The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  “If I must I must,” the girl said. Kate raised her eyebrows, but decided to let that one pass. “Ride easy with it,” Julia had advised, and Kate was prepared to follow this counsel up to a point. She was, as always, astonished to discover how sharply she reacted to rudeness.

  “That takes care of that,” Kate said. “Now, to return to the verse which appeared and disappeared, in each case so provocatively, from the wall. It is perfectly true that I might never have seen it had I not been given a tour of the school, and it is equally true that discretion might perhaps suggest the pretense that I had not seen it. But—I saw it, and if there is one rule I have learned from the young, it is that pretense is to be avoided at all costs. We might even say there is some connection with the Antigone there, but let that pass. The verse was a challenge to which I intend to respond. I suggest that each of you write a poem derived from the Antigone, perhaps from some minor point in it. You will be able to sharpen your versifying techniques, and I will feel better.

  “Now, I’ll pass around a reading list of works which seem to me to come to grips in an interesting way with some of the problems of the Antigone. As we go along, you may discover other works equally or more interesting, and we will add them. I’d like to suggest as a procedure that, since there are seven of us and fourteen weeks, we each take charge of assigning the reading and directing the discussion in two seminar meetings. I’ll start next week, you six will follow in succeeding meetings, and then we’ll go round again. Any comments, suggestions, or spontaneous versifying?”

  “I can’t write poetry,” Alice Kirkland said. “I never could. There are seminars in verse writing, but I didn’t choose to take them.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “I’m sure it’s not too late to choose your way out of this one. Just go in and see Miss Tyringham or her assistant. If you stay, write a poem for next time. It needn’t be a good poem, you know; it can be silly stuff or, which is always good practice, an Italian sonnet, a villanelle, or a sestina. If you have a strict form to stay within, you at least have fun even if you don’t come up with one of the world’s great lyrics.”

  Alice Kirkland opened her mouth to argue and then, as five pairs of eyes bore into hers, ceased. It was clear that Alice would go on playing the devil’s advocate only so long as the others were behind her—something which it was well worth six bad verses to have discovered.

  “I’ve thought of a few possible topics for discussion. We don’t have to do them, but they’re fairly obvious and likely to come up in one form or another anyway. Perhaps they’ll set you to thinking about what aspects of the play really interest you. Incidentally, though I do tend to go on rather—it’s a habit which, like smoking, I seem unable or unwilling to abandon—do interrupt me at any time.

  “I’ve only just begun reading about the Antigone, and I want to be perfectly frank in telling you that. I do not expect to remain one lesson ahead of the class, as is the usual desperate remedy of pedagogues. I expect you’ll catch up with me or overtake me, and my only wish is that we shall all leave the course knowing more about the Antigone and perhaps about how to approach a living, vital work than we did before.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elizabeth McCarthy said. “Is the Antigone any more living or vital than Caesar, or Cicero, say, and does it have to be approached differently?”

  “I think the Antigone is more living, but the point is arguable and, as I have said, I hope you will argue it. There are, after all, two kinds of literature, broadly speaking: that which still speaks to us and our particular anguishes of today, and that which spoke to its contemporary audience and can only have a scholarly interest for us as we try to discover what the work meant to those for whom it was written. Take a play like, oh, Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson. It’s a wonderful comedy if you’ve got up enough about the sixteenth century to be able to get the jokes. Shakespeare, on the other hand, speaks, as we say, to our condition. The study of Jonson’s play I would like to call a task in literary history, the study of Shakespeare’s a task in literary criticism, but it happens that is not a very safe distinction to make, and I hope you will all be quite clear that I am not making it.” The class grinned and Kate felt better.

  “Our interest,” Freemond Oliver said, “even for those of us who struggled through the play in Greek, is that it’s so very now—I mean, the story of a tyrant who wants to impose his rules and his ideas of patriotism, and this young woman, this single individual, who insists on following her own conscience about what is right, and who wants to act from love.”

