SOURCE: Howarth, W. D. “Anouilh's Antigone: An Analytical Commentary.” InAnouilh: Antigone, pp. 22-47. London: Edward Arnold, 1983.

[In the following essay, Howarth provides a close reading of Antigone and surveys critical and popular reaction to the play.]

Though longer than Sophocles' original, Anouilh's is not a long play, and structurally the two works are very similar. Like the Greek tragedy, Anouilh's Antigone is not divided into acts, and is written for continuous playing without interval. Moreover, it respects in large measure the Greek convention referred to above, according to which there were seldom more than two principal characters on stage together, and each scene, or episode, was normally a dialogue. Here, the only exceptions are brief linking scenes in which one or more of the Gardes, La Nourrice or Le Choeur, is temporarily present with two of the principal characters, and one isolated occasion on which Créon, Antigone, and Ismène together occupy the stage for no more than a page of dialogue—the counterpart of a similar scène à trois in Sophocles (lines 453-508). For the rest, the play is constructed on the Sophoclean pattern, with a succession of fairly short scenes bringing together either Antigone or Créon and one other character—and as a centrepiece the magnificent long scene between the two main characters themselves, which on its own constitutes well over a quarter of the whole play. Since there are no formal indications in the published text, it may be useful to begin by setting down a scheme of scene-divisions for easy reference. If we follow the established French practice of indicating a new scene with the entrance or exit of a character or characters, we arrive at the following picture¹:

(i) pages 39-41 Prologue

(ii) 42-6 Antigone, La Nourrice

(iii) 46 Antigone, Ismène, La Nourrice

(iv) 46-51 Antigone, Ismène

(v) 51-3 Antigone, La Nourrice

(vi) 53-7 Antigone, Hémon

(vii) 57-8 Antigone, Ismène

(viii) 58-62 Créon, Le Garde

(ix) 62-3 Le Choeur

(x) 63-5 Antigone, Les Gardes

(xi) 65-8 Antigone, Créon, Les Gardes

(xii) 68-85 Antigone, Créon

(xiii) 85-6 Antigone, Créon, Ismène

(xiv) 86-7 Créon, Le Choeur

(xv) 87-9 Créon, Hémon, Le Choeur

(xvi) 89 Créon, Le Choeur

(xvii) 89 Créon, Antigone, Les Gardes, Le Choeur

(xviii) 90-5 Antigone, Le Garde

(xix) 95-6 Le Messager, Le Choeur

(xx) 96-7 Créon, Le Page, Le Choeur

(xxi) 97-8 Le Choeur

It will be seen that on one side of the central confrontation nearly all the scenes involve Antigone: she is indeed absent for only one scene, between Créon and Le Garde; while on the other side Créon is on stage virtually the whole time, the only substantial exception being a scene between Le Garde and Antigone: evidence of a care for balanced composition which suggests a debt to the Sophoclean example.

The list of Personnages, if we compare it with the dramatis personae of the Greek play, hints straightaway both at the closeness of Anouilh's adaptation and at the nature of the changes he has introduced. The substitution of the Gardes (three speaking parts) for a single Sentry allows Anouilh to fill out, and embroider on, the dialogue reported in Sophocles (lines 219ff, 370ff); the Page de Créon is a functional character with a handful of lines, who exists purely as a recipient of the King's confidences, especially in the closing lines of the play. The principal characters—Créon, Antigone, Ismène, and Hémon, even Le Messager and Eurydice—are taken over (though Eurydice becomes a non-speaking part); and the only substantive changes appear to be that Tiresias is missing from the list, and that Antigone is provided with a confidente in the form of her old nurse. If the absence of the blind prophet suggests a ‘désacralisation’, or rationalization, of the mythical subject-matter, we can presume that the introduction of the Nourrice will act as a complement to this, and enable the French playwright to develop sympathy for his heroine on a more familiar domestic level.

There is one entry among the dramatis personae that is somewhat deceptive, however. ‘Le Choeur’ is by no means a simple equivalent of the Greek Chorus—which we may take, incidentally, to have been composed of the standard number of twelve or fifteen members, elders of the city of Thebes and therefore with a stake at first hand in the fortunes of its rulers. Anouilh's Choeur, or Prologue², on the other hand, is an individual, almost entirely detached from the action, and placed, as we shall see, in the unique position of privileged commentator, which suggests a loose comparison (inasmuch as he provides authorial comment) with the ‘omniscient narrator’ of prose fiction. In dramaturgical terms, the function of the Shakespearean Chorus (who speaks the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, for instance, or the Prologue and Epilogue to Henry V) offers a closer analogy than the Chorus of Greek tragedy; though the role of Anouilh's Choeur is subtler and more idiosyncratic than this. In addition to his expository function (pp. 39-42, 62-3) and his function as Epilogue (pp. 97-8), this character does also on occasion assume the more traditional guise of confident and mentor to Créon (pp. 86-9), and even acts as a supplementary messenger (pp. 95-6). Far from being a conventional figure, Le Choeur represents Anouilh's principal innovation; and our attitude towards this feature will play a large part in determining our critical interpretation of the play.

About the staging of the play there is only this to say: that Anouilh seems deliberately to have left this unspecified, and himself to have envisaged a ‘décor neutre’, or purely functional space, with a minimum of embellishment. The ideal, as regards both set and costume, is surely that both should be as unobtrusive as possible, leaving the whole emphasis (possibly assisted by lighting effects) squarely on the characters themselves. Photographs of the early Paris productions show a set of this nature: plain drapes, three steps leading up to a semicircular rostrum, and a pair of simple stools; while the costume (the men wear either evening dress or dinner-jackets; the guards black raincoats; and the women long black dresses except for Ismène who wears white) is similarly intended to leave the greatest possible freedom to the actors³. The photograph of the New York production of 1946, on the other hand, looks wrong: Cedric Hardwicke (Créon) and Katherine Cornell (Antigone), although dressed in a similar manner to their French counterparts, suggest a scene from a drawing-room comedy because the furniture and drapes convey an atmosphere, not of functional austerity but of elegance and comfort. Anouilh obviously had in mind an indoor set, but that is about as far as the decor ought to go: the designer should aim at something with the same non-committal character, mutatis mutandis, as the open-air Greek stage.

(I) LE PROLOGUE (P. 39)

The curtain rises on the ‘décor neutre’, revealing all the characters on stage, who ‘bavardent, tricotent, jouent aux cartes’ during the long speech by the Prologue with which the play opens. The fact that they are all on stage to begin with, occupied in a variety of day-to-day activities, and that they get up and leave in turn towards the end of the Prologue's speech, to return only as and when the action requires their presence, brings convincing visual reinforcement to the idea implicit in what he says: that as well as being characters in Anouilh's play (‘tous les personnages …’), these are members of a company of actors, waiting to assume the roles assigned to them in the forthcoming performance. In other words, Anouilh can be seen to be already suggesting an idea here that he will exploit more explicitly at the beginning of L'Alouette (1953), where the opening stage-direction reads in part:

En entrant, les personnages décrochent leurs casques ou certains de leurs accessoires qui avaient été laissés sur scène à la fin de la précédente représentation, ils s'installent sur les bancs dont ils rectifient l'ordonnance …⁴.

However, the Prologue does not say ‘Ces acteurs vont vous jouer l'histoire d'Antigone’, but ‘Ces personnages …’. So that even when the actors have taken on their allotted parts within the play, they are still going to be performing, or acting out, a predetermined course of events: a notion that is at once given a most challenging illustration: ‘Antigone …’ (that is, not merely the actress playing the part, but the created character within the play) ‘… pense qu'elle va être Antigone tout à l'heure’. For the time being, she is ‘la petite maigre … assise là-bas’, ‘la maigre jeune fille noiraude et renfermée …’; but her destiny, of which she is aware, is already calling her to make her stand against Créon, and to die for it. She is set apart from us, the spectators, ‘qui sommes là bien tranquilles à la regarder, … qui n'avons pas à mourir ce soir’—set apart not only because as an actress she has stepped into the imaginary world on the other side of the footlights, but also because in her role as Antigone she is marked by a tragic destiny that does not concern itself with ordinary men and women.

