be over-praised, and Creon’s anger starts not without provocation. The pivot of Creon’s argument is genealogical. He never claims that Antigone is stupid, ugly, ill-natured, or any other personal thing. He speaks of the “house” (domos,) the “hearth” (oikos,) of “good stock” (genos,) and he makes these things the foundation of good “government” (arkhein) and of just “power”(kratos.) His tone is patronizing and schoolmasterly, and his insistent mixing of family with civic concerns is often interpreted, anachronistically, as the platitude of a stupid man —as if the modern split between public and private could ever apply to the ruling family in an hereditary monarchy. What might be a schoolmaster’s platitude in another situation is, here, the main issue: a chain of failings within the family of the Labdacids has brought Thebes to a political crisis that cannot be solved without reference to its ruling family. Hölderlin’s translation, and his “alterations,” exploit the polysemy inherent in the Greek words that are derived from arkhe, a word that means both power/rule and origin/principle. Hölderlin shapes German equivalents for the Greek verb arkhein, (govern, dominate,) moving from “domination,” “dominate,” “without domination” (herrnlos,) to “authority” (Obrigkeit) and, finally, “principle/first beginning” (Uranfang.) Rather than chide Creon for mixing public and private matters, Hölderlin emphasizes their entanglement. The troubles of the ruling house, the feelings of individual members of that house for each other, are matters of public importance. Seen in this light, it makes perfect sense for Creon to tell Haemon that Antigone is

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

135

a “bad wife” for Haemon. To marry Antigone is to marry, and perpetuate, the house of Labdacus. As the fruit of incest, she has no place in the polis. Whether she belongs above the polis or below it is not his concern: “let her go sing hymns among the dead,” is his brusque summation. Hölderlin’s translation was the first to bring out the dual nature of this family/political issue. Curiously —considering his reputation for obscurity and interpolation —he did this by taking the text literally: “When the native/endogamous stock fails, I will raise a foreign stock,” (Verdirbt das Eingeborne, nahr ich fremd Geschlect.) He brought out the suggestive contrast between two Greek expressions: “what grows in the blood/family” (eggene phusei) and “what they grow outside the stock/family” (threpso…exo genous.) The plain meaning of Creon’s advice to Haemon is that it is time to end the incest and lift the curse by breaking with Antigone and marrying a woman from a different bloodline. Whether Haemon understands his father’s lecture or not, he is having none of it. He counsels his father to consider the will of the people, who venerate their royal family and the princess Antigone. His arguments are as objective as Creon’s, perhaps more so, since he ignores not only the person of Antigone but also the characteristics of her family. For Haemon, it is all about politics —and Athenian politics at that. In words that sound like a speech of Pericles he warns his father against making unilateral decisions without taking counsel of others: “No true city is the property of a single man.” But Creon is ready with a Periclean reply: “But custom gives possession to the ruler.” It is here, if anywhere, that a reader with an interest in political history should look for information about Athens in the Age of Sophocles, for Haemon and Creon present the two faces of the Theban polity very much as Thucydides will present the two faces of the Athenian polity a few years later: a deliberative democracy, fair and orderly, that nonetheless controls its empire (arkhe) like a tyrannos.

136

Antigone

Even if this last word refers to the imperial power of Athens, Knox does not hesitate to connect this collective imagination of power with the attitudes of Athenian citizens who would recognize the values of a democratic leader in Oedipus. “The Athenian arche,” says Knox, “like that of Oedipus, is not an inherited power, but something new in the Greek world, gained by self-exertion.” A tyrannos, then — whether an individual or a city —creates a new foundation and a new set of laws, as a founding hero does. Sophocles skillfully bandies about the political clichés of his era, bringing statements of topical conflict to bear on an ancient myth, and showing how they support conflict within the myth as in current politics and statecraft. In this case, the conflict that they support is that of father and son. For Haemon is thin-skinned, irritable and aggressive perhaps more than his father, and Creon’s prompt retort wounds him. In the next line it is Haemon, supposedly gentle, not his generally vilified father, who launches the hostilities in this scene: You’d rule a desert beautifully alone. Haemon, like all characters in ironic works of fiction, knows less than his creator. He does not realize that Thebes actually is a desert, a wild and savage place of incestuous relations that reduce the city and the ruling family to the law of the jungle. If he knew more, who knows what he might have said? But he does not want to know, and so he misses his father’s strong political and genealogical reasoning. From most translations, it is easy to see how he makes his mistake. Wyckoff, for instance, has Creon ask: Am I unjust, when I respect my office? Hölderlin makes Creon’s position considerably clearer: When I hold fast to my basic principles, would I be lying?

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

137

Hölderlin takes the Greek word, arkhas, which Wyckoff renders as “office,” and which a less tidy translator might express as “the rights to govern or dominate,” and translates it as “basic principles” —a translation that draws on deeper etymological levels. Hölderlin’s change spotlights Creon’s intention to refound Thebes, or, rather, to give it a proper founding for the first time. It is as if Creon said to his son: “Am I wrong to try my best to give Thebes —finally! —a royal family worth the name? A royal family free of hereditary curses and monstrous incest? Am I wrong to want to start a new line of kings who will mark the beginning of legitimate government?” Haemon thinks his father is wrong. Like Antigone, he blames Creon for insulting the gods of the dead; and it is immediately apparent that father and son have wasted their breath so far. From this point the argument becomes a vicious circle, returning invariably to the basic, inescapable problem of the founding of Thebes. When Haemon and Creon debate the honor due to the chthonian powers, they are speaking in a city whose relationship to the earth, through the spartoi, is foundational and excessive. Born in contradiction, improperly related to gods and men from its beginning, Thebes is a place where civic piety can never lead to civic wholeness. Haemon is doubtless right when he dismisses his father’s opinions as “empty,” but he fails to see that his recommendation of piety and proper worship presupposes a system of orderly family relations that does not, and cannot, exist at Thebes. There can be no stable polity, no true religion, without clarity and hierarchy within families. Creon understands this. That is why he wants to found a new, unpolluted, royal family, and why he wants Haemon to marry another woman (“Oh, there are other furrows for his plow,” he has already bluntly told Ismene.) The Chorus explicitly agrees with him, and Creon seems to have a much firmer grasp of the political realities than his son does. So much, then, for Haemon as a tragic hero. However much one may sympathize with him as Antigone’s defender, Haemon is

138

Antigone

a hot-headed young man, as obstinate as his father but much less thoughtful. Creon is not unreasonable to think of him as blinded by love, and Haemon’s parting threats, which turn out to be prophetic of his suicide, sound at the time more like menaces of revenge and revolution. The Tragic, and Paradoxical, Love of Antigone and Haemon Although Haemon’s passion dominates his scene with Creon, and the Chorus is right to foresee a bad outcome, Sophocles does not stop there. As usual, he adds some small details that help to hold the play together. It is interesting, for example, that Creon, at the peak of his rage, should yield to the wishes of the old men, setting Ismene free and modifying Antigone’s sentence considerably. She will not now be killed, but entombed alive. It is not absolutely certain that she will die. Creon is ducking the theological arguments by leaving her fate quite literally in the hands of the gods. This is the context for the choral song in honor of love, the so-called Hymn to Eros. Creon, we know, has accused Haemon of putting love before civic and filial duty, and commentators have usually spoken of Haemon as a lovesick young man. Haemon himself, however, has never said anything of the kind, arguing only as a citizen and a son. So, when the old men sing in honor of Eros, it is worth asking if they have Haemon and Antigone in mind specifically, or if they are considering love as a general problem —Antigone’s love, for example, or the love of any Theban. At stake are the creative and destructive dimensions of Love. Hölderlin believes that the old men are singing of love in general, and his translation alters the text considerably as a guard against the “error” into which, he believes, most critics have fallen. To begin, he changes the very names of divinities, so that “Eros” becomes first “Spirit of Love, always victorious, yet always at war” then “Spirit of Peace.” By yoking Love and War to Peace and Beauty, Hölderlin

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

139

means to bring out the paradoxical function of love, feeling a need to distort his modern language as a way of bringing out meanings that a German audience, separated from Periclean Athens by unbridgeable gaps of culture and history, can no longer hear in the original words. Hölderlin also —and it is a good example of his strength as a critic —understands the Hymn not merely as something that follows the scene between Creon and Haemon, but also as something that precedes the Chorus’ own scene with the doomed Antigone. It is, for him, a graveside utterance, and he makes it the bridge between the father-son argument and the choral lament with Antigone as soloist. Placed on this isthmus, the hymn cannot refer only to individual feelings or the state of individual psyches, to the romantic love that so many critics create between Haemon and Antigone; it must also have to do with the great issues of the play. By banishing the proper names of gods (Eros and Aphrodite) Hölderlin succeeds in showing how thin the line is between love and hate, between the imminent destruction of Thebes and its return, so long desired, to peace and good order. When “Eros” becomes “Spirit of Love at war” and “Spirit of Peace,” Hölderlin is asking what love can mean, what it can possibly mean, in a city so chaotic and incestuous, a city where even the relationships between self and other, between individual and collective, are biologically tangled. What is love, then? For Hölderlin, a paradox: both a force for peace and a power of savage violence. Hölderlin notes that, for Sophocles, love is not uniquely human and strikes both man and beast, and even the gods —although, as Loraux and Mazon note, “beasts are generally opposed to men, and (that) they are justly called by the word ktemata.” Can love still be reconciled with civilized friendship and alliances (philia) in Thebes, a city without hierarchical links between men and other animals, between men and gods, between parents and children? All these things are passing through Antigone’s mind as she prepares for death. Her lament (kommos) follows immediately on

140

Antigone

the hymn to Eros, and it was probably not by chance that Hölderlin, dividing the play into acts and scenes, made the hymn part of Antigone’s scene instead of the Creon-Haemon scene, connecting it not to Creon’s unsupported charge of love-blindness but to the marriage and childbearing of which Antigone will straightway sing. Antigone’s Lament: a young woman caught between “self-bearing” and “self-knowing” It is a pity that Gluck never wrote music for Antigone’s choral scene. It is one of those set-piece moments in Greek tragedy — Cassandra’s lament in the Agamemnon is another —that cry out for a flexible operatic treatment and make us realize how much the loss of Greek music has cost us. As the young heroine sings, the Chorus consoles, mourns, even teases. And the paradoxes of the words are as close to baroque art as Athenian poetry affords: death is her husband, the tomb her nuptial bed, her body is delivered alive to the decay of death —to phthinein, the death most shameful and least heroic. The old men, who love her and feel anguish in her fate, worry that her death will be inglorious and bad, at the same time comforting her (and themselves) with the thought that her death is “unique” and conforms to a law that applies only to her. In ambiguous words they praise her incomparable heroism and reproach her for courting a bad death without glory or honor. In some ways Antigone’s song in the lament scene is a somber and ironic reply to the hymn. Antigone sings of love, the tragic loves of her ancestors, from Oedipus and Jocasta back to Niobe. In her words, an ironic contiguity of the themes of incestuous self-conception and Delphic self-knowledge (autogennetos and autognotos) establish a connection between Antigone’s origins — obscure, perverse, unruly —and her heroic bearing. Hölderlin has the chorus suggest that, by facing her incestuous birth fearlessly, Antigone achieves self-knowledge and accepts her destiny. In this

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

141

she is wiser than Haemon. While he understands nothing of the drama that is sweeping him along and rails against fate in the person of his father, she understands that, because of her accursed birth, she can have no true love, no normal marriage, no conventional family feeling. Haemon will soon kill himself in her lifeless embrace, and there is always pathos in the death of a young prince; but there is nothing heroic or tragic in Haemon’s childish unwillingness, or inability, to face the facts. Like her father, Antigone is in a disastrous situation from which there can be no happy issue. And, like her father, she has the courage to recognize her position and accept her fate. From episode to episode, from song to song, she recognizes more and more clearly the personal destiny that is also the destiny of Thebes. Hölderlin emphasizes this, and it is, for him, the central moment of the play. His translation suggests that Antigone’s growth of understanding splits the play in two; henceforth, she will be indifferent to life and earthly affairs, and her indifference will be proper and beautiful, the correct response to her actual situation. Her embrace of death is not a sign of psychiatric disorder —a death wish, as some have said, or an incestuous passion for her dead brother —but a bold action to kill someone, herself, whose existence makes civilized life impossible. Sophocles renders this with two words, autogennetos and autognotos, similar in sound but different in meaning, and Hölderlin creates German equivalents: selbstgebaerend (self-engendering) and selbsterkennen (self-knowledge.) Antigone sees the chaos of selfengenderment and achieves self-knowledge by understanding that she herself is the issue of a monstrous folding of one family into another. She cries out against the “unhappy madness of my mother’s marriage-bed” (matrai lektron atai) and the “self-engendering embraces” (koimemata autogenneta) from which she and her siblings arose. She laments a “dangerous marriage” (duspotmon gamon,) — but there are so many of these in her bloodline that she may mean