  “Sure,” Kate said, “but I would argue with you whether Creon is a tyrant—there is a good deal of right on his side, which also makes the play so modern. You can say if you want, and George Eliot has, that the conflict is between individual judgment and the conventions of society, but it is dangerous to assume that the conventions of society are, despite our sneering use of the word ‘conventional,’ necessarily wrong. Without some conventions, each day would be a new battle back at the beginning of time.”

  “Anyone who says he will stone to death whoever disobeys his rules is a tyrant,” Angelica Jablon proclaimed.

  “Creon has a lot of right on his side,” Betsy Stark said, “particularly if you give him credit for changing his mind, which seems to be the human accomplishment least often accomplished. Imagine Bill Buckley changing his mind about student movements or Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  “It’s like the arguments over closing the school for Moratorium Day,” Irene Rexton said. “We ended up having a so-called compromise; that is, we came to school and had discussion groups on the Vietnam War. But that didn’t leave me, for example, if I believed that the war was an honorable one, able to attend school in the ordinary way, which surely I had a right to do.”

  “Isn’t it ‘school’ discussing a war the country’s all hung up on over?” Angelica asked, with more heat and prepositions than were perhaps desirable.

  “The question of whether or not Creon is a tyrant is therefore on the agenda,” Kate quietly said, “as is the connected question of whether Creon or Antigone is in fact the ‘hero’ of Sophocles’ play. Expert opinion, as is its unpleasant habit, is divided. We do know that the role of Antigone was played by the first actor, and that of Creon by the third, which is an example of how historical knowledge can cast light. And then, Antigone dies halfway through the play, never having doubted her destiny, while Creon is alone at the end of the play living out his terrible fate and managing, as Betsy pointed out, to change his mind, alas, too late.

  “Now just a moment,” Kate said, holding up her hand, as several of the girls tried to speak. “I told you to interrupt me and now I won’t let you, so typical of aging teachers, I know. But if I can just get the list of possible subjects completed, I promise you, I solemnly swear, that starting with the next session I will allow you to interrupt me, I may even shut up altogether once in a while. We must get the semester’s schedule made out today so as to have all the mechanics done with once and for all. Creon as tyrant or hero is one subject; I would like to suggest …”

  “Will you put your money where your mouth is?” Alice Kirkland asked. The five pairs of eyes again revolved toward Alice Kirkland, this time returning to observe Kate’s face.

  “If you can manage to rephrase that question so that it exudes some slight air of courtesy, I shall consider it.” Kate allowed the silence which followed this statement to remain unbroken.

  “What I meant,” Alice Kirkland said finally, “is that maybe you would want to agree to put some sum of money, you know, a dime or something, into a pot every time you talk for more than three minutes at a stretch and then, the end of the year, we can have a bash.”

  “Three minutes it is,” Kate answered, “if you’ll allow me, in addition, five minutes at the beginning and end for setting forth and summing up. After all, I’m responsible if we all fall flat on our faces. What’s more I’ll double whatever the amount is at the end, enough to make it a feast. Will you keep tr
ack of the dimes, Elizabeth?”

  “All right, but I think the suggestion is rude, presumptuous and just plain nasty. Why take the seminar if she doesn’t want to hear you talk?”

  “There,” Kate said, “I think you’re being unfair. She wants to try out her ideas, which she can’t do if she’s forever listening to mine. Since, however, it’s I who am being presumptuous and just plain nasty today, let me go on with a list of possible topics for reports and discussions. Has anyone any brilliant suggestions?”

  “Why did she have to bury her brother at all?” Irene Rexton asked. “It had been forbidden, he was a traitor to his country, and anyway, what did she accomplish by throwing some dust over his rotten old corpse?”

  “Oh, God, let’s not go into that!” Freemond Oliver said. “Burial to the Greeks meant something different than it means to us, and that’s it. You didn’t leave the dead to rot, that was divine law, and obviously it was important or Creon wouldn’t have bothered about not burying the body in the first place. The facts are right in the play and, anyhow, it’s a tired subject and tiresome besides.”

