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PARTISAN REVIEW
Man's ingenuity and power are great, but both his power and life are
limited. Such is the basis for the Greeks' tragic view of life. There is no
excuse for passivity, for human beings can help shape the environments
that shape
them
and they have the opportunity and the power to dety
their societies and their unjust laws, as Antigone does in detying Creon.
He has overridden the unwritten divine law by forbidding the burial of
her brother, killed in a rebellion against his state. She chooses to bury her
brother and accept a horrible death as the penalty, and we marvel and
admire her for it.
So far, it is possible to think of Sophocles as the kind of artist de–
scribed in Mr. Donoghue's quotation from Malraux - the champion of
revolt against man's fate, so often in our time taken to be the revolt
against society and its ways. True artists, like Sophocles, however, are not
,
propagandists but pursuers of deep, usually complicated, understandings of
the human condition. Sophocles's play reveals such complexity. There is
\
something to be said for Creon. His decree is meant to preserve the secu-
rity of the state and society, the minimal requirement of civilization, the
thin veneer that protects us from the plunge into barbarism and savagery.
Modern artists tend to assume that the established order is always wrong.
Ibsen's Dr. Stockman in
An Enemy of the People
made it clear that the rule
applies even to democratic establishments with his passionate assertion
that "the majority is always wrong."
But the greatest artists are prepared to search for the truth of the hu–
man condition wherever the trail may lead. They do not prejudge the
outcome. The establishment or the defiant rebel may be right or, as is
typical of real tragedy, each may by right in his own way, even as the two
rights clash disastrously. Sophocles' portrayal of the struggle is so even–
handed that some ancient scholars thought that Creon's case is the
stronger and that the play should be called
Creon,
not
Antigone.
That must
be wrong, for Antigone alone displays the willful, defiant, single-minded,
unrelenting, uncalculating determination to do what she must, regardless
of consequences, that is characteristic of Sophoclean heroes. But the point
is that Sophocles wrestles with the issues and depicts their champions with
such honesty as to do justice to the depth, difficulty and universality of
the subject and his characters.
Such an artist does not reflexively take the side of any rebel against
the established order.
It
may be that the establishment is right. More
likely, there is a degree of right on both sides, so that the difficult task for
human beings is to gain a deeper understanding of what is at stake, both
for individual and society, to understand that the needs of individual and
society are both competitive
and
complementary and to contemplate the
resulting dilemma with the seriousness and awe it deserves. In
Antigone,
