Review article
Antigone from the Antiquity to Postmodernism – a Reinterpretation of Sophocles’s Source Text in Creon’s Antigone by Miro Gavran
Mirna Čudić
Abstract
The paper is aimed at analysing the echoes of the ancient Greek myth of Antigone as written by the tragedian Sophocles (5 th century B.C.), functioning as the genotext, in its phenotextual transformation within the framework of historical and literary contexts of Modernist and Postmodernist drama. As the basic phenotext a tragedy by Miro Gavran entitled Kreontova Antigona (Creon’s Antigone), created in 1983, has been chosen, accompanied by sporadic allusions to other metatextual realisations and reinterpretations of the ancient Greek tragedy, both Croatian and European, such as Antigone by Jean Anouillh (1944) and Antigona, kraljica u Tebi (Antigone, Queen of Thebes) by Tonči Petrasov Marović (1981). Within the timeframe ranging from the Antiquity to Postmodernism, based upon the chosen dramatic texts, numerous variations in the concept of the Antigonian motif have been distinguished. While some metatextual reinterpretations, illustrated by Marović’s Antigone, Queen of Thebes, play with the tragedy’s conclusion envisaging a sequel in which the heroine degenerates into a ruthless sovereign, some others, as Anouillh’s Antigone, play with the true historical role as performed by Antigone’s brothers, as well as the absurdity of tragedy as a dramatic genre. The one last created, written by Gavran, conversely, plays with the very authorship as such, juxtaposing the sublime ancient world of the art as represented in Sophocles’s genotext to the absurd world of dystopia as manifest in Creon’s variation of events. Referring to the typology as created by Slobodan Selenić, based upon the coordinate system with four poles and two antitheses, order-rebellion and reason-passion, the female protagonists pertaining to Sophocles’s genotext and three metatexts (in Marović the role of the Antigone from the Antiquity being assumed by the young Antigone, Ismene’s daughter), although stygmatised as passionate rebels against the social order, paradoxically stand for a higher order and reason, which unmasks Creon as an insane and imprudent sovereign. The three chosen secondary dramatic texts, in their redefinition of the ancient archetype, conclusively, oscillate between the affirmation of the ideals of the Antiquity on one side and their embedding into the Modern context, thus sustaining the universality of commonly acknowledged human moral dilemmas juxtaposing the fragility and inconstancy of human justice and law to the constancy of ideals, respectively.
Keywords
Antigonian myth; Sophocles; Creon’s Antigone by Miro Gavran; tragic flaw(hamartia); maieutics; Kafkian dystopia
Hrčak ID:
198785
URI
Publication date:
22.2.2018.
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