Ireland, Antigone and Sundry Mourning Bodies
Kusumita Datta [Kusumita Datta has submitted her MPhil work, undertaken at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. HUG thanks Amlan Dasgupta for facilitating the publication of this essay.] My larger work constitutes a close study of the Irish post-revolutionary deployment of Antigone, through the enactment of the myth, by placing it within the text’s own interpretive history as well as a mythological-historical document within the changing world of Irish society. I have tried to unravel the need for newer versions of the Antigone today, in contributing to a contemporary understanding of nationhood, especially in times of displacement and forceful assimilation in that troubled nation. The Irish Antigones since the 1980s do not simply emerge from discussions surrounding the civil‐rights movement in the North and the advent of the resurgence of civil strife from the late 1960s onwards. The particularly local potency of the 1980s Irish Antigones was founded upon pre‐existing cultural affinities and practices that allied Antigone to Erin, the virginal emblematic figure of Romantic Irish Nationalism. Indeed, even Seamus Heaney’s version, commissioned for the centenary celebrations of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, draws upon this rich seam of cultural resonance. But, in addition to nationalist accretions, Antigone was also merged with the mythological figure of Deirdre in the Irish cultural imaginary as a strong independent woman who challenges the dictates of the patriarchal system. Brendan Kennelly’s version, performed in the Peacock Theatre at the Abbey in 1986, was able to draw upon these deep affinities between Deirdre and Antigone. Heaney’s play on this theme is much indebted to William Butler Yeats’ Antigone who is portrayed implicitly as a figure for the depredations of civil war, the calamity wreaked on “Brother and brother, friend and friend, / Family and family” by the “great glory driven wild” that is Antigone’s response to Creon, “driven” by familial piety and affection against the unreasonable demands of the state. So, linking 1904 to 2004, Heaney’s Antigone may be a gesture of piety to Yeats. This intellectual heritage is therefore not just allegorical, political but also literary in nature, emphasizing for us the wide range which needs to be considered. In the larger work I have looked closely at four Irish authors and their retelling of the saga and the allegory—Seamus Heaney, Owen McCafferty, Brendan Kennelly and Tom Paulin. In the following essay, I would specifically like to consider the idea of mourning in these retellings of the Antigone allegory in the Irish context. The Fate of the Dead Body and its Grief in Antigone Death and burial have been integral issues in the myth and play of Antigone. George Steiner, while enumerating the various reasons for the endurance of this ancient play posits a minor reason in the ‘subject of live burials’ and the motif of ‘entombment of living persons’ as an exercise in arbitrary judicial power. Moreover the opposition between the household gods and gods of the city finds a pivotal manifestation in the burial of the dead. In death, the ‘individualized particularity’ (1) is best achieved as the individual reverts immensely to the ethical domain of the Self. Of course when death occurs in the war-service to the nation, this ‘achieved totality’ is expressly civic in nature. The ‘civic’ must then be understood in terms of a ‘communal totality’ when the family keeps away the appetites of unconscious organic agencies, and sets its own action in place of theirs, to wed the relative to the bosom of the earth and an elemental presence which does not pass away. This is what Hegel perceives as the ‘positive ethical act’. In the words of Tara Beaney: ‘Hegel’s thinking here is dialectic; he considers two subjects engaged in a life-and-death struggle to realise their subjecthood. Just as each stakes their own life, so too do they seek the other’s death, since ‘the other’ is something which opposes their own status as subject.’ (2) Hence the ethical act is perceived as a conflict whose reconciliation will result in the attainment of the Spirit of Self-Consciousness. In its reconciliatory ethics it enunciates a concept of the ‘beautiful death’ in a rightful acknowledgement by the family and an enactment of all rituals pertaining to the dead. Beaney has explained how the concept of the ‘beautiful’ dead is only a negotiation by the nineteenth century of ‘their own complex attitudes towards horror and death, and [they] have done so through seeing Antigone’s death as beautiful work of art.’(3) Hence it is hardly a site of reconciliation but only points a path forward to an inadequacy and indeterminacy in our due acknowledgement of the dead in the rites of mourning. Both Antigone and Creon embody a death-instinct, one acting for and one against the forces of life. The Hegelian conflict is also best dramatized in the kinship relations of fraternity and sorority. The rites of burial, with ‘their literal re-enclosure of the dead in the place of earth and in the shadow-sequence of generations which are the foundation of the familial, are the particular task of [the] woman.’(4) When this task falls upon the sister, bound by the most genuine bond of philia, it attains the greatest degree of holiness. Yet it is also a crime because the state may not be prepared to relinquish authority over the dead. The dead body may claim honour or chastisement. In Sophocles’ play Polyneices claims both. However the end there is a ‘calm of doom, parity…The body of Polyneices had to be buried if…the living was to be at peace with the house of the dead.'(5) But our consideration of mourning which follows the ritual of burial or a lack of it undermines the sense of the holy, the calm and the peaceful. In this context Jane Coyle feels that ‘Creon’s centrality marginalizes Antigone almost to the point of underplaying the importance of the burial itself’. (6) I’d therefore like to concentrate more on an act subsequent to the burial of the dead—the mourning of the dead, a lamentation evoked after