142

Antigone

the marriage of Polyneices with the princess of Argos, or the bloodwedding of her two brothers, or the marriage of her brother-father with her grandmother-mother. She can, and should, and must lift the curse of her bloodline from Thebes. She, and she alone, can make it possible for Thebes to know true love, philia, in its families and its polity. This is why, as Lacan says, she is a “victim so terribly voluntary”; and it gives meaning to her earlier declaration: “I am for love, not hate.” This is also what Nicole Loraux means when she observes the paradox that Antigone, although surrounded in the text by the marks of tragic “doing”, (i.e. repulsive violence resulting from excessive, incestuous love, the all too abrupt transitions from love to hate, which is destructive and self-destructive) is never mentioned as a suicide. Suicide was a serious crime in Athens, but Sophocles’ art extends a veil of serene beauty over his heroine’s end, abolishing the doom of self-destruction. It is not by chance that Antigone is the best-loved of tragic heroines. It is the artistry of Sophocles that makes her so. Strength, Roughness, and the Height of Antigone’s Beauty One husband gone, I might have found another, or a child from a new man in first child’s place. (EW 909–910) Antigone’s last speech includes language that most readers have found strangely rough. The authenticity of these lines —although confirmed by Aristotle —has been matter of considerable dispute. Goethe was far from the only modern authority to think Sophocles incapable of such ignoble utterance. It is worth asking, then, if these “rough” lines fit with the rest of the play. They are certainly different from everything that anyone has said in the play so far. When the other characters have something rough to say, even something essential, they leave things half-unsaid

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

143

or resort to euphemism. Not even the meltdown of family and social relations is enough to overcome their strong sense of propriety in speech — their reticence, in fact, gives us a rare sense of the social pressure that Athenian society must have applied with respect to speech in public. In this context, Antigone’s words are scandalous. She speaks the unspeakable, roughly and without prettiness, and her freedom of speech makes it possible for her to grasp, and speak, the “living meaning” of the “tragic” and “fearful” situation of Thebes. This elasticity of intellect and sensibility is, for Hölderlin, the secret of Antigone’s beauty. The key word, perhaps, is paradoxical ambivalence. She is both rough and smooth. She wants to live and she wants to die. Having come to a realization of her nature and fate, she is resolute in spite of her despair. Unquestionably, she would like to have a happy life as a married mother of children; but she has come to see that the legacy of incest makes this impossible, and she has dismissed it as a fantasy. What is left to her, as a fit object for her love, is the pious observance of pre-existing duties to her parents, her brothers, and her city — about whom she feels civilized feelings, although her tragic journey has led her to understand that she incarnates the evils that have beset Thebes for generations. Once she recognizes the omnipresence of incest, she speaks the bald truth: the obscene matings of her ancestors have destroyed the fundamental distinctions that make ordered life possible —names, degrees of relationship, honors, hierarchy. Seen in this perspective, her rough words about husband and children —the “moral” indifference of saying that she could replace them if she lost them and would leave them unburied as if she and they were just all too natural beasts —take on a different meaning. She speaks as she looks into the void that is swallowing her, the symbolic vacuum that strips her of her social, psychological, and moral identity. There is no time for beating around the bush, nothing to be gained by sidestepping difficult truths. Her marriage? She could have no true marriage. Any

144

Antigone

marriage of hers would be a union for which humans have no name, a continued violation of the proper relationships between husband and wife, parents and children —a beastly union, no more. Antigone’s reality, not her language, is scandalous, and her new understanding makes her choose death as the least of possible evils. It is her fate to remain alone, caught between two worlds, in an “indescribable tomb” (taphos potainios,) waiting to “marry Acheron” (akheronti numpheuso.) Before she is led away, she sets herself apart: Unwept, no wedding-song, unfriended, now I go the road laid down for me. And the poet underlines the fact that this fate remains somehow beyond the imagination: My fate, without tears, No one weeps, no one loves. Antigone’s regret does not mean that she has lost all interest in the world of the living, or that, as Knox says, she insists stubbornly on having her own way. Her solitude, properly understood, is not subjective or psychological; it is an objective fact that her connections to the living are null and void, just as it is objective for her father, at the end of Oedipus Rex, to say that he is “no one” and “nothing.” For Hölderlin, Antigone’s half-hostile isolation has a specific meaning: she is dying in majestic shame to purify the miasma that she ineluctably carries. Perhaps it is this aspect of her death, this taking on her the iniquity of others and sacrificing herself for her people, that leads Hölderlin to give her the title of “queen” in place of Sophocles’ “daughter of kings.” But she does not go gentle. She challenges her condemnation more forcefully in Hölderlin’s translation than in the Greek original:

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

145

I call you to witness, however, how [it can be that], deprived of the tears of those I love, and under what laws, I must descend into the unexampled grave. She is pointing indirectly both to the injustice of her death and to the unfitness of her line for civilized life, and her being condemned to death. However sad and bitter her fate, she recognizes Necessity and understands what Creon means when he orders her burial. This is emphasized also by Creon, when he justifies her condemnation: “Since she is a stranger to the domesticity above (metoikia among the living.)” Antigone is a very unusual character in the history of tragedy, a poetic figure who contains in herself enough evidence to make the interpretation of tragedy possible. The fate of an entire city bears down upon her, and she resigns herself after resisting. Her suicide (uncle-assisted, we might say,) at the end of a multi-generational chain of violations of philia, transcends the hostile connotations of other suicides. It is rightly said that she accepts her destiny peacefully, without violence of speech or action, as if she recognized herself in the dilemma of her city, recognized also that the city’s insoluble problems were her own. She does not seek to be avenged, does not even blame her bitter fate on any individual (Creon or the Chorus.) Instead, in language that is unforgettably strange, she awaits the strict and reciprocal justice of the gods —but not to save her life, or to punish those who cause her death, only to reestablish her proper relations with them. Seen in this perspective, the words of Tiresias, which follow Antigone’s slow march to the hollow tomb, make sense. He speaks of her as if she did not exist, although she is still alive in her underground chamber. Her death is voluntary, a suicide —but a paradoxical suicide, not a grave transgression against the community, but a self-erasure that fulfils her fate and offers the community a hope of redemption.

146

Antigone

So much, then, for the idea that Antigone harbors an incestuous passion for her dead brother. Sophocles rewrites the mythic story with so much irony that even the “first sophism borrowed from Herodotus” avoids the banal logic of blood. He creates, in Antigone, a character so unusual, so complex, that she becomes an image of structural orphan-ness. As the fruit of a unique incest, she has no proper father or mother, belongs to no proper generation, has no proper status in the world. She is at once too much and too little, wandering through a world that has no place for her.

Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon

147

Notes 1. das tragischmassige Zeimatte, literally something that is tragically slowed and weakened with respect to time 2. RA, 2. 3. ROE, 2. 4. RA, 2 5. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, 1, p. 175.

148

Antigone

Chapter 6 Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

The status of the oracle (“pure speech”) in the rhythm of the play

Pure speech allows us to glimpse, beyond the representations that succeed each other neatly in human time, other forms of knowledge that make man part of Nature and the cosmos. During this “caesura,” normal signs lose their value. The intervention of Tiresias suspends the arguments of the protagonists and makes them look small by comparison with the vastness of the order for which he speaks. It is significant that Tiresias intervenes only late in the play, after the early scenes have laid a crushing pressure on the later ones. Hölderlin calls this the “calculation” and “rhythm” of the play.2 As for prophecy, it seems to function only as a caesura, that is, to mark the gap between human and more-than-human realms. Tiresias’ “pure speech” holds up to human view the extra-human order of the world and connects the events of Antigone’s tragedy to that order. His voice is the voice of Necessity, and his words confirm that the death of a young girl, which has already perhaps taken place, is the stuff of tragedy. Antigone has already made the other world her own by deleting herself silently from this one, as if she had recognized the necessity of her death. Critics have paid insufficient attention to the silences3 in Sophocles, seduced by the brilliance of his debates and looking for easy parallels between tragedy and democracy. But Sophocles believes in another world, a world not knowable, and it is silence that allows Antigone to get some purchase on that world. Hölderlin speaks of this as “divining” (Ahnen.)

150

Antigone

Tiresias puts an end to the abstract arguments that have dominated the play so far. Decrees, customs, unwritten laws, written laws, justice — all these man-made foundations of orderly human life cannot, in the end, be measured with the same instruments as the absolute justice to which Tiresias gives voice. That, in a nutshell, is what makes the conflict between Antigone and Creon a tragedy. In place of the endless arguments of two committed antagonists, Tiresias offers a speech that is beyond dispute, organized around an intuition of the full web of connections in the cosmos. As a prophet, he pays no attention to the arguments that have been made before. His starting point is not the record of things that happened in Thebes on a certain day, but the “power of brute nature” and its “eccentric” demands, which threaten to “tear out” even a person of heroic status, thrusting man towards the abyss of “natural power” or “torrential time.” Hölderlin speaks of a “rapturous madness” (Verrückung, Entrückung) that comes over a hero at the moment when he can no longer “keep his balance”4 on the razor’s edge between the order of finite understanding and a nature (super-human or sub-human, but emphatically non-human) whose order is under no obligation to meet the needs of humanity: [Tiresias] enters into the progression of destiny, as the warden of the powers of nature, whose ability to snatch man from the sphere of his life, from the center of his inner life, to bring him in madness5 to another life and (plunge him into) the eccentric sphere of the dead, is the essence of tragedy.6 Both Aeschylus and Sophocles show Tiresias as the figure who re-establishes the fragile connection between this world and the next, but in all cases this re-establishment requires a bloody sacrifice.7 Only the death of a hero can represent adequately the radical annulment of the “sign” of human existence. It is the same with Euripides. In

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

151

The Phoenician Women, when Creon tries to escape the threatening irruption of sacred speech, his son Menoeceus volunteers to fulfill the oracle by throwing himself heroically from the top of the city walls,8 and his death restores the equilibrium required by Tiresias. When Hölderlin says that oracular or prophetic speech is “pure,” he means that it is indifferent to the normal interests and feelings of individuals and is concerned instead with the fragile equilibrium between the incommensurable worlds of men and gods. It is the job of ritual — repetitive, commemorative, founding and re-founding, with a necessary component of partial destruction9 — to maintain this equilibrium; and it is the role of Tiresias to mediate between the cosmos and the people of Thebes. This is why his speech is unique in the play. He does not speak as men and women speak. He does not even speak as he speaks. The gods speak through him, and his voice is the open door between the two worlds. Is it any wonder that Tiresias and his words so readily stir the people of Thebes to hostility?10 Creon in this play and Oedipus in another, for all their differences, are alike in feeling a visceral distaste for the seer whose voice is the voice of powers beyond their control, indifferent (at best) to their fates. Unlike ordinary speech, which helps humans to exercise mastery over the world, the speech of Tiresias reveals a world that humans cannot master. Hölderlin ’s observations on “calculation’ and “living meaning” anticipate some recent studies that interpret Sophocles’ enigmatic oddness as an ‘imaginary grammar constructed for tragic ends.”11 The great modern translators and critics have begun just here, with the powerful logic and the “thinking” structures that Sophocles robes in poetry.12Let us see what happens when we look at Tiresias’ words from this point of view — both what he says and what he does not say, or says allusively.

152

Antigone

Is Pure Speech True? Not for Creon. Like most arguments in Greek tragedy, the dialogue between Creon and Tiresias begins politely: Creon: Tiresias, what news has brought you here? Tiresias: I’ll tell you. You in turn must trust the prophet. Creon: I’ve always been attentive to your counsel. Tiresias: And therefore you have steered this city straight. Creon: So I can say how helpful you’ve been. Though apparently on firm ground, Tiresias is somewhat coy in his next line: Tiresias: But now you are balanced on a razor’s edge. Creon is immediately worried: Creon: What is it? How I shudder at your words! Tiresias then reports the disquieting results of his study of birdomens: two eagles clawed each other in flight, with cries of unknown fury. In a play that began with bird-images for the fratricide brothers, this sounds like just one more: Tiresias:

They screeched about, Goaded by madness, inarticulate. I marked that they were tearing one another With claws of murder.

The reader and Creon are obviously meant to see it this way. But this is not how Tiresias sees it. He does not read the future in analogies between observable phenomena, but in the failure of his

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

153

sacrifice to the gods: Tiresias: I was afraid, so straight away I tried Burnt sacrifice upon the flaming altar. No fire caught my offerings. A successful sacrifice would have shown the maintenance of right relations between men and gods, with the fire that Aeschylus called “civilizing” and “master of all the arts” as the binding force. The failure of fire on Tiresias’ altar, making only a stinking mess, shows him that the gods have denied the gift of fire to the people of Thebes. Tiresias could easily have blamed it all on the Labdacids, particularly on the fratricide brothers; but he blames it instead on Creon, for having forbidden the burial of Polyneices: Tiresias: The birds will not cry out a sound I can distinguish, gorged with the greasy blood of that dead man. Tiresias goes against the train of reasoning that any normal person would use, and Creon’s sudden fury is quite understandable. This is the last thing he expected from the prophet. Instead of praising Creon for restoring order, freeing the city at last from the many curses of its royal house, Tiresias is attacking him; and Creon can only imagine that Tiresias is speaking dishonestly, as part of a plot in favor of the Labdacid line. It is not just what Tiresias says, but how he says it, that angers Creon. His “pure” speech makes no effort to establish a direct connection with the reality of daily life. It cannot be explained with reference to ordinary knowledge — not even by the knowledge of prophetic inspiration. No, something completely out of the ordinary is inspiring Tiresias to advise the burial of Polyneices.

