TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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turns out to have familial implications that he, focused exclusively on the polis, does not acknowledge. Creon is, after all, not only the ruler of Thebes but also the head of the oikos to which Antigone belongs; indeed, he is doubly tied to her both as Jocasta’s brother and as the father of her fiancé. But in his encounter with Antigone, Creon notably does not explicitly invoke his familial authority; instead, he continues to assert the political distinction between Polyneices and Eteocles, just as Antigone repeatedly counters him in the vocabulary of kinship. When Haemon arrives on the scene, he invites his father to speak the language of family by offering a conventional expression of filial loyalty: “My father, I am yours. You keep me straight with your good judgment, which I shall ever follow” (635–36). 48 But Creon refuses the invitation and quickly shifts the terms of the conversation, swallowing family into polis. He replies by praising Haemon, but immediately introduces the metaphor of “a soldier posted behind his leader” to describe the proper relation of son to father (640). 49 Finally, although Creon nominally acknowledges that Antigone’s disobedience is an instance of disorder within the oikos, he does so only in order to deny that Antigone’s kinship ought to influence his action, and to reinforce his subordination of all other concerns to political rule. To permit disobedience among relatives, Creon says, would compel him to permit it in the city at large; thus, enforcing the edict against Antigone is just another instance of ensuring “justice in the polis” (662). But Creon’s act, like Antigone’s, exceeds the identity from which it proceeds. Just as Antigone’s act of family piety was also an act of political subversion, Creon’s defense of political order also turns out to be an assault on his own family, first in the person of Haemon, whose love for Antigone drives him to join her in death, and second in Eurydice, driven to suicide by the loss of her son. 17
Worse still, Creon’s acts, like Antigone’s, not only exceed but also undermine his own identifications. Just as Antigone’s ruthless devotion to her family leads her to treat her own sister cruelly, for instance, Creon’s monomaniacal pursuit of civic order transforms him from a leader into a tyrant. After Creon shifts the terrain of his exchange with Haemon from family to city, Haemon criticizes his father’s style of rule, at first gently and then with increasing passion and frustration. After reminding Creon of the murmurs of support for Antigone among the citizens of Thebes, Haemon warns his father: “do not have one mind, and one alone,” for “whoever thinks that he alone is wise” will, “come the unfolding, sho[w] his emptiness” (705–9). Here already we have a pointed suggestion that Creon is betraying his own values, since he himself had earlier mocked Antigone for acting in isolation from the rest of the city (510); Teiresias will confirm the suggestion by insinuating that Creon is not a king but a “tyrant” (1056), and by forecasting the devastation that Creon’s misrule will bring, not only upon his family, but upon the entire city (1080–84). Finally, just as Antigone’s action exceeds and frustrates her identification as a woman, Creon’s deeds, though meant to secure his masculinity, actually undermine it. For Creon, as we have seen, masculinity is closely tied to political rule, and therefore (he insists) to the rejection of the normative force of kinship. But consanguinity was what brought him the political power through which he expresses his manhood: he rules Thebes by virtue of being Jocasta’s adelphos—the very same relation in which Polyneices and Antigone stand. His disavowal of the import of kinship leads to the death of his own son, Haemon, in a violent rush of blood (haima). As Creon is graphically reminded of the blood-ties he had repressed, his fragile economy of identification and disavowal collapses like a house of cards. “So insistent earlier on the separation of gender roles and scornful of the female,” Segal observes, “Creon now performs the 18
Page 1 and 2: TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDEN
Page 3 and 4: Of course, the tradition of dramati
Page 5 and 6: one with itself by virtue of its tr
Page 7 and 8: At first glance, the Antigone doesn
Page 9 and 10: Yet the Antigone’s struggle is no
Page 11 and 12: commanders but also to Polyneices,
Page 13 and 14: Creon’s first speech sharply cont
Page 15 and 16: What happens when Antigone and Creo
Page 17: (844). Given the function of the la
Page 21 and 22: preceding events; she leaves the ro
Page 23 and 24: not in the agency-enhancing recogni
Page 25 and 26: those relating to thought or intell
Page 27 and 28: argument that is consistent with, t
Page 29 and 30: causal order of the world, the will
Page 31 and 32: This is not altogether wrong, but i
Page 33 and 34: the paradigmatic recognition scene
Page 35 and 36: 6. This ambivalence is registered i
Page 37 and 38: 19. See for instance Lysias 2.7-10
Page 39 and 40: thus either to love [philian] or ha
Page 41 and 42: etween (and therefore the inseparab
Page 43 and 44: 61. This use of Aristotle’s Poeti
Page 45 and 46: arbitrary, see Marion Smiley, Moral

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