How A Woman Becomes the Burial
What can reading Antigone, in these days of fear and sadness, reveal about performance as survival and of our collective desire for justice?
Lately, the only thing bringing me peace is scrolling through the blue abyss of Twitter, which feels more like an exercise in self-torture rather than repose. Of course, there are peaks and nadirs: from the tonally incomprehensible “Imagine”; to mass, city-by-city organizing for homebound folks and sex workers; to writers and comedians, who are providing much-needed relief — or at least, the ones not crying to camera. One of these accounts is @imchriskelly, whose on-the-nose missive on modern theatre made me think about why and how we make art in crisis, especially bad art. “In six years, a play about this time will win the Tony. It’ll be four hours long and take place in real time, in one apartment, over the course of a single night. It'll follow a big family (with a [lesbian] daughter) and 40% [of it] will be performed back-to-audience so it really feels like they're in an apartment.” Then, there’s the sucker-punch of a follow-up: “The family is upper-middle-class. But one son is dating a girl from a working-class family and she represents Every Other Person in America. There’s also an Aunt who's a Nurse. She’s only in Act One because she has to get to her shift, but she returns at the end for the Very Last Line.”
It’s the skeletal structure of any play written by a second-year Drama major — an easy vision to prophesy: by Act Two, you know the son will accuse his mother of social distancing away from him for years; by Act Three, you know that the stage will collapse in on itself. Despite, or, rather because of the theatrics of quarantine, a lot of us would not be ashamed to say we’ve made it to this bathetic Act Three. In the past month, the COVID-19 death toll in the United States has passed 4,700; Joe Biden has been accused of sexual harassment by former staffer Tara Reade; the coronarecession is increasingly looming; the Keystone Pipeline is quietly going back under construction. These days of unease show no sign of abating. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I was performing life — even in daily little routines, like quickly dabbing concealer under my eyes before heading into the grocery store, painfully nodding through classes narrated by professors who believe that trigger warnings mire fiction, or performing the role of Normal Person with the help of a high dosage of hydroxyzine.
Performing during crisis, rather than before or after it, is an entirely different task. It’s certainly hard to feel like a person when the world is disintegrating and there’s nothing you can do about it but join a Zoom call. I’ve been rereading Sophocles lately — the Jean Anouilh translation of Antigone from 1941, written shortly before the end of World War II and produced in the context of the anti-fascist French resistance — and, at the top of the play, the Chorus gives us our context: Antigone’s brothers recently died in battle; Eteocles died honorably, and her other brother, Polyneices, perished on the other side of the battlefield, in defiance of the king, Creon. By cruel order, Polyneices’ body is to be left to rot, unlamented, and anyone who honors him with burial does so on pain of death.
In most translations, defiance becomes the play’s stuffing, with the first time we ever see Antigone being her blunt assertion that she will, in fact, bury her brother, even if it kills her. Anouilh’s translation is a wild variation on the text; the play begins lazily. Antigone goes out to look at the flowers in the palace garden, then trudges up to the muddy battlefield where her brothers died days prior. When she returns, she argues with her nurse about getting a good night’s sleep, has breakfast with her sister, Ismene, and the righteous anger we often associate with Antigone — both the protagonist and the play itself — is nowhere to be found. Where anger should be is replaced with a quiet, anxious serenity. When Ismene tells her sister that the plan to bury their brother is half-cooked, noting that the king will hang them, Antigone sips her coffee and tells her: “Of course he will. He will do what he has to do, and we will do what we have to do. He is bound to put us to death. But we are bound to go out and bury our brother. That's the way it is. What do you think we can do to change it?”
This acquiescence, we learn, is mirage; Antigone’s terrified. She ends things with her fiancé, Haemon; she instructs her nanny on how to care for her dog once she’s killed; she can’t handle the knowledge that Polyneices might not be deserving of an honorable burial, with a hidden reputation for gambling and drinking. This kind of performance — a false resoluteness in the face of unpredictable chaos — is pulled as taut as a bowstring, and it’s not dissimilar from the ways we perform in crisis. We pretend, bargain, make excuses, attempt to hold onto life; in quarantine, there’s a split faction. For some, stay-at-home orders are a challenge between boredom and a light, gossamer fear, unsure of when regular life will continue, relying on Zoom and Slack to replace regular communication; for others, especially the immunocompromised, it’s a question if they will live or die in the next several months. It is easy to perform a sense of composure — it is harder to just simply be. When Ismene yells at her sister that she will not let her bury Polyneices, Antigone puts her coat on and replies: “You are too late, Ismene. When you first saw me this morning, I had just come in from burying him.”