154

Antigone

Tiresias prophesies — Twice Tiresias’ prophecy — like a Hebrew prophet, he judges a ruler and foretells the future — is divided into two parts, two oracles, each independent of the other and fitting into a totally different context. The first (H, 1035–1072) speaks exclusively of the pollution brought to Thebes by the blood of Polyneices, unburied, torn by dogs and birds of prey. Focused on the need for purification, this first oracle gives the spectator new information. Tiresias here contradicts the earlier testimony of the guardsman, who had reported, as a wondrous prodigy, the survival of the corpse without any mutilation, as if the gods had protected it. Instead, Tiresias proclaims that the city is suffering a material pollution; the soil and the altars have been fouled by the blood spilled as Polyneices is torn by dogs and birds. The only remedy is a prompt burial. Considered as strictly human speech, this first oracle is surprising, since it fails to mention in any way the shocking fate that Creon has decreed for Antigone. He might have pointed out that the entombment of the living Antigone is a doubling and reversing of the refusal to entomb her dead brother. But he does not. It is perfectly clear that Tiresias never had the slightest intention of judging Creon’s action against Antigone or of pleading her case; rather, his speech focuses entirely on the pollution that the unburied body of Polyneices has brought to the city, on its cause and on the means of ending it. Not until Creon has goaded him with insults and accusations does Tiresias threaten to “speak the unspeakable,” or, as Hölderlin says: “You will rouse me to say openly what has so far remained asleep (unerschuttert, akineta) within my thoughts.”13 Creon — so respectful and worried at the beginning of their dialogue — has by this time decided that Tiresias is no true prophet, and he responds with the levity of a man who thinks he is in control of the situation. “Well, speak it out,” he says. “But do not speak for profit.” Like the other failed heroes of Thebes, Creon refuses to acknowledge

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

155

any kind of understanding that is irrational, inhuman, or divine.14 His anger immediately provokes a second oracle from Tiresias. This time Tiresias speaks about Creon. Terrible things await him. Tiresias had not intended to speak of them, and had hoped to serve Creon as a good counselor, but Creon has angered him. The verb tense of Tiresias’ second prophecy (the future) shows that he was unaware of Creon’s fate at the start of their dialogue. He began to see it in his mind just as Creon accused him of treason, and, in his indignation — the god’s indignation — he now sees it clearly. He announces imminent deaths in Creon’s house, punishment for Creon’s confusion of elementary categories like high and low, living and dead, human and sub-human or super-human. It is Creon’s contempt for burial rites that breaks down the limits between human and non-human — for which his household, and his plan to purify the city, will soon pay. But where is Antigone in all this? Tiresias has plenty of fault to find with Creon, but it all has to do with the corpse of Polyneices. He mentions Antigone only allusively, as an example of Creon’s failure to distinguish between categories like living and dead and as part of an argument for burying the dead. Tiresias’ indifference to Antigone’s fate is in sharp contrast to the feelings of all other characters in the play. But there is really no contradiction. The “pure speech” of Tiresias is not motivated by moral, legal, or psychological concerns. It is not human speech. Tiresias is human, but his prophetic speech is not his own. After all, he had failed at first to notice the danger inherent in leaving Polyneices unburied.15 Only after the strange actions of birds and the failure of burnt offerings did he “divine” the truth. It is clear, in fact, that Tiresias — thinking and speaking as a human being — does not realize the gravity of the situation until the god begins to speak through him. He is gracious to Creon at the beginning of the scene, and nothing in his first prophecy suggests that he considers the situation irremediable. He even closes the first

156

Antigone

prophecy with an expression of confidence in Creon’s character, and he advises Creon fondly to correct his error. The logic of “pure speech” and the failure of communication In his Remarks on Oedipus, Hölderlin notes that Oedipus does not hear the Delphic oracle passively. He cross-examines Creon energetically, even brutally, and Hölderlin thinks that he has already guessed at least part of what the god had to say, but Oedipus’ understanding is not strong enough to grasp or hold these glimmers of divine enlightenment — with disastrous results. Hölderlin says that Oedipus is undone by the tendency of finite human understanding to look for specific meanings in the unspecific and ambiguous flow of pure speech. Oedipus is not content to understand the oracle generically, as an exhortation to pursue all the criminals who pollute the city; instead, he insists on determining which criminal he must pursue. For Hölderlin , it is not enough to hear or understand prophecy word by word. There is meaning in the force itself of divine possession, in the way the god’s message is pronounced, and in the way it is received. If we apply this observation to the sacred speech of Tiresias in Antigone, we observe, first, that Tiresias comes onstage very late. Antigone and Haemon are dead or dying by the time he arrives. Why did he not come sooner? The most plausible explanation is that he did not at first consider Creon’s burial decree to be blasphemous. He might well have considered it formidable without feeling obliged to oppose it — another example of the audacity of mankind, which the Chorus in the first stasimon, the Polla ta deina, has already described as “marvelous and terrible” (deinos.) He might have thought well of Creon’s attempt to purify the city by severing its destiny from that of the cursed Labdacids. He might have thought that, like so many things in human life, it could go either way, and time alone would tell. We know, at any rate, that he did not decide against Creon’s action

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

157

until the strange behavior of oracular birds and the failure of a burnt offering made him realize that the unburied corpse had brought a new pollution to the city. Moreover, the decision of Sophocles to keep Tiresias offstage until Antigone has been led away and buried alive has, at the very least, kept alive the possibility that Creon might after all be acting justly and correctly. Although Tiresias does not say so, the reappearance of pollution seems a kind of obscure sign, illuminated one facet at a time by the light of prophecy. Be that as it may, what is unmistakable is that the god’s practical advice, uttered through the seer rather than by him, seeks to purify the pollution of an unburied corpse and has nothing to do with the conflict between Creon and Antigone. Tiresias enters with the intention of speaking as a loyal counselor to the king and the city, and he offers his advice to proceed with proper burial rites as a full and sufficient remedy for the ills that he has divined. It is not Tiresias, but the Chorus, who interprets the sacred word as bearing on Antigone. After Tiresias has stormed off, it is the old men of Thebes who advise Creon to free Antigone before burying Polyneices. Why has the Chorus delayed so long to defend Antigone? Why, for that matter, does Tiresias fail to defend her at all? The obvious answers are the need to free Thebes from the Labdacids and the objective impossibility of a marriage between Antigone and Haemon. The Chorus has already taken Creon’s side wholeheartedly in his shouting-match with Haemon, when Creon’s only argument was the importance of choosing a good wife for the heir to a throne. The old men of Thebes are, besides, a pretty passive lot. They do nothing to oppose Creon in any way and seem in fact to listen to him, whatever he has to say, in a kind of daze. It is easy to sympathize with them. They are, after all, in Thebes — the Thebes of the Athenian imaginary, the topsy-turvy Thebes discovered by Froma Zeitlin, where nothing ever works out all right.16 In a city that allows them no good choices, they can hardly be blamed for silences, hesitations, omissions, and evasions. Seen in

158

Antigone

this way, there is no inconsistency in the fact (noted by Tycho von Willamowitz as a bit of stagecraft designed to heighten dramatic tension) that Sophocles presents the corpse of Polyneices first as intact and undefiled, then as torn by dogs and carrion fowl.17 Until Tiresias’ final fulminations, the Chorus and Tiresias seem to be tolerating and even approving Creon’s decree against burial, and nothing in the logic of the drama prevents an optimistic reader from believing that the gods agree with them and are protecting the city from pollution. What changes the fates of Thebes and Creon? Why is the corpse of Polyneices, protected at first by the gods, later torn by dogs? Is there a relationship between the new pollution and the entombment of Antigone? Sophocles gives no easy answers. The only thing that emerges clearly from a close reading of Tiresias’ sacred speech is an insistence — belated, to be sure — on burying Polyneices. As for Antigone, he displays a curious indifference to her fate. Nothing in his long scene supports the common belief that he defends Antigone and condemns Creon for injustice to her. Even Goethe believed this — believed too that Tiresias spoke for Sophocles in judging Creon’s mistake to be ‘hateful” and Antigone’s nature “noble…with justice on her side.”18 But Tiresias does not in fact say anything at all about the conflict between Creon and Antigone. He says that fate has put Creon on the razor’s edge, at the crossroads of destiny, at the most delicate moment of his life — but not because of Antigone, rather, because this is the moment when Creon will either free Thebes from the miasma or introduce the miasma into his own family.19 And, as the audience will soon learn, the good father and his good son have already pushed each other to self-destruction. Eurydice will soon curse Creon as the murderer of her two sons, and the play will end in the ultimate Greek nightmare, the descent of a city into chaos.20 Hölderlin discusses the descent of a civilized culture into savagery in his Remarks on Antigone.21 He observes at the beginning that a complete reversal of fortune is not permitted to man. Here,

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

159

as so often with Hölderlin , we need to remember that he speaks of “man” to mean the world of man, the world of “finite intelligence,” as opposed to the universe, sub-human or super-human, of intelligences and beings radically different from ours. This idea takes up again his earlier images of “uprooted being” and “eccentric trajectory,” of “chaos” and “savagery,” of the world of nature and the dead. All these things are ‘hostile to man,” inasmuch as man, limited to the evidence of his senses and the weakness of his understanding, cannot penetrate them except through “the face of death.” In these last parts of his Remarks, Hölderlin develops the idea that tragedy brings indomitable men and women face to face with the central limitation of their species. The heroes and heroines of tragedy take on the limitations of their condition precisely through their effort to overcome them by attempting the impossible: ... even the man who is neutral…perhaps forced to present himself as a patriot — in an infinite way, in an infinite shape — of the religion, the political order, or the moral values of his country. (prophanethi theos.)22 There is so much of Hölderlin ’s private jargon here, with so many topical references to current events in the age of the French Revolution, that this passage takes as much exegesis as any in Sophocles. The Chorus, for Hölderlin, is “neutral.” The old men avoid firm expressions of opinion and draw back from hard choices, even though their advice is stated clearly. Not until the crucial moment — the “delicate moment” proclaimed by Tiresias as Creon falls apart before their eyes — do they give their ruler unambiguous practical advice. As Hölderlin sees them, their attempt to give shape to the undetermined meaning of Tiresias’ “pure speech” corresponds to the “being forced to present himself…in an infinite way, in an infinite shape — of the religion, the political order, the moral values of his country.” Pressed to act, the Chorus and Creon, like Oedipus in his

160

Antigone

tragedy, find a “too infinite” meaning in the oracle; and, in hopes of endowing the sacred word with a new form, they force and accelerate the appearance of the immeasurable, the tragic attempt to make human limitations the measure of the infinite — the gods, or fate, or Necessity — to which humans can aspire only in vain. To counter the implied reductionism of this analysis, Hölderlin is at pains to note that heroic effort is not entirely wasted. Even the death of a hero is not simply a reminder that mortals are not infinite; it is also a connection between the world of man and the other world of nature and the divine. This is why Creon is not a hero. After attempting a bold stroke to save Thebes, he is cowardly when the time comes for him to pay the price for his boldness — the death prescribed by Tiresias. By contrast, Antigone is heroic and brave. She seems to go beyond the specific form of the “beautiful death,” a death that can unite the two worlds and the two totally different ways of being. The Hymn to Dionysus The Chorus convinces Creon to free Antigone. As he rushes off to do so, the Chorus hymns Dionysus. Wyckoff renders it: God of the many names, Semele’s golden child, Child of Olympian thunder, Italy’s lord. Lord of Eleusis, where all men come To mother Demeter’s plain. Bacchus, who dwell in Thebes, By Ismenus’ running water, Where wild Bacchic women are at home, On the soil of the dragon seed. Seen in the glaring flame, high on the double mount, With the nymphs of Parnassus at play on the hill, Seen by Kastalia’s flowing stream.

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

You come from the ivied heights, From green Euboea’s shore. In immortal words we cry Your name, lord, who watch the ways, The many ways of Thebes. This is your city, honored beyond the rest, The town of your mother’s miracle-death. Now, as we wrestle our grim disease, Come with healing step from Parnassus’ slope Or over the moaning sea. Leader in dance of the fire-pulsing stars, Overseer of the voices of night, Child of Zeus, be manifest, With due companionship of Maenad maids Whose cry is but your name. (EW, 1118–1151.) Here is Hölderlin ’s version: God-creator of names, pride of the waters that Cadmus Loved, and of him who rumbles in the echo, A part, of the father of the earth, And you surround Italy in growth, Renowned everywhere. But common to all Is the impenetrable; thus you reign In the bosom, at Eleusis. But it is here that you abide, god of joy, In your mother’s city, the Bacchic city, In Thebes, beside the cold stream Ismenos, Near the enclosure, where the dragon’s mouth Waits to snatch the breath (of man.)

161

162

Antigone

The smoke of sacrifice, rising straight and fair On the shoulders of the rocks, has seen you; near Cocytus, where the waters Fall, Bacchic, as well As the forest of Castalia. And under the mountains of Nyssus The springs stir you, listening from afar, And green banks, Loaded with grapes, Where you go toward the immortal words Of Thebes, In the streets, when they shout for joy, Since this is the city that you honor Above all, as the highest of cities, With your mother struck down. Now, nonetheless, since the whole city is sick With a grievous illness, we should Take the road of penitence, crossing The ridge of Parnassus or The groaning wave. Io! You! Draw near in fire! Corypheus of the stars and guardian Of secret words! Son, begotten of Zeus! Reveal yourself! With the people of Naxos, The Thyads who watch and sing delirious choruses For you, the lord of mirth. (H, 1162–1202.) This is the last of the six choral odes in Antigone, the climax of a growing anxiety in the old men of Thebes. They know that something vitally important is happening, but they do not know what it is; and, caught between hope and despair, they fall back on a kind of piety

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

163

that reaffirms the importance of their collective identity, their city. In invoking Dionysus, they are praying to their hometown god as to a fellow townsman, and they pull out all the stops. They recount the extent of his power, both near (Thebes) and far (Italy;) they recall the miracle of his birth, his rescue by Hermes at Nysa, 23 and the dangers that threatened him in childhood. They celebrate his triumphs over Theban kings who denied his divine birth and end by raising him to equality with Apollo. The constellation of images in this hymn shows how nervous the old men are. Hölderlin captures their anxiety, in part, by altering their very first invocation: “God of many names” becomes “God–creator of names,” opening a hymn that is notable by its profusion of imagery. The context of the hymn suggests a double connotation, at once concrete and abstract, for Hölderlin ’s noun Namenschöpfer. Schöpfer means both “creator” and “drawer,” as one who draws water from a well; Hölderlin’s neologism evokes, on one hand, him who draws from the undrawable springs of Nature, and, on the other, him who creates or forms. His hybrid translation marks his rejection of the Christian idea of a transcendent divinity as creator ex nihilo and returns to the ancient concreteness of divinity as immanent in creation. He invokes Dionysus as a “descendant” (genos) of Zeus and as “part of the father of the earth,” and he emphasizes the double origin of the god, both human and divine, by speaking of Thebes as his “mother city.” Dionysus is, for Hölderlin, an inherently paradoxical figure. Even as he presides over the profusion of the fruits of the earth (brought out by metaphors of springs, brooks, waterfalls, ivy, and vines,) Hölderlin remains aware that these blessings come with curses: But it is here, god of joy, In your mother’s city, the Bacchic city, In Thebes, that you dwell, beside the cold stream of Ismenos, Near the enclosure, where the dragon’s mouth Waits to snatch the breath (of man.)

