Kingship versus Kinship: Part II

Part two (read part one here) of an essay that investigates the “Antigone” story set in modern Afghanistan in Joydeep Roy-Bhattachary’s ‘The Watch’

By Peter Krause

While Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ is objectively inconclusive about whether or not Polynices is justified in initiating civil war with Thebes, the subjective language of the Chorus implies that Polynices is a belligerent invader who immorally threatens the city. Creon obviously believes this, while Antigone appears apathetic about this issue and is concerned only with the fate of Polynices’ body. If Polynices is indeed in the wrong, then from a legal, political and ethical standpoint, Creon is rightly warranted in resisting Polynices’ attack and defeating him with the help of Zeus (lines 143-165). While the main moral issue in ‘Antigone’ is, of course, whether Antigone or Creon is right regarding the post-war treatment of Polynices’ body, it is useful to rewind the story a little and remember the a priori issue that precedes the in media narrative: whether or not it was ethical for Creon to kill Polynices in the first place. As will be addressed below, this is also a crucial issue in ‘The Watch’. Sophocles’ text hints that Creon is justified in killing the murderous invader Polynices, which somewhat validates his decision to scorn the invader, even after he is dead.

But, as Hegel states, Antigone is also justified in disobeying Creon because of her “holy love for her brother”. Just as evidence exists supporting Creon, so too does evidence exist supporting Antigone. While Creon draws on his status as a legal and political entity, Antigone draws on her own legitimate status as a sister and woman of religious faith. Thus, Antigone establishes that she and Creon exist in two planes, the state and the family, which do not correspond, do not measure “right” by the same criteria, and are consequently entirely irreconcilable. This irresolvable opposition causes stasis. 

Another significant dimension of difference between Antigone and Creon is gender. On the subject of emasculation and the potential for Antigone to “hijack”, so to speak, Creon’s dominant masculinity, Charles Segal writes in ‘Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus’: The conflict between Creon and Antigone is not only between city and house, but also between man and woman. “If this victory (Krate) rests with her without punishment, then I am not the man, but she’s the man,” [says Creon] (484-485) (171). So, the stubborn dispute between the two protagonists is made even more irresolvable by their fundamental difference in gender and kinship position. Antigone, the female and sister, is acting out the highest “good” she knows, while Creon, the man and future father-in-law projects onto his kingship the dominance of his masculinity. If his masculinity is contradicted, then so is his kingship, and vice versa. The two are tied up with one another, making his kingly act also a decidedly male act. Segal discusses the essentially gendered nature of their opposition:

“Creon confronts an opposing principle of an especially feminine kind, Antigone’s “reverence for those of the same womb, homosplanchnous sebein” (511). On this basis Antigone defends herself against the male-oriented, civic ethic of the polis. She makes kinship a function of the female procreative power: she defines kinship in terms of the womb.” (172) [1]

Thus, what Antigone does is stage a gendered tug-of-war over what constitutes a higher power in the polis: patriarchal government or the biological procreativity of women. Men govern women, but men rely on women for procreation. Patriarchy writ large in state power, like that imposed in both ‘Antigone’ and ‘The Watch’, assumes its dominance over women, but without women to give birth and provide maternal care, neither patriarchs nor their subjects would exist at all, and Polynices is both citizen and enemy of the state, but he is also brother. Which classification is more important, and why? Again, basic paradoxes of human life are masterfully explored in Sophocles’ text and can be read as the basic interpretative stepping stones by which to understand the story.

In ‘The Urgency of Tragedy Now’, Helene Foley and Jean Howard correctly note that generally “the female protagonists of tragedy are royal women, and as such, they are located in spaces that blur the distinction between public and private worlds” (628) [2]. However, Antigone is not royalty in the conventional, simple sense. Her father, Oedipus, the tragic, fallen character of ‘Oedipus The King’ and ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ is a dethroned king. Antigone is engaged to be married to Haemon, Creon’s son, which would make her royalty but, of course, this marriage never occurs. Thus, Antigone remains throughout the entire play in the epitome of the private, familial, kin-based world, radically at odds with Creon’s world of law that is blind to matters of the heart and kinship. In this way, the core characteristics around which the two protagonists are built are also what cause them to implode: Antigone, through suicide, and Creon, through complete mental breakdown and pleas for those around him to “strike a two-edged sword right through me” (line 1385). Just as Meltzer points out that “Sophocles’ play can give us an Antigone who finally does not belong anywhere,” so too does the play demonstrate that Creon too is dislodged from his station and cast beyond the realm of belonging (174). In this manner, the play can be shown to be about characters that are doomed from line 1 to be undone by their convictions and the irresolvable opposition into which they enter. Meltzer writes:

“Sophocles’ Antigone echoes her leitmotif on homelessness begun in ‘Oedipus at Colonus’. But if in that play her homelessness is literal (she does not want to, and fears that in any case she cannot, return to Thebes) — in ‘Antigone’ foreignness takes on ontological proportions since it partakes of what Kierkegaard calls ‘the fellowship of the already dead.’ “ (175) [3]

Inherent in Antigone’s character is her outsider status. Her character cannot live in a world defined by laws of state rather than laws of kinship, so she must die. As Meltzer and Kierkegaard suggest, there is never a place for her in Thebes or in the larger world of the living, so she is always already a member of the dead. Thus, we have arrived at what must be the most important and fundamental difference between Antigone and Creon: the opposition of the living and “dead”.