It is easy to become over-familiar with a well known text, with the result that one may come to overlook its challenging or provocative character. This opening paragraph is a remarkable tour de force, presenting as it does with such economy of language the striking interplay of different levels of reality and illusion, and introducing the notion of life as the acting out of preordained roles, which will figure prominently in later scenes.

Ismène is contrasted throughout with Antigone, in every possible way. It is a contrast that could no doubt be said to be implicit in Sophocles, but from the beginning Anouilh makes it explicit: ‘la blonde, la belle, l'heureuse Ismène’ establishes her as the opposite of ‘la maigre jeune fille noiraude et renfermée …’ with her ‘petit sourire triste’. The anecdotal account of the betrothal of Antigone and Hémon again develops suggestions that are perhaps latent in the Greek text, though in this case more of Anouilh's own gratuitous invention has gone into it. In particular, the effect of the anecdote is to present the relationship in anachronistic terms: though much less glaring than some of the examples that are to follow, the deliberate anachronism of ‘un soir de bal où il n'avait dansé qu'avec Ismène’, ‘éblouissante dans sa nouvelle robe’, ‘L'orchestre attaquait une nouvelle danse’, ‘Ismène riait aux éclats … au milieu des autres garçons’ is an attempt to close the gap between the mythological figures and the members of a twentieth-century audience. The last sentence of this paragraph: ‘Il ne savait pas qu'il ne devait pas exister de mari d'Antigone …’ reverts to the suggestive fatalism of the opening lines, and with ‘ce titre princier …’ the language takes on a more elevated tone; but the overall effect of the paragraph is to make the spectator feel: ‘these are characters like ourselves’; they are no longer the remote heroes of a centuries-old tradition.

The thumbnail sketch of Créon looks forward to what will be the dominant traits of Anouilh's King: ‘Il a des rides, il est fatigué. Il joue au jeu difficile de conduire les hommes’. Again, suggestive touches bridge the gap and help us to envisage Créon in twentieth-century terms, not only as a man of culture and a patron of the arts: ‘la musique, les belles reliures, les longues flâneries chez les petits antiquaires de Thèbes’, but also as a man of conscience devoted to his duty: ‘il a retroussé ses manches …’, ‘… comme un ouvrier au seuil de sa journée’.

Eurydice, with her knitting, is an Anouilh stereotype: compare La Mère in L'Alouette, who similarly ‘tricotera pendant toute la pièce, sauf quand c'est à elle’; and so are the card-playing Gardes. ‘Ils sentent l'ail, le cuir et le vin rouge …’: here Anouilh is using his Prologue very much like an omniscient novelist, for ‘Ils sentent …’ is not something demonstrable, that spectators can test empirically; we have to take the author's word for it, as an ‘objective correlative’ of their mental limitations: ‘… et ils sont dépourvus de toute imagination’.

The Prologue's last paragraph discreetly fulfils a traditional expository function, with a brief summary of the antecedents of the plot: the events following on the exile of Oedipus and the curse laid on his sons. The events, indeed, of Racine's tragedy La Thébaïde; and Anouilh's phrase ‘les deux frères ennemis sont morts …’ reproduces, no doubt intentionally, the subtitle (Les Frères ennemis) of that play. At this point, the closing lines of the Prologue's speech bring us into the closest contact yet with Sophocles' text, where Antigone says:

Eteocles has been buried, they tell me, in state,
With all honourable observances due to the dead.
But Polynices, just as unhappily fallen—the order
Says he is not to be buried, not to be mourned;
To be left unburied, unwept, a feast of flesh
For keen-eyed carrion birds.

(lines 20-5)

(II) ANTIGONE, LA NOURRICE (P. 42)

The dialogue begins with a passage of considerable charm, which owes nothing to the Greek original. Antigone's poetic evocation of the distinctive beauty of the hour before dawn, with its personification of the sleeping world of nature, has something in it of the imaginative quality of Giraudoux's prose-poetry (‘Le jardin dormait encore. Je l'ai surpris, nourrice. Je l'ai vu sans qu'il s'en doute. C'est beau un jardin qui ne pense pas encore aux hommes … je me suis glissée dans la compagne sans qu'elle s'en aperçoive’), and one might be tempted to remember Anouilh's admiration for that writer. However, this is not ‘fine writing’ for its own sake: the poetic touches are entirely acceptable in their context, where they help to characterize Antigone as herself a child of nature, and there is none of the straining after effect that sometimes marks Giraudoux's ‘preciosity’.

At various points during this scene the dialogue almost takes on a comic tone, as Antigone and the Nourrice talk at cross purposes; not only does Antigone deliberately play on her old nurse's misunderstanding of the situation, but the Nourrice, alternately solicitous and scolding, acts on the familiar level of ordinary domestic considerations (‘Il va falloir te laver les pieds avant de te remettre au lit … Je me lève pour voir si elle n'était pas découverte. Je trouve son lit froid …’), while Antigone on the other hand constantly invests the ordinary with a mysterious significance. The conversation between these two characters is of course a complete innovation, and indeed their invented relationship is one of the factors that contribute to the ‘rounding’ of Antigone's personality, and help to establish her close affinity with other early Anouilh heroines. Not that the whole scene is equally successful in this respect: the fragment of imaginary dialogue between the Nourrice and the dead Jocasta is somewhat laboured, and borders on the sentimental (‘Voilà ce qu'elle me dira, ta mère, là-haut, quand j'y monterai, et moi j'aurai honte, honte à en mourir si je n'étais pas déjà morte, et je ne pourrai que baisser la tête et répondre: “Madame Jocaste, c'est vrai”’); but it is obviously introduced in order to prepare the way for Antigone's cryptic hint: ‘Elle sait pourquoi je suis sortie ce matin’. More hints, in which the fate-motif is adumbrated (‘… je n'aurai jamais d'autre amoureux …’, ‘il ne faut pas que je sois petite ce matin’) bring the scene to a close, as Ismène enters and the Nourrice departs to prepare an anachronistic cup of coffee.

(III)-(IV) ANTIGONE, ISMèNE, LA NOURRICE (P. 46)

From the beginning of this scene too, it is evident that the two speakers are not on the same ‘wavelength’; but this time it is not so much a question of a ‘sub-text’—mysterious hints that remain to be elucidated—as of an open and explicit difference of viewpoint. The subject of their disagreement is clear, since the Prologue has already informed us of Créon's edict; and throughout this scene we see disobedience, rebellion, contrasted with conformism and acceptance. Ismène's opposition to her sister is categorical: it is based on temperamental difference (‘Tu es folle … Nous ne pouvons pas … Il nous ferait mourir … Je ne veux pas mourir’), and it is also backed up by rational argument: ‘… je comprends un peu notre oncle … Il est le roi, il faut qu'il donne l'exemple’. Antigone, for her part, is capable of expressing a wistful regret for what might have been (‘Moi aussi j'aurais bien voulu ne pas mourir’); but she answers her sister in an equally categorical fashion, giving expression to the life-as-theatre metaphor which contributes so powerfully to the fatalistic theme of the play: ‘A chacun son rôle. Lui, il doit nous faire mourir, et nous, nous devons aller enterrer notre frère. C'est comme cela que ç'a été distribué’.

On the other hand, it is clear from the beginning that Antigone's ready acceptance of this fate also depends on subjective, temperamental factors (‘Moi je ne veux pas comprendre un peu … Je ne veux pas avoir raison …’). Her long speech: ‘Comprendre … Vous n'avez que ce mot-là dans la bouche, tous, depuis que je suis toute petite …’ may seem more suited, in some of its familiar detail (‘Il fallait comprendre qu'on ne peut pas toucher à l'eau … Il fallait comprendre qu'on ne doit pas manger tout à la fois …’), to the situation of other Anouilh heroines than to that of a high-born daughter of the court of Thebes; but there can be no doubt that Anouilh's Antigone is presented as a consistent personality from the beginning, and the intransigent opposition to Créon is already being prepared in her stand against Ismène which, however arbitrary it may appear, unambiguously establishes her refusal to compromise: ‘Comprendre. Toujours comprendre. Moi je ne veux pas comprendre. Je comprendrai quand je serai vieille …’.