164

Antigone

Here there can be no doubt that Hölderlin is overinterpreting the text. Sophocles says only that Dionysus dwells “near the wild Ismenos and also near the field of the dragon’s teeth;” and Lacoue-Labarthe speaks for almost all critics when he derides Hölderlin’s “visibly deliberate alteration” of the text and dismisses it as “totally enigmatic.”24 As usual, however, there is method to Hölderlin’s apparent madness. He seems to have realized, at a time when all mainstream scholars and writers incessantly smoothed and prettified ancient Greece, that Thebes was not an idyllic place full of brooks and streams. He found something strange and incomprehensible — for man, at least — in the growth of the “impenetrable” Mysteries at Eleusis, close to and allied to the “wild” Ismenos, that cold stream. 25 Not for a century and a half would Dodds take up his work and restore the irrational to our understanding of the Greeks. In a play where the gods of Olympus and the gods of the underworld are consistently contrasted, the Chorus associates Dionysus, the patron god of Thebes, with both chtonian mysteries and Olympian oracles; and this hymn maintains a tension between images of growth and images of destruction. Dionysus makes things grow, but he lives near the “dragon” who snatches the breath of man; and images of the mythic landscape, the sterile rock and the sounds of leaf and water, give poetic form to the thought. Thus is illuminated, in various ways, the double nature of the god, sometimes the protector of Thebes, sometimes a dread avenger exacting horrible vengeance. Hölderlin puts this tension at the center of his translation, allowing (or forcing) him to make some surprising changes to the text, as at line 1176: The smoke ... has seen you; near Cocytus, where the waters Fall....

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

165

A downright incorrect translation of the original: Where the corycian nymphs rejoice, Bacchic.... Hölderlin is concerned here to establish an associative connection between Dionysus and Hades by way of Cocytus, the river of the underworld;26 and he makes the text continue the work of exaltation that the Chorus began in the Parodos, when it linked Dionysus to Ares and Hephaestus. Dionysus, then, is the god who creates and maintains communication between the world of the dead and the world of the living — precisely the communication that is at issue in this play. Perhaps the unexpected interpolation of Cocytus relates to the images of Hades as a god with two faces, terrible when he harvests lives, friendly when he appears as the “rich man” (Pluton) of the immortals. In the last strophe the old men implore Dionysus to appear in the city, and they offer him precise geographical options. He may come from Parnassus, or from the groaning wave (seufzende Furt, tonoenta porthmon,) that is, from the straits of Euripos, whose violent and unpredictable currents are emblematic of the unpredictable element in human destiny.27 Hölderlin reverses the action: the god is no longer the object of appeal, rather men need to undergo a rite of purification that will expose them to altogether unpredictable dangers. This is how Hölderlin sharpens the sense of danger in meetings between gods and mortals; sudden death awaits the man who dares an equal relationship with his dread superior. Hölderlin’s Chorus, with equal amounts of enthusiasm and despair, is riven by anxiety. Even as the old men ask the god to appear among them, they fear that he will bring disaster, what Hölderlin calls “total reversal” (ganzliche Umkehr,)28 perhaps through a return to the chaos of pure Nature, which man, with his narrow and inflexible requirements, cannot endure. Hölderlin brings out the fear of the evils that so often befall when gods enter the life of men. His translation emphasizes both the

166

Antigone

sheer incommensurability of things divine and mortal (the shining glory of Zeus that consumed Semele,) and the fact that Dionysus is the ongoing point of contact between the two realms, the concrete apparition of this absolute dimension. Forever “the stranger,” he inspires overpowering enthusiasm in those who accept him; but the kings of Thebes continually persecute him as a human impostor. Fortunately, Hölderlin does not abandon himself to the simple meta-poetic pleasure of turning dramatic characters into metaphors for some new theory of aesthetics. When he calls Dionysus “creator/ drawer of names,” he is saying that Dionysus is the “god of drama,’ the figure of the transformation and revitalization of ancient names and values in the “hesperic” imagination.29 Dionysus is not merely a god who has many names and epithets — all gods do — but a god who can give new names, a savior who can make life new. Here the Chorus is showing that it has understood the drama of Antigone’s last day on earth. Thebes cannot save itself. It needs its patron god. Who will not save it. The hope of the Chorus will soon be shown to be vain. The founding curse of Thebes will work again, and the “excess of self” that has already set the trap of incest for Oedipus and Jocasta, driven Eteocles and Polyneices to a fratricide that is also a suicide, and moved Haemon to threaten his father with shocking impiety, is about to kill Antigone, Haemon, and Eurydice, and reduce Creon to the level of “a man who is no longer anything other than nobody.”30

Tiresias, or “Pure Speech”

167

Notes 1. ROE. 2. ROE, 1. 3. Franz Rosenzweig speaks of the heroic “silence” as what distinguishes Aeschylus from his successors. Der Stern der Erlösung, Frankfort-amMain, Fischer Verlag, 1921, pp. 98–100; also W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, op. cit., vol. i, p. 286–287 and vol. II, p. 418 (“Schicksal und Charakter.“) 4. RA, 2. 5. Here Hölderlin uses verbs, nouns, and adjectives with the root — rücken (ent-rückt, ver-rückt  ) to show how the trajectory of a tragic character differs from a supposedly “normal” trajectory. A character moves from the “rapture“ (Entrueckung) of a contemplative state of divine possession to the total dismembering of understanding in madness (Verruecktheit, Wahnsinn) 6. ROE, 1. 7. On the relationship between the seer, the earth, and the serpent, see Luc Brisson, Le Mythe de Tiresias, Leyden, Brill, 1976, p. 47. 8. Vian, OT, P. 206. 9. Jacques Derrida gives “risk” a more important role. See Marges, Paris, Minuit, 1972, p. 385. 10. Brisson, op.cit., p. 35. 11. Loraux-Mazon, p. 119. 12. W. Benjamin, in Die Aufgabe des Uebersetzers, argues that the “naïve, original, intuitive” gesture of the poet becomes an act “derived, final, bound by the idea” in the translator’s mind. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, 1, p. 16. See also Theodor Adorno’s contention that “poetic obscurity demands philosophy and calls it forth. “Parataxis,” in Noten zur Literatur III, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1980, p. 159. 13. H, 1101 et seq. 14. This ancient theme recurs in Euripides’ Bacchae. Pentheus refuses to recognize both Dionysus and bacchic inspiration. 15. A remarkable lapse, considering Greek attitudes towards decomposing bodies. See J.-P. Vernant, L’Individu, la Mort, l’Amour, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, p. 60 ss.. 16. Froma Zeitlin, op. cit. p. 131.

168

Antigone

17. Tycho von Wilamowitz, Die dramatische Technik des Sophokles. Zurich, Weidmann, 1969, p. 26 et seq., pp. 40–43, p. 48 et seq. 18. Gespräch mit Eckermann, op. cit., April 1, 1827. 19. It is worth asking why so many critics believe that Tiresias commands Creon to free Antigone. Perhaps it is because of dramatic timing (the Chorus advises freeing Antigone immediately after Tiresias has broken down Creon’s defenses.) Perhaps, too, readers remember that Tiresias actually does predict the catastrophe of Oedipus Rex — though even in that play he does not actually bring it about. 20. Loraux-Mazon, p. 125. 21. RA, 3. 22, RA, 3. 23. According to Henry Jeanmaire, “from the Caucasus to Arabia, from India to the Libyan West,” all the way to the Nysa. (Dionysos, op. cit. p. 349.) 24. Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., p. 177. 25. Ismenos was also one of the epithets given by Thebans to Apollo, where he presided over empyromancy, divination by fire. See M. Detienne, Apollon le couteau à la main, pp.  66, 79, 263, n.  24, 269, n. 111 and 112. 26. Homer, Odyssey, X, 514. 27. Pauly-Wissova, op.cit., article Euripos. 28. RA, 3. 29. Bernhard Böschenstein, “Frucht des Gewitters,” in Zu Hölderlins, p. 68 et seq. 30. H, 1377.

Chapter 7 Rhythm, Language, and Time in Hölderlin’s Remarks on Antigone and Oedipus

I attribute more importance to poetry than to other human activities. Not only does it presuppose deep knowledge, it also extends the realm of knowledge beyond itself, into the frontiers of divination, polysemia, singularities — a region where understanding no longer limits perception. — Robert Musil, Fragment

Hölderlin did not develop his thoughts in a vacuum. As he noted, there was in his day a reigning conception of the Greek world, and he set himself firmly against it. This reigning conception, annunciated mainly from Weimar, defined Sophocles as the model of rational moderation. As Hellingrath and Beissner have since pointed out, Hölderlin emphasized eccentric enthusiasm, by which he meant certain destabilizing tendencies that wrench a hero from the center of human life; but even they, Hölderlin’s editor and biographer, disagree with him. Beissner goes so far as to say that the classic equilibrium of Sophocles’ writing would have denied Sophocles the strange excesses that he finds in Hölderlin ’s translation.1 This is disappointing, inasmuch as Beissner acknowledges that there is more to classic Greek art than the brilliant rational surface admired by Goethe and Winckelmann, and Beissner admits that Hölderlin finds his ideas in the actual text of Sophocles, rather than by invoking Orphism or oriental influences. It would have helped if Beissner had asked himself whether the translations of the mid- twentieth century gave us the full breadth of the Greek

170

Antigone

universe. If he had, he would have found that Hölderlin was, in his day, both the first and the only translator who gave as much poetic value to the underside of Sophoclean classicism as to its smooth superstructure. Hölderlin even coined a word for this underside, determinity (Determinierheit), and claimed to find it, between the lines, in Sophocles, Pindar, and others. For him, Sophocles was a poet who could write smoothly and clearly — the ideals of the world around Hölderlin — without any sacrifice of the forcefulness and openness to the irrational that Hölderlin himself was pioneering. How, then, did Hölderlin connect his conceptions of tragedy and Antiquity to his ideas about language and time? Hölderlin’s Remarks give valuable clues. He spoke of the Remarks as notes on his translation. Even his weird translation failed, he thought, to capture the illuminating strangeness that he found in Sophocles, and he wrote the Remarks to finish the job. He was concerned to show how Sophocles’ tragic paradox 2 operates on two levels. The first of these levels he calls mekhane, the craftsman’s skill that allows Sophocles to represent actions, thoughts, and feelings in a convincing way. The second level is that of the imponderability of the play as a whole, its ability to contain things that cannot be represented realistically (das Festzusetzende)3 In undertaking to annotate his own translation, Hölderlin was conforming, in a somewhat exaggerated way, to the new Goethe-and-Schiller ideal of the poet as a learned man with a solid knowledge of science and of the phenomena that art represents in scale models.4 What makes Hölderlin ’s Remarks unusual is that he tried to combine scientific and historical knowledge with theories about tragedy itself as a timeless, placeless form that includes another dimension beyond the grasp of consciousness.

