Antigone - The Unburied Grief

This week, we gently closed the door on A Doll's House with a wonderful discussion of the tension that Ibsen created. Nora couldn't pretend to be two different people anymore. The stakes were high with her debt of conflicted meaning, we followed her three day struggle, and in the end she decided to leave her husband, children, and home she had known for eight years to seek the true person she really was. 

The Book Club Verdict was it was worth a read. 

In January we go back in time, to the period after the last Old Testament book was written but our journey continues with the Sophocles play, Antigone (422 BC). But, unlike Nora in A Doll's House, Antigone knows exactly who she is. The play, Antigone, is the first play written in the Oedipus trilogy, but the finale of the chronology Oedipus Rex - Oedipus at Colonus and finally Antigone. It would have been a familiar tale to the Athenians of the time as the story of the family of Oedipus had been in the oral tradition of the Hellenic world for generations.  Sophocles was like a new director rebooting the Superman or X-Men IP with his own spin. 

In 422 BC, Athens was a democracy, while Thebes an oligarchy which had sided with the Persians in the Greco-Persian War against their former allies Sparta and Athens. There was a historic beef. Sophocles, an Athenian, staged his play in the rival city state of Thebes. He would have been like a Ukrainian playwright staging their political drama in Moscow. 

He had been more than just a playwright, he had also been an elected official and the son of a wealthy arms manufacturer. A connected man, he had some opinions on leadership. The play deals directly with these thoughts, on the nature of political leadership, and very much like A Dolls House, Antigone is a tragic cautionary tale.

Summary-

We begin with the unburied grief of Antigone and her sister Ismene arguing over what to do with their dead brother's body, who their new king and uncle Creon has forbidden to be buried. This decree contradicts the ageless traditions of the Hellenic world, it's the buried who will reach the afterlife. Which spurns Antigone to act!

What would motivate this bold decision of Creon? Are his motives well intended? Is Antigone justified in the bold course she takes, sacrificing her own budding future?

Antigone has been produced many times throughout history, famously in France in 1944 under the specter of German occupation. In 1957 in Soviet occupied Hungary, in the 1960's Nelson Mandela played King Creon in a prison production on Robin Island. There was a play written about that Mandela production entitled The Island.  

Why Antigone?

When we read the novel, The Brothers Karamazov, I noticed how valuable my understanding of the biblical narrative helped me to understand the novel. I did however have to do a lot of homework on Russian and 19th Century European politics and events. Consequently I grew curios about the classic Greek and Roman authors, what influence did they have on later generations? I know that Shakespeare, the American Founding Fathers, French Revolutionaries were familiar with them, so I poked around some lectures on Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelias, Caesar, the Gracchus Brothers and Augustine.  How much more familiar would their writings be if I understood their influences? What had I been missing?

So we dip our little toe into the classical Greek literary world with Antigone. It's short, accessible and hits like a train. I am very much looking forward to the discussion.