The scene with Ismène also gives expression to the important paradox that this character who seemingly arbitrarily renounces the possibility of life and happiness, does so in the name of a love of life more intense than that of her sister:

Qui se levait la première, le matin, rien que pour sentir l'air froid sur sa peau nue? Qui se couchait la dernière seulement quand elle n'en pouvait plus de fatigue, pour vivre encore un peu de la nuit? Qui pleurait déjà toute petite, en pensant qu'il y avait tant de petites bêtes, tant de brins d'herbe dans le pré et qu'on ne pouvait pas tous les prendre?

This speech develops the ‘child of nature’ theme of the opening scene, and establishes a positive complement to her apparent death-wish.

W. M. Landers, commenting on this scene in his edition of the play, writes as follows:

Ismène's attitude here is quite different from that of her namesake … The Ismene of Sophocles hangs back through fear of the consequences; she confesses to a sense of guilt at not helping her sister and entreats the dead to forgive her. Anouilh's Ismène is really on Créon's side, at least in the early part of the play …

and also cites the ‘shift in the attitude of the populace’, who, according to Ismène, here side with Créon, as evidence of a desire to ‘equalize the moral forces opposed to each other in the central scene’ (p. 101). It seems rather that these are subsidiary considerations, and that fundamentally the French Ismène, like her Greek counterpart, is motivated by lack of courage, so that when she says ‘Je comprends un peu notre oncle’ and ‘ils pensent tous comme lui dans la ville’, she is trying to rationalize what is essentially a question of temperament. Her final plea: ‘C'est bon pour les hommes de croire aux idées et de mourir pour elles. Toi tu es une fille’ is not only a close verbal echo of Sophocles' text at this point:

O think, Antigone; we are women; it is not for us
To fight against men …

(lines 52-3)

but it also expresses what I take to be the essence of the character's psychological motivation in both plays.

(V) ANTIGONE, LA NOURRICE (P. 51)

The Nourrice's entry with coffee and tartines takes us away from Sophocles again; and in the theatre, this second scene of familiar dialogue on domestic matters has the effect of lowering the dramatic tension. The scene has been criticized for an excess of sentimentality: this is a matter of subjective taste, though it may well seem to most readers or spectators that Anouilh is taking something of a risk by placing such emphasis on the heroine's childlike relationship with her old nurse. The series of appellations ‘mon pigeon’, ‘ma petite colombe’, ‘ma mésange’, ‘ma tourterelle’ would not be out of place in a comedy; indeed, Anouilh uses a similar sequence elsewhere for comic effect.⁵ On the other hand, Antigone's own affectionate appeal to the simple certainties of the past (‘Mais fais-moi tout de même bien chaud comme lorsque j'étais malade …’) is clearly meant to establish quite a different mood. But what might almost be seen as a kind of infantile regression on her part—suggested in the invocation of ‘the wicked giant, the sandman, and the bogeyman who comes and steals little children away’, together with the childlike rhythms of her speech at this point (‘Alors je te le demande: ne la gronde pas. Promets que tu ne la gronderas pas. Je t'en prie, dis, je t'en prie, nounou … Et puis, promets-moi aussi que tu lui parleras, que tu lui parleras souvent’) is surely rather overdone, and falls on the wrong side of the borderline between deeply-felt emotion and a more superficial sentiment. By the same token, the page devoted to the heroine's concern for the future of her dog, though it is no doubt intended to reinforce the feeling of foreboding that we by now share with Antigone, but which the Nourrice cannot share, runs the risk of producing the opposite effect by its build-up of homely detail, and of trivializing, rather than deepening, our relationship with the character.

(VI) ANTIGONE, HéMON (P. 53)

The playwright is on surer ground in the scene between Antigone and Hémon: a scene that would have been out of place in Sophocles' version both for the structural reason discussed above, and also because his age took far less interest than we do in the literary possibilities of a romantic relationship between a pair of lovers. To have written a modern play on this subject, however, without taking the opportunity to bring the ill-starred lovers together, would have been virtually unthinkable; and as we have shown in our comments on the structure of Anouilh's play, above, the creation of this scene, which completes the triangular relationship between the principal characters, is one of the means by which the French dramatist produced a shift of emphasis, from the tragedy of Creon to a play whose focus is the conflict between Créon and Antigone. And while the subject-matter of the scene is of necessity just as new (and in fact may seem just as incongruous in relation to the Sophoclean material, for the notion of Antigone borrowing her sister's dress, perfume and lipstick in order to make herself attractive is another of the anachronisms that link her to characters like Thérèse and Jeannette), its effect is to heighten the emotional tension, and to increase our apprehension of impending catastrophe, rather than to dissipate them by means of irrelevance and triviality. Antigone's tender evocation of the child she and Hémon now will never have; her use of a conditional tense (‘Le petit garçon que nous aurions eu … je l'aurais serré si fort … Il aurait eu une maman … plus sûre que toutes les mères … toi, tu aurais eu une vraie femme … j'aurais été très fière d'être ta femme …’) that Hémon is unable to understand; her confession of an unsuccessful attempt to give herself to Hémon: all of these form part of a consistent build-up to the poignant climax of the scene, the elegiac ultimatum to her bewildered lover: ‘… jamais, jamais, je ne pourrai t'épouser’ and the following speech, whose passionate intensity overcomes the threat of melodrama and carries complete conviction:

Hémon, tu me l'as juré! Sors. Sors tout de suite sans rien dire. Si tu parles, si tu fais un seul pas vers moi, je me jette par cette fenêtre. Je te le jure, Hémon. Je te le jure sur la tête du petit garçon que nous avons eu tous les deux en rêve, du seul petit garçon que j'aurai jamais. Pars maintenant, pars vite. Tu sauras demain. Tu sauras tout à l'heure.

Hémon goes out at a high point of dramatic and emotional tension, all the more convincing because the scene has persuaded us of the couple's reciprocal affection. Hémon's is very much the more passive contribution, however, and it is Antigone who brings out the quality of their present relationship:

Tu m'aimes, n'est-ce pas? Tu m'aimes comme une femme? Tes bras qui me serrent ne mentent pas … ? Tes grandes mains posées sur mon dos ne mentent pas, ni ton odeur, ni ce bon chaud, ni cette grande confiance qui m'inonde quand j'ai la tête au creux de ton cou?

as well as the impossibility of a shared future, with her superlatives and temporal adverbs which stress the finality of the step she is taking: ‘C'est la dernière folie … jamais, jamais, je ne pourrai t'épouser … [le] seul petit garçon que j'aurai jamais … C'est tout ce que tu peux faire encore pour moi …’.

Much has been written about the quality of love in the early Anouilh plays, where it frequently tends to take the form of a tender, loyal comradeship whose overtly sexual character is much played down: what H. Gignoux calls, in a happy phrase that is not too wide of the mark, ‘une sorte de camaraderie garçonnière, de scoutisme mixte’ (p. 71). Elsewhere, the images ‘petit soldat’, ‘petit frère’, ‘petit copain’ recur; and although Anouilh does not draw on the same range of imagery to portray the relationship between Antigone and Hémon, nevertheless there are certain clear hints of an affinity in this respect with the system of values in force in La Sauvage and Eurydice. When Antigone says: ‘Je suis noire et maigre. Ismène est rose et dorée comme un fruit’; when she says: ‘j'avais fait tout cela pour être un peu plus comme les autres filles’—even when she compares herself to other women with ‘leurs vraies poitrines’—she is implicitly defending a conception of her relationship with Hémon that is based not on conventional ideas of sexual attraction, but on a comradeship that is essentially asexual. It is true that she confesses to having tried to lead Hémon on so that he might want her to give herself to him; but the fact that her attempt was frustrated perhaps indicates that she had been acting out of character. This in no way detracts from the intimacy of the couple; and indeed I think it adds to the emotive power of the situation. For the reader or spectator who can relate Antigone in this way to other early heroines of similar temperamental make-up, her gauche and inexpert attempt to achieve sexual fulfilment before she goes to her death gives an extra poignancy to the scene.