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

171

From Intellectual Intuition to Paradox and Rhythm Perhaps the best way of understanding how Hölderlin conceived of tragedy, and to see what Hölderlinian ideas like rhythm and poetic logic5 have to do with his ideas about Antiquity and dramatic performance, is to look at his rigorous conceptions of language and time. Such an examination requires a piecing together of bits from the translations, the Remarks, and various fragments not published in his lifetime, which contain nuggets like a definition of tragedy as a metaphor for intellectual intuition6 or as a paradox.7 Hölderlin did not coin the phrase intellectual intuition. It was already a wellknown problematic of Kant and his successors, Fichte and Schelling. Kant had defined intellectual intuition as an unconditioned (or divine) knowledge, referring only to itself, created within itself, and inaccessible to human consciousness. M. Franz has shown how Schelling applied this Kantian scheme (understood as a universal imaginative process of giving a concept an image to divine intelligence.8 Schelling’s essay on poetry (Dichteraufsatz) attributes the poet’s production and the effect of wonder, whose natural causes cannot be traced to the inward art of the soul, ever working in silence.9 Hölderlin too develops the problem of the Kantian barrier between understanding and reason, between idea and experience: A great strength of the soul that works in secret is that it can evade consciousness at the peak of consciousness, and that, before the present deity can gain effective control of it, it blasts him with a blasphemy, gaining thus the lively and sacred possibility of the spirit.10 Already, in a letter to Immanuel Niehammer, editor of a philosophical review at Jena, Hölderlin had sketched out the ideas that would become his New Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man — an effort, published only in a few fragments, to criticize Schiller’s

172

Antigone

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, then much admired, and to lay a new theoretical foundation for the aesthetic sense and the poetic imagination. In the philosophical letters, I will try to find the principle that can explain the divisions (distinctions) by means of which we think and exist, and which is nonetheless capable of abolishing the contradiction between subject and object, between our self (Selbst) and the outside world, and even between reason and revelation — [I will try to find this] theoretically, in intellectual intuition, without recourse to practical reason. To this end, we need aesthetic sense, and I will call my philosophical letters ‘New Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. In these I will show a transition from philosophy to poetry and religion.11 The philosophical fragments that Hölderlin wrote between 1794 and 1798 show how quickly he diverged from his great model, Schiller. Schiller had defined art as appearance, something beautiful but illusory that conciliates the real and inescapable tensions within the aesthetic ideal. Hölderlin saw both art and life as arising from the contradictions of experience. Art’s apparent harmony does more than merely attenuate the experiences of the divided self, of loss and of grief; rather, harmony and beauty are the signs of a primary reality, a pure being, a unity that cannot be apprehended directly through the different techniques of rational division and distinction, but only divined. That is why, for Hölderlin, artistic beauty must be conceived as a kind of memory that restores, in intelligible form, the lost unity of the world. Taking Plato as his starting point (but without Platonic idealism,) Hölderlin proposed to show the experience of beauty as the gateway to the more infinite connection that exists beyond the necessity of practical reason and dependence on sensory intuition. In his fragment On Religion, he had already tried to establish a link

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

173

between finite understanding and a knowledge independent of necessity, and had attempted to show how the forms of knowledge, of consciousness and self-consciousness, are part of a structure that encompasses everything (the ‘more infinite connection.) Although inaccessible to thought, the more infinite connection is the origin of the objects of thought, the foundation (Grund) of thought, to which certain fundamental experiences return, the implicit forms of knowledge, sustaining the insights of divination (Ahnungen) whose outward signs are found in the affective tonality of movement, of actions, or of explicit affirmations (like love-friendship for relatives, gratitude for life, or a sense of beauty.) Hölderlin locates these affective or qualitative processes midway between sensibility and intellect: according to Dieter Heinrich, they take the place of implicit modes of knowledge, like echoes and emotional pitches, which must be considered as an implicit knowledge concerning the trajectories of possible lives.12 At the same time, this way of knowing opens a radically other horizon that tends to destabilize the subject. In tragedy, it wrenches the tragic hero towards his eccentric path and precipitates him into sacred madness. Rhythm as a Dimension Independent of Language and Time …wie dir unsre Stunden abgleiten von der vollen Sonnenuhr, auf der des Tages gleiche Zahl zugleich, gleich wirklich, steht in tiefem Gleichgewichte, als wären alle Stunden reif und reich. — Rilke, The Angel of the Meridian By the time Hölderlin wrote his Remarks he had found better words for the concept of intellectual intuition. Now he used poetic logic or rhythm to explain the same phenomenon, the transition between experience in temporal succession and a-temporal

174

Antigone

knowledge. His reflection on rhythmic order led him beyond the limits set by Kant, that is, beyond Kant’s radical separation of understanding from idea; and he proposed rhythm as the element of language that allows sensory intuition to grow into intellectual intuition, permitting poetic logic to find adequate equivalents for intellectual intuition. To make rhythmic order the key to poetic thought is to put oneself far beyond the schoolroom rules of syntax; Hölderlin finds multiple layers of meaning in the rhythmic order of Sophocles, and it is the rhythmic order between these layers that creates a coherence beyond consciousness and understanding, an absolute dimension of language that Hölderlin calls, variously, a higher connection and a more infinite connection. Hölderlin is one of the first critics to apply the approaches of modern philosophy to the interpretation of literature. As he considers, and asks us to consider, a work of drama, a creation of language firmly set in time and space, he shows that the drama is also acted out in a parallel reality beyond language, time and space. This would be challenging enough in an essay, and it is positively strange in a translation. But the ungainliness of Hölderlin’s translation should not blind us to the deep thought that his words reveal. As we have already seen, many critics have felt that Hölderlin’s absorption in the issues of contemporary German Idealism drew him away from a true appreciation of Antiquity. Sophocles, we are told, was not raised in an atmosphere of Swabian Pietism, and it would never have occurred to him to give an ancient hero an interiorized relationship with a personal god.13 Even at the mere formal level, we are told that Hölderlin turned an ancient tragedy, based on ingenium, into a modern tragedy, based on ars.14 If these criticisms are valid, Hölderlin is no guide to ancient tragedy, however useful he may be as a theoretician of modern tragedy. That they are not valid, however, Hölderlin shows in his fragment On Religion, where, in an analysis of gratitude, he argues that ancient conceptions of drama did not exclude a recognition

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

175

and an agreement between very different kinds of representation. Gratitude, he says, begins with an experience that is independent of any external cause; this experience makes it possible to divine (ahnen) another form of thought and being, and to acknowledge and accept the difference between representations whose purpose is religious, political, or purely artistic. Hölderlin, who bent over backwards to understand and explain the differences between ancient Greece and the Germany of his own day, was the last person to project modern subjectivity onto an ancient hero. Fortunately, since Hellingrath, a number of critics have realized that Hölderlin (despite various errors that they find and catalogue) did not translate Sophocles falsely or idiosyncratically. Like his translations of Pindar, his renderings of Sophocles try to grasp the essential of Greek thought and language. He was one of the first to ask how the complex syntax and the particular rhythm of ancient Greek might have influenced the thought of those who spoke it. Moreover, his translations reveal an extreme sensitivity to the rigidity of long and short syllables, which a speaker (he thought) could not vary by vocal expression. His strange translations make us realize that we are trying to penetrate a strange world with a strange language that did not express things as modern, accented, languages express them. As Th. Georgiades says: When we speak in our [modern] languages, we use the length of syllables flexibly, to emphasize what is important.15 Like all speakers of modern European languages, Hölderlin ’s readers took it for granted that people would use the length and accentuation of syllables to convey meaning, intention, and feeling. In ancient Greek, by contrast, as Georgiades says, syllables cannot be extended or shortened. They have their own free will. The duration of syllables is equally independent of their meaning.16 It was precisely by reflecting on this kind of linguistic difference — between Greece and Hesperia, as he said — that Hölderlin had his great insight about the importance of rhythm in Sophocles.

176

Antigone

We have already seen (Chapters 4 and 6 above) that Hölderlin founded his understanding of rhythm, as explained in his Remarks, on the existence of a dimension of language that is independent of humanity and inaccessible to human understanding. Tragedy, then, is written on two levels, one accessible to human understanding and situated within human time, the other revealing itself only at the limit of understanding, where human thought divines more than it knows (ahnen, Ahnung.) This second level, then, exists in a time that is different from human time. Hölderlin speaks of torrential time, which wrenches man away from any center or reference point. The trajectory of a tragic hero acts out the passage or transit between the world of human time and speech and a world where speech is pure and unfettered by human understanding; and a tragic hero is a person whose destiny makes him or her a dweller in both worlds at once. In consequence, in his Remarks on Oedipus, Hölderlin distinguishes two ways for poetic logic to proceed, both driven by the rhythm of spoken language.17 The first is craftsmanlike, representing phenomena that can be known and explained. A poet needs to have the craft skill to understand how people see and feel and think in his own time and to put his understanding to work in a system of rules — what Hölderlin calls poetic calculation. But this skill, though necessary to a poet, is insufficient. Hölderlin says that, next, we must see how content is related to this calculation, and he asks how movement and living meaning, which cannot be calculated, are related to calculable law.18 Meaning is living precisely when it is not deduced from artificial conventions, learned habits, or the concepts of the understanding that assure comprehension, but when it is divined and felt in its relation with ever-living power, — even if the phrase “divine and feel” necessarily remains obscure and even incomprehensible. Having defined poetic logic by means of his two ways of proceeding, Hölderlin describes poetic calculation as a system

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

177

of sensations, representations, and chains of reasoning; and he understands man as a structure historically determined and subject to the formal conditions of time and space. Not that man is completely subject to causes and various kinds of necessity; it is in tragedy that human experience collides with something radically other, independent of material or historical conditions. In tragedy the various successions (Sukzessionen)…are rather equilibriums than pure successions (Aufeianderfolge.)19 Hölderlin already understands that he is grappling with two incompatible concepts of time — one, empirical, corresponding to physical or human time; the other, which he calls full time and torrential time, a time that sweeps away the distinctions of human time, a time without time, eternal and absolute. The essence of tragedy, then, consists in the transition (the transit) that gives (a-temporal) equilibrium to the change of successive representations (Wechsel der Vorstellungen.) The transit abolishes the distinctions and the understanding assured by succession in physical or human time, to the extent that the rhythm of the words calls forth an all-embracing connection — a connection that is beyond time, not subject to the segmentation of successive changes — between the elements of the tragic action and the totality of the universe. Through rhythm, the bottomless depth of a connection to totality can be seen, felt, and divined; and it is thus, paradoxically, that tragedy presents the movements of both forms of language as equivalents and concomitants. Like a fugue with a subject and a counter-subject, weaving in and out of each other, tragedy offers at the same time and in the same space both a range of human thoughts and feelings played out in human time and the pure, timeless language of the seer. The two unfold in equilibrium — having the same weight, says Hölderlin (als gleichwiegend.)20 Both are true; both are necessary. Hölderlin’s idea of rhythm applies the laws of metrics to the complex units of thought. He sees the action of the play, the emotions and arguments of the characters, as syllables with double meanings,

178

Antigone

one conditioned by human understanding, the other by the higher connection. As scene follows scene with craftsmanlike realism, rhythm reveals representation itself, that is, what is essential in the story, independent of the intention, and even the understanding, of the speaking characters.21 The supposed novelty of Hölderlin’s double articulation of time is actually quite Aristotelian. In Book IV of the Physics, Aristotle too posits two kinds of time, one based on succession, the other on simultaneity. Aristotle’s first kind of time is as a measure of bodily movement, a kind of time that corresponds to Hölderlin’s notion of craftsman-like time, in which the succession of actions, emotions, and arguments defines the trajectory of the hero. Aristotle’s second kind of time is not limited to the measurement of movement and the necessity of temporal succession but is always the same, and all movement within it is simultaneous, 22 as in Hölderlin’s higher or more infinite connection. In fact, whenever Aristotle considers time — in the Physics, the Categories, and the Poetics23 — he distinguishes two aspects: discontinuous time, with distinct moments in succession, and a time that is pure continuity, an absolute time, an eternity, that assures the cohesion and the unity of everything. As he says: In fact, time present is always connected to the past and the future.24 Hölderlin knew the Categories well and understood that his conception of time could be applied to ancient Greek literature without anachronism. Hölderlin’s curious phrase “torrential time” refers to absolute time, beyond and apart from any function of measurement. When he speaks of the torrential spirit of time wrenching a man from his sphere without sparing him so that the spirit of time may be felt, not merely understood and learned, he is talking about the double

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

179

experience of time (and language) that tragedy makes visible.25 He thinks that the subjective feelings of tragic loss are caused by the bursting-in of absolute time: the hero, in his eccentric zeal, cannot remain exclusively in the craftsmanlike succession of moments that mortals call time, and he loses what is proper to empirical experience. No longer can he struggle, as humans do, to grasp or understand absolute time by means of the connections that the understanding discovers between the successive moments of the past. He is cut off from human time, from humanity itself. We can find Hölderlin’s ideas in the formulations of two scholars of Greek philosophy: Victor Goldschmidt and G.E.L. Owen. Owen, in particular, has analyzed the distinction between “now” and “the moment” and observed that, between two nows, there should be a permanent time that is not made of one now after another…. The [Aristotelian] paradox on the non-reality of time should be understood in his own terms, as a contrast between a present that exists and a non-existent past and future.26 In tragedy, the challenge for the hero is to maintain himself in equilibrium in a middle state that includes both finite ways of thinking (syllogism) and the more infinite combination of knowledge and being that Hölderlin calls intellectual intuition. Freed from the snapshot succession of human time, intellectual intuition breaks into the utterance of a seer with pure speech that encompasses everything — even distinct snapshot moments — in the higher connection of continuous time. Thinking of Hölderlin ’s ideas in an Aristotelian context helps to dissipate the cloudiness of Hölderlinian phrases like torrential time. The rhythm of tragedy, which suspends the progress from before to after and thus mixes ordinary time in timelessness, is not without analogy to the relationship between movement and size, time and instant, in Aristotle’s Physics. Several critics have noticed that Aristotle here uses the verb akolouthein in a swinging, ambiguous way, which captures both the movements of “following after”

180

Antigone

and “accompany.” As Goldschmidt says: “The verb acolouthein… does not always indicate a relationship of dependence with only one meaning; it can show concomitance as well as succession.”27 This swing of succession towards accompaniment, or of succession towards simultaneity, corresponds to the double aspect that allows us to view tragedy both as a story that unfolds in physical time and as an a-temporal presence. Rhythm is what creates this co-presence of all moments. It supports our recognition of completeness (holos) as a concept outside successive time. Even if there were not many signs of Aristotle’s influence on Hölderlin, it would still be useful to remember the use that Hölderlin makes of a lexical range constructed out of words for succession — nacheinander hervorgehen (produce each one after the other) and Aufeinanderfolge (succession.) Hölderlin’s reflections on poetic logic prefigure Hegel’s development of the concept. As Hegel says: Logic should be grasped as the system of pure reason, the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth itself, unveiled, in and for itself; for this reason, one can say: this content is the presentation of God as it is in its eternal essence, before the creation of nature and of a finite mind.28 Hölderlin’s conception of language as rhythm approaches Hegel’s formulation. Both divide being into two essences, temporal and a-temporal, relative and absolute. In this context, Georgiades says, Posing the question of language as rhythm illuminates… the fact that meaning becomes an a-temporal thing, and man something of an ephemeral being…. Naming is purely incomprehensible…. It does not know time. It is an original phenomenon of the spirit.29