  Kate wished, for the first in what was to be a very long series of such wishes, that the young would not be quite so cruel to one another. “That question has rather died from view, I think,” she said to Irene Rexton, “though it was very much argued about at one time. Another question which might interest you is less hashed over: How original was Sophocles in his presentation of the Antigone story? He’s credited with originating Haemon as Antigone’s betrothed; Ismene, her sister, as a foil to Antigone; and the idea of putting Tiresias into the play. Would an account of what Euripides is thought to have done with the story in his lost play on Antigone or what Aeschylus did with it in his Seven Against Thebes interest you?”

  “I’d like to study what Anouilh did with the story,” Betsy Stark said. “Personally, I think Anouilh stinks on ice, but it’s interesting that he wrote such a play, that he left Tiresias out, and that the Nazis let him put it on in Paris. That ties in with the bit about Is Creon a tyrant or isn’t he, tune in next week and find out same time same station, because supposedly the Nazis let him put on that play because they thought Creon was right, and Antigone, who represented the French, was wrong.”

  “The Free French,” Kate rather breathlessly said, “as opposed to the French government which had made a pact with Hitler.” She had long accustomed herself to the fact that such events, to her the very cornerstone of contemporary history, were just ancient history, and rather shopworn at that, to students who had not been born until twelve years or more after the fall of France. “A good idea,” she said to Betsy. “What has always struck me so forcibly about the Antigone is the way it sort of floats into the Greek theater—the whole story of Antigone’s burying her brother contrary to Creon’s edict isn’t even part of the tradition—and then disappears until the nineteenth century. Then it’s discovered by a woman writer, George Eliot, as central to her ideas about identity and destiny.”

  “It’s the sort of story that would have to wait around for a woman to pick it up,” Angelica Jablon said. “Antigone had to be a woman; it’s why Creon can keep sneering at her. ‘No woman’s going to tell me what to do,’ and that sort of thing. Only a woman was enough of a slave to like require the kind of guts Antigone had.”

  “So Virginia Woolf suggests, more or less,” Kate said. “Would that be a topic for you?”

  “I don’t mind if that’s what you want,” Angelica said, “but it seems to me it’s really a story of individuals against the Establishment, the military-industrial complex like, and all that.”

  “I’ll do the woman bit,” Alice Kirkland said. “How about comparing it to Lysistrata?”

  “No harm comparing it to anything you want,” Kate said, “if you think the comparison isn’t just superficial.”

  “It’s not even a comparison,” Betsy said. “One is a real modern problem, the other’s the same old comic turn—woman’s only weapon is sex, so she uses it.”

  “I agree,” Angelica said. “Antigone stands for humanity against arbitrary state law. That she’s a woman just makes it harder to stand up to Creon. But she doesn’t use her sex to bury her brother.”

  “She uses her sex, or rather, her sex matters in her having Haemon on her side,” Elizabeth said.

  “If Haemon were really a male chauvinist like Creon,” Betsy said, “he would have gone for Ismene who’s much more ‘feminine,’ if you’ll excuse the expression.”

  “Perhaps,” Kate said, “we might discuss the role of Tiresias in that connection.”

  “He’s certainly one of the few—perhaps the only true—androgynous characters there are,” Betsy added.

  “What I like about talking to you,” Alice Kirkland said, “is that it’s so educative.”

  “The fact is, I wonder why someone doesn’t write a comedy of manners about him,” Betsy said. “Not to mention the boy he is always leaning on—in play after play, he never gets a chance to open his little mouth, like the bat boy with a baseball team.”

  “So tell us what’s ‘androgynous’ already,” Angelica said.

  “There goes Angelica, the Jewish mother—cut it out, Angie,” Freemond Oliver said. “Angie wrote a skit for the drama group about Saint Mary and Saint Elizabeth as Jewish mothers. It was pretty funny, I’ll admit, but let’s not make it a habit, O.K., Angie?” Her eyes, like Kate’s, were on Elizabeth, who looked embarrassed.

  “O.K., Oliver, so what’s—how do you define ‘androgynous’?”