Overall, Antigone and Creon both exhibit an undeterred moral clarity: what they believe is right exists in their characters well before the play begins. In this way, both ‘Antigone’ and ‘The Watch’ begin in media res with regard to their moral stance. The duel protagonists undergo no change or development of opinion until (in Creon’s case), the very end of the play. In some sense, they are diametric mirror images of one another. “Each is necessary to define the other,” writes Segal. “Antigone’s harshness would make no sense without Creon’s authoritarian willfulness” (139) [1]. Like a binary pair, Antigone and Creon constitute each other through opposition. The zealous stubbornness of one is inspired by the equivalent zealous stubbornness of the other. The one quality they have in common is their unwillingness to compromise. “Sophocles in his ‘Antigone’ does not make Antigone suffer alone and die,” says Hegel on this equivalence and mirroring. “On the contrary, we also see Creon punished by his wife and [his son] Haemon, who both likewise perish owing to the death of Antigone” (471, Volume 1. Hegel’s brackets) [4]. Like any binary pair, Antigone and Creons’ fates are linked. They suffer from the same tragic flaw hamartia (stubbornness), and as a result, they both ultimately suffer tragedy. Like any now-clichéd, well-known plot, this story of opposing, yet intertwined, fates is based in ancient truth.

“My brother was a Pashtun hero, a Mujahid [sic], and a freedom fighter,” says Nizam to the American’s Afghani translator. “He fought the Taliban. And he died fighting the Amrikayi (American) invaders. He was a brave man” (7, parenthetical comment mine). “He was a terrorist,” the translator responds (7). The Army officer supervising the translator interjects angrily: “Your brother Yusuf wasn’t innocent. He was a Taliban leader who murdered my friends and fellow soldiers. He was a dangerous militant” (13). Nizam in unmoved. She refutes everything and reiterates how the rest of her family was killed in the airstrike that left her legless. Hearing this, the Army officer is similarly unmoved and refutes her claims in turn. He adds, “I myself am here because innocents were killed–thousands of innocents. Do you know what was done to my country? Entire buildings collapsed!” (13) [5]. Thus, the basic opposition of war is articulated in Sophoclean terms: each side not only feels more “right”, but also more “wronged” than the other.

Roy-Bhattacharya has the advantage of writing not only well after Sophocles, but also after Hegel and hundreds of subsequent translations and analyses of ‘Antigone’. He cites two versions: Robert Fagles’ 1982 translation and Nicholas Rudall’s 1998 translation. His familiarity with the central paradox of the play is obvious in his retelling. “That’s sacrilege!” Nizam exclaims upon hearing that Yusuf’s body will be publicly displayed in Kabul. “You can’t rob a dead man of his soul. It’s forbidden, and I won’t allow it. I have a religious duty to my brother,” exclaims Nizam (14). “And I have a duty to the state,” the American officer replies. “Which is also your state, by the way. I have a duty to abide by the rule of law, which are now your laws. Without laws, we’d be back to your tribal anarchy” (14) [5]. Just as in the original play, it is evident that Nizam and the American soldiers are operating within two antipodal systems of belief, Nizam siding with religion, and the soldiers with the law of state. Each has a “duty” or “law” to follow that is either not recognized or declared illegitimate by the other. The soldier’s insensitive, Americentric remark about “tribal anarchy” puts him fundamentally at odds with Nizam, dividing the spheres like in ‘Antigone’, but through different application.

Nizam is just as homeless and out of place in the American’s valley as Antigone is in Thebes when it is reduced to Creon’s state of exception. “They’ve leveled everything here,” Nizam says of the valley. “There are no trees, and there’s no vegetation. […] The ground is scored with boot marks and the tracks of many vehicles” (3-4). She describes the fort as “an Alien accretion” (5). Just as Butler [6], Meltzer, and others show how Antigone is wholly out of place in Creon’s state and even unfit for the world of the living, so too can we see how Nizam is a strange ghost in her own land. Already reduced in body by the loss of her legs, she resigns herself to death early on in the novel: “I look around the field with a heavy heart. This is where I’m staying. This is now my final home. How strange life is. I used to have so many wishes, so many dreams” (25). Like Antigone, Nizam now only has one wish and dream: to honor her brother’s body. She devotes her entire being into this single cause, as Segal says of Antigone:

“She challenges human law with an absolute that she backs up with the resolve of her own death, for this is the fullest assertion she can make of the intensity of her moral convictions. She can assert what she is only by staking her entire being, her life. It is by this extreme defense of her beliefs that she rises to heroic and deeply tragic stature.” (140) [1]

Each incomprehensible to the other, Nizam and the American soldiers attempt in various ways to do what they believe is “right.” The soldiers attempt to placate Nizam by giving her a bloody piece of Yusuf’s clothing to bury in lieu of his body (20). It is a surprisingly compassionate, humanistic gesture from a group ready to kill Nizam at any moment, but it does not satisfy her need to honor her brother and her religion.