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

181

The specificity of Greek poetic rhythms, their independence of an actor’s nuances, predisposed Hölderlin to think of language as an absolute. Although it was impossible — as he knew well — to bring the specificity of Greek metre into German, Hölderlin did his best to reproduce something of the strange distance that ancient Greek maintains between readers and a dimension of meaning that they can never fully master. Hölderlin saw, in the tragedies of Sophocles, two diametrically opposed attitudes towards language: while the dialogues and action affirm intellectual understanding and practical mastery (gnome, zethesis,) they also contain clues that lead to something entirely other. In the Theban myths, the Delphic oracle and the words of Tiresias embody this other dimension. It is unalterable fate, inaccessible to human understanding, appearing, through divination and intuitive grasp, only at rare moments. This is why Hölderlin reads tragedy not (or not only) as a conflict between certain characters, but also as a meeting between a hero and a hidden dimension of language and being. This is a hard meeting; the hidden dimension is troublesome, enigmatic, indecipherable, incomprehensible. It is not, however, meaningless; it is, instead, supremely meaningful. It is the whole of the universe, a thing not created by man or made to his measure. Sophoclean heroes do not succumb to objective circumstances or flesh-and-blood adversaries, but to something indefinable and timeless. Aristotle speaks elsewhere, not of “the” mistake, but of “some” mistake, as if it were impossible to define hubris.30 Thus, Hölderlin ’s translation spends little time on the contrast between the two principal heroes, Antigone and Creon, whom Hölderlin sees as two runners with courses perfectly parallel and balanced. They struggle, in his translation, not so much one against the other, but, side by side, against time: The grouping of such characters in the Antigone is like a running race in which the loser is the first who stops to catch his breath and so collides with his adversary. In Oedipus

182

Antigone

Rex, by contrast, the struggle is more like a boxing match; in the Ajax, it is like fencing.31 In the tragic struggle against time, it is useful to put the word time in quotation marks, since the backdrop for this struggle is the spirit of the savage and unwritten world, the spirit of the world eternally living, and of the dead.32 In short, there is a time that is radically different from human time. It is full time, divine, not segmented. It is eternity. Hölderlin’s brief, dense observations at the beginning of the Remarks on Oedipus touch directly on the paradoxical failure of the units of meaning (representations, emotions, reasoning) that are accessible to knowledge and understanding. This failure is paradoxical because, although inadequate, it sets up a rhythmic balance (the simultaneous presence of all elements) that reveals a meaning radically other beyond the reach of human perception. It is tragedy that makes this other meaning present, in all its fearful otherness (ungeheuer, deinos;) and this other dimension of language, whose essence and purpose are unknown to mortals, makes itself visible in various details, apparently obscure, which Hölderlin sets himself the task of putting into the clarity of ordinary language. Strangeness — the most obvious characteristic of Hölderlin’s translations — becomes thus a metaphor for the immeasurable otherness of this other dimension, an otherness that is completely objective, unrelated to human time or human concerns. The ultimate expression of this other dimension is death. Hölderlin speaks of death mathematically when he says that it cancels the sign, that is, reduces the hero to nothing (he even writes = 0.)33 The principle of temporal succession, which is the basis of human thought and action, becomes, in Hölderlin’s words, a landscape punctured or cracked, with fissures that open to reveal something totally other. The succession of distinct and antagonistic moves that predominate in the dialogue scenes of tragedy, where arguments

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

183

answer each other as in a tennis match, is not the essential element of tragedy. Unlike Hegel, who organizes his interpretation of Antigone around the explicit conflict between Creon and his niece, Hölderlin founds his view of the play on the radically different status of language (both word and sign) depending on whether it operates within or beyond human time and understanding. Hölderlin seeks something to be established (etwas Festzusetzendes,) but the something can neither be fastened onto particular words nor extracted from them. It appears only in verbal rhythm, which brings out suggestions running between the lines. To understand tragedies, the best starting-point is paradox. So wrote Hölderlin in a fragment that probably dates from the time of his Sophocles translations.34 Tragedy gives witness to the hidden source of all nature, a force so overpowering and so hostile to man that its entry into human life produces the situations that tragedy documents. From the point of view of human beings, nature is the devastating source of universal death. It cancels the sign that is man, and human language has no means of representing it adequately35 The closest the Greeks came to a single adequate word was deinos; Hölderlin’s translation das Ungeheuere, (immense and marvelous, worrisome and terrible, monstrous and frightful) accentuates the relationship, fateful and unhappy, between man’s technical knowledge and his rational capacities. Hölderlin’s term reminds us that an immeasurable gap runs through the middle of the one pattern that seems to us complete and coherent: language and its associated networks of civilized behavior. The function of rhythmic order is to bring out the troubling otherness that is usually invisible behind the normal language of human life. What happens, in tragedy, after all, is absolutely abnormal. Another realm of reality bursts in upon one or more heroes, and they find themselves suddenly face to face with living meaning (der lebendige Sinn,) an echo in earthly language of the eternal and inexhaustible force that passes our understanding.

184

Antigone

Writing at a time when the best interpreters of Sophocles emphasized his rationality and brilliant surfaces, Hölderlin emphasized the elements of otherness and savagery that he found in the plays more than he might have done in a different critical environment. He created his translations as if to force his contemporaries to break through their own smug and tepid rationalistic prejudices and open themselves to the full depth of Sophoclean tragedy, even at the risk of personal discomfort and disorientation. Perhaps, Hölderlin thought, his translations would allow modern readers to feel enthusiasm, the sense of being seized by something unforeseen, and incomprehensible that the ancient Greeks attributed to the gods, and that Aristotle, in the Poetics, called thaumaston. Divine enthusiasm is no everyday surprise (what Kant calls Verwunderung,) but a disorientation great enough to overturn our normal beliefs (Bewunderung). It is the basis of spiritual life. Tragedy, with its hardy balance of rational argument and openness to the irrational, brings it before us in a form that we can grasp. In Antigone, intimations of a dangerous other dimension can be felt from the beginning of the play. They break out into open view in the pure speech of Tiresias, the guardian of the forces of nature. Finally, however, it is the tragic hero, not a prophet or any other subordinate character, who brings the hidden knowledge of the other world into… not quite our consciousness, rather into some intuitive horizon (Hölderlin uses the term Ahnung, divination). This is very obvious in Oedipus Rex, where the hero’s manic thought processes sketch out a troubled dimension of unseen existence. In that play, Sophocles builds up the picture through a layering of trivial-seeming details: how Oedipus listens, how he understands, and how, without consciously willing it, he leads the other characters (Creon, Tiresias, etc…) to connect dots that do not need to be connected — at least not in the realm of human understanding. Nonetheless, it is precisely these apparently anodyne details that release the enthousiasmos, as the hero’s being is seized by the torrential spirit of time. Hölderlin

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

185

argues that the intervention of Tiresias in the drama of Oedipus, with his pure and sacred speech, serves the dramatic purpose of maintaining the weight of these details. Tiresias creates a caesura in the play. The counter-rhythmic movement keeps the rapid succession of actions and discoveries from obscuring the little sign that has already prefigured the entire reversal. The co-presence of things that can and cannot be understood drives Oedipus into a rage of curiosity (zornige Neugier.) The same thing is true in Antigone. The heroine confronts otherness, is wrenched from her sphere, and eventually accepts the cruel order of the universe. Tiresias appears very late in the action, and his words accentuate the importance of some apparently trivial details that have already been introduced — and are soon to be compacted (gedrungen,) as Hölderlin says, by the rapid succession of events in later scenes. Hölderlin does not think that Tiresias gives the moral of the play, or even contributes to it; rather, Tiresias and his pure speech bring the parallel reality of the timeless gods into the world of man. It is Antigone, standing utterly alone, who confronts that parallel reality as it bursts in upon her. Youth, beauty, birth, public opinion, justice, brilliant intelligence, even language itself, are powerless to help her. What she meets is the power of nature which, tragically, wrenches man out of his sphere, from the center of his own life; it drives him towards another world and hurls him into the eccentric sphere of the dead.36 Nothing earthly can stand against that.

186

Antigone

Notes 1. Friedrich Beissner, Hölderlins Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1961, p. 168. 2. J.-F.  Courtine, “De la métaphore tragique,” Revue philosophique de Louvain, v. 81, February, 1983, p. 55–57 on “ l’unité du plus séparé .” 3. ROE, 1. 4. RA, 3. 5. ROE, 3. 6. DKV, 2, p. 553. 7. DKV, 2, p. 561. 8. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1968, B 179 f. 9. Franz, Schellings Tübinger Platon-Studien, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996, p. 199. The Dichteraufsatz appears as an appendix, p. 284 et seq. 10. RA, 2 11. Letter of February 24, 1796. DKV, 3, p. 224. 12. Cf D. Heinrich, Der Grund im Bewusstsein, p. 519. Heinrich notes that Hölderlin “supposes that there is a kind of continuity between the original unity that is inaccessible to us [which corresponds to a mode of knowledge totally different from ours] and the situation in which our knowledge operates.” (ibid, p. 549.) Jochen Schmidt explains Hölderlin’s understanding of intellectual intuition as a unity of myself with everything. (DKV, 2, pp. 1232–1235.) 13. Cf Klaus Düsing, “Die Theorie der Tragödie bei Hölderlin und Hegel,” in C.  Jamme et O.  Pöggeler, Jenseits des Idealismus, pp.  61 and 69. Düsing emphasizes Hölderlin’s anachronism. See also Helmut Hühn, “Mnemosyne-Zeit und Erinnerung in Hölderlins Denken,” Stuttgart, Metzler, 1997, pp. 170–178. 14. Huhn, op.cit., p. 171. 15. Georgiades, LR, 79. 16. Gerorgiades, op. cit. 79. 17. ROE, 1. 18. Ibid., 1. 19. DKV, 2, p. 850. 20. ROE,1.

Rhythm, Language, and Time In Hölderlin ’s Remarks

187

21. Ibid, 1. 22. Aristotle, Physics, IV, 11,219 a 10, 219 b 10. 23. Aristotle, Categories, 4 b 20-5 a 14: Physics, IV, 11, 219 a 10–220 a 5; Poetics, 1455 b 25–28. The relationship between physical and another concept of time is dealt with by Victor Goldschmidt, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote, Paris, Vrin, 1982. See also G.E.L. Owen, Logic, Science and Dialectic, Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy, London, Duckworth, 1986, p. 305 et seq. 24. Aristotle, Categories, 5 a 6. 25. RA, 3. 26. Owen, op. cit. pp. 305-306. 27. Goldschmidt’s commentary on this passage emphasizes that the verb “to follow indicates that one notion is predicated on another, so that the second necessarily follows from the first.” In the very different interpretation advanced by Gilles-Gaston Granger, “succession being symmetrical,” the verb ought to be translated as “accompany” rather than “follow.” See Goldschmidt, op.cit., p. 32. He cites Aristotle’s Rhetoric I, 6, 1362 a 29–31 and Metaphysics, IV, 2, 1003 b 23–4, also Bonitz’s commentaries on Metaphysics A, 1, 981 a 12 and G.-G. Granger, La Theorie aristotelicienne de la science, Paris, Broché 2000, p. 189. 28. G.F.W. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke in zwanzig Banden, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, Vol. 5, 1969, p. 44. 29. Georgiades, LR, p. 87. 30. Aristotle, Poetics, 1453 a 7–11. 31. RA, 2. 32. RA, 2. 33. RA, 3: “The origin and secret source of nature cannot appear before man in all its force, lest it destroy him. Given that there is no adequate sign for this infinite power, it should be thought of as reducing the hero to 0.” 34. Die Bedeutung der Tragödien, in DKV, 2, p. 1252 et seq. Dating by Schmidt. 35. RA, 2. 36. ROE, 1.

188

Antigone

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frequently-cited works Antigone, in Sophocles Fabulae, ed. Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones and N.G. Wilson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990. EW Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1954. H Friederich Hölderlin. Antigona, Frankfurter Hölderlin Ausgabe RA Anmerkungen zur Antigonä, (Remarks on Antigone,) Frankfurter Hölderlin Ausgabe, vol. 16, pp. 411– 421. ROE Anmerkungen zum Oedipus (Remarks on Oedipus,) Frankfurter Hölderlin Ausgabe, vol. 16, pp. 249–258 ACM Marcel Détienne. Apollon, le couteau à la main, Paris, Gallimard, 1998 DMM Marcel Détienne. Dionysos mis à mort , Paris, Gallimard, 1998. MP J.-P. Vernant. Mythe et Pensée chez les Grecs, 2 vol., Paris, Maspéro, 1981. MT J.-P. Vernant et P. Vidal Naquet. Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, Paris, 1972; vol. II, Paris, La Découverte, 1995. Loraux-Mazon, Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Paul Mazon, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1958. OCT

Editions of Sophocle’s Antigone Antígone, trans. Guilherme de Almeida, in: Três Tragédias Gregas, São Paulo,Perspectiva, 1997, pp. 49-97. Antígona, trans. Pereira, M. H. da Rocha, Editora UnB, Brasilia, 1997.

