Spheres Theory
In terms of 20th Century literary criticism on the Antigone, this essay by Charles Segal is among the most well read and reprinted � at least in the English language. There are, of course, many reasons for this. The essay was originally published in a critical treatise (book) called Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Segal, 1981). In that book, he argued for an anthropological (largely structural) approach to analysis of all extant Sophoclean drama, i.e., its relation to the polis (civilization). In particular, Segal�s concern was �with the implicit definitions of civilization in the plays [of Sophocles] and with the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the paradoxes of human nature, as explored in their tragic light� (xv). Segal would go on to say �Sophocles� largeness of vision embraces both the unifying and disruptive phenomena of the human spirit� (xvi).
Now here�s where our �spheres� theory comes from: �Within the structure of Greek thought civilization�occupies a mediate position between the �savage� life of the beast on the one hand and the eternal happiness of the blessed gods on the other. Civilization is the fruit of man�s struggle to discover and assert his humanness in the face of the impersonal forces of nature and his own potential violence on the one hand and the remote powers of the gods on the other� (2).
Spheres as symmetry & order: place of the polis
Throughout Classical Athenian thought, not just tragedy, the measure of man�s �civilization� was the polis: �Aristotle�s Politics, the culmination of this attitude, virtually hypostatizes the polis as the fundamental unit of civilization�. Civilized life for the fifth century is unthinkable without the polis, a bounded space dividing the human world from the wild� (3).
�In Sophoclean tragedy the city is also the focus for the hero�s problematical relation to civilized values� (3). This dynamic is particularly acute in the 4 extant Theban plays by Sophocles (we won�t be reading Seven Against Thebes). �The Greeks view the human condition�in terms of a set of spatial configurations, a structure whose spatial and moral coordinates coincide. Man is threatened by the beast world pushing up from below, but he is also illuminated by the radiance of the Olympian gods above� (3). There is a very clear symmetry at work here, and Greeks loved symmetry. If there are 3 columns on the left of a temple fa�ade, then it must by symmetrically balanced by 3 on the right. Triglyphs and metopes (architectural designs atop colonnaded temples) must occur symmetrically across the fa�ade and properly align with the columns beneath them. If there exists a wing on one side of a building, then there must be a wing on the other side, again, for balance, symmetry. If there is a city gate at the western wall, then all things being equal, there must also be one at the western wall. In Platonic dialogues, there are always two �arguments� in play, each comprising the polar opposite of the other, each symmetrically balancing the other. For the Greek mind � and this isn�t terribly far removed even from modern thought processes � order, structure, required symmetry & balance to ward off the chaos of nature or the splendor of the divine (e.g., Zeus� appearance to Semele).
Athenian Enlightenment
I spoke at the beginning of the semester, in a reference from Albin Lesky, about the Classical Age of Athens as being �bound by two wars.� This is, of course, true, but not �truth.� Or rather, it is accurate without being absolute. For instance, Plato & Aristotle wrote & taught in what was technically Classical Athens; although Athens was in the twilight of its own political autonomy (something it would lose in the Hellenistic Age at the hands of Phillip of Macedon & his son, Alexander the Great). Even Homer was concerned with demarcating man from beast: �Greek thought from Homer on was haunted by an awareness of the precarious division between man and beast� (5); for instance, it is something �bestial� in the Iliad for fallen warriors not to be buried; burial was the civilized thing to do.
Nonetheless, there is much truth in the previous statement about the two wars, for it was at this time that 1) tragedy flourished and 2) Athenians began to seriously scrutinize their relationship with nature � nature being represented by both the divine and animal worlds. And this was no literary abstraction. Achilles battled the river Xanthus itself, a god. The sun, rising and setting every day was a result or reflection of divine agency in heaven. Night, Dawn, Fate: these were all personified aspects of the natural world that Greeks represented, conceptualized as gods. But these personifications of nature began to falter, perhaps because of the disillusionment brought on by the devastation of the Persian Wars � it was Greece�s & Athens� finest hour, but it also saw the city of Athens burned to rubble & ash � or perhaps by a different cause altogether. In any case, �The enormous acceleration of cultural life in fifth-century Athens, combined awareness of conflicting values and an extraordinary expansion of consciousness� (5) that is represented in tragedy, but in other areas of Athenian culture as well: sophistry, philosophy, history (all three would perhaps be lumped together by an Athenian) and poetry (poetry at this time primarily comprised of drama � tragedy & comedy � and victory odes � usually to athletes).
In virtually all of Sophocles� plays, �nothing less than man�s civilizing power is at stake� (6). Here, we might be well advised to turn to Freud�s Civilization and Its Discontents; note that Freud�s characterization of man�s relationship with society is something that was not lost on fifth century Greeks anymore than it is on 21st Century Americans:
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another. Their interest in their common work would not hold them together; the passions of instinct are stronger than reasoned interests. Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men and hold their manifestations in check�. Civilization expects to prevent the worst atrocities of brutal violence by taking upon itself the right to employ violence against criminals..... (6)
This tension and ambiguity of man�s relation to society, often expressed in the dichotomies of nature and the divine (which are, as we�ve already discovered, paradoxically both polar opposites and one & the same) are constantly represented, enacted, on the tragic stage. It�s also worth noting the function of law in Freud�s work; it is the same law, simultaneously guarded and enforced by justice, that we see depicted in Aeschylus and modern law courts: blind Dike with her scale to measure and her sword to inflict punishment. With the sword of Justice, according to Freud, civilization uses violence to suppress man�s otherwise chaotic & contradictory impulses. This, in other words, is a rearticulation of the physis-nomos debate: nature vs. law, savage vs. civilized, desire vs. restraint.
