free act as a fateful necessity, which visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children. There is indeed enough freedom in it to enable us to love Antigone for her sisterly love, but in the inevitability of fate there is also a higher refrain, as it were, that encompasses not only Oedipus’s life but also his family. Whereas the Greek Antigone goes on living so free from care that, if this new fact had not come up, one could imagine her life as even happy in its gradual unfolding, our Antigone’s life, on the other hand, is essentially at an end. I have not en- dowed her parsimoniously, and, as is said, a good word in the right place is like golden apples in a silver bow];* so also I have placed the fruit of grief in the bowl of pain. Her endowment is not vainglorious pomp that moth and rust can consume;> it is an eternal treasure. Thieves cannot break in and steal it; she The Tragic in Ancient Drama 157 herself is too alert for that. Her life does not unfold like the Greek Antigone’s; it is turned inward, not outward. The stage is inside, not outside; it is a spiritual stage.
My dear Zupnapavexempevor, have I not managed to capture your interest for such a maiden, or shall I resort to a captatio benevolentiae [procedure aimed at gaining the favorable dispo- sition of the judge or listener]? She, too, does not belong to the world in which she lives; although healthy and flourishing, her real life is nevertheless hidden. She, too, although alive, is in another sense dead; her life is quiet and concealed. The world does not hear even a sigh, for her sighing is concealed in the secrecy of her soul. I do not need to remind you that she is by no means a weak and morbid woman; on the contrary, she is proud and energetic.
Perhaps nothing ennobles a person so much as keeping a se- cret. It gives a person’s whole life a significance, which it has, of course, only for himself; it saves a person from all futile con- sideration of the surrounding world. Sufficient unto himself, he rests blissful in his secret; this might be said even though his secret is a most baleful one.
So it is with our Antigone. She is proud of her secret, proud that she has been selected in a singular way to save the honor and glory of the lineage of Oedipus. When the grateful nation acclaims Oedipus with praise and thanksgiving, she feels her own significance, and her secret sinks deeper and deeper into her soul, ever more inaccessible to any living being. She feels how much has been placed into her hands, and this gives her the preternatural magnitude that is necessary in order for her to engage us tragically. She must be able to interest us as a par- ticular character. She is more than a young girl in a general sense, and yet she is a young girl; she is a bride, and yet alto- gether virginal and pure. °!As a bride, woman has fulfilled her destiny, and therefore a woman generally can concern us only to the degree that she is brought in relation to this her destiny.
There are analogies to this. We speak, for example, of a bride of God; in faith and spirit she has the content in which she rests. In a perhaps still more beautiful sense, 1 would call 134 I 135 158 Either/Or, I our Antigone a bride—indeed, she is almost more, she is a mother. Purely esthetically, she is virgo mater [virgin mother]; she carries her secret under her heart, concealed and hidden. Precisely because she is secretive, she is silence, but this turn- ing back into oneself implicit in silence gives her a preternat- ural bearing. She is proud of her grief, she is jealous of it, for her grief is her love. But yet her grief is not a dead, static pos- session; it is continually in motion; it gives birth to pain and is born in pain. Just as when a girl resolves to sacrifice her life for an idea, when she stands there with the sacrificial wreath on her forehead, she stands as a bride, for the great animating idea transforms her, and the sacrificial wreath is like the bridal wreath. She knows not any man,* and yet she is a bride; she does not even know the idea that animates her, for that would be unfeminine, and yet she is a bride.
So it is with our Antigone, the bride of sorrow. She dedi- cates her life to sorrowing over her father’s fate, over her own. A calamity such as the one that has befallen her father requires sorrow, and yet there is no one who can sorrow over it, since there is no one who knows it. And just as the Greek Antigone cannot bear to have her brother’s body thrown away without the last honors, so she feels how harsh it would have been if no one had come to know this; it troubles her that not a tear would have been shed, and she almost thanks the gods because she has been selected as this instrument. Thus, Antigone is great in her pain. Here, too, I can point out a difference be- tween Greek and modern tragedy. It is genuinely Greek for Philoctetes to lament that no one knows what he is suffering; it is a deeply human need to want others to understand it, but reflective pain does not desire this. It does not occur to Antig- one to wish anyone to come to know her pain, but instead she feels the pain in relation to her father, feels the justice implicit in sorrowing, which is just as warranted esthetically as is suf- fering punishment when one has done wrong. Therefore, while it is first the awareness of being destined to be buried alive that extorts this outburst of grief from Antigone in the Greek tragedy, The Tragic in Ancient Drama 159 (850) im dvatavoc, ott év 6gotois, év vexeoton, ustoixos, ob C@atv, od Favovoa* [alive to the place of corpses, an alien still, never at home with the living nor with the dead],>° our Antigone can say this of herself all her life. There is a strik- ing difference; there is a factual truth in her utterance that di- minishes the pain. If our Antigone were to say the same thing, it would be figurative, but the figurativeness is the factual pain. The Greeks do not express themselves figuratively sim- ply because their lives did not have the reflection required for this. Thus, when Philoctetes laments that he lives abandoned and solitary on a desolate island, his remark also has external truth; when, however, our Antigone feels pain in her solitude, it is only figuratively that she is alone, but for this very reason, only then is her pain truly literal.