(VII) ANTIGONE, ISMèNE (P. 57)

This brief scene is of capital importance: if not in terms of plot or character, at least in terms of dramatic impact. Ismène's second appearance represents another innovation—in Sophocles we see Ismene twice only, and her second scene corresponds to the French character's third appearance—and its justification is that it rounds off the exposition, properly speaking, and leads up to the tremendously effective ‘curtain-line’ that marks Antigone's exit: ‘C'est trop tard. Ce matin, quand tu m'as rencontrée, j'en venais’. Preliminaries are now over, and the ‘coup de théâtre’ of this announcement brings us fully up to date with past events; if Anouilh had followed a conventional division into acts, this would have been the end of Act I. As it is, it is the first occasion on which the stage has been left empty between episodes, without what in neo-classical dramaturgy is called ‘liaison des scènes’; and in the theatre, the director may well decide to emphasize the fact by a slightly longer pause before the next sequence begins.

(VIII) CRéON, LE GARDE (P. 58)

Compared with Sophocles' Sentry, Anouilh's Garde is much more obviously a representative of the rough common soldier (cf. the stage-direction ‘C'est une brute’); and despite the closeness in certain details to the Sophoclean text, there is a degree of caricatural exaggeration which suggests that Anouilh's aim here is much nearer to Shakespeare's: that is the creation of ‘comic relief’ for its own sake, rather than (as in Sophocles, if one can accept Kitto's comment, quoted above) the establishing of a coherent scheme of things in which the divine purpose finds expression in the most diverse kinds of humanity.

To begin with, it is the closeness to Sophocles that strikes one: the elements are the same, assembled flexibly and with a certain amount of discreet expansion:

—It's this, sir. The corpse … someone has just

Buried it and gone. Dry dust over the body

They scattered, in the manner of holy ritual.

—What! Who dared to do it?

—I don't know, sir.

There was no sign of a pick, no scratch of a shovel …

(lines 205-18)⁶

—Le cadavre, chef. Quelqu'un l'avait recouvert. Oh! pas grand' chose. Ils n'avaient pas eu le temps avec nous autres à côté. Seulement un peu de terre … Mais assez tout de même pour le cacher aux vautours.

—Tu es sûr que ce n'est pas une bête en grattant?

—Non, chef. On a d'abord espéré ça, nous aussi. Mais la terre était jetée sur lui, selon les rites. C'est quelqu'un qui savait ce qu'il faisait.

—Qui a osé? Qui a été assez fou pour braver ma loi? As-tu relevé des traces?

—Rien, chef. Rien qu'un pas plus léger qu'un passage d'oiseau …

The Greek guards, like the French, have drawn lots to see who shall carry the unwelcome message to Creon; and although Sophocles' Sentry is perhaps less prone than Anouilh's Garde to insinuate that his colleagues are more to blame than himself: ‘On n'a pas parlé, chef, je vous le jure! Mais moi, j'étais ici et peut-être que les autres, ils l'ont déjà dit à la relève …’, there is a remarkable debt to the original, and this scene is in one sense one of the most closely copied in the whole play.

On the other hand, Anouilh's innovations and anachronisms are such as to give his Garde a distinct personality. With the mixture of servility and familiarity conveyed by the obtrusive ‘chef’ (which occurs no fewer than 21 times in this scene), the military jargon (‘J'ai dix-sept ans de service. Je suis engagé volontaire, la médaille, deux citations. Je suis bien noté, chef. Moi je suis “service” …’) and the popular expressions (‘On est les trois du piquet de garde … Les autres c'est … Mes supérieurs ils disent …’), Garde Jonas, ‘de la Deuxième Compagnie’⁷, comes across as a coherent representation of a regular serving soldier in the modern idiom, as we know him from novels and films.

In Créon's case, the anachronisms are more discreet—‘avec leur or bloqué dans Thèbes’, for instance—so much so that it is possible to overlook even ‘qui crachera devant mes fusils’ at a first reading. But the whole of the long speech in which these phrases occur (‘Un enfant … L'opposition brisée qui sourd et mine déjà partout …’), while not incompatible in general terms with the psychology of Sophocles' King, establishes Créon too as a sort of figure that is familiar to us in a modern context: a police chief or American state governor, perhaps—though ‘les chefs de la plèbe puant l'ail’ has a European rather than a transatlantic connotation. In this first meeting, Créon is presented as above all a realist. Not quite certain of the support of his people, suspicious of the role of the clergy, he is determined—unlike his Greek counterpart who insists on discovering the identity of the lawbreaker—to keep the matter quiet, so as not to provide a pretext for further unrest:

… si tu parles, si le bruit court dans la ville qu'on a recouvert le cadavre de Polynice, vous mourrez tous les trois.

One of Anouilh's additions in this scene, unremarkable in itself, has a certain symbolic significance. This is the ‘petite pelle d'enfant’ (anachronistic in that we may assume that Oedipus and Jocasta were not in the habit of taking their young family for seaside holidays) which forms part of an important complex of references to childhood and the past—such as we have already commented on in the second scene with the Nourrice—by which the youth and the childlike qualities of Anouilh's heroine are established as a dominant motif. For the moment, the evidence of the spade serves to set Créon's suspicions on the wrong tack; but for the spectator who is already in the know, it symbolizes those values of incorruptible innocence and of obstinate determination to which Antigone has already given expression. And as Créon goes out, the words he speaks to the young Page:

Tu mourrais, toi, pour moi? Tu crois que tu irais avec ta petite pelle? … Oui, bien sûr, tu irais tout de suite toi aussi …

not only have the effect of showing a more humane, understanding aspect of his character, but can also be related in the spectator's mind to the theme of obstinate dedication to a cause on the part of Antigone herself.

(IX) LE CHOEUR (P. 62)

The reflections on tragedy by Le Choeur constitute one of the most distinctive and one of the best-known scenes of Anouilh's play. The practice of putting a mouthpiece of the author's on stage to express, not a comment on the specific action of the individual play, but generalizations about fate, free will or similar philosophical preoccupations is of course an extension of the practice of Greek tragedy, where choric odes commonly also departed from the play's specific context in order to utter philosophical truths of more general application, as in this example from the Antigone itself:

Happy are they who know not the taste of evil.
From a house that heaven hath shaken
The curse departs not
But falls upon all of the blood,
Like the restless surge of the sea when the dark storm drives
The black sand hurled from the deeps
And the Thracian gales boom down
On the echoing shore.

(lines 509-16)

Among modern dramatists, Cocteau had most notably exploited the possibilities of this device. His own Antigone (1922) had virtually been an adaptation of Sophocles' text, somewhat abridged but little changed; but in a similar adaptation of Sophocles in Oedipe-Roi (1927) he had introduced a Prologue-chorus to comment on the cruelty of the gods in setting traps for men. This theme is developed, and given considerable prominence, in La Machine infernale seven years later; and Cocteau's dramaturgical invention here, as well as the specific image of the ‘infernal machine’ itself, must be considered as a major inspiration of the scene under consideration.

In Cocteau's play, the Prologue is used (as a disembodied Voice) not only to present the audience with a summary of the plot in advance, but also to comment on the action, which is described as follows:

Regarde, spectateur, remonté à bloc, de telle sorte que le ressort se déroule avec lenteur tout le long d'une vie humaine, une des plus parfaites machines construites par les dieux infernaux pour l'anéantissement mathématique d'un mortel.