But tragedy is more than just the simple dichotomy of savage nature versus civilized society: �The ritual setting, with its ancient agonistic [competitive] elements, dramatizes the importance of the struggle and provides some assurance of ultimate victory through the sense of continuity and tradition�. The effect of sacralizing and ritualizing violence that tragedy promotes is a means of keeping man human and civilized� (7). �It is a ritual that avoids the catastrophe of society� (7).
The �ironies and paradoxes of man�s self-knowledge and self-ignorance� are part and parcel with his drive �toward pattern and coherent meaning,� sometimes affirmed (Oedipus at Colonus) and sometimes destroyed (Oedipus Tyrannous, Antigone). �The hero not only fulfills a pattern of attaining personal knowledge out of ignorance, reality out of illusion, but also enacts paradigmatically the place of man on the axis between god and beast, between the divine order and the threat of chaos or meaninglessness. The two axes intersect at the points of man�s uniquely human creations: the city, the house, ritual, law, justice, language� (9).
Character in Sophocles
Individual characters in Sophoclean drama, male or female; hero, heroine, or supporting character are distinguished by they otherness, their difference from the �everyman� of society or the chorus: �To be an individual in Sophocles is to have a special destiny apart from other men and to suffer a potentially dangerous, indeed fatal, isolation from the community and its secure values. Tragic character in Sophocles exists in the tension between the isolation imposed by heroic individuality and the larger design which that destiny fulfills. The hero�s task is to discover and accept his life as part of this larger design� (8).
Structural Approach
Myths contain certain, largely unconscious or unconsidered aspects of cultural identity & life. These are called mythemes. We have analyzed the Iliad, the Orestia, Oedipus Tyrannous and Oedipus at Colonus with an eye for locating and identifying certain of these mythemes, what we labeled affirmations. The same mythemes, the same myths often form the subject of tragedy that they did in more traditional myth such as Homer or Hesiod, but they are rarely treated in the same manner:
Tragedy�deals with situations where the division between civilization and savagery no longer seems to apply. Where this division is disturbed, so is the very nature of man and his humanity. Tragedy no longer locates the boundary between the civilized and the savage on the frontiers of the society, at the limits of the inhabited world, but bring it within the polis itself, within the very hearts of the rulers and its citizens. (Segal 30)
Dionysus, �the god of orgiastic rites of mountain and forest takes a place at the very center of the polis,� figuratively in the theater of Dionysus and literally in that the rites in his honor take place onstage (30).
�Whereas the myth that provided the material of tragedy moves toward the resolution of oppositions, tragedy itself recasts the myth so as to complicate, distort, or deny the mediations. �The myth,� as Roland Barthes remarks, �starts from contradictions and tends progressively toward their mediation; tragedy, on the contrary, refuses the mediation, keeps the conflict open�� (51).
Whitman, Cedric H. "Antigone and the Nature of Nature." The Heroic Paradox: Essays on Homer, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. Ed. Charles Segal. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1982. 105-131.
Whitman asserts that the most debated themes of Sophocles' day, addressed by Antigone, were the conflicting demands of social structure and nature, specifically the nature of mankind. He terms this debate nomos-physis: laws (societal) versus physics (laws of physics or nature). The Antigone presents the two ideologies in contrast with each other, not to prove which one is correct - neither can be - but, rather, by opposing both in order to question each one's nature. In Whitman's eyes, Antigone acts on her nature, not a moral principle, which would have been a societal construct, a nomos.
He then sets the character of Antigone aside and addresses the choral "Ode to Man," (first stasimon) where he points out the ambivalent nature of the original Greek text and suggests that it is not simply an affirmation of the greatness of humanity, but simultaneously lauding humanity's accomplishments and expressing its darker, "dread" aspects. The question of two burials follows. Whitman summarizes many arguments and comes to adopt the "divine first burial" theory of S. M. Adams after qualifying it as an act of nature: the gods did not act directly. Through nature (storm, wind, etc.) and Antigone, gods manifest themselves in the tragedy. He then addresses the fourth stasimon and its motif of cave symbolism. What is important to the author is the close association between tombs, references in the play to "chambers" and their likeness to caves. Caves were sacred places of worship for the Greeks and home to divine, primal nature spirits, especially Nymphs and Pan. The fourth choral interlude, according to Whitman, emphasizes the cave as both womb and tomb, beginning and end, a realm where the mortal interacts with the divine. A short analysis of Haemon and his likeness to Romeo is touched upon, then Whitman returns to the centrality of nomos-physis in the character of Antigone. Antigone acts on love/passion, putting herself seemingly on the physis side of the debate, but her action to bury her brother coincides with her moral (nomos) decision to love her brother. Thus in Antigone, according to Whitman, Sophocles presents us with a successful balancing of the nomos-physis antinomy, the undercurrent anxiety of Antigone.