As for the tragic guilt, it is related in part to the fact that she buries her brother and in part to the context of her father’s sad fate implied by the two previous tragedies. Here I am face to face again with the curious dialectic that places the family’s in- iquities in relation to the individual. This is what is inherited. Ordinarily, dialectic is thought to be rather abstract—one thinks almost solely of logical operations. But life will quickly teach a person that there are many kinds of dialectic, that al- most every passion has its own. For this reason, the dialectic that connects the iniquity of kindred or of family to the indi- vidual subject in such a way that this one not only suffers un- der it (for this is a natural consequence against which one would futilely try to harden oneself) but also bears the guilt, participates in it—this dialectic is alien to us, contains nothing constraining for us. If, however, we were to imagine a rebirth of ancient tragedy, then every individual would have to con- template his own rebirth, not only in the spiritual sense but in the finite sense of the womb of family and kindred. The di- * (844) O weh, Unselige! Nicht unter Menschen, nicht unter Todten, Im Leben nicht heimisch noch im Tode!* 136 137 160 Either/Or, I alectic that connects the individual with family and kindred is no subjective dialectic, for that elevates the connection and the individual out of the context; it is an objective dialectic. It is essentially [familial] piety. To preserve this cannot be regarded as harmful to the individual. In our day something is deemed to hold in the sphere of nature that is not deemed to hold in the sphere of spirit. Yet one does not want to be so isolated, so un- natural, that one does not regard the family as a whole of which it can be said that when one member suffers, then they all suffer.°> One does this spontaneously—otherwise for what reason is the particular individual so afraid that another mem- ber of the family may bring disgrace upon it except that he feels a share of the suffering from it. Obviously the individual must put up with this suffering, whether he wants to or not. But since the point of departure is the individual, not the fam- ily line, this compulsory suffering is maximum; one feels that the person cannot quite become master of his inherited char- acteristics but nevertheless desires this as far as possible. But if the individual sees the inherited characteristics as a component of his truth, then this manifests itself in the world of spirit in such a way that the individual participates in the guilt. Perhaps not many are able to comprehend this conclusion, but then they would not be able to comprehend the tragic, either. If the individual is isolated, then cither he is absolutely the creator of his own fate, and then there is nothing tragic anymore, but only evil, for it is not even tragic that the individual was infat- uated with or wrapped up in himself—it is his own doing; or the individuals are merely modifications of the eternal sub- stance of life, and so once again the tragic is lost.
With respect to tragic guilt, a difference in modern tragedy is readily apparent after it has assimilated the ancient, for only then can this really be discussed. In her childlike piety, the Greek Antigone participates in her father’s guilt, and so also does the modern Antigone. But for the Greek Antigone the fa- ther’s guilt and suffering are an external fact, an unshakable fact, that her sorrow does not move (quod non volvit in pectore [something that she does not turn over in her heart]);5¢ and in- sofar as she personally suffers, as a natural consequence, under The Tragic in Ancient Drama 161 her father’s guilt, this again is in all its external factuality. But for our Antigone it is different. I assume that Oedipus is dead. Even when he was alive, Antigone knew this secret but did not have the courage to confide in her father. By her father’s death, she is deprived of the only means of being liberated from her secret. To confide in any other living being now would be to dishonor her father; her life acquires meaning for her in its de- votion to showing him the last honors daily, almost hourly, by her unbroken silence. But one thing she does not know, whether or not her father knew it himself. Here is the modern element: it is the restlessness in her sorrow, it is the amphiboly*’ in her pain. She loves her father with all her soul, and this love draws her out of herself into her father’s guilt. As the fruit of such a love, she feels alien to humankind. She feels her guilt the more she loves her father; only with him can she find rest; as equally guilty, they would sorrow with each other. But while the father was living, she could not confide her sorrow to him, for she indeed did not know whether he knew it, and consequently there was the possibility of im- mersing him in a similar pain. And yet, if he had not known it, the guilt would be less. The movement here is continually relative. If Antigone had not definitely known the factual con- text, she would have been trivial, she would then have had nothing but a suspicion to struggle with, and that is too little to engage us tragically. But she knows everything; yet within this knowledge there is still an ignorance that can always keep the sorrow in motion, always transform it into pain. In addi- tion, she is continually in conflict with her surrounding world. Oedipus lives in the memory of his people as a fortunate king, honored and extolled; Antigone herself has admired and also loved her father. She takes part in every commemoration and celebration of him; she is more enthusiastic about her father than any other maiden in the kingdom; her thoughts contin- ually go back to him. She is extolled in the land as a model of a loving daughter, and yet this enthusiasm is the only way in which she can give vent to her sorrow. Her father is always in her thoughts, but how—that is her painful secret. And yet she does not dare to abandon herself to sorrow, does not dare to 138 139 162 Either/Or, I mourn; she feels how much depends upon her; she fears that a clue would be given if anyone saw her suffering, and so here, too, she finds not sorrow but pain.
Developed and elaborated in this way, Antigone can engage us, I believe, and I believe that you will not reproach me for frivolousness or paternal prejudice when I believe that she might very well venture into the tragic line and appear in a tragedy. Hitherto she has been only an epic character, and the tragic in her has had only epic interest.
A context appropriate to her is not very difficult to find, either; in that respect, one can very well be satisfied with what the Greek tragedy provides. She has a sister living; I shall have her be a little older and married. Her mother could also be alive. That these two always remain subordinate characters is, of course, taken for granted, as is the fact that tragedy gener- ally contains an epic element in the manner of Greek tragedy, although this need not be so conspicuous because of that; nevertheless, monologue will always play a leading role here, even though the situation ought to be of assistance to it. Everything must be thought of as focused on this one main point of interest that makes up the content of Antigone’s life, and when the whole thing is designed in this way, then the question is: How is the dramatic interest to be produced?
As described above, our heroine is on the point of wanting to leap over an element in her life; she is beginning to want to live altogether spiritually, something that nature does not tol- erate. With her depth of soul, when she ever falls in love, she is bound to love with an extraordinary passion. So here I come to the dramatic interest—Antigone is in love, and I say it with pain—Antigone is head over heels in love.** Here, obviously, is the tragic collision. Generally there ought to be somewhat more discrimination about what is called a tragic collision. The more sympathetic the colliding forces are, the more pro- found but also the more alike they are, the more momentous the collision. So she has fallen in love, and the object of her love [Kjerlighed] is not unaware of it. Now, my Antigone is no ordinary girl, and her dowry likewise is not ordinary—her pain. Without this dowry, she cannot belong to any man— The Tragic in Ancient Drama 163 that, she feels, would be taking too great a risk. To conceal it from such an observant person would be impossible; to wish to have it concealed would be a breach of her love—but with it can she belong to him? Does she dare to confide it to any hu- man being, even to the man she loves? Antigone is strong; the question is not whether for her own sake, to ease her mind, she should confide her pain to someone, for she can very well en- dure it without support, but can she defend this to the one who is dead? Indeed, by confiding her secret to him, she herself suf- fers in a way, for her life is also sadly interwoven in that secret. But this does not concern her. The question is only about her father. Consequently, from this angle the conflict is of a sym- pathetic nature. Her life, which previously was peaceful and quiet, now becomes violent and passionate, at all times self- contained, of course, and here her lines begin to have pathos. She struggles with herself; she has been willing to sacrifice her life for her secret, but now her love is demanded as a sacrifice. She is victorious—that is, the secret is victorious—and she loses.
Now comes the second collision, because in order for the tragic collision to be really profound, the colliding forces must be alike. The collision described above does not have this qual- ity, for the collision is actually between her love for her father and for herself and whether her own love is not too great a sac- rifice. The second colliding force is her sympathetic love for her beloved. He knows that he is loved and audaciously ven- tures upon his offensive. Of course, her reluctance amazes him; he perceives that there must be some very strange diffi- culties, but not such as to be insurmountable for him. What to him is of supreme importance is to convince her of how deeply he loves her, indeed, that his life is over if he must give up her love. Finally his passion becomes almost unveracious, but only more inventive because of this opposition. With every protestation of love, he increases her pain; with every sigh, he plunges the arrow of grief deeper and deeper into her heart. He leaves no means untried to move her. Like everyone else, he knows how dearly she loves her father. He meets her at Oed- ipus’s grave, where she has gone to pour out her heart, where 140 141 164 Either/Or, I she abandons herself to her longing for her father, even if this longing is itself mixed with pain because she does not know how she is going to meet him again, whether or not he knew of his guilt. He surprises her; he beseeches her in the name of the love she has for her father. He perceives that he is making an extraordinary impression on her; he persists, placing all his hope in this means, not knowing that he has actually worked against himself.
