Power of the Absent: Elusiveness of the Real in the Two Antigones

Abstract

Sophocles’s Antigone famously never introduces gods on stage (even in the form of prophecy), and yet everything happens through their agency. The authority of the gods is never called into question; their absence, however, makes their will elusive and unclear, which enables Antigone and Creon to interpret it in completely different ways and causes their fatal conflict. When Teiresias reveals that Creon is wrong, it is too late for Antigone, who dies because she remains true to her (correct) understanding of the divine will (law), although unsupported by any, either divine or human, external authority. In Dominik Smole’s Antigone, by contrast, it is the heroine herself who is absent until the very end of the play, when, after her death, the Pageboy takes over her role. Smole’s radical innovation persistently draws the reader’s (audience’s) attention to the background of the dramatic action, to the invisible reality beyond the stage: to the forbidden region outside society where the key questions of historical truth and of the quintessence of human existence arise. There is a striking analogy between the two Antigones, both in terms of dramaturgy and representation of reality: both plays present the ultimate reality (gods in Sophocles, true human identity in Smole) as hidden yet effective. This ultimate reality reveals itself as a dark horizon and keeps the reality of human existence open. In addition to the central theme, the paper discusses a number of questions about the motivation for reinterpreting canonical texts.