190

Antigone

Antígona, trans. Donaldo Schüler, Porto Alegre, L&PM, 1999. A trilogia tebana, trans. Mário da Gama Kury, Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1989. Hölderlin, Antígona, Act I, Scene I, Portuguese translation by Haroldo de Campos, in: Três Tragédias Gregas, São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1997, pp. 297–308. Antigone, trans. Paul Mazon, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1958. Tragédies, trans. Paul Mazon, Preface by P. Vidal Naquet, Paris, Gallimard, 1962. Antigone, trans. Paul Mazon, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, Poche, 1997 (Introd., notas e pósfacio de N. Loraux) Antigone, trans. Jean and Mayotte Bollack, Paris, Minuit, 1999. Antigone,ed. R. C. Jebb, Cambridge Cambridge University Press,1900. Antigone, trans. W. Schadewaldt, Frankfurt-am-Main, Insel-Verlag, 1974. Antigonae, ed. E. Bruhn, Berlin, 1913. Antigone, éd. R. Rossanda, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1978. Editions of Hölderlin’s works [StA] Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1943 - 1985, éd. Friedrich Beissner [DKV] Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 3 vol., Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1992, éd. Jochen Schmidt. [FA] Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, “Frankfurt-am-Mainer Hölderlin Ausgabe”, (D. E. Sattler, ed.), vol. 16, Stroemfeld/ Roter Stern, 1988. [LL] Hölderlin, Antigone de Sophocle, trans. Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Christian Bourgeois, Paris, 1978/1998

Bibliography

191

General Adams, Sinclair McLardy. Sophocles the Playwright, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1957. Adkins, A. H. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford, 1960. Adorno, Theodor W. “Parataxis”, in Noten zur Literatur III, Suhrkamp, 1980, 156 ff. Alaux, Jean. Le liège et le filet, Paris, Belin, 1995. Aristótele. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes ed., 2 vols., Princeton, Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXI–2, 1995. Aristote. La Poétique, trans. Dupont-Roc and Lallot Paris, Seuil, 1980. Bacon, Helen H. “The Shield of Eteocles”, in: E. Segal (ed.), Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 24–33. Bailly, A. Dictionnaire Grec - Français, Paris, Hachette, 1950. Beauchet, L. Histoire du droit de la république athénienne, Paris, 1897. Beaufret, Jean. Hölderlin et Sophocle, Paris, G. Monfort, 1983 Behre, Maria. “Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,” in Hölderlins Mythoskonzept Dionysos, Munich, 1987. Beissner, Friedrich. Hölderlins Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen, Stuttgart, 1961. Belfiore, Elizabeth S. Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Anke. “Das topographische Verfahren bei Hölderlin und in der Lyrik nach 1945”, in: Hölderlin und die Moderne (G. Kurz, ed., Tübingen 1995), pp. 300–321. Benardete, Seth. “A reading of Sophocles’ Antigone I, II, III,” in Interpretation, 4, 1975, pp. 148–96; 5, 1975, 1–55; 5, 1975, 148–84. Bennett, Larry and William Blake Tyrrell. “Sophocles’ Antigone and Funeral Oratory,” in American Journal of Philology, 111, 1990, pp. 441–456.

192

Antigone

Benjamin, Walter., Gesammelte Schriften, 12 vol. Frankfurt-amMain, Suhrkamp, 1980 = sigla GS ———. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. GS, I,1, 203 et seq. ———. “Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin”, GS, II,1, 105 et seq. ———. Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, GS, IV, 1, 9–21. ———. “Schicksal und Charakter”, GS, II, 1, 171–179. Benveniste, É. Les Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen, Paris, 1935. ———. Problèmes de lingüistique générale, 2 vol., Paris, 1966. Binder, Wolfgang. Hölderlin und Sophokles, Tübingen, TurmVorträge, 1992. ———. “Hölderlin und Sophokles”, in Friedrich Hölderlin, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1987. Böschenstein, Bernhard. “Frucht des Gewitters,” in Zu Hölderlins Dionysos als Gott der Revolution, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1989. ———. “Hölderlins ‘Oedipus’–Hölderlins ‘Antigone’”, in: Hölderlin und die Moderne, Tübingen, Attempto, 1995, pp. 224–239. Bollak, Jean and Mayotte. Sophocle, Antigone, Paris, Minuit, 1999. Bowra, Sir Maurice. Sophoclean Tragedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1944 Brisson, Luc. Le mythe de Tirèsias, Leiden, 1976 ———. Platon, les mots et les mythes, Paris, Seuil, 1982 ———. Introduction à la Philosophie du mythe vol. I. Sauver les mythes, Paris, Vrin, 1996 ———. Divination et rationalité, Paris, Seuil, 1974. Broadie, Sarah. Ethics with Aristotle. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991. Bultmann, R. “Polis und Hades in der Antigone des Sophokles”, Glauben und Verstehen, II, Tubingen, Mohr, 1958. Burkert, Walter. Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche. Stuttgart, 1977. ———. Greek religion. Archaic and classical, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985. ———. Wilder Ursprung. Opferritual und Mythos bei den Griechen. Berlin, Wagenbach, 1990. ———. Antike Mysterien, Munich, C. H. Beck, 1994

Bibliography

193

Burton, R.W.B. The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies”, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980. Bushnell, Rebecca W. Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1988. Buxton, R.G.A. Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Calame, Claude. Thésée et l’imaginaire athénien, Lausanne, Éditions Payot, 1996. Campbell, Lewis. Paralipomena Sophoclea, G. Olms, Hildesheim, 1969. Campos, Haroldo de. A Arte no horizonte do provável, São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1978. Courtine, F. “De la métaphore tragique”, in Revue philosophique de Louvain, vol. 81, February. 1983. Darmon, Jean Pierre. «Structures de la parenté», Dictionnaire des Mythologies, 2 vols., Paris, Flammarion, 1981. Dastur, F. Hölderlin, le retournement natal, Paris, Encre Marine, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question, Paris, Galilée, 1987. ———. Glas, Paris, Galilée,1974. Détienne, Marcel. Dionysos mis à mort, Paris, Gallimard, 1998. ———. Dionysos à Ciel ouvert, Paris, Hachette, 1986 ———. Apollon le couteau à la main, Paris, Gallimard, 1998. ———. L’invention de la mythologie, Paris, Gallimard, 1981. Diehls-Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 2 vol., Berlin, 1906. Dihle, Albrecht. The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1982. Diller, H. ‘Göttliches und menschliches Wissen bei Sophokles’, in: Gottheit und Mensch in der Tragödie des Sophokles, Darmstadt, 1963. ———. “Sophokles,” Wege der Forschung 95, Darmstadt, 1967. ———. “Über das Selbstbewusstsein der sophokleischen Personen”, Wiener Studien, t. LXIX, pp. 80 et seq. Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1959. ———. The Ancient Concept of Progress, 1973

194

Antigone

Dostoïewsky, Fyodor, L’Idiot, Paris, Gallimard, 1953. Dover, K.J. Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle, Oxford, Blackwell, 1974. Dumézil, Georges. Le moyne noir en gris dedans Varennes, Paris, Gallimard, 1984. ———. Rituels indo-européens à Rome, Paris, Klingksieck, 1953. ———. “ Les trois fonctions dans quelques traditions grecques,” in: Un éventail de l’histoire vivante : Hommage à L. Febvre, Paris, A. Colin, 1953. ———. Mithra–Varuna  : Essai sur deux représentations indoeuropéennes de la souveraineté, Paris, PUF, 1960. Düsing, Klaus. “Aesthetischer Platonismus bei Hölderlin und Hegel”, in Homburg von der Höhe in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte. Studien zum Freundeskreis um Hegel und Hölderlin, ed. Ch. Jamme und O. Pöggeler, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1981. ———. “Die Theorie der Tragödie bei Hölderlin und Hegel”, in Jenseits des Idealismus:Hölderlins letzte Homburger Jahre, éd. Jamme, Ch., Pöggeler, O., Bonn; Bouvier Verlag, 1988. Eberlein, E. “Über die verschiedenen Deutungen des tragischen Konflikts in der Tragödie Antigone des Sophokles, Gymnasium, 68, 1961, 16–34. Else, G.F. The Madness of Antigone, Heidelberg, 1976. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Oeuvres complètes, Trans. Jean Grosjean, Introd. R. Dreyfus, Paris, Gallimard (Pléiade), 1967. Euben, J. Peter. Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1986. Euripides. Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard (Pléiade), 1967. Fédier, F. (trans.) Remarques sur Œdipe et Remarques sur Antigone in : Hölderlin, Œuvres, Paris, Gallimard (Pléiade,) 2000. Festugière, A. J. Études de Religion grècque, Paris, Vrin, 1972. ———. Études de Philosophie grècque, Paris, Vrin, 1971. Förster, Eckart “’To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again’”: Hölderlin and the ‘Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism’, European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 2, August, 1995, London, Blackwell, pp. 174–200. ———. “I regard Reason As The Beginning Of The Understanding”,

Bibliography

195

séminar at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, March, 1998. ———. “  Da geht der Mann dem wir alles verdanken. Eine Untersuchung der Beziehung Goethe-Fichte”, Revista de Philosophie Política – Nova Série, vol. 3, Porto Alegre, 1998 a, pp. 143–160. Frank, Manfred. Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie, 2 vols, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1982/3 Fränkel, Hermann. Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, New York, Irvington Publishers, 1984. Franz, Michael. Schellings Tübinger Platon-Studien, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996. Fritz, Kurt von. “Haimons Liebe zu Antigone”, in Antike und Moderne Tragödie, Berlin, 1962, pp. 227–240. Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise. Le dieu-masqué. Une figure du Dionysos d’Athènes, Paris-Rome, 1991. ———. Dédale, Mythologie de l’artisan en Grèce ancienne, Paris, Maspéro, 1975. ———. “Homère et le temps retrouvé”, Critique, no. 348, May, 1976. ———, “Figures du masque en Grèce ancienne”, in J.-P. Vernant et P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et Tragédie, II, Paris, Maspéro, 1995, p. 25 et seq.  Gaier, U., Der gesetzliche Kalkül, Tübingen, 1962. ———. “Hölderlin und der Mythos”, in: Manfred Fuhrmann (ed.), Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption, Munich, 1971, pp. 295–340. ———. Hölderlin, Tübingen, A. Franke, 1993. Gentili, Bruno. Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece. From Homer to the Fifth Century, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Georgiades, Thrasybulos. “La langue comme rythme”, in Philosophie, no. 12, Autumn 1986, pp. 80–95. Gernet, Louis. “Épiclérat”, Revue des Études Grècques, vol. 34, 1921. ———. Anthropologie de la Grèce antique, Paris, Maspéro, 1968. Gernet, Louis et André Boulanger. Le Génie grec dans la religion, Paris, La Renaissance du livre, 1932.

196

Antigone

Glotz, G. L’Ordalie dans la Grèce primitive, Paris, 1904. Gockel, Heinz. Mythos und Poesie: Zum Mythosbegriff in Aufklärung und Frühromantik, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1981. Goethe, J. W. von. [SW] Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurt-am-Main, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989–, ———. Schriften zur allgemeinen Naturlehre, Geologie und Mineralogie, vl. 25 ———. Dichtung und Wahrheit, vol. 14. ———. Gespräche mit Eckermann, vol. 39 (28.03. 1827) ———. As Afinidades eletivas, São Paulo, Nova Alexandria, 1992. ———. Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Schiller, Gedenkausgabe (ed. Ernst Beutler), Bd. 20, Zürich, 1950. Goff, B. ed., History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama. Austin, Univ. of Texas Press, 1995. Goheen, R. The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1951. Goldhill, Simon. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Goldschmidt, Victor. Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote, Paris, Vrin, 1982. Gomme, A. W. “The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries,” CP 20 (1925). Goody, Jack. La Raison graphique. La domestication de la pensée sauvage, Paris, Minuit 1978. Granger, G.-G. La théorie aristotélicienne de la science, Paris, Aubier, 1988. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich and K Pfeiffer. Ludwig (eds.), Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche. Situationen offener Epistemologie, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1990. Harrison, R. B. Hölderlin and Greek Literature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975. Havelock, Eric A. The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982 ———. The Greek concept of Justice: From its Shadow in Homer to its Substance in Plato, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1978.

Bibliography

197

Hegel, G. F. W. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, (20 vol.), Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1970, vols. 13, 14,15. ———. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, III, vol. 20, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981 ———. Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 3., sigla PhG, (trans. bras. Vozes, 1970, sigla FE) Hegel, Hannelore. Isaak von Sinclair zwischen Fichte, Hölderlin und Hegel: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte der idealistischen Philsophie, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1971. Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, Vittorio Klostermann, 1980. ———. Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken”, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 52, loc. cit., 1982. ———. Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1966. ———. Approche de Hölderlin, Paris, Gallimard, 1962. ———. Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1953 Heistershagen, T. Ganzheit—Einheit—Differenz. Systematische Rekonstruktion im Blick auf das Spätwerk Hölderlins, unpublished doctoral examination, Göttingen, 1986. Henrich, Dieter. Der Grund im Bewusstsein:Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795), Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1992. ———. The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. “Danken zur Dankbarkeit,” Festschrift für Robert Spaemann, Acta Humaniora, 1987. Herington, J. Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press,1985. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Frühe Schriften 1764–1772, ed. U. Gaier, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985. ———. Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, 2 vol., Munich, 1984 and 1987. Hölderlin und die Moderne: Eine Bestandaufnahme, ed. Kurz, G., Lawitschka, V., Werheimer J., Tübingen, Attempto, 1995. Hölscher, U. Empedokles und Hölderlin, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1965.