And at the beginning of each act, Cocteau uses La Voix to similar effect, in a manner more akin to that of the Shakespearean than of the Greek Chorus:

La grande peste de Thèbes a l'air d'être le premier échec à cette fameuse chance d'Oedipe, car les dieux ont voulu, pour le fonctionnement de leur machine infernale, que toutes les malchances surgissent sous le déguisement de la chance …

(Act IV)

From the beginning of this scene in Anouilh, the same metaphor recurs insistently (‘Maintenant le ressort est bandé. Cela n'a plus qu'à se dérouler tout seul … on donne le petit coup de pouce pour que cela démarre … on n'a plus qu'à laisser faire … Cela roule tout seul. C'est minutieux, bien huilé depuis toujours’). This sustained image, borrowed from Cocteau, presents a similar, though not an identical, view of the tragic action—the difference being that according to Anouilh's Choeur the human victim seems to be involved in a mechanistic process (there is no indication as to who winds up the clockwork mechanism), whereas for Cocteau the process implies the hostility of the gods: supernatural beings who in his scheme of things have their own superior destiny which they must obey: ‘Le mystère a ses mystères. Les dieux possèdent leurs dieux’ (La Machine infernale, Act II). In human terms, however, the view of tragedy is essentially the same: it is an inexorable, impersonal process that man is powerless to resist.

The plot of La Machine infernale is fully consistent with that proposition and with its corollary, that free will does not exist. For whenever Oedipe thinks he is making a free choice in order to frustrate the oracle's prediction, he is in fact playing into the hands of fate and making his ‘anéantissement’ the more certain. But the application to Antigone's case is a good deal more ambiguous. It is true that the image of the tragic ‘machine’ fits in well enough with the life-as-theatre metaphor, the notion of the heroine acting out a pre-ordained destiny, which is expressed so challengingly in the opening lines spoken by Le Prologue; but as we shall see, this is not an interpretation to which we are necessarily led to subscribe by the main thrust of the action.

In the second paragraph of his soliloquy, Le Choeur sketches a contrast between tragedy and ‘le drame’ which prefigures, at least in its opening lines, the paragraph quoted above from Camus's 1955 lecture. ‘Le drame’ (that is to say, melodrama) is to do with the conflict between the wicked and the good (‘ces traîtres’—the term always used of the ‘villains’ of melodrama—… ces méchants acharnés … cette innocence persécutée’), whereas in tragedy ‘On est tous innocents en somme’. This can be taken either to mean that, as Camus was to say—and as conventional theories of tragedy ever since Aristotle had claimed—the tragic hero is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but a character of ‘middling virtue’; or else perhaps to show that Anouilh is offering, as Landers suggests, a ‘typically Romantic’ view of ‘Man as the eternal victim of creation’ (p. 103). In any case, Le Choeur continues, ‘C'est une question de distribution’: all are acting out their predestined roles. And it is for this reason, no doubt, that tragedy is ‘propre’, ‘reposant’, ‘tranquille’. Chance, the accidental and avoidable, are excluded from tragedy; there is no reprieve, no hope. This view of the tragic process has a long and reputable ancestry in the history of European literature—Landers suggests a parallel with the stoicism of Vigny's ‘La Mort du loup’, and there is also a clear affinity with the twentieth-century philosophy of the Absurd—but the resonance of ‘le sale espoir’ is peculiar to Anouilh, and to the very subjective scale of ethical values reflected in heroines like Thérèse and Antigone.

As Antigone enters, dragged in by the Gardes, Le Choeur's comment refers us back to the theme expressed in the opening lines of the play; while ‘pour la première fois’, together with ‘pour la dernière fois’ that we shall encounter later, provides a temporal framework for the unique tragic event, setting it apart from the accidental contingencies of ordinary everyday life.

(X) ANTIGONE, LES GARDES (P. 63)

This brief linking scene creates the opportunity to develop the homely, popular element contributed to the play by the Gardes: the sort of lifelike vignette that Anouilh does so well. With their naive assumption that they are about to become national heroes, and their self-absorbed argument about the relative merits of eating-places, these are the simple soldiers of any modern army; but they are also representatives of a more timeless humanity. If their dialogue is comic, it is because of its unconscious incongruity in the present context. This may be the tragedy of the house of Thebes, but it is essential to Anouilh's purpose (as, less obviously, it had been to Sophocles') that the heroine's preoccupation with death be juxtaposed with the obtrusive continuity of ordinary life.

(XI) ANTIGONE, CRéON, LES GARDES (P. 65)

By contrast, the scene which follows returns us to Sophocles. The two supplementary guards now become non-speaking figures, and their spokesman is given a narrative that closely corresponds to the original. Anouilh does not retain the feature (‘a storm of dust, like a plague from heaven’, line 358) which has suggested to some commentators a supernatural intervention, hiding Antigone's reappearance from the guards; and some other details are the result of analogical transposition rather than of translation. And similarly, the circumstantial detail with which Antigone herself invests the episode of the ‘petite pelle’ is obviously also an invention of the modern dramatist. For the rest, the narrative is handled with the same economy as in Sophocles, and the scene leads into, rather than holds up, the confrontation between the two central characters.

(XII) ANTIGONE, CRéON (P. 68)

Previous scenes have shown us that Créon is a realist, and that Antigone is pursuing some kind of ideal, or absolute; but the precise nature of their motives has not yet been revealed. It is the detailed unfolding of the characters' motivation, and the changing patterns of moral advantage—and therefore of sympathy in dramatic terms—that this produces, which provides the fascination of this justly celebrated scene. Not so much curiosity as to its outcome, for that we already know. We know Antigone is ordained to die, but not—in a play from which the gods are absent—how the moral forces, Camus's two ‘forces légitimes’, will be given dramatic expression.

Créon's first thought is to hush the matter up, and to prevent scandal ('tu vas rentrer chez toi … Je ferai disparaître ces trois hommes'); but Antigone firmly rejects this expedient, with the first of her reasons for disobeying Créon's order: ‘Je le devais’. This moral imperative is expanded, drawing on the traditional interpretation of the action by Sophocles' heroine (‘Ceux qu'on n'enterre pas errent éternellement …’), and expressing this in the form of an appeal to the notion of family—even the ill-fated family of Oedipus, whose members are now united in death: a passage whose simple imagery (‘Polynice aujourd'hui a achevé sa chasse. Il rentre à la maison …’) is both eloquent and moving.

There is no doubt that these opening exchanges generate a sympathetic feeling for Antigone, and that Créon's political expediency alienates our sympathy:

—C'était un révolté et un traître, tu le savais.

—C'était mon frère.

However, the next ‘movement’ of the scene⁸ is introduced by Créon's acknowledgement that the rough justice of political expediency is not the answer, and that Antigone's motives require a different approach: in his long speech beginning ‘L'orgueil d'Oedipe …’ he changes from a threatening, hectoring approach to a more reflective, more reasonable manner. If his sarcasm at the expense of the ‘orgueil d'Oedipe’ and of the death-wish of father and daughter, shows his inability to comprehend Antigone's motivation, nevertheless his dignified exposition of his own attitude, his determination to be a ‘prince sans histoire’, is not lacking in humanity; and his touch of ironic humour in ‘si demain un messager crasseux dévale du fond des montagnes …’ also helps to redress somewhat the balance of sympathy.

The final paragraph of this long speech is still based on the same assumption: that Antigone has made her gesture, and that will be the end of the matter if it can be kept quiet; but Créon is now using a tone of friendly advice (‘Tu vas rentrer chez toi …’) rather than threatening her. The revelation that this second approach is no more effective than the first—represented with graphic economy when Antigone makes to go out of the door which leads back out of the palace, and by the pause that follows—introduces the next ‘movement’, which comes nearer to a genuine exchange of views, and to a real attempt on Créon's part to persuade, rather than to browbeat, his adversary.

The attempt at persuasion starts from Antigone's 'il faut faire ce que l'on peut': a confession of obstinate determination in face of absolute power. To argue her out of this attitude, Créon carries out a rational analysis of ‘cet enterrement dans les règles’: the ceremony is a ‘pantomime’, performed by mercenary priests, and is lacking in dignity and humanity. At each point Antigone gives way: ‘Oui, je les ai vus … Si, je l'ai pensé … Oui, c'est absurde’—and this last term has at least some of the connotations it possesses in the vocabulary of twentieth-century philosophy. Antigone's defiance is an ‘acte gratuit’, devoid of rational meaning, and the exchange which follows is one of the most significant of the whole scene:

—Pourquoi fais-tu ce geste, alors? Pour les autres, pour ceux qui y croient? Pour les dresser contre moi?

—Non.

—Ni pour les autres, ni pour ton frère? Pour qui alors?

—Pour personne. Pour moi.

What had begun as a pious tribute to the dead is now acknowledged as a gratuitous death-wish; and Creon has to admit that although he might have saved Antigone from the penalty of his law, he is powerless to save her from herself. ‘J'ai le mauvais rôle, c'est entendu, et tu as le bon’: the distribution of sympathy he recognizes is a conventional one, though it is a ‘distribution’ (to use Le Choeur's term) that has a touch of the melodramatic about it, with its implication of a polarization into black and white. However, we are already aware that the relationship is not as simple as this: Antigone is apparently by no means a reluctant victim, just as Créon is not the conventional villain (‘Si j'étais une bonne brute ordinaire de tyran …’). And the next ‘movement’ of the scene is devoted to a thoroughly plausible, and intellectually acceptable, exposition of the ‘mauvais rôle’ in which he has been cast. This section does not immediately get under way, though: the linking passage in which Créon tries a show of physical strength, while it fits well enough into the context as a demonstration of how a ‘brute ordinaire de tyran’ might behave, is really justified in theatrical terms as a visual distraction, breaking up this very long dialectical exchange. Similarly, the stage-direction ‘Il la fait asseoir … Il enlève sa veste … en bras de chemise’ invests the pause before the next ‘movement’ of the dialogue with a striking visual character. Créon has stripped off all pretence, as it were, in taking off his jacket, and he will now reveal to Antigone the secrets of his ‘métier’: a job that is ‘ignoble’, but which leaves him no choice. The choice that once faced him, as it now faces Antigone, was to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’:

… je me suis senti tout d'un coup comme un ouvrier qui refusait un ouvrage. Cela ne m'a pas paru honnête. J'ai dit oui.

The essence of the confrontation between the two characters is the opposition between Créon's ‘oui’ and Antigone's ‘non’—not only a refusal to obey Créon's edict, but a denial of a whole way of life, a rejection of life itself. And it is in this section of the scene that Créon's defence of an ordered, stable society begins to win our intellectual adherence:

Le cadavre de ton frère qui pourrit sous mes fenêtres, c'est assez payé pour que l'ordre règne dans Thèbes. Mon fils t'aime. Ne m'oblige pas à payer avec toi encore. J'ai assez payé.

And perhaps even more than our intellectual adherence, for his speech beginning ‘Mais, bon Dieu! Essaie de comprendre …’, with its sustained image of the ship of state, forces our admiration for a decent man doing a necessary job of work, however unpalatable. But if Créon has won the spectator over at this point, he has made no impression so far on Antigone herself:

Je ne veux pas comprendre. C'est bon pour vous. Moi je suis là pour autre chose que pour comprendre. Je suis là pour vous dire non et pour mourir.

We have moved a long way from the confrontation between an authoritarian ruler and a subject prepared to sacrifice her life for a noble cause: the opposition is now between a humane ruler working for his country's good and a rebel motivated by a totally anarchic individualism.

Since Antigone's is not a reasoned stance, but the product of intense emotive feeling, she will be won over, if at all, not by rational but by affective means. And in the next ‘movement’—again preceded by a significant pause—what is conceived as a last despairing appeal to her reason (‘c'est mon rôle et je vais te faire tuer. Seulement, avant, je veux que toi aussi tu sois bien sûre du tien’) almost at once begins to operate on a different level, by reviving intimate recollections of the past, of that childhood which is so important as a nostalgic source of emotional strength to Antigone, and in respect of which she proves so vulnerable. In spite of himself, it seems, Créon's reference to the past hits exactly the right note, as Antigone spontaneously takes over from him with her childhood memories, defending her brother but also providing emotional justification for herself: ‘Une fois … il était tout pâle, les yeux brillants et si beau dans son vêtement du soir! … Et il m'a donné une grande fleur de papier qu'il avait rapportée de sa nuit’. And his intuitive shot in the dark:

Et tu l'as conservée, n'est-ce pas, cette fleur? Et hier, avant de t'en aller, tu as ouvert ton tiroir et tu l'as regardée, longtemps, pour te donner du courage?

finds the weak spot in her emotional armour:

ANTIGONE tressaille:
Qui vous a dit cela?

She is now on the defensive: the ‘fleur de cotillon’ was the symbol, the ‘objective correlative’ of her emotional dependence on the past, and this is now to be systematically destroyed. As the graphic catalogue of her brother's moral turpitude and iniquity builds up, her repeated ‘Ce n'est pas vrai!’ tries to shut out the truth. Almost immediately, however, she is forced to capitulate, and long before the end of Créon's recital she is beaten—not by intellectual persuasion, but by a process of emotional humiliation.

Créon's victory is symbolized visually, after another of the pauses that mark off the stages in this crucial encounter, by Antigone making as if to leave by the other exit: the exit that represents submission, and the acceptance of life on Créon's terms. But it is a short-lived victory; and one of the most convincing touches in the scene is that it should be Créon's better nature—the measure of sympathetic humanity by which Anouilh's character distinguishes himself from his Greek counterpart—that brings about his undoing. His speech ‘Rien d'autre ne compte …’ is certainly motivated by relief that the argument is over: the past tenses (‘tu allais le gaspiller … je buvais tes paroles. J'écoutais …’) express this relief, and there is perhaps now also a reflection of the patronizing superiority of the older and wiser man to be seen in the repeated imperatives, the confident future tense of ‘Tu verras … Tu l'apprendras toi aussi’, and the sententious maxims (‘Rien n'est vrai que ce qu'on ne dit pas … la vie ce n'est peut-être tout de même que le bonheur’). But it would be wrong, I think, to interpret Créon's conciliatory manner here (‘j'aurais fait comme toi à vingt ans … J'écoutais du fond du temps un petit Créon maigre et pâle comme toi’) and his frank confession of expediency (‘Ne m'écoute pas quand je ferai mon prochain discours devant le tombeau d'Étéocle. Ce ne sera pas vrai …’) as a cynical argumentative ploy. For the argument appears to be won; and Créon is inspired not so much by dialectical considerations—not even by the desire to press home his tactical advantage—as by a wholly human urge to make a genuine confession, and to show understanding and fellow-feeling.

And once again, it is not the faulty logic of an argument, but the emotive connotations of a single word, ‘le bonheur’, that allow Antigone's subjective imagination to take over and reassert her defiant stand. ‘Le bonheur’ revives Antigone's intransigent opposition to the normal order of things: she is once again recognizable as the blood-sister of those other Anouilh heroes and heroines who similarly reject all thought of compromise and conciliation. ‘Quel sera-t-il mon bonheur? …’: this speech could easily have been spoken by Thérèse in La Sauvage; while the notion of an ideal love, inexorable in its demands:

… si Hémon ne doit plus pâlir quand je pâlis, s'il ne doit plus me croire morte quand je suis en retard de cinq minutes, s'il ne doit plus se sentir seul au monde et me détester quand je ris sans qu'il sache pourquoi …

is that to which Orphée subscribes in Eurydice. This is the poetic expression of an attitude that forms part of the psychology of all genuine sexual love; but if it is not tempered by other attributes such as tolerance and a sense of proportion, it is inimical to any permanent relationship in the real world. Antigone, however, has now moved out of the range of such common-sense considerations (‘Je vous parle de trop loin maintenant, d'un royaume où vous ne pouvez plus entrer …’), and Créon's cause is lost for good.

