Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T07:01:33.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Antigone’s Suffering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2021

Ankhi Mukherjee Open the ORCID record for Ankhi Mukherjee [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.

Keywords

AntigoneKamila ShamsieplagueIslamophobia
Type
Article
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 8 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: On Postcolonial Suffering , April 2021 , pp. 214 - 231
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64.Google Scholar

2 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 64.

3 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 51.

4 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 56.

5 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 63.

6 Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel on Tragedy, ed. Paolucci, Anne and Paolucci, Henry, trans. Osmastan, F. P. B., et al. (Smyrna, DE: Griffon House Publications, 2001), 269.Google Scholar

7 Butler, Judith, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 52.Google Scholar

8 Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain, vol. 7 (New York, 1992), 281.Google Scholar

9 Bonnie Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Member, and the Politics of Exception,” Political Theory 37.1 (February 2009), 5–43, esp. 7.

10 The authoritative Kitto translation I have referenced uses the spelling “Polyneices”; spelled “Polynices” elsewhere.

11 Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief,” 14.

12 Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra, ed. Edith Hall, trans. H. D. F. Kitto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), lines 422–26.

13 Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief,” 22.

14 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 454.

15 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 466–68.

16 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 1140–41.

17 Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Electra, ed. Edith Hall, trans. H. D. F. Kitto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), l. 26.

18 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 172.

19 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 1015–18.

20 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 418–20.

21 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 255–56.

22 Rehm, Rush, “ Antigone and the Rights of the Earth,” in Looking at Antigone, ed. Stuttard, David (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 99.Google Scholar

23 Rehm, “Antigone and the Rights of the Earth,” l. 1014.

24 Mitchell-Boyask, Robin, “Plague and Theatre in Ancient Anthens,” The Lancet 373, no. 9661 (January 31, 2009): 374–75 (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60123-9/fulltext).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 1296.

26 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 885–90.

27 Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief,” 22.

28 Chanter, Tina, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalisation of Slavery (Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 2011), x.Google Scholar

29 Foley, Helene P., Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 For detailed analyses of Gothic conventions in English literature, see Botting, Fred, Gothic (New York and London: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar, and Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

31 Saadawi’s, Ahmed Frankenstein in Baghdad (London: Oneworld Publications, 2018)Google Scholar also addresses the US War on Terror. It is set in Baghdad in the aftermath of the invasion on Iraq, a slaughterhouse from which rises an Arab Frankenstein’s creature.

32 Theresa May, “Home Secretary Theresa May on Counter-terrorism,” (transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered), Home Office and The Rt Hon Theresa May MP November 24, 2014 (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretary-theresa-may-on-counter-terrorism).

33 Kamila Shamsie, “True Story: Kamila Shamsie on Predicting the Rise of Sajid Javid,” The Guardian, May 3, 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/may/03/true-story-kamila-shamsie-on-predicting-the-rise-of-sajid-javid).

34 Shamsie, “True Story: Kamila Shamsie on Predicting the Rise of Sajid Javid.”

35 Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, 172.

36 Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 152.

37 Shamsie, Home Fire, 221, 224.

38 Shamsie, Home Fire, 224.

39 Shamsie, Home Fire, 188.

40 “Islamic State ‘Beatles’ Duo Complain about Losing UK Citizenship,” BBC News, March 31, 2018 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43601925). See also “Islamic State ‘Beatles’ Duo: UK ‘will not block death penalty,’” BBC News, July 23, 2018 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44921910).

41 See “Islamic State ‘Beatles’ Duo Complain about Losing UK Citizenship,” and “Islamic State ‘Beatles’ Duo: UK ‘will not block death penalty.’”

42 Kamila Shamsie, “Exiled: The Disturbing Story of a Citizen Made UnBritish,” The Guardian, November 17, 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/17/unbecoming-british-kamila-shamsie-citizens-exile).

43 “Shamima Begum Will Not Be Allowed Here, Bangladesh Says,” BBC News, February 21, 2019 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47312207).

44 Shamsie, Home Fire, 230.

45 Shamsie, Home Fire, 90–91.

46 Kundnani, Arun, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (London: Verso Books, 2014), 110.Google Scholar

47 Shamsie, Home Fire, 224–25.

48 Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, 33.

49 For a detailed discussion of the two-tier citizenship system as it affects transnational migrants, see Farahat, Anuscheh, “The Exclusiveness of Inclusion: On the Boundaries of Human Rights in Protecting Transnational and Second Generation Migrants,” European Journal of Migration and Law 11.3 (2009): 253–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 I am using the Freudian definition of melancholia here, which differs from mourning in its narcissistic identification with the lost object. If mourning involves severing ties with the dead, the melancholic, unable to form a new libidinal investment in the world of the living, fosters affective bonds with the dead. See “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 24 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 237–60.

51 Shamsie, Home Fire, 188.

52 Shamsie, Home Fire, 65, 122, 209.

53 Shamsie, Home Fire, 193.

54 Shamsie, Home Fire, 196.

55 Shamsie, Home Fire, 228.

56 Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain, trans. Porter, Dennis (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 290.Google Scholar

57 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 247.

58 Cited in Goldhill, Simon, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy, 150.

60 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 52.

61 Meltzer, Françoise, “Theories of Desire: Antigone Again,” Critical Inquiry 37.2 (Winter 2011): 175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Meltzer’s reading, which focuses on Anouilh’s Antigone, makes a valuable point about the misreading of Antigone’s death drive as a desire for death: as with Freud’s interpretation of Thanatos, it is an unconscious, cellular drive that has nothing to do with desire.

62 Meltzer, “Theories of Desire,” 171.

63 Seamus Heaney, “The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’” (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 3.

64 Notable literary and philosophical interpretations of Antigone, referred to in passing but not elaborated on in this article, include the following: Racine, Jean, La Thébaïde: ou Les Frères Ennemis, in Théâtre de Jean Racine (Paris: Hachette Livre, 2018)Google Scholar; Kierkegaard, Søren, “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” Either/Or Part 1 Kierkegaard’s Writings 3, ed. and trans. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1087)Google Scholar; Beauvoir, Simone de, “Moral Idealism and Political Realism,” Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings ed. Simons, Margaret A., trans. Cordero, Anne Deing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Anouilh, Jean, Antigone (London: Methuen Drama, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steiner, George, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, 69.

66 Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, cited in A Companion to Sophocles, ed. Kirk Ormand (Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 2015), 277.

67 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 1068–071.

68 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 455.

69 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 76.

70 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 80.

71 Shamsie, Home Fire, 235.

72 “Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie Review—A Contemporary Reworking of Sophocles,” The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/10/home-fire-kamila-shamsie-review).

73 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 59–61.

74 Shamsie, Home Fire, 199.

75 Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, 183.

76 Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, 197.

77 Shamsie, Home Fire, 5.

78 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 74–76.

79 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 47, l. 92, both spoken by Ismene.

80 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 220.

81 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 572–73.

82 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 888–89.

83 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 559–60.

84 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 856–57.

85 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 855.

86 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 861, lines 869–71.

87 Goldhill, Simon, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

88 Schweizer, Harold, Suffering and the Remedy of Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 89.Google Scholar

89 Shamsie, Home Fire, 227–28.

90 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 846.

91 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 942–43.

92 See Segal, Charles, Sophocles’s Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

93 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 806–09.

94 Sophocles, Antigone, l. 876.

95 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 900–03.

96 Meltzer, “Theories of Desire,” 185.

97 Sophocles, Antigone, 802–04.