198

Antigone

Hühn, Helmut. “Mnemosyne – Zeit und Erinnerung in Hölderlins Denken” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stuttgart-Weimar, 1997. Humbert, Jean. Syntaxe Grecque, Paris, Klincksieck, 1960. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 Jaeger, Werner. Paidéia: La formation de l’homme grec, Paris, Gallimard, 1964. Jamme, Christoph. “Ein ungelehrtes Buch. Die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt-amMain 1797–1800”, Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 23, 1983. ———. Introduction à la Philosophie du mythe : Époque moderne et contemporaine, Paris, Vrin, 1995. Jamme, Christophe., and O. Pöggeler, eds. Homburg vor der Höhe in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1981. ———. Jenseits des Idealismus  : Hölderlins letzte Homburger Jahre, Bonn, Bouvier Verlag, 1988, (sigle JI). Jacobs, Carol. “Dusting Antigone”, in: Modern Language Notes on Comparative Literature, vol. 111, no. 5, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Jäekel, W. “Die Exposition in der Antigone des Sophokles, ” Gymn. 68, 1961, pp. 38–52. Jakobson, R. Selected Writings II, The Hague, 1971. Janke, W. Vom Bilde des Absoluten. Grundzüge der Phänomenologie Fichtes, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1993. ———. Transzendentalphilosophie als System: Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen 1974 und 1806, Meiner, Hamburg, 1989. (cap. “Hölderlin und Fichte, pp. 294–312) Jeanmaire, Henry. Dionysos. Histoire du culte de Bacchus, Paris, Payot, 1985. Jebb, R. C. The Plays of Sophocles: III The Antigone, Cambridge, 1902. Joly, Henry. Le renversement platonicien  : Logos, episteme, polis, Paris, Vrin, 1985. Kafka, F. Amerika, Fischer, Frankfurt-am-Main., 1976. Kamerbeek, J.C. The Plays of Sophocles—Commentaries: III The Antigone, Leiden, 1959.

Bibliography

199

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977. ———. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Frankfurt-am-Main am M., Suhrkamp, 1968. Kerenyi, K. Dionysos und das Tragische in der Antigone, Franfurt am Main, 1935 ———. Die Heroen der Griechen Zürich, 1958. ———. Gli Dei e Gli Heroi della Grecia, Garzanti, 1989 ———. Die Herkunft der Dionysosreligion, Köln, 1956 ———. Niobe, neue Studien über antike Religion und Humanität, Zürich, 1959. ———. Die Mythologie der Griechen,2 vols., Munich, DTV, 1997. ———. Prometheus, Rowohlt, 1959. Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. 1843 (Harmondsworth, 1985, trans. Alastair Hannay). Killmayer, Wilhelm. “Zur Lautstruktur bei Hölderlin”, Hölderlinjahrbuch, 28, 1992/93. Kirk, G.S. Homer and the Epic, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1965. Kirkwood, G. M. A Study of Sophoclean Drama, Ithaca and New York, Cornell Univesity Press, 1958. Kitto, H. D. F. Form and Meaning in Drama, London Methuen, 1956. ———. Greek Tragedy, London, Methuen, 1940. Knox, Bernard. Word and Action, Essays on the Ancient Theater, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. ———. The Heroic Temper, Berkeley, University of Califonria Press, 1966. Koczizsky, Eva. Hölderlins mythische Figuren, Würzburg 1998. Kurz, Gerhard. Mittelbarkeit und Vereinigung: Zum Verhältnis von Poesie, Reflexion und Revolution bei Hölderlin, Stuttgart, 1975. ———. “Winkel und Quadrat. Zu Hölderlins später Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie”, in: Hölderlin und die Moderne, Tübingen, Attempto Verlag, 1995. Kurz, G., V. Lawitschka and J. Wertheimger, (eds.) Hölderlin und die Moderne, Tübingen, Attempto Verlag, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire VII  : L’Éthique dans la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1986.

200

Antigone

Lefebvre, J.-P. “Les yeux de Hölderlin”, in: Hölderlin, L’Herne, no. 57, Paris, 1989, p. 426 et seq. Lesky, Albin. Die tragische Dichtng der Hellenen, Göttingen, 1972. ———. Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, München-Bern, 1963. ———. Greek Tragic Poetry, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983. ———. Zwei Sophokles-Interpretationen, Hermes, 80, 1952, pp. 91–109. Göttliche und menschliche Motivation im Homerischen Epos”, SHAW, 1961. Liddell H. G. and R. Scott. Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie Structurale, Paris, Plon, 1958. ———. La Pensée sauvage, Paris, Plon, 1962. ———. Mythologiques, 4 vol., Paris, Plon, 1962–1971. Lloyd-Jones, Sir Hugh. Greek Epic, Lyric and Tragedy-The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990. ———. The Justice of Zeus, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1971. Loraux, Nicole. Les enfants d’Athéna, Paris, 1981. ———. Né de la Terre. Mythe et Politique à Athènes, Paris, Seuil, 1996 ———. Les expériences de Tirésias, Paris, 1989. ———. La voix endeuillée  : Essai sur la tragédie grecque, Paris, Gallimard, 1999. ———. “Introduction” and “La main d’Antigone”, in Sophocle, Antigone, Paris, 1997 pp. VII–XIV, 105–143. ———. Façons tragiques de tuer une femme, Paris, Hachette, 1985. ———. L’ invention d’Athènes, Paris, Payot, 1993. ———. “Cité grecque”, Dictionnaire des Mythologies, vol. I, Paris, 1981, pp. 203–209. Lossau, Manfred. “Hölderlin’s Sophokleschöre”, Hölderlin-Jahrbuch, vol. 30, 1996–7, pp. 255–256. Lupas, Liana et Zoe Petre. Commentaire aus Sept contre Thèbes d’Eschyle, Bucarest/Paris, Editura Academici/Les Belles Lettres, 1981., pp. 207–208. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue, South Bend, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

Bibliography

201

McCall, Tom. “The Case of the Missing Body”, in Le Pauvre Holterling, no. 8, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1988, pp. 53–72. Mazon, Paul. Introduction à l’Iliade, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1948. Méautis. L’Authenticité et la date du Prométhée Enchaîné d’Eschyle, Genève-Neuchâtel, 1960. Mezzadri, Bernard. “Étéocle pris au piège du cercle”, in: Les Tragiques Grecs, Revue Europe, January-February, 1999, Paris, pp. 235–241. ———. “L’inquiétante modernité de la tragédie grecque”, in: Les Tragiques Grecs, Revue Europe, January-February, 1999, Paris, pp. 3–5. ———. Autour d’Arès. Quelques aspects du dieu de la guerre et de son domaine en Grèce ancienne, Thesis at l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 1993, chap. X. Mossé, Claude,.Les Institutions Grecques, Paris, Armand Colin, 1996. Most, Glenn. The Measures of Praise: Structure and Function in Pindar’s Second Pythian and Seventh Nemean Odes, Göttingen, 1985. Müller, G. Sophokles’ Antigone, Heidelberg, 1967. ———. “Überlegungen zum Chor der Antigone”, Hermes 89, 1961. Murray, P., ed., Plato on Poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nägele, Reiner “In Winkeln schreitend Gesang: Hölderlins Geographie und Geometrie des Geistes”, in Bad Homburger Vorträge 1988/89, pp. 7–21. Nagy, Gregory. Greek Mythology and Poetics, Ithaca and New York, Cornell University Press, 1990 ———. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Nauck, A. Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta. 2. ed. Leipzig. 1889. Nietzsche, Friederich. Die Geburt der Tragödie, Werke, Darmstadt, 1982. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Otto, Walter. Les Dieux de la Grèce, Paris, Payot, 1981 ———. Dionysos. Le mythe et le culte, Paris, Mercure de France, 1969.

202

Antigone

Oudemans, C. W. et A. P.M. Lardinois. Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy and Sophocles’ Antigone, Leyde, Brill, 1987. Pailler, Jean-Marie. Bacchus, Figures et Pouvoirs, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1995 Palmer, Richard. Tragedy and Tragic Theory, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1992 Parker, R. Miasma, Oxford, 1983. Pauly-Wissowa. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Neue Bearbeitung beg. von G. Wissowa ———. Der Kleine Pauly: Lexikon der Antike in fünf Bänden, München, DTV, 1979. Patzer, Hölderlin. Hauptperson und tragischer Held in Sophokles’ Antigone, Sitzungsberichte Frankfurt-am-Main, XV, 2, Wiesbaden, 1978. Pearson, A. C. The fragments of Sophocles, 3 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1917. Perrota, G. Sofocle, Milan, 1935. Pfotenhauer, Helmut. “Dionysos. Heinse—Hölderlin—Nietzsche”, Hölderlinjahrbuch 26, 1988/89, pp. 38–59. Pickard-Cambridge, A. Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962. Pindar Siegeslieder. ed. Uvo Hölscher. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1962. Rehm, Rush. Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994. Reinhardt, Karl. Sophokles, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1933. ———. Sophocle, Paris, Minuit, 1971. Ryan, L. Hölderlins Lehre vom Wechsel der Töne, Stuttgart, 1960. Rosenzweig, Franz. Stern der Erlösung, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1921. Roussel, Pierre. “Les fiançailles d’Hémon et d’Antigone”, Revue des études grecques, XXXV, 1922. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang. Hellas und Hesperien, Zürich, 1960 ———. “Hölderlins Übersetzung des Sophokles,” in Über Hölderlin, Aufsätze von Th. v. Adorno, F. Beissner, etc., Frankfurt-amMain, Insel Verlag, 1970.

Bibliography

203

———. “Sophokles’ Aias und Antigone”, Neue Wege zur Antike, VIII, 1929, pp. 59–109. Schnapp, Alain. Le chasseur et la cité : Chasse et érotique dans la Grèce ancienne, Paris, Albin Michel, 1997. Schneider, Johann Gottlob. Griechisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, Leipzig, 1819 (3. ed.). Seaford, R. “On the Origins of Satyric Drama”, Maia 28, 1976, pp. 209–221. Seale, D. Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles, London, Croom Helm, 1982. Séchan, L. Études sur la tragédie grecque, Paris, 1926. Segal, Charles. Tragedy and Civilization- An Interpretation of Sophocles, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981. ———. La musique du sphinx, Paris, La Découverte, 1987. ———. Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986. ———. Sophocles Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1995. ———. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripide’s Bacchae, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997. Segal, Erich, ed. Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983. Seifert, Albrecht. Hölderlin und Pindar, (ed. Anke BennholdtThomsen), Eggingen, Edition Isele, 1998. Silk, M. S., ed. Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. Snell, Bruno. Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Hamburg, 1948. Sorabji, Richard. Necessity, Cause and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory. London, 1980. Souza, Eudouro de. “Leitura de Antígona”, in: Revista da Universidade de Brasília, 1978. Steiner, George. Antigones, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996. Stinton, T.C.W., Collected Papers on Greek Tragedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990 Strack, Friedrich. Ästhetik und Freiheit: Hölderlins Idee von Schönheit, Sittlichkeit und Geschichte in der Frühzeit, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1976.

204

Antigone

Szondi, Peter. Schriften I, Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1978. Taminiaux, Jacques, La nostalgie de la Grèce à l’aube de l’idéalisme allemand, La Haye, Nijhoff, 1967. Taplin, O. Greek Tragedy in Action, London, Methuen, 1978 ———. The stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977 Turk, Horst, Klaus Nickau and Fred Lönker. “Hölderlins Sophoklesübersetzung”, Hölderlin-Jahrbuch, 26, Tübingen 1988/89, pp. 248–306. Tucídides. História da Guerra do Peloponeso, Editora de Univ. de Brasília, 1982. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Mythe et Pensée chez les Grecs, 2 vol., Paris, Maspéro, 1981. ———. L’individu, la mort, l’amour, Paris, Gallimard, 1989. ———. et Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, I. Paris, 1972; vol. II, Paris, La Découverte, 1995. ———. La Mort dans les yeux. Figures de l’Autre en Grèce ancienne, Paris, Hachette, 1998. ———. La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, (avec M. Détienne), Paris, Gallimard, 1979 ———. Dans l’œil du Miroir, (avec Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux), Paris, Odile Jacob, 1997 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Le Chasseur noir. Formes de pensée et formes de société dans le monde grec. Paris, Maspero, 1981. ———. “Le mythe à l’épreuve de la cité”, in: Les Tragiques Grecs, Revue Europe, January-February, 1999, Paris, pp. 42-69. ———. “Le chant du cygne” ———. Préface, in: Sophocle, Tragédies, Paris, Gallimard, 1962. Vian, Francis. Les Origines de Thèbes : Cadmos et les Spartes, Paris, Klincksieck, 1963. ———. La guerre des Géants : Le mythe avant l’époque hellénistique, Paris, 1952. Waldock, A. J. A. Sophocles the Dramatist, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966. Webster, T. B. L. An Introduction to Sophocles, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1936.

Bibliography

205

Waugh, L. R. “Marked and Unmarked: A Choice between Unequals in Semiotic Structure”, Semiotica 38, 1982, Polinice 299–318 West, M. L. Hesiod: Theogony, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966. ———. Iambi et Elegi Graeci, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. Greek Metre, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982. Wilamowitz, Tycho von. Die dramatische Technik des Sophokles. Zürich, 1969. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, U. von. Griechische Verskunst, Berlin, 1921. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1985. ———. Shame and Necessity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993. Winkler, J. and Froma I. Zeitlin. (eds.) Nothing to do with Dionysos? Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990 Winnington-Ingram, R.P. Sophocles—An Interpretation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. Studies in Aeschylus, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972. Wycherley, R. E. “Note on Sophocles’ Antigone, ll. 904–920,” Classical Philology, 1947, pp. 51–52. Zbikowsi, Reinhardt. “Und der Fürst”, in Jenseits des Idealismus, pp. 240 et seq. Zeitlin, Froma I. Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Rome, 1982. Zingano, Marco. “Katharsis poética em Aristóteles”, Revista Síntese Nova Fase, v. 24, n. 76, 1997, Belo Horizonte, pp. 37–55.