Journal Prompt. Anouilh class 2
Please submit this journal entry only after you've read the whole of Anouilh's Antigone. The entry is due on 30-Apr, the second class on the play.
In Anouilh's Antigone, the Chorus states:
"In drama you struggle, because you hope you're going to survive. It's utilitarian — sordid. But tragedy is gratuitous. Pointless, irremediable. Fit for a king!" (p. 102)
QUESTION: When thinking about readings up to this point in the course, including Anouilh's play (read the play!), does the preceding quotation resonate with you? What kind of response does it prompt from you? Can tragedy be meaningful to those of us who aren't royalty?
PLEASE NOTE: That quotation, perhaps less a straightforward observation than a provocation, needs to be treated with care:
- What is "drama" here? I think the chorus means something like melodrama ("a dramatic work in which the plot, typically sensationalized and for a strong emotional appeal, takes precedence over detailed characterization," Wikipedia) or possibly like what we'd call suspense thrillers, but they may also mean real life. (?) In any case, tragedy seems less real to the Chorus than "drama"
- But even if tragedy is "fit for a king," is it completely unrelatable, completely remote? And what is tragedy, anyway — or maybe better, why* is tragedy?
* In case you're wondering, that "why" is there to make you think. But this is the same "why" that we've been asking from nearly the first moment of the first class.
Text Access
Anouilh, Jean. Antigone. Trans. Barbara Bray. Plays: One. Variation: Methuen World Classics. London: Methuen, 1997. 77-137. Access via Brightspace course site > Content
Introduction
Jean Anouilh
Playwright Jean Anouilh (pronounced "an-OO-ee") once wrote to a critic, "I have no biography and am very glad of it" (Plays: One, p. x). Still, he did have a biography. Born in 1910, in Bordeaux, France, he moved to Paris at a young age. He spent World War 2 in that city under the Nazi occupation. His playwrighting continued after the war, this last arguably influencing his war-time and post-war creative output. He died in 1987.
Anouilh's Antigone
For Anouilh's Antigone, the obvious antecedent will be Sophocles' play of the same name, a play that the French playwright at times seems to map fairly closely. Yet the context for the later play's composition and first production seem to set it far apart in a number of ways. So, for instance, its Prologue, that is, the character who speaks the play's prologue, comments on the play as if offering a self-commentary, and seems to assume that the action is a foregone conclusion. So, too, the ending comes crashing down on the characters with the speed and violence of a tornado. Yet the Chorus anticipates eventual oblivion for its action. Finally, the play as a whole is labeled "Scene One" from beginning to end — as if scene two, the inevitable sequel, remained to be supplied by the viewers themselves. Thus it is, in every sense of the word, a "modernist" creation.
The play was composed and produced under the Nazi occupation of France (the year of production was 1943), and therefore had to be vetted by Nazi censors before it could be staged. Yet the mere fact that its Nazi censors gave it the go-ahead forces us to ask what, if any, are the play's ideological commitments. Do you find any?
As to which, Anouilh's protagonist will, for many, embody the brave spirit of the French resistance standing up to the cowardly compromises of French collaborators — figures like Philippe Pétain, who headed the puppet government in the unoccupied French south after the German occupation of the north. One could also say something similar about Antigone as a forward-looking feminist.
For others, Antigone's eventual acquiescence to Creon's revelations, to his utilitarian rationale for comprise, may suggest a "rebel without a cause," someone seeking death as the easy way out of a difficult moral choice. Read thus, the play could almost be accused of critiquing the resistance as a beau geste pursued only for the sake of gratuitous self-aggrandizement.
Bonnie Honig's comments (Antigone, Interrupted, 2013) are perhaps useful. As we've seen, Honig pushes back against the notion of a self-indulgent and/or unhinged Antigone in Sophocles' play, a version of Antigone that she detects in Anouilh's handling of the character:
For others, [Antigone's] lack of balance is a kind of self-indulgence. Most notably Jean Anouilh (1946 [this is the published version of the play first produced in 1943]) and more recently Jeremy Menekseoglu (2008 [I don't believe this was ever published]) interpret the heroine through a chiasmus: in their versions of the play, she is not driven mad by too much love (for family or underworld). She is, rather, driven to exorbitant love by being mad. . . . In both Menekseoglu's and Anouilh's adaptations of the play, the heroine is motivated less by substantive commitment or principle than by the sheer thrill of conflict and the reward of renown. She is self-regarding, self-absorbed. It is not insignificant that both feature Antigone, in one scene, quite taken with her own image as she combs her hair in a mirror. (p. xii)
Is, though, Anouilh's Antigone just his interpretation of Sophocles' character or is she the French playwright's fresh take on her? At this point, we run the risk of having to deal with as many versions of Antigone as of tragedy itself. So, to get back to the question posed at top, what, if anything, does Antigone's death (Sophocles, Anouihl Antigone), what, for that matter, does Atreus' deranged act of vengeance against his brother (Seneca Thyestes), WHAT DOES TRAGEDY, BROADLY CONSIDERED, DO FOR AUDIENCES? FOR YOU?