Antigones (Yale University Press, 1984) by American literary critic George Steiner is about a literary era, author and, above all, a heroine like no other in cultural history, so momentous a figure that author has given the plural form as title. To spread out the Antigone legend over as wide a range of historical and literary epochs as possible seems to be its end. Steiner likes taking Sophocles’ play well beyond the tragic drama conventions in which it’d been raised and the historical Athenian audiences for whom Antigone had been performed to great acclaim. It’s been presented as a work resurrected, reworked and retold by succeeding generations as if it were a holy text recently excavated. (Apparently the great German Romantic poet Frierich Hölderlin had treated it with just this sort of reverence in his own translated version). But the author’s own expansiveness may have caused his work in the end to appear too verbose, too grandiose. Somewhere in all of this self-conscious scholarship Antigone herself is missing.
Perhaps he ought to have tried to give an appreciation of the play strictly as play. And as text Antigone by Sophocles can be nicely read within the classical framework of ‘fate’, action and character. Antigone could be condemned to death for as little as sprinkling dirt over the body of her traitorous brother Polyneices, and to see why requires a sympathetic view of the play and its heroine as a whole. And so why doesn’t moving piecemeal (as Steiner does) through the stages of choric song and commentary, Agon or encounter between opposing forces and the final sentence of death by entombment fulfill that sense of aesthetic completeness? And, without it, how is the reader to properly gauge the sentence of death passed on somebody who’s only performed a symbolic burial or who’s, after all, a dutiful daughter and sibling and fiancée and can hardly be considered a threat to Creon and temporal authority as a woman? On its face Sophocles’ great play provides enough material for a very successful dramatic experience(even by contemporary standards). And yet the reader might feel that, with so much to work with, Steiner hasn’t really moved the reader’s interest and curiosity enough to make the play worth reading and viewing.
The problem is that the textual turns into the ‘interpretive’ Antigone. This is its primary role as literary exemplar. Steiner proposes more than one Antigone since as literary historian he seems to have been unable to settle on a living original Antigone from whom all of the others have followed: from Goethe’s retelling of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Hölderlin’s Antigona to Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s own ruminations (in the Phenomenology and Either/Or, respectively) on the nature of the tragic soul. Steiner sees evidence of its dramatic and theatrical effects even on Shakespeare and his Hamlet. It’s remarkable how they could have transformed a fifth-century Greek play, a dramatist and classical tragic tradition into a cultish admiration for ideas and characters. Antigone became for Goethe, Hegel, Hölderlin, all faced with the“the supreme literary-linguistic art form” of the original, a vehicle for their views of poetics, metaphysics and theories of translation itself. Heidegger saw in the play’s first “choral ode” “a sufficient basis for Western metaphysics.” It didn’t occur to Steiner that Heidegger may have been a bridge too far in Sophoclean scholarship.
And, again, if Antigone is a play worth retelling it’s because, in Steiner’s words, “There is an order of finality in the ‘textual fact’ of Sophocles’ Antigone.
But there is also undecidability in regard to archaic intent and the turbulence which history brings to the reach of meaning. This is so of all serious literature.” Here is the acclaimed literary theorist’s most general (or perhaps overblown) praise of the Antigone legacy: namely, that it’s “serious” only to the degree that it’s open to many interpretations. A claim he’d like to extend to ancient Greek culture in general. And not just in the play but throughout the language of Sophocles itself, Steiner says echoing Heidegger, is to be found a fresh, unadorned openness to “the native ground of our being”-- as reflected particularly in its syntax, tropes and grammatical cases-- that’s made both play and language a source of our own poetry and philosophy, the very wellspring of human creativity. Literacy itself or the view of artistic creation in regards to its own conditions and materials must be seen as a “continual return to Greek sources”.
To regard “ancient Hellas” as an originating linguistic source is, of course, textbook logocentrism. And if Steiner’s not aware of that, certainly the encomiums Steiner bestows on Greek culture may seem a bit exaggerated, at times even a bit ponderous. It is nice to see in a retelling of Antigone Roman Rolland’s and Bertold Brecht’s historical adaptations but then the same could have been done for other popular figures like Christ or Che Guevara. After a while--and this may be a design flaw in Steiner’s book--the reader wonders on what the author’s especial reverence for Sophocles’ play is really based.The literary critic, rather than giving the original text the ‘close readings’ it deserves--he surprisingly quotes from Derrida’s own Glas--shoots wide of the mark and devolves into the tedious scholiast looking for every imaginable intersection between the original Antigone and its many variants in literary history. To drone on, for example, about“Heidegger’s idiom, the tidal strategy of his readings” in the philosopher’s interpretation of the play’s “second stasimon” is to take risks with the reader’s patience.
The “pleasures of the text” have been sacrificed to scholarly rigor. Steiner, though posing them, hasn’t answered his own questions: “how can we read, how can we ‘live’ Antigone now?” Steiner has asked many questions like these but, I suspect, mostly for rhetorical effect. The reader senses the self-satisfied tone of the modernist academic who likes the sound of his own voice; the smugness of the scholar with his private stash of authors, titles and learned quips to draw from. Here’s the kind of “high seriousness” Saul Bellow rightly mocks in his There Is Simply Too Much To Think About: "Deep readers of the world, beware! You had better be sure that your high seriousness is indeed high seriousness and not, God forbid, low seriousness." But I think it’s worse than even Bellows could have imagined. Antigones is at bottom a case of misappropriated language or of (perhaps) a stubborn refusal to admit that the author can’t offer anything refreshingly original. Recurring discussions of “untranslatable lines”, choric odes replete with metaphysics and even the odd deconstructive ‘readings’ (citing Derrida not a few times) reveal a failed agenda. The result is that Steiner’s now himself the cold didactic and legalistic Creon to a literary character whose grace and fluidity elude him always. How ironic that Antigone’s story is really about literary critic Steiner himself!
How can a critic who dryly describes Sophocles as a poet who“has brought to bear on lucid, indeed transparent modes of statement a stronger inference of secret presences” do justice to perhaps the most lyrically attractive figure in drama? How can the cryptic speech of editors and textual critics endlessly cited in Steiner’s book, their dreary analysis and “variant transcriptions and translations” give us a flesh-and-blood figure? I’m reminded of the frustrated scholar Edward Casaubon in Eliot’s Middlemarch whose coldness extends to both his failed research project and a much younger wife. The scholar’s prose, in both cases, is overbearing and affectedly ornate where it should be direct and congenial. Take Steiner’s summary, for example of the pivotal Creon-Antigone confrontation and the inflated prose in which it’s written: “The dialectic of genders, of generations, of private conscience and public good, of life and of death, of mortal and divine, unfolds unforcedly from within the dramatic situation. Thus the structure of conflict is at once universal and local. It is inherent in the context yet wholly transcends it...” It is almost impossible to find in all this verbiage the essence of the confrontation the reader eagerly anticipates: between the anger and outrage of the city ruler disobeyed by a headstrong young woman, on the one hand, and the crushed dignity of the dutiful sister, on the other, who knows her punishment will be a living death. Steiner’s only picked at it, like a scavenger. George Steiner’s style of writing and commentary may very well represent--to my mind-- the last gasp of the modernist project in literary analysis and appreciation ( a distinction he shares with people like Harold Bloom and Herbert Dreyfus). To use his own phrase, they are “woodenly patriarchal”. The subject-matter is for him layered in learned allusions to fifth-century historiography, Greek inflections and tropes, textual cross- references that literally span millennia as well as an exhaustive inventory of “high masters and purists” that Steiner never tires of mentioning. Both author and book are very unapproachable. And that’s regrettable. I recall teaching Antigone to my high school students and always feeling grateful to educators and textbook editors for professional encouragement or any pedagogical guidelines to make the play accessible to young people. I enjoyed great support from colleagues and students motivated only by their fascination with the classical past (and in those days I sometimes faced stiff competition from The Hobbit and Harry Potter!). I can’t think of anything more designed than Steiner’s book to make the great literary heroine odious and personally unattractive to a generation of young people who live precisely for Antigone’s sort of authenticity.