The remainder of the scene is a ‘dialogue de sourds’. On the one hand the man of reason, increasingly angry that his advantage has been lost; and on the other, the representative of an irrational anti-life force, exultant in her escape from his domination. It is in the speech already quoted above, which significantly begins with the phrase repeated from La Sauvage: ‘Vous me dégoûtez tous avec votre bonheur! …’ that Antigone comes nearest to a rational analysis of the difference that separates her from Créon. His idea of ‘le bonheur’ is rejected because it depends on a permanent compromise with the pettiness and the squalor of life: Créon and the other conformists and accepters of life are content to put up with ‘cette petite chance, pour tous les jours si on n'est pas trop exigeant’, whereas Antigone's own notion of ‘le bonheur’ is the intransigent ideal of an implacable Romantic:

Moi, je veux tout, tout de suite,—et que ce soit entire,—ou alors je refuse! Je ne veux pas être modeste, moi, et me contenter d'un petit morceau si j'ai été bien sage. Je veux être sûre de tout aujourd'hui et que cela soit aussi beau que quand j'étais petite—ou mourir.

But the last page of the scene shows rational analysis giving way to insult and abuse, Créon threatening and using physical force, and Antigone taunting him with the repeated ‘cuisinier’, to end on a note of heightened dramatic tension.

(XIII) ANTIGONE, CRéON, ISMèNE (P. 85)

As in Sophocles, the central confrontation is brought to an end by the entrance of Ismène. Anouilh makes less of this scene between the sisters—in the Greek play their argument is expressed in an effective passage of highly dramatic stichomythia—but essentially the purpose is the same: to allow the heroine to assert her independence. Sophocles' ‘You chose; life was your choice, when mine was death’ (line 481), corresponding to Anouilh's ‘Tu as choisi la vie et moi la mort’, reminds us once more of the close affinity in the attitude of the two heroines, however different Anouilh's interpretation of that attitude may be. Having rejected her sister's support, Antigone renews her taunting of Créon; and as the women go out, Anouilh brings Le Choeur in for a brief linking scene.

(XIV) CRéON, LE CHOEUR (P. 86)

This considerably reduces the length of the corresponding scene in Sophocles, where a choric ode dwells on the perils lying in wait for those in a position of power: ‘For mortals greatly to live is greatly to suffer’ (line 531)—a cryptic warning to the wilful and unheeding Creon of the Greek play. Anouilh's Choeur is not so circumspect, with his ‘Tu es fou, Créon. Qu'as-tu fait?’; but this direct challenge is met by Créon with a considered defence of his conduct which must carry conviction: ‘C'est elle qui voulait mourir …’. What he says here—that Polynice's burial was a mere pretext, and that ‘Ce qui importait pour elle, c'était de refuser et de mourir’—is surely entirely valid: no other explanation will account for Antigone's behaviour at the end of the scene with Créon, and this is certainly how we are meant to see her exit:

ANTIGONE:
(dans un grand cri soulagé) Enfin, Créon!

It seems not unimportant, therefore, that Créon should be provided with the opportunity to justify himself in this way before the scene with Hémon.

(XV) CRéON, HéMON, LE CHOEUR (P. 87)

In the scene with Hémon itself, Créon's self-justification carries less weight, for now his intellectual persuasiveness is countered by the emotional appeal that Hémon makes to the spectator: a good deal less ambivalent than that made by the heroine, for his reaction to the threatened loss of his beloved has none of the arbitrary quality of her voluntary rejection of life. This is another scene that closely follows the inspiration of its Greek counterpart—though here too the French playwright has seen fit to reduce the length of the original, where both father and son speak in terms of measured debate before engaging in angry stichomythia. It is not clear why Anouilh should make Le Choeur intervene here as he does (‘Est-ce qu'on ne peut pas imaginer quelque chose … Est-ce qu'on ne peut pas gagner du temps?’), except perhaps that the Greek Chorus also intervenes, though in a much less partisan spirit. In the French play as in the Greek, the scene mounts to a dramatic climax—a more affective climax in Anouilh's case, for Hémon, as Antigone has done, draws emotional reinforcement from the evocation of the past: ‘Tu es encore puissant, toi, comme lorsque j'étais petit. Ah! je t'en supplie, père, que je t'admire, que je t'admire encore! Je suis trop seul et le monde est trop nu si je ne peux pas t'admirer’. The young man's emotional anguish is helpless against the resigned pragmatism of his father, however: ‘Regarde-moi, c'est cela devenir un homme, voir le visage de son père en face un jour’. But where the Greek Haemon rushes out at the height of an angry explosion, and with Creon's vindictive threat ringing in his ears, Anouilh's character goes out in frustrated bewilderment to fulfil his tragic role.

(XVI) CRéON, LE CHOEUR (P. 89)

And the only difference between the attitude of Créon and that of Le Choeur is that the latter, no omniscient commentator now, but a participant whose function is much nearer to that of the Greek Chorus, still hopes that some way may be found of averting the tragedy (‘Créon, il faut faire quelque chose’). It is Créon, not le Choeur, who now seems to possess a compassionate insight into the tragic process.

(XVII) CRéON, ANTIGONE, LES GARDES, LE CHOEUR (P. 89)

As she does in Sophocles, Antigone makes a final reappearance before she goes to her death. But whereas the corresponding scene in the Greek play presents a moving exchange between the heroine and the Chorus:

—But here is a sight beyond all bearing,
At which my eyes cannot but weep;
Antigone forth faring
To her bridal-bower of endless sleep.
—You see me, countrymen, on my last journey,
Taking my last leave of the light of day;
Going to my rest, where death shall take me
Alive across the silent river …

(lines 708-15)

Anouilh's purpose is to underline the pathos by other means; and after a brief linking scene, Antigone is left alone with Le Garde.

(XVIII) ANTIGONE, LE GARDE (P. 90)

As in the scenes with La Nourrice, the playwright has deliberately chosen at this point to adopt a tone at variance with what one traditionally expects of serious tragic drama; but here, the challenge of the familiar, colloquial style is a much more difficult one. For in the earlier scenes the nostalgic evocation of the heroine's childhood not only generates the sympathy that we feel for her in the initial stages of her clash with Créon, it also defines the vital emotional resources on which she will draw in that encounter. In this closing scene, we may assume that the author's purpose is to reinforce the poignancy of Antigone's approaching death by juxtaposing it with the ordinary banalities of life; but if the lowering of the emotional tone, and the adoption of such a colloquial stylistic register, fails to strike the right note, it can easily lead to the dissipation of the spectator's sympathy. This is in an acute form the problem that faces every author of tragic drama in a domestic idiom.

The scene opens with the emotionally charged ‘Mon dernier visage d'homme’; we may compare ‘la dernière folie …’ (p. 56), and two instances of ‘pour la dernière fois’ (pp. 78, 88), that fateful phrase which has such a powerful tragic resonance whenever it occurs as a half-line in Racine's verse: even in Anouilh's prose, it is impossible to mistake the emotional potential of the repeated ‘dernier’. But at once the level of the dialogue drops to that of everyday conversation. It is not a case of intrinsically comic, or caricatural, characterization: the portrait of this very ordinary soldier, with his military slang, his self-importance, and his obsession with pay and perquisites, is thoroughly lifelike, and any comic effect derives from the incongruity between his very ordinariness and the high drama of the preceding scenes. The longer the exchanges go on, the greater will be the risk that the verbose, repetitive parade of trivia will neutralize the dramatic tension that has built up to its climax—or that the spectator will take refuge in laughter as a relief from that tension.

From Antigone's ‘Je vais mourir tout à l'heure’, the focus is no longer on Le Garde. For a moment she is unable to break through his self-absorption, but her question ‘Comment vont-ils me faire mourir?’ succeeds in reestablishing genuine communication. However, contact is abruptly broken again with her exclamation ‘O tombeau! O lit nuptial! O ma demeure souterraine!’—a version of Sophocles'

So to my grave,
My bridal-bower, my everlasting prison,
I go, to join those many of my kinsmen
Who dwell in the mansions of Persephone.

(lines 769-72)

The change to such a strikingly different mode of expression symbolizes her retreat into her own private sensibility. The beginning of Le Garde's next speech, with its mythological allusion (‘Aux cavernes de Hadès …’) is not too incongruous, but in no time at all he lapses into more of his trite observations on the military life.

