LIONEL ABEL
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unless one makes the heroine irrational, as Anouilh did. But on the
other hand, we are still concerned, and we have to be , to call our–
selves civilized , with some ceremonial politeness toward the dead.
And this may often require
some
kind of sacrifice. As Heidegger has
put it, even a dead person is not a thing, but a "having-been-a–
presence-in-the-world." Perhaps one of the most original and crea–
tive treatments of the theme of the
Antigone
can be found in Faulkner's
novel
As I Lay Dying,
in which Addie Bundren, propped in her bed,
watches through her window the fashioning of her coffin, and deter–
mines the place where her children are to bury her. Once she is
dead, they cart her for some forty miles to Jefferson so that she can
be buried with those she knew as a child. Now, some of her children,
like Jewel, treat the dead Addie as a person; others, like Darl, treat
her as a thing. And in some children the two attitudes alternate.
Now Steiner, who has looked into the most trivial versions of the
An–
tigone,
has not even noticed one of the most original works by a
modern in treatment of its theme.
I suggested that there are hardly any European writers who to–
day want to be considered "good Europeans ." But many of us have
read and enjoyed the essays of a "good" Belgian-French-American
critic, the late Paul de Man, who ended his career in the American
university system as a Yale professor. A comparison of some of his
writings on literary topics with Steiner's are surely in order here.
Now I am not always in agreement with de Man's critical pro–
cedures, which I have criticized elsewhere . I am inclined to reject
out of hand his notions about reading, rhetoric, and deconstruction;
but when I compare one of de Man's late essays on lyric poetry with
Steiner's
Antigones
,
the comparison has to favor de Man's methods
against Steiner's. What de Man does in his essay on the lyric is to lift
Keats's much criticized "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," by asso–
ciating it with this much more sophisticated judgment of Nietzsche's:
"What is truth? A manoeuverable army of metaphors, metonomies,
and anthropomorphisms," and also with the whole content ofBaude–
laire's sonnet,
Correspondances.
The effect is to give meaning to, rather
than remove meaning from, Keats's line. I think Steiner has some–
thing to learn from such a procedure. When he compares European
drama with the Greek tragedies, he diminishes almost everything
after Sophocles, even the works of Shakespeare. He writes :
There ought to be by now a pride of "Hamlets," "Macbeths,"
"Othellos," and "Lears" related to the canon as are the numerous
