I confess that, in the last few weeks, I have watched
the tumult on college campuses nationwide with deep misgivings, and
particularly at my alma mater, Columbia University.
I have wondered about the damage to institutions and
to the general image that higher education presents to a segment of the public
that, more than at any other since the Second World War, suspects such schools
as being inimical to their way of life.
I have questioned how the message that most students
are probably trying to convey—the humanitarian problems faced by the people of
Gaza—with the anti-semitic fringes distracting from their discourse.
I have thought about school administrators—well-meaning,
often inexperienced, and caught between opportunistic right-wing Capitol Hill
members and students with demands frequently difficult to satisfy.
And I wonder about the students themselves—how much
their idealism mixes inextricably with willfulness, even ignorance, about
consequences.
At one point outside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall a couple
of weeks ago, a news segment featured a female protester, shouting rapidly and
furiously. In all her stridency, the young woman reminded me of the image of a
similar one from a play I had seen on public television a half century ago,
in my teens: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.
When French audiences first saw the play staged in the
midst of World War II, they interpreted the mortal-stakes conflict they were
watching as analogous to their own, with Antigone standing in for the Resistance
movement; her uncle Creon, the ruler of Thebes, for the Nazi collaborator
Marshal Petain; and the guards for the German occupying forces who were "just following orders."
But, in a manner stronger than what I found on the
printed page for this play—and even more than Sophocles’ Greek tragedy that
started it all—the performance of Genevieve Bujold (in the accompanying image) in the title role, one year
after the end of the Vietnam War, must have brought to mind for TV viewers of
the time the fierce passions that many protesters in the conflict displayed.
Motives, emotions, and issues of right and wrong were far more clear cut in World War II than they would be in the domestic protests over Vietnam, mirroring the ambivalence in the Anouilh text.
This Antigone was every bit the “tense, sallow,
willful girl” introduced by the Chorus and embodied by both Bujold and the
young woman I saw on the news. Stubborn, obsessed, she resists the entreaties
of Creon (played by Fritz Weaver) and her more conventionally beautiful but less passionate sister
Ismene to obey Creon’s edict that the body of her brother--who led a rebellion
against the state--be left on the battlefield to rot.
Typically, in her youthful zealotry, she bursts out to
Ismene:
“The first word I ever heard out of any of you was
that word ‘understand.’ Why didn't I ‘understand’ that I must not play with
water-cold, black, beautiful flowing water-because I'd spill it on the palace
tiles. Or with earth, because earth dirties a little girl's frock. Why didn't I
‘understand’ that nice children don't eat out of every dish at once; or give
everything in their pockets to beggars; or run in the wind so fast that they
fall down; or ask for a drink when they're perspiring; or want to go swimming
when it's either too early or too late, merely because they happen to feel like
swimming. Understand! I don't want to understand. There'll be time enough to
understand when I'm old...If I ever am old. But not now.”
“If I ever am old”—she can’t see beyond the present
moment, and if it means living in a world she can’t abide, she’ll have none of
it.
Creon, who years before had “loved music, bought rare
manuscripts, [and] was a kind of art patron,” has been forced, with the deaths
of his brother-in-law Oedipus and the latter’s sons, to practice “the difficult
art of a leader of men.” But, like college administrators the last several
weeks, he has come to see order as the overriding consideration of what he
oversees, leading to a fate he can’t escape.
Creon tries to disabuse Antigone about “the kitchen of politics,” but it doesn’t work. What matters are the dictates of her conscience: “Tell me: to whom shall I have to lie?” she asks Creon. “Upon whom shall I have to fawn? to whom must I sell myself?”
In the clash between reason and passion, authority and
conscience, Antigone and Creon drag not only themselves but those around them
to disaster. Nothing else is possible when authority won’t answer the
unyielding “tribe that asks questions.”
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