Antigone is one of these plays with which I feel I have a very intimate relationship, even though I never read the Sophocles’ version. My introduction to Antigone was made through Anouilh, back when I was a 15 year-old student in France. The class was taught by a young professor, whose name I can’t remember right now, but whose face has stayed with me — a very rare occurrence. Mademoiselle… Anyway. I fell in love with the play, fell in love very hard, and read so much Anouilh that year. There are to this day moments when my life goes Anouilh-colored. Being lost in a vast crowd, feeling tiny and defiant and free, is an Anouilh moment for me. I feel like he’s writing me. It’s a little scary and very wonderful, this sensation that being lost and drifting is exactly where I’m supposed to be, my rightful place in the world — at least for the time being.

It is not Antigone, though, who captured my  imagination back then, but Ismene. It might have been because I ended up reading her lines so often in class that I identified with her, but I rather think that it was something more. When I started reading her, she allowed me to express a part of my identity that needed to be spoken. It felt vital, necessary and freeing simultaneously. All I know is that I remember these hours in the classroom like no others. Another girl was almost always Antigone. Perhaps she too found something then; it is quite remarkable that the teacher would have let the two of us take over the play the way we did. Then again, this woman was quite a remarkable teacher.

What distinguished Ismene from Antigone for me was not willingness to compromise with Créon (power, politics, you name it) but the understanding of small things. Flamboyance for Antigone, empathy for Ismene; the two opposed like I had never known they did, and that rang true.  Antigone claims to love life more passionately than Ismene, and much as my love for the latter would have made me want to pretend her claim was contradicted by her acts, I believed her. However her passion blinds her to humble things, to contradictions; her passion makes it unacceptable for her to just.. float She has to act. She stands for something that can win or be defeated, which I felt made her more contingent.

As part of my “summer of reading things that have been sitting around for too long”, I started reading Antigone’s claim by Judith Butler. It is a series of lectures that were given to undergrads and grads, and are collected and published by Columbia University press. I will also be reading Sophocles’ Antigone, and probably re-read Anouilh’s after that. Right now however, I am struggling through Antigone’s claim, which is still way beyond my critical abilities, fishing for what I can take out of it. It is very fascinating and a good exercise in stretching out my intellectual muscles. Hopefully that will serve me next year — I just found out I have passed all my exams and am the happy recipient of a licence de lettres modernes, a BA. I am definitely registering for the master LGC (Master’s in General and Comparative Literature) — my plan is to get one year under my belt simultaneously to applying to grad programs in the US, and maybe in Europe as well.