Week 13, Drama -- Sophocles' Antigone

Introduction to Ancient Greek Theater
Best Books I’ve Come Across:

Easterling, P.E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy.

Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991.

McLeish, Kenneth. A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003.

Pomeroy, Sarah. Et al. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Classical theater flourished mainly from 475-400 B.C. I have posted a run-down of its history, mostly the major plays composed by our three extant tragedians.

Festivals: The Festivals of Dionysus at Athens were called the City Dionysia, which was held in March or April, and the Lenaea, which was held in January.

The God of Honor: Dionysus was an Olympian god, and the Greeks celebrated his rites in the dithyramb. In mythology, his followers were satyrs and mainades, or ecstatic females. We sometimes call him the god of ecstasy, and as Kenneth MacLeish says, he “supervis[ed] the moment when human beings surrender to unstoppable, irrational feeling or impulse” (1-2). His agents are wine, song, and dance. Song and dance were important to Dionysian rites, and the participants apparently wore masks.

At the festivals, three tragic writers would compete and so would three or five comedic playwrights. The idea was that each tragedian would present three plays and a satyr play; sometimes the three plays were linked in a trilogy, like the Oresteia. So the audience had a great deal of play going to do during the festival seasons; the activities may have gone on for three or four days, with perhaps four or five plays per day. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides something like this pace.

Organization: How were the festivals organized? Well, the magistrate was chosen every year by lot – the archon. Then, dramatists would apply to the magistrate for a chorus, and if they obtained a chorus, that meant that they had been chosen as one of the three tragic playwrights. After that affair was settled, wealthy private citizens known as choregoi served as producers for each playwright. The state paid for the actors, and the choregos paid chorus’ training and costumes. So there was both state and private involvement in the production of a tragedy or comedy.

The Playwrights: Aeschylus 525-456 B.C. / Sophocles 496-406 B.C. / Euripides 485-406 B.C.

Aeschylus composed about 80 dramas, Sophocles about 120, Euripides perhaps about 90. Aristophanes probably wrote about 40 comedies. Dramatists who wrote tragedies did not compose comedies, and vice versa.

The playwright was called a didaskalos, a teacher or trainer because he trained the chorus who were to sing and dance. As drama developed, the playwright also took care of the scripts and the music. He was something like a modern director, and may at times have acted in his own plays, especially in the early stages of his career. A successful dramatist could win prizes, but generally, playwrights were able to support themselves independently by land-holdings. Sophocles, for example, was a prominent citizen – he served as a general and treasurer. Aeschylus was an esteemed soldier against the Persian Empire, and his tombstone is said to have recorded his military service, not his prowess as a playwright.

The Theater: The theater for the City or Great Dionysia was located on the south slope of the citadel of Athens, the Acropolis. Let’s look at a later reconstