Antigone’s Claim – Yvy Truong

Okay, so maybe I’m not quite done here. I blame the coffee I had earlier.

I have to study for my Anthropology midterm but nope, not right now. Why? Because Antigone is why.

To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about Antigone. I can’t hate her but I can’t like her. I can’t define her but I can’t deny her existence. Even the play itself, I feel absolutely nothing for it. I don’t hate it, I don’t like it, but neither do I deny it’s substance.

To be or not to be.
To be is to think.
To think is to be.
To do is to be.
To be is to do.

Which is it?

Be nothing. It’s easier.

I don’t know what to make of Antigone… If I choose one opinion then I betray the existence of another opinion which undoubtedly has some truth in it. If I focus on one aspect of the play then I betray other aspects that are just as important and vital. Is Sophocles saying that we must choose or that we cannot choose for there are no options? (Choice being a very vague word here) But even so, there are parts in Antigone’s where choices are present… Right? Are we subjected to fate or is there free will?

There are two ways I’m starting to see the play as well:

One, being that the reader itself is being pulled into ambiguity and the readers responsibility is to make sense of it (almost how we are born into the world and it is up to us to make sense of it. It is up to us to live. Tuum Est – it is yours. Ha-ha.)

Two, being that when we first read the play, we can make sense of it and form our opinion but those opinions are not based on a solid foundation therefore it is less easily defined. Surly I had an opinion when I first read the text but the more I think about it, nothing makes sense and very little has substance or truth.

The Gods are mocking me right now.

Truth be told, I didn’t read all of Antigone’s Claim because I found it quite dry. However, after today’s lecture I think I’ll give it another go (but that means I have to juggle between rereading Antigone for the essay, Antigone’s Claim, and Dr. Faustus). Perhaps the second time around I’ll be able to get through the text and feel more interested.

So for this, I’ll just go on about not the text itself, but what I learned in lecture.

I found it interesting how Jill Fellows pointed out how when we focus on one aspect of the play, something else falls into ambiguity. I can kind of understand what she means because I remember in the last two seminars we had last week, when we would discuss a certain aspect of the play, something else would fall apart and when we tried to pick up those pieces, something else didn’t make sense. At one point, I would see Antigone as a strong character but at another, I would find her weak. Some things would make sense, but when the conversation progressed into something else, it contradicted what used to make sense.

Am I making sense?

So the structure of the play cannot be clearly pin-pointed, and that idea is reiterated when looking at Antigone as a character. Again, as earlier said in the lecture, Antigone does not fit the role of the woman nor does she fit in the role of a man.

Now this reminds me of two quotations:

“She is not of the human but speaks its language. Prohibited from action, she nevertheless acts, and her act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm.” (Butler, 82)

and

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath out notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast of a god” – Aristotle (taken from Robert Crawford’s lecture slides)

Is Antigone apart of society? If a ship is metaphorical to the polis, what part of the ship is she?

From the two passages that I just quoted, it seems as thought Antigone cannot be defined as human and neither is she a part of society. Could that be perhaps the reason why she had to die? That it was essential for her to die because there was no way for her to be defined? She is an island onto herself but is it by nature or is it because of the circumstances?

I’m also looking back on my blog post from last week and I mentioned how Antigone was interesting because Sophocles shows us the struggle between individual wants and needs versus the polis and society. There is no clear answer to what is more triumphant, society or the individual, because remember, Kreon is the state and he is later subjected to a fate just as confusing and bleak as Antigone’s fate once was (before she killed herself)

And now I’m in a tangled mess of thoughts but I have a few questions….

What is it that defines us as human?

What could Antigone have done? What action could she have taken?

Why did Antigone have to die?

Why doesn’t this play make sense?

Am I making sense?

What is life?

Life?

And with that, I am very tired now.