The focus of interest here, then, is to extort her secret from her. To have her become temporarily deranged and in that way to betray it would be of no help. The colliding forces are matched to such a degree that action becomes impossible for the tragic individual. Her pain is now increased by her love, by her sympathetic suffering with the one whom she loves. Only in death can she find peace. Thus her life is devoted to grief, and she has, so to speak, established a boundary, a dike, against the misfortune that perhaps would have fatefully prop- agated itself in a following generation. Only in the moment of her death can she confess the fervency of her love; only in the moment she does not belong to him can she confess that she belongs to him. When Epaminondas was wounded in the battle at Mantinea, he let the arrow remain in the wound until he heard that the battle was won, for he knew that it was his death when it was pulled out.® In the same way, our Antigone carries her secret in her heart like an arrow that life has contin- ually plunged deeper and deeper, without depriving her of her life, for as long as it is in her heart she can live, but the instant it is taken out, she must die. To take her secret away—this is what the lover must struggle to do, and yet it is also her certain death. At whose hand does she fall, then? At the hand of the living or the dead? °'In a certain sense, at the hand of the dead, and what was predicted to Hercules,® that he would be mur- dered not by a living person but by a dead one, applies to her, inasmuch as the cause of her death is the recollection of her fa- ther; in another sense, at the hand of the living, inasmuch as her unhappy love is the occasion for the recollection to slay her.® SILHOUETTES PSYCHOLOGICAL DIVERSION!
Delivered before the TVETAEAVEXOMUEVOL [Fellowship of the Dead]?
Abgeschworen mag die Liebe immer seyn; Liebes-Zauber wiegt in dieser Héhle Die berauschte, tiberraschte Seele In Vergessenheit des Schwures ein.
Gestern liebt’ ich, Heute leid’ ich, Morgen sterb’ ich; Dennoch denk’ ich Heut’ und Morgen Gern an Gestern [Foresworn may love at all times be; Love-magic lulls down in this cave The soul surprised, intoxicated, In forgetfulness of any oath.
Yesterday I loved, Today I suffer, Tomorrow I die, Yet today and tomorrow I like to think Of yesterday].° EXTEMPORE APOSTROPHE We celebrate in this hour the founding of our society; we re- Joice anew that the happy occasion has repeated itself, that the longest day is over and night begins to triumph. We have waited all the day long; just a moment ago we sighed over its length, but now our despair is transformed into joy. To be sure, the victory is not great, and the preponderance of day will last for a long time, but that its domination has been bro- ken does not escape our attention. Therefore, we do not post- pone our celebration over the victory of the night until it is plain to all; we do not postpone it until the torpid bourgeois life reminds us that day is declining. No, as a young bride im- patiently awaits the coming of night, so we longingly wait for the first onset of night, the first announcement of its coming victory, and the more we have been inclined to despair over our being able to hold out if the days were not shortened, the greater our joy and surprise.
A year has gone by, and our society still survives. Should we rejoice over that, dear Lupnagavexempevot, rejoice that its existence mocks our doctrine of the downfall of everything, or should we not lament instead that it survives and rejoice that in any case it has only one year left to continue, for if it has not vanished within that time, was it not our decision to dissolve it ourselves? In founding it, we did not make farsighted plans; too familiar with the wretchedness of life and the perfidious- ness of existence, we resolved to come to the aid of universal law and obliterate ourselves if it does not forestall us. A year has gone by and our society is still intact; as yet no one has been released, no one has released himself, since every one of us is too proud for that, because we all regard death as the greatest good fortune. Should we rejoice over this and not rather be sad 145 146 147 168 Either/Or, I and take pleasure only in the hope that life’s confusion will soon split us up, that the storms of life will soon carry us off! Surely these thoughts are better suited to our society, are more in agreement with the festivity of the moment, with the entire setting. For is it not ingenious and significant that the floor of this little room is strewn, as is the local custom, with foliage, as if for a funeral; and is not nature itself giving us its approval when we take note of the wild storm raging around us, when we pay heed to the wind’s powerful voice? Yes, let us be silent for a moment and listen to the music of the storm, its spirited course, its bold challenge, and the defiant roar of the sea and the uneasy sighing of the forest and the desperate crashing of the trees and the faint sibilating of the grass. To be sure, people do say that the voice of the divine is not in the driving wind but in the soft breeze,* but our ears, after all, are constructed not to pick up the soft breezes but to swallow the uproar of the elements. And why does it not rage even more violently and put an end to life and the world and this short speech, which at least has the merit exceeding everything else that it is soon ended. Yes, would that the vortex, which is the world’s core principle,® even if people are not aware of it but eat and drink, marry and propagate themselves with carefree industrious- ness, would that it might erupt with deep-seated resentment and shake off the mountains and the nations and the cultural works and man’s clever inventions; would that it might erupt with the last terrible shriek that more surely than the trumpet of doom announces the downfall of everything; would that it might stir and spin this bare cliff on which we stand as light as thistledown before the breath in its nostrils. The night, how- ever, is being victorious, the day is shortening, and hope is growing! So fill your glasses once again, fellow topers; with this goblet I toast you, silent night, the eternal mother of everything! From you comes everything; to you everything returns. Have mercy again on the world; open up once again to gather in everything and keep us all safe in your womb! I greet you, dark night, I greet you as the victor, and this is my comfort, for in eternal oblivion you shorten everything, day and time and life and the irksomeness of recollection!
