Antigone: What is Burial?

The events of Sophocles’s Antigone are instigated by a civil war. When Theban King Oedipus discovers that he was cursed to marry his own mother, he goes into exile, and power passes to his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, who agree to rule in turns. Eteocles, who rules first, refuses to cede power to his brother. Polynices attacks the city. The two brothers kill each other. And the kingship passes to their uncle Creon. Creon, who sided with Eteocles, decrees that Eteocles should be buried with honor, while Polynices should be left to rot on the battlefield. But Antigone, sister to both brothers, violates Creon’s decree and buries Polynices anyway. The play’s central question is: Was this burial just? 

Creon has a strong case to make. With respect to the law, Polynices and Eteocles are exactly opposed: the former attacked the city; the latter fought to defend it. What use is justice if it cannot distinguish between these two? If the ruler treats lawbreakers and law-followers in the same way, then does law even exist? From Creon’s perspective, to bury both brothers would be an egregious ethical contradiction. It would not be merely unjust: it would undermine the very idea of justice.

Confronted with this argument, Antigone does not attempt to justify her action. Instead, she makes a series of strange claims. She notes first that she herself has buried every fallen member of her family—not only the two brothers, but also her mother. She goes on to remind Creon that, given the double relation of her parents, every member of her family is struck through with contradiction. (She herself is both sister and daughter to her father, aunt and sister to her brother.) Finally, she contends, “Mine is not to divide in hate but to join in love.” What is Antigone attempting to communicate with these cryptic remarks?

As I understand her, Antigone means something like this. Creon is correct: burying both brothers is a contradiction, but far from proscribing the burial, the contradiction makes it all the more urgent. What if justice can’t resolve every opposition? What if the law can’t? What if there are genuinely insoluble conflicts, not only between different people but within a single individual? Fractures, fissures, problems with no rational solution. I think Antigone understands herself and all the members of her family in this way. Because of her parents’ incestuous marriage, each member of the House of Oedipus is divided from himself, turned against himself, even at war with himself. Political justice can offer no assistance. So what can?

I think, for Antigone, the answer is burial. 

What is burial to her? What does she think it can do? In my view, Antigone sees burial as a tremendous act of hope: the hope that, by means we do not and cannot understand, the insoluble can be solved. To bury a conflict is neither to ignore it nor to pretend to rectify it. Instead, it is to acknowledge the impossible as impossible, the limits of what human beings can achieve, all in the hope of a resolution beyond our comprehension. Beneath the ground, one finds not only dirt, but also gods, the underworld: to give our oppositions to earth is to give them to something beyond us—a hidden world, a secret mind. And if it is not only Antigone and her family who have monsters inside—contradictions that cannot be solved—then maybe we too must hope for something like that. 

— Kit Slover, Faculty Member