Leon Katz

Representative Headnotes:


1932. SHAW, THROUGH THE MOUTH OF A YOUNG AUBREY, MOURNS THE UNHINGING OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION’S VALUES FOLLOWING THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Bernard Shaw, Too True to Be Good, Act III

248. The legend goes that when Too True to Be Good, one of Shaw’s late (neglected) plays was in rehearsal at the Malvern Festival, the director suggested to him that a speech was needed to conclude the play. Shaw, so the legend has it, composed it right then, handed it to the director, and it was given to the actor playing the young Preacher Aubrey--whose Preacher father, the Elder, “vanishes into the recesses of St. Pauls [cathedral], leaving his son to preach in solitude.” And so Aubrey bears the burden of confronting what none of the cast of 1920s disenchanted characters, “too absurd to be believed in; yet they are not fictions,” bother to confront: the gods that failed. Shaw, out of the mouth of the babe Aubrey, preaches his lonely sermon:

“I am Ecclesiastes. But I have no Bible, no creed: the war has shot both out of my hands.” After the first World War, Shaw faced the debilitating fact that along with its unprecedented destruction of life and property, it had “rent a hole” in the “impossible idealisms” of the pre-war period. Then, they were life-sustaining; now they were insupportable, and his lament is that, like the young, he too is without “creed,” and to have no truth to preach and no struggle to sustain is beyond bearing. His bewilderment, his inability to find the clothing for “the souls that go in rags now,” produces, if not resolution, a soul’s lamentation of Biblical proportions, and perhaps the greatest speech Shaw ever wrote.



ANTIGONE DEFENDS HER BURIAL OF HER BROTHER
(441 BC) Sophocles, Antigone, tr. P. Arnott

11. (See I, #8 & #9) After Oedipus’ demise, the battle of his two sons for the rule of Thebes leaves both dead, and Creon supplants both as the new king. He buries Eteocles, the defender of the city, with honors, but the “traitor” Polyneices, who laid siege to the city, is forbidden burial by anyone under pain of death. Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter and Polyneices’ sister, refuses to obey Creon’s injunction, performs the burial rite, is arrested and brought before Creon. In perhaps the most famous confrontation in Greek tragedy, she poses her allegiance to the unwritten sacred law of tie-of-blood against Creon’s commitment to the supremacy of the laws of the state.

The most celebrated analysis of this confrontation--and for decades the most influential--was the philosopher Hegel’s, who understood the “principle” defended by Creon and that defended by Antigone to be on a par. Both absolutes, both equal in their moral force, their opposition is subject to ultimate reconciliation only at the cost of the human agents'--Creon’s and Antigone’s--demise. The dialectic underlying such “world-historical struggles” of antithetical principles such as these inevitably end in the sacrifice of the protagonists to, and by, that eventual reconciliation.

But just as it can be argued that it is the character underlying the dicta of Creon, who lives comfortably within his narrowness of soul, a narrowness which makes possible the emanations of his dicta and the eventual tragedy of his acts, (for which argument, see I, #8) so, it is arguable, it is the inflexibility in Antigone’s “character,” and possibly a similar narrowness of soul, not of credo, that is on a par with Creon’s. Unquestionably, and unlike Hegel’s assumption, there is a distinct moral preference discernible between their two positions; but, ironically, there may be none between their characters. If that is so, there’s an interesting disconnect between the virtue of argument and the virtue of person, and--as Ibsen explores so ruefully in The Wild Duck--the virtue of argument may be altogether undone by the practical burdens placed on it by the misguided or over-guided underlying intentions of person. In other words, the motive behind argument may be altogether in bad faith, yet the argument not at all, and the effect of argument may be altogether destroyed by the irrelevant or compromising urgencies advancing it.

Noticeably in Creon (in I,#8), the purity of his principle was sabotaged in every way by the personal urgencies of his idea of women and his mystique of self. It was the force and the direction in which he privately reconceived and manipulated his principle--not it itself--that led to the tragic consequence for himself, Antigone, and his son Haemon. Unlike Creon’s, the core of Antigone’s argument, given abiding cultural norms and preferences of belief, is unanswerable. Does she, as does Creon, impulsively and propulsively subvert it?

Antigone argues that she is beyond argument. The proof of the virtue of her belief is not that it contradicts Creon’s, but that it has altogether no relation to it. They have, she insists, no common ground. “My laws,” she explains, “are meaningless to you,” and “If what I do is foolish in your sight / It may be that a fool condemns my folly.” In another way too they have no common ground. Creon threatens her with taking her life for disobedience to his “law.” Not only is his law no law to her, but the threat of taking her life has no sting. “I know that I must die even without your edict.” In any case, the value of life is small indeed “when a person lives as I do in the midst of evils.”

She cannot be touched by argument; she cannot be touched by threat. Her deed, and her defiance, will gain for her something greater than debased life: “the world’s renown,” and beyond its praise (merely, after all, praise from all those cowards who remain alive and uncomplaining in so debased a world), the approval of the gods.

That certainty--the certainty of a law beyond the laws of men mired in the world’s contingencies--is the argument and defense of all the world’s proud and willful martyrs. Given Antigone’s perfect assurance of being at one with perfect principle, there is indeed no argument against her. But person so thoroughly self-enwrapped in perfect accord with divinity, is, as person, measurably at a distance from the humility and self-abnegation that, in principle, adheres to that certainty itself. And so martyrs to that law above laws can conceivably exemplify for us the “commands” of divinity. They can also be hell on earth.

Antigone is replying to Creon’s “Did you know there was an order forbidding this?... And yet you dared to go against the law?”



c. 1587; 1602. MAD HIERONYMO MISTAKES A SUPPLIANT FOR HIS DEAD SON
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, Act 3, Sc.13

59. Madness is reckoned in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama not so much as the derangement of a mind into verbal incoherence (as was was the practice in Italian commedia dell’arte), but rather as the madman imagining he is undergoing sudden and successive shifts of scene and circumstance, each experienced with absolute clarity, almost with the swiftness of thought (as in the rapid shifts of subjective time and place in Ophelia’s and Lear’s scenes of “madness.”). Hieronymo in this monologue undergoes four such transitions.

Petitioners come to Marshal of Spain Hieronymo, each begging him to plead his case before the King. One of them stands apart, an old grieving man who brings a “humble supplication” for his murdered son. Hieronymo, (like Hamlet overcome by the acted grief of the Player,) is shamed by the old man’s example into confronting his own guilt for “neglect[ing] the sweet revenge of [my] Horatio.”

As with Hamlet, to Hieronymo’s longing for revenge is added the guilt of having not yet accomplished it. But unlike Hamlet, Hieronymo moves to immediate remedy: the old man will lead him into Hell where, like Orpheus, he will plead his cause, and win from Hell’s monarch the right to “rent and tear [the murderers]...shivering their limbs in pieces with [his] teeth.”

Running off stage, he returns to find his son - in the body of the Old Man--risen from Hell, wanting revenge. The son’s image is soon displaced, and becomes a Fury from Hell arresting him for so long “seeking not vengeance.” But at a cue from the Old Man, he recognizes him once again as the bereaved father of another murdered son.

The mania of Hieronymo is now fixed on his longing for justice, his guilt at not achieving it, and simultaneously on the impossibility of his ever reaching it.