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PARTISAN REVIEW
with us. Steiner was much more severe and pessimistic about the
possibilities of tragedy today than a clear view of the art requires.
This, I think, is because he was bent as usual on exaggerating and
amplifying differences - in this case between our own culture and
that of fifth-century Greece .
Recently returning to the subject, Steiner gave us in
Antigones
his more mature reflection on what happened to the art form in–
vented by the Greeks. Singling out the tragedy of Sophocles which
Hegel judged to be his greatest, Steiner has studied almost every in–
terpretation of the play by classicists and philosophers, and the
many new versions of the play by European playwrights over the
centuries, including the most recent versions of Brecht and Anouilh.
The "good European" Goethe pointed unerringly to the one thing
which mars the
Antigone,
and which he called
"ganz schlecht"
(alto–
gether bad). I am referring to Antigone's incomprehensible assertion
that she would not have done for any other member of her family
what she was prepared to do for her brother, our felt objection to this
being that in her action, for which she gives her life, she represents
her family against the state. Hegel, another "good European," pointed
out - one of his remarkable insights - that the sister is the most
perfect ethical representative of the family, more perfect in such a
role even than the mother, who has enjoyed sexual pleasure in con–
ceiving her children. And Antigone's speech in Sophocles's play in–
comprehensively negates all that gives her the authority to act as she
does. That Steiner has not been able to equal these insights of Goethe
and of Hegel is not at all surprising- neither have our best
classicists. The interesting thing though is that he cannot even deal
with the greatest judgements of the
Antigone
in a whole volume
devoted to the play, and to the various ways in which it has been
understood. For he is interested in setting Sophocles's play on a level
which Western dramatic thought and dramatic composition since
the Greeks simply cannot match, and this attitude towards the
An–
tigone
is not forced on him by the play's excellence; it is, I believe,
willed,
and follows from his determination (which I have tried to
understand) to differ with the judgement of "good Europeans." But
there is this consequence: he does not see the continuity of our own
experience with that of Athenians of the fifth century, and he does
not see that the theme of the
Antigone
is the theme of civilization as
such. Not that one could reasonably expect a modern woman to sac–
rifice her life in order to give a dead brother proper burial. This is
why the plot of the
Antigone
is just impossible in a modern setting,
