Antigone: beauty over propaganda

Seamus Heaney's translation of Sophocles' Antigone paints a picture without greyness. Yet, beauty prevails. Review by Garry Wills

Hegel looms high over Antigone, as Freud looms over Oedipus Tyrannus, and Sophocles must shift between them as he best may. Hegel imposed the notion, now almost inescapable, that Antigone and Creon embody opposite principles, she as the daughter of Oedipus and he as the successor to Oedipus in the rule of Thebes. In Hegel's eyes, Antigone stands for oikos (family) and Creon for polis (the state). Antigone's brothers have slain each other in battle, Eteocles defending Thebes, Polyneices attacking it. Creon orders that Polyneices be denied burial as a traitor to his own city. Antigone asserts her right to bury a member of her family. Hegel thought both positions equally meritorious, and therefore flawed -- a thesis and an antithesis calling for some higher synthesis.

Most later critics find it hard to think of Antigone and Creon as equally right and equally wrong. The seer Teiresias demonstrates that the gods are angry at the denial of burial for Polyneices, apparently tipping the scale toward Antigone. But she and Creon are still thought of as emblems of opposite principles – of freedom versus tyranny, perhaps, or individuality versus mass pressure, or conscience versus coercion, or religion versus irreligion or just plain right versus wrong. Seamus Heaney, in this new translation of Antigone, makes it clear that he thinks in such stark polarities. He tells us in a note to The Burial at Thebes that ''the situation that pertains in Sophocles' play was being re-enacted in our own world'' as he was writing. ''Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war on Iraq.'' The result is a black-and-white picture, with Antigone all purity and Creon sheer taint. There are good reasons for opposing the invasion of Iraq, but none that Sophocles can provide.

Heaney bleaches out ambiguities. Sophocles has the Chorus of Theban elders say this: ''Do you not leave for the enclave of the dead with glory and praise, neither withered with illness nor cut down by the sword? Alone of mortals you go down to Hades a law to yourself and alive.'' In Heaney, this becomes: ''Steadfast Antigone. / Never before did Death / Open his stone door / To one so radiant. / You would not live a lie. / Vindicated, lauded, / Age and disease outwitted, / You go with head held high.'' The original question becomes a trumpet blast. ''A law to yourself,'' a word with possibly sinister meaning (autonomos), becomes ''you would not live a lie".

Similarly, the Chorus says: ''The act of revering deserves some (tis) reverence. But authority, wherever lodged, should never be transgressed. Your impulse (orga) of self-certitude (autognotus) has obliterated you.'' For this Heaney gives us: ''You go because you were noble. / Your nobility mitigates / The offense you gave; but power / And everyone who wields it / Will brook no opposition. / You were headstrong and self-willed / And now you suffer for it.'' One need not, of course, agree with the misgivings of the Chorus, but they should not be flattened out into pure praise if we are to follow the subtleties of the playwright.

All those who take a black-and-white approach to these characters turn tragedy into propaganda. In fact, Antigone and Creon do not truly represent opposed principles, since both depart from their own professed views. They are both caught in that murky middle time of what the Greeks called tyrannis, when the motion from royal rule to polis rule was haltingly advanced by a strong man breaking into the royal lineage, realigning the forces of society. Creon says he is advancing the authority of the polis, but he ignores the citizens' sympathy with Antigone, reverts to royal fiat, rejects the counsel he solicited from the Elders and flouts the religious authority of the seer Teiresias. His position is too confused to be identified with principle, good or bad.

For her part, Antigone says she stands for ''the unwritten laws'' – the first time this phrase is used in classical literature. It is not ''natural law'' as later centuries would define that, but traditional (royal, familial) law. Antigone is not an innovative individual, but an aristocrat fighting the new order, like other Sophoclean protagonists (Ajax, Hercules). And she is no more true to her own professions than Creon is. She invokes traditional laws, but those laws themselves denied women many rights, including the right to bury (as opposed to the right of preparing the body for burial). She says it is the highest duty to be true to ''one's own'' (philoi, not ''friends'' merely, but family and allies -- the adjective refers as well to one's own property or one's limbs); yet she turns with enmity on her sister, Ismene, when the latter says the burial cannot succeed (it doesn't), and then generously tries to join her in taking credit for the failed attempt at burial.

In fact, Antigone is not devoted to all her family, but mainly or only to one member, Polyneices, with a fixation that some very good scholars (notably Nicole Loraux) have found incestuous. When she praises their family to Ismene, Ismene reminds her that they are sisters sprung from an incestuous union (Oedipus with his mother). The mutual murder of their brothers is seen as militarily quasi-incestuous, in phrases of reciprocity that Antigone uses of herself and Polyneices. She says that she prefers her brother over the man she is espoused to (Haemon) – and over any husband at all, or any child she might bear from one.

Naturally, Heaney mutes these hints at incest in his heroine. Sophocles wrote: ''I shall lie with my own, as he with his own, in a holy crime.'' Heaney softens that to: ''I'll go down to the underworld / Hand in hand with a brother.'' Heaney cannot see that Antigone and Creon are both tragic characters caught in a tragic situation, she noble but unbending, he following a pettier but remediable course. She has lost all she loves, her brother, and cares not for the future. He bargains for the future and loses what he cared for, his wife and son – though he lives on, accepting compromise. Their conflict not only drives these two apart from each other but apart from their own better selves.

Though Heaney lets ideology interfere with tragedy, he has nonetheless composed a poem full of brilliant strokes. He cannot approach the kaleidoscopic metrical effects of the original (no one can), but he varies his rhythms ingeniously. It is doubtful that these register on the stage when it is performed, but on the page they are compelling. For the most part he uses the two-part line, each part with two beats, that made his Beowulf translation so energetic. But for Antigone's opening speeches he uses a one-part three-beat line derived from a famous Irish lament. When Ismene and the Chorus sympathise with Antigone, they use her meter and then, brilliantly, Creon is made to use it in his repenting final scene.

The Guard who first reports Antigone's attempted burial speaks in colloquial prose; but when he comes back, proud of capturing Antigone, he uses the four-beat poetic line. The rapid-fire one-line-exchanges (stichomythia) between characters, so stilted in most translations, blaze here with intense hostility, especially in the deadly verbal duel of Creon with his son Haemon. The choral odes have a clarity far from the allusive teasings of the original, but dramatic in this new context, and of a searing beauty. Heaney omits the more obscure elements, or the simply repetitive ones (as in the famous song on human mystery). His rapt descriptions of Teiresias' augury equal the ability of Christopher Logue, in his Homer translations, to make these exotic things come creepily alive for us.

This brilliant poem is not the place to learn about Sophocles' nonideological profundity, or the complexities of his characters, but time after time sheer beauty trumps propaganda:

O Dionysus, appear

With men and maenads headlong

And dance the world to rights.

Be sunlight from Parnassus

Adazzle on the gulf,

Be the necklace-fire of stars,

The cauterizing lightning.

Bewilder us with good.

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