Journal Update: Antigone and Medea

Well, we were warned not to leave the journal too long as it was hard to go back and write about all the books we've read and of course, I didn't listen. It's only been two weeks but it feels like a long time since I read Antigone/Medea and Sappho/Aristotle. Reading that and it strikes me how very large each of these works is. It occurred to me today in the Lucretius seminar: each of these books has spawned entire industries of academic work, and here we are attempting to wrap our heads around them in quick succession, two at a time, week after week.

But that, in a way, helped me with Lucretius. I realized that the point is to read the books for a progression of the larger idea, passion vs. reason, and the balancing act that man has been struggling with since the beginning of written thought. We are by nature passionate beings and also thinking beings, and the two live in an uneasy balance within us. So how do/have we define(d) ourselves as a species? How have we negotiated our relationship with the world around us which is so incapable of organizing itself as well as we can? How do we create and regulate social order when our emotions and fears can get the better of us and threaten to topple it? How do we create room for ourselves to still be sentient beings within the demands of order and a moral society?

So taking this idea, rather than replicating my notes from the readings and discussions, I will try to fill in the blanks from the past two weeks.

Antigone/Medea

I had read and seen Medea before and was familiar with it. We were getting a visit from Zoe Caldwell when I was in theater school and she had recently starred, to enormous acclaim and a Tony award, in a production of Medea that her husband, Robert Whitehead, had directed. We watched a video of the performance and studied her carefully. It was odd for me, having never seen classical theater before except for a high school production of Iphegenia in Aulis that my father directed and in which I performed as a six-year old. I don't remember much except that I had to be carried on stage asleep but held up my entrance because I had to pee. We all wore tunics and I saw the full breast of the girl playing Iphegenia.

Ms. Caldwell's Medea indeed sported the same tunics, but I was struck by one extraordinary thing: her voice. It was so full and deep and pained, like a wail from an animal being sent to slaughter (I grew up in the country and unfortunately have heard such a thing). It seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in her groin, which indeed it must have, because she spent most of her performance clutching and rubbing what I could only imagine was her womb. I've never heard anything like it since on stage, or anywhere for that matter.

When she spoke, she talked about the difficulty she had each night as she sat for dinner with her sons before the show. She said she couldn't look at them without crying, a feeling that persisted until the end of the run. She admitted that she was using them to prepare for her performance each night, imagining slaughtering them with her own hands as they ate quietly. I thought my mother was the only one who did that kind of thing.

The play was a deeply moving meditation on a woman who had been grievously betrayed. There was no sense of Jason being right. He had obviously scorned his wife, and her grief had turned inward to rage, and then outward to murder. It was the story of the first wife scorned by a callow husband for a younger woman. The sense of great injustice was palpable and righteous. And she wasn't taking it lying down. No wonder New Yorkers loved it. (I'm joking, but the point is that the production was very much of it's time).

It was interesting to read the play again with this experience in hand. This time I saw (forgive me) Jason's side of things. Perhaps it's because I've been through a divorce myself, but I saw a world in which Jason was also trapped by circumstance. He didn't handle it very well, and to me that was the mistake. If he had a master plan, he should have made her a partner in it. But perhaps, in that age, a man needn't but assume that his wishes stood for the best interests of his family. But still, the drama of "natural" law, versus social norm, the law of man, plays out like a time-bomb.

But that is nature of great drama, especially tragedy. There is no "bad guy", certainly a hero and a villain, but we must have empathy for both or the drama sinks! (or it's a tv series) Circumstances and time are the true enemies. Perhaps this is the nature of the struggle? We contain within us the struggle between passion and reason, but are victims, if we fail, of time and circumstance.

Antigone astonished me. I had never read it before, nor seen a production, and I left it thinking it was one of the great tragedies I had read. I thought that Arthur Miller would have written it, had he been around back then. It was as didactic as anything that he had ever written, but like the best of his work, it's essential humanity soared over the moral lesson it tried to teach.

Like Joe Keller or Willie Loman, Creon has a tenuous hold on power over his family, and the fear of failure and threat from within drives him to inflexibility and rage. Caught in his own egotistical trap, he is forced to condemn his son's fiance for doing what all acknowledge to be "the right thing", burying her brother to save his soul.

Antigone as well is caught by the same inflexibility, and that is the stuff of both comedy and tragedy. Two rigid characters caught in a circumstance that demands they negotiate change. And like all great tragedies, from Hamlet to The Crucible, it ends in the physical death of the hero, and the moral (emotional?) death of the villain.

And again, the lesson is the same, a man of reason is reduced to an emotional wreck, and an emotional heroine makes a treaty of reason with her soul, removing herself from fear of death. They change places, as it were. In both these plays, the marriage of Passion and Reason fails. And I think that's the point: in marriage, each partner must be able to accommodate the other. They must strive for balance. The stuff of marriage, I suppose, but a little dull for a Greek Tragedy.