In both tales, each party acts boldly and with resolve (at least initially) because they are sure they are “right”. Yet, inevitably, neither party can take into account all the factors in play. Not all important information can be known. Each party is blinded by their bias and by circumstance and stick to them until the end of the narrative.

“Tragedy,” writes McClintock, “poses the question: how do we act justly in a world where absolute knowledge is not guaranteed, where our eyes may deceive us, and where the stuff of the material world may be precarious?” (827) [7]. Regarding ‘Antigone’, ‘The Watch’, and the real context of war, it is impossible to achieve absolute knowledge and to always read the material world accurately. Ideology, bias, fear, and certainty of “rightness” ensure the ongoing production of conflict and tragedy. Just as in Sophocles’ Antigone the laws of the state are too stringently imposed on family, kinship, and religion with disastrous, tragic effect, so too are the “laws” of the American neo-colonial state problematically imposed in various contexts around the globe with equally troubling results. If Hegel is correct in his assertion that tragedy often stems from the opposition of “right” with “right”, then in order to reach resolution both “rights” need to reassess their self-defining criteria and take into account the reality that no position is “right” in every context. Flexibility, compromise, and compassion would hypothetically stop the tragedy of ‘Antigone’, and the same can surely be said about ‘The Watch’ and real-world conflict.

Peter Krause is a graduate of Goucher College (summa cum laude) and holds a M.A. in English and American Literature from New York University. Fascinated by contemporary literature, postmodernism and the nascent literatures of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Peter currently teaches at North Star Academy College Preparatory High School in Newark, NJ.

Bibliography

[1] Segal, Charles. “Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus” in ‘Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles’; Cambridge, Mass, Harvard UP, 1981. 179-188

[2] Foley, Helene P. and Jean E. Howard. ‘Introduction: The Urgency of Tragedy Now’ in PLMA, Vol 129, No 4, October 2014, 617-633

[3] Meltzer, Francoise. ‘Theories of Desire: Antigone Again’; Critical Inquiry, Vol 37, No 2, Winter, 2011. 169-186

[4] Hegel, G.W.F. ‘Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art’, Trans. T.M. Knox; Oxford, Clarendon, 1974

[5] Roy-Bhattacharya, Joydeep. ‘The Watch’; New York, Hogarth, 2012

[6] Butler, Judith. ‘Antigone’s Claim in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death’; New York, Columbia UP, 2000. 1-25

[7] McClintock, Anne. ‘Imperial Ghosting and National Tragedy: Revenants from Hiroshima and Indian Country in the War on Terror’ in PLMA, Vol 129, No 4, October 2014. 819

Further Reading

Agamben, Giorgio. The State of Exception – Der Ausnahmezustand; Lecture at European Graduate School. August 2003. Transcription by Anton Pulvirenti. (Cited in part one)

Brown, Andrew, ed. ‘Introduction in Sophocles: Antigone’, Trans. Andrew Brown; Wiltshire, Aris and Philips, 1987, 1-19

Cardullo, Robert, ed, “Introduction: The Portable Antigone” in ‘Antigone Adapted: Sophocles’ Antigone in Classic Drama and Modern Adaptation, Translation, and Transformation’; Palo Alto, Academica Press, LLC 2011. 1-4

Chatterjee, Jaya Aninda. “The Watch Humanizes Both Sides of a Classic Tale.”; NPR Books, 6 June, 2012

Fainlight, Ruth and Robert. J. Littman, eds. “Introduction” in ‘The Theban Plays: Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone’, Trans. Ruth Fainlight and Robert J. Littman; Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. xi-lix

Fradinger, Moira. ‘Tragedy Shakes Hands With Testimony in Antigona oriental’ in PLMA Vol 129, No 4, October 2014. 761-772 (Cited in part one)

Goff, Barbara and Michael Simpson. ‘Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora’; Oxford, Oxford UP, 2007

Grene, David and Richard Lattimore, Eds. ‘“Antigone” in Greek Tragedies: Volume 1’, 2nd edition. Trans. David Grene and Richard Lattimore; Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1991. 177-232

Hannan, Jim. ‘Review: The Watch, by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’; World Literature Today, Vol 86, No 6, November/December 2012. 66-68

McCall, Josh. ‘Book Review: The Watch is an Important War Novel’; The Dallas Morning News Online, 6 July, 2012

Nussbaum, Martha C. ‘‘Sophocles’ Antigone: Conflict, Vision, and Simplification in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy’; Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2001. 51-82

Scott, David. ‘The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time’; PLMA, Vol 129, No 4, October 2014. 799-808

Segal, Charles. “Sophocles’ Praise of Man and the Conflicts of the Antigone” in‘Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text’; Ithaca, Cornel UP, 1986. 137-161

Segal, Charles. “Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus” in ‘Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles’; Cambridge, Mass, Harvard UP, 1981. 179-188

Shamsie, Kamila. “The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya – Review“, The Guardian Online. 15 June, 2012 (Cited in part one)