Silhouettes 169 Since the time when Lessing defined the boundaries be- tween poetry and art in his celebrated treatise Laokoon,® it no doubt may be regarded as a conclusion unanimously recog- nized by all estheticians that the distinction between them is that art is in the category of space, poetry in the category of time, that art depicts repose, poetry motion.’ For this reason, the subject for artistic portrayal must have a quiet transparency so that the interior rests in the corresponding exterior. The less this is the case, the more difficult becomes the task for the art- ist, until the distinction asserts itself and teaches him that this is no task for him at all.
If we apply to the relation between sorrow and joy that which has been casually stated but not developed here, it is easy to perceive that joy is far easier to depict artistically than sorrow. By no means does this deny that grief can be depicted artistically, but it certainly does say that there comes a point where it is essential to posit a contrast between the interior and the exterior, which makes a depiction of it impossible for art. This in turn is due to the singular nature of sorrow. By nature, joy wishes to disclose itself; sorrow wishes to conceal itself, in- deed, at times even to deceive. Joy is communicative, sociable, open, wishes to express itself. Sorrow is inclosingly reserved [indesluttet], silent, solitary, and seeks to return into itself. Surely no one who has made life the object of any observation at all will deny the correctness of this. There are people whose make-up is so constituted that when their emotions are stirred the blood rushes to the surface of the skin, and in this way the interior motion becomes visible in the exterior; others are so constituted that the blood recedes, withdraws into the heart chamber and the inner parts of the organism. It is somewhat like this with respect to the mode of expressing joy and sor- row. The first make-up described is much easier to observe than the second. In the first, one sees the manifestation; the in-~ terior motion is visible in the exterior. In the second, one has an intimation of the interior motion. The exterior pallor is, as it were, the interior’s good-bye, and thought and imagination hurry after the fugitive, which hides in the secret recesses. This applies particularly to the kind of sorrow I shall consider more 148 149 170 Either/Or, I explicitly here, what could be called reflective sorrow. Here the exterior has at most only a suggestion that puts one on the track, sometimes not even that much. This sorrow cannot be depicted artistically, for the interior and the exterior are out of balance, and thus it does not lie within spatial categories. In yet another respect it cannot be depicted artistically, for it does not have inner stillness but is constantly in motion; even if this motion does not enrich it with new effects, the motion itself is nevertheless the essential. Like a squirrel in its cage, it turns around in itself, yet not as uniformly as does that animal, but with a continual alternation in the combination of the interior elements of sorrow. What excludes reflective sorrow as the subject for artistic depiction is that it lacks repose, is not at one with itself, does not come to rest in any one definite expres- sion. Just as the patient in his pain tosses from one side to the other, so reflective sorrow is tossed about in order to find its object and its expression. If the sorrow is in repose, the interior of sorrow will gradually work its way outward, become visi- ble in the exterior, and in this way become a subject for artistic depiction. If sorrow has inner repose and rest, the motion be- gins outward from the inside; reflective sorrow moves in- ward, like blood rushing from the outer surface, and lets one have an intimation of it only because of the fleeting pallor. Re- flective sorrow does not involve any essential change in the ex- terior; even in the first moment of sorrow it hurries inward, and only the more careful observer has an intimation of its dis- appearance; later it carefully sees to it that the exterior is as in- conspicuous as possible.