  “Both men and women,” Betsy said, “have aspects of both sexes, with one sex predominating if you’re lucky, and one sex predominating too much if you’re unlucky enough to end up with a sewing circle or the Elks. Shaw called them manly men and womanly women, but we’ll let that one go by. Tiresias had actually been both a man and a woman, so was the only person who could report on what it was like to be both sexes, an enviable position, was it not?” My God, Kate thought, she’s got a chance to be something, if she doesn’t try too hard and burn it out. Another reason for not teaching the really young—you see so much promise and most of it gone before they get their wisdom teeth.

  “Well,” Betsy continued, “Hera and Zeus got into a rap one day about who had a better time making out; Zeus said women did, and Hera said men did, and so of course they decided to ask old Tiresias, who’d been there and knew.” She paused dramatically, having reached the high point of her story.

  “Sooo?” Elizabeth asked, making them all laugh.

  “So Tiresias said women did, and Hera was so mad she made him blind. Zeus couldn’t undo that, since one god can’t ever undo another’s work, but he tried to make it up to Tiresias by giving him the gift of prophecy, which has always seemed to me pretty poor compensation, since he keeps coming on in play after play, led by that boy, and getting yelled at by all the major characters. Of course,” she concluded, “he has the satisfaction of always being right.”

  “Thank you, Betsy,” Kate said, recognizing a curtain line when she heard one. “If anyone doesn’t have a topic, stop by and discuss it for a minute. Next time I’ll distribute the schedule and you distribute the poems. Each of you get your poem dittoed so we can each have a copy.”

  “Jesus, I don’t want anyone else to look at it,” Alice Kirkland said.

  Kate bravely refrained from advising her to put her money where her mouth was. “The point of a seminar,” she said in her best pedagogical tones, “is so that we may all discuss everything together, and learn not to get our vanity involved. Impossible, but our reach must exceed our grasp or what are seminars for?” And she rapidly adjourned this one, before anybody could decide to try to answer that question.

  Five

  FEBRUARY, with its alternating freezes and false promises of spring, gave way to March which, though it promised more, was less readily believed. People went around reminding each other that the blizzard of ’88 had been in March and mid-March at that. Mrs. Johnson, still at home in t
raction and frantic for diversion, was glad to hear Kate’s reports on the Antigone seminar.

  “Are you using the Jebb translation after all?” she asked Kate, who had come to visit and report.

  “Yes, though they’ve read through at least three others, for comparison, and we spend some time discussing them. It’s odd really that I should prefer Jebb, who’s full of thees and thous, verbs with unfamiliar endings and inverted sentences—everybody talks the way one might have supposed Englishmen would have talked at the time of the Antigone if there had been an English language, though of course one knows they would have talked Anglo-Saxon or something if there had been—I’m not making this at all clear.”

  “I understand exactly what you mean,” Mrs. Johnson said, laughing and then grimacing. “Oh, dear,” she added, “it’s exactly like Saint Sebastian when they asked him if it hurt and he said only when I laugh—coughing and sneezing hurt worse, of course, but I don’t mind not coughing and sneezing. The most recent translations—Watling and Wyckoff and Townsend and so forth—would certainly be easier for actors, and I suppose manage to turn the speeches into idiomatic English, not to say hep talk—but I too prefer Jebb. Can it be that we resent Antigone sounding as up to date as all that?”

  “Well, when you decided the Antigone would be relevant, you certainly had your finger on the pulse of the times, to coin a phrase. The girls have got so involved they’re not only doing twice as much work as I would have dreamed of requiring, but three of them are in Mrs. Banister’s drama group, and they’ve been improvising on Antigone for weeks now, so she tells me. How these dead bones do take on flesh given half a chance.”

  “I’m sure a great part of the credit is yours,” Mrs. Johnson loyally said. “It’s why I insisted they couldn’t just shove a classicist into the spot—not that there aren’t classicists who could have done it, heaven knows, but the ones at the Theban are quite properly interested in the structure of the language and the historical background to Greek lives.”