The second half of this scene, which is taken up with Antigone's attempt to dictate a farewell letter to Hémon, is a masterly invention on Anouilh's part. The heroine's loss of the certainty and self-confidence she had shown when facing Créon (‘je ne sais plus pourquoi je meurs …’), the revelation of how near she came to being won over by him, can only be expressed in a confessional medium equivalent to the classical soliloquy; and in addition to the imaginative realization of such an equivalent, Anouilh has created a scene which offers the theatrically effective counterpoint between Antigone's intimate self-analysis (‘Il vaut mieux que jamais personne ne sache. C'est comme s'ils devaient me voir nue et me toucher quand je serai morte’) and the clumsy insensitivity of Le Garde (‘C'est une drôle de lettre’). This is another scene which to the reader may perhaps seem to border on the facile and the over-sentimental; one can only say that it is capable of working successfully in the theatre, as a vehicle for genuinely-felt emotion.

(XIX) LE MESSAGER, LE CHOEUR (P. 95)

The elimination of the scene with Tiresias, which occurs at this point in the Greek play, is quite the most significant change introduced by Anouilh. Not only does it go a long way towards abolishing the role of the gods, and depriving the myth of its metaphysical dimension; it also has an important effect on the characterization of Créon. For the result of this scene is that Sophocles' King belatedly takes steps to undo what he has done, though of course he is too late to save Antigone. Anouilh's Créon undergoes no such change of heart: there is no mouthpiece of the gods to persuade him, and he remains unrepentant to the end.

From this point on in Anouilh's play, the final events happen even more rapidly than in Sophocles. Le Messager is less prolix and sententious than his Greek counterpart, though the vital detail of his narrative is taken over unchanged:

His son looked at him with one angry stare,
Spat in his face, and then without a word
Drew sword and struck out. But his father fled
Unscathed. Whereon the poor demented boy
Leaned on his sword and thrust it deeply home
In his own side, and while his life ebbed out
Embraced the maid in loose-enfolding arms,
His spurting blood staining her pale cheeks red.

(lines 1076-83)

… Il regarde son père sans rien dire, une minute, et, tout à coup, il lui crache au visage, et tire son épée. Créon a bondi hors de portée. Alors Hémon le regarde avec ses yeux d'enfant, lourds de mépris, et Créon ne peut pas éviter ce regard comme la lame. Hémon regarde ce vieil homme tremblant à l'autre bout de la caverne et, sans rien dire, il se plonge l'épée dans le ventre et il s'étend contre Antigone, l'embrassant dans une immense flaque rouge.

(XX) CRéON, LE PAGE, LE CHOEUR (P. 96)

In what is presumably a deliberate change designed to produce a greater measure of sympathy for Créon at the end of the play, the closing lines spoken by Sophocles' Messenger, with their implication of Creon's guilt:

Two bodies lie together, wedded in death,
Their bridal sleep a witness to the world
How great a calamity can come to man
Through man's perversity

(lines 1084-7)

are transferred to Créon himself:

Je les ai fait coucher l'un près de l'autre, enfin! Ils sont lavés, maintenant, reposés. Ils sont seulement un peu pâles, mais si calmes. Deux amants. Ils ont fini, eux

—a passage in which it may not be too fanciful to see, as well as the transposition of Sophocles' text, an echo of the end of Romeo and Juliet.

Finally, le Choeur takes over for the narration of the death of Eurydice: one of the passages that stand out by their anachronistic detail, and a passage that can surely be criticized for its unwarranted trivialization of the original. A bourgeois Queen who does good works for the poor of Thebes, and who methodically finishes off her row of knitting before going away to commit suicide: is this successful modernization of the context, or a glaring lapse of taste? The same points apply as have been made in the commentary on scene xviii; this is, after all, the emotional climax of the play, and that it is not merely a question of old-fashioned, narrow standards of taste is suggested by Bergson's perceptive remark about laughter: ‘Est comique tout incident qui appelle notre attention sur le physique d'une personne alors que le moral est en cause’⁹.

(XXI) LE CHOEUR (P. 97)

The last section of this scene, together with the final scene in which Le Choeur appears on his own, are devoted to closing the ‘frame’ in which the death of Antigone has been presented, by re-establishing the continuum of ordinary life that had been disrupted by the violent events. ‘La journée a été rude’: the spectator, like the characters who have participated in the ‘rude journée’, has earned the right to rest. But for Créon, the active protagonist, there can be no rest (‘devant l'ouvrage, on ne peut pourtant pas se croiser les bras …’); and he goes off to his council meeting. He has opted for life, he has a responsibility for others, and he must see it through to the end. This is more than just passive resignation to the continuity of things; and Créon's active acceptance of such a commitment can be seen as representing that reaffirmation of positive values after the destructive force of the tragic event has spent itself, that seems to be a necessary condition for the ‘purging of the passions’ traditionally associated with tragedy, and that can be clearly illustrated in such diverse examples as Hamlet, King Lear, Phèdre or La Machine infernale. We do not feel emotional involvement with Créon at this point, any more than we do with Albany, Fortinbras, Racine's Thésée or Cocteau's Tirésias, who similarly ‘close the frame’, rounding-off the tragic process. We respect and (possibly) admire him, but our position is closer to that invoked by Le Choeur: the position of those for whom normal existence can resume (as it will for us as we leave the theatre), but whose life has, in spite of themselves, been marked by the impact of ‘la petite Antigone’:

Sans la petite Antigone, c'est vrai, ils auraient tous été bien tranquilles. Mais maintenant, c'est fini. Ils sont tout de même tranquilles. …

For those who understood nothing, there is nothing to forget. Nothing has changed, and life will carry on as before: the Gardes ‘continuent à jouer aux cartes’. Yet although this is the image that we are left with as the curtain falls, it does not determine our attitude as spectators, and we cannot identify with characters so incapable of reflection. Our affinity is with ‘ceux qui vivent encore’, who have come through the tragic anguish to a new serenity. With the passage of time we too may, as Le Choeur suggests, gradually begin ‘à les oublier et à confondre leurs noms’; but for the time being ‘Un grand apaisement triste tombe sur Thèbes’—and this is by no means an unsuccessful attempt to define the position of the spectator, whose ‘tristesse’ is also ‘apaisée’, but not yet eliminated, by the return to normality that forms an essential part of the cathartic process.

Notes

1. Page-references throughout are to the edition by W. M. Landers, London 1957.

2. Though Anouilh uses both terms, I take it as self-evident that the two roles are one and the same. This corresponds to stage practice in presenting the play in the theatre.

3. André Barsacq, who directed the 1944 production, comments as follows: ‘L'Antigone m'a permis de réaliser ce rêve que je caressais depuis si longtemps: concevoir une mise en scène d'où tout pittoresque serait banni, faire se dérouler l'action dans un décor neutre, une sorte de scène idéale qui donnerait une impression de grandeur par la seule noblesse de ses lignes’ (‘Lois scéniques’, Revue Théâtrale, 5, April-May 1947, pp. 157-8).

4. Cf the comment made by editors of L'Alouette: ‘In Antigone, for instance, we are made to feel that what we are watching is a play and nothing else, moreover that we are participating in it. Similarly in L'Alouette …’ (L'Alouette, ed. M. Thomas and S. Lee, London, 1956, p. 16).

5. In Ardèle (1948). Cf. Pièces grinçantes, Paris, 1956, p. 64.

6. See the continuation of this passage quoted above, p. 20.

7. The name ‘Jonas’ is a strange choice. It corresponds to the Old Testament ‘Jonah’, and is hardly plausible as a modern French nom de famille; Camus was to use it as the name of the central character of one of the stories in L'Exil et le royaume (1957), but this was apparently in order to fit in with an epigraph taken from the Book of Jonah. Here, it may perhaps carry the popular connotation ‘one who brings ill-luck’.

8. I am using the term current in French dramaturgical analysis to denote identifiable sections of a long scene. Here, the ‘movements’ indicate shifts in the audience's relationship with the characters.

9. Le Rire (1899), Paris, 1946, p. 39.