I went back to Antigone because, in the wake of COVID-19, I kept thinking about bodies. I could feel a despair hardening inside me — an increasing desire to find justice, to do the capital r-t Right Thing; a difficult task when you’re not a healthcare professional, and an even more difficult task when you are quarantined inside your bedroom. Antigone is, at its cerebral core, about justice, but it is also a work about whose lives matter. We learn from Creon (referred to as “Uncle Creon” in Anouilh’s translation, perhaps a slick post-Freud idea, considering Antigone’s father is Oedipus) that the virtuous brother, Eteocles, was no different from Polyneices. The two brothers had worked together, on opposing sides, in an effort to sell out Thebes to the highest bidder. As both sides couldn’t be wrong, for fear of upsetting the city, a saint had to be made out of one of them — on a dice roll.
CREON. But, as I told you a moment ago, I had to make a martyr of one of them. I sent out to the holocaust for their bodies; they were found clasped in one another's arms — for the first time in their lives, I imagine. Each had been spitted on the other’s sword, and the Argive cavalry had trampled them down. They were mashed to a pulp, Antigone. I had the prettier of the two carcasses brought in and gave it a State funeral; and I left the other to rot. I don't know which was which. And I assure you, I don't care.
These ideas of who deserves honor in death are, unfortunate as they may be, based on our world, even if Sophocles’ work seems 2,500 years removed from us. The discourse as to whether or not those dying from COVID-19 with pre-existing conditions, from the elderly to those battling cancer, should be lower on the list for ventilator access has metamorphosed into a conversation on eugenics and classism. Many people who die end up dying alone, with their loved ones in a separate room; at the funerals of those who lost their lives to the virus, the bodies cannot be touched. On the day I began reading Anouilh’s play, the day in which I drove up to UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus to retrieve the rest of my belongings from my dorm room, there were quiet whispers about turning dormitories into field hospitals. As more people die and there are more talks of an extended quarantine through the summer, where we find justice seems like a particularly unanswerable question, and, even moreso, the lengths we’ll go to for justice are difficult to trace. There are lessons to learn. Uncle Creon asks why Antigone buried her brother, and why she keeps saying she’ll do it again and again if he doesn’t hang her:
ANTIGONE. I owed it to him. Those who are not buried wander eternally and find no rest. Everybody knows that. If my brother were alive, and he came home weary after a long day's hunting, I should fetch him food and drink and see that his bed was ready for him. And Polyneices is home from the hunt.
Of course, the idea that art is a way of survival during times of consequence is twofold; it grates as both an agonized-artist pity party and a capitalist testament to the idea we must always be working, even as the world burns around us. But that is not to say that art cannot be a tool for healing and dissent; as George Steiner’s’ 1984 book Antigones suggests, trying to interpret a monolithic thesis of the play is like giving a monkey a typewriter. To Anouilh, in 1941, and Brecht in 1948, Antigone is both a martyr for the French Resistance and a battering ram towards the passive bystanders of Nazism; to Conor Cruse O’Brien, in 1968, she is a representative of Irish Republicanism; in 2003, Blake Morrison’s Thebes is obstructed by the violence of the Iraq War. We render the play so nebulous as to reshape it, because the moral question it poses will never not feel contemporary; as long as war goes on, as long as suffering still stands, Antigone will be standing behind us, like a smiling ghost, tapping our shoulders and casually asking what we’re going to do about the casualties of greed.
Anouilh doesn’t change the ending. As always, it is Antigone who has the real honor in death. In his version, she is horrified to learn that she will be entombed alive, walled up in a cave and left to die. She kills herself in her jail cell before anyone can reach her; before she does so, she asks a bumbling guard to write a letter for her, telling Haemon she loves him. At first, she asks the guard to write “I am afraid — and I don’t even know what I’m dying for,” but then quickly backtracks: “No. Scratch that out. Nobody must know that. They have no right to know. It's as if they saw me naked and touched me, after I am dead. Scratch it all out. Just write: ‘Forgive me.’” Antigone is performing — strength, courage, integrity — until performance and the real self converge. Perhaps the longer we do what we can to make things right, even in the face of hidden shame and anxiety, the two will meet at a nexus; from donating money to food banks, to shopping for groceries as infrequently as we possibly can. Until then, we will be inside, watching, waiting, radiating grief and exhaustion.
The first line of the play, with her tense nurse asking where Antigone had run off to, feels apropos; we’ve all been waiting for her to arrive. But the second line of the play, with a happy Antigone covered in mud and morning dew, dirt under her fingernails, coming inside after successfully burying her brother, is unexpected. She kicks off her boots and answers her nurse’s question: “Nowhere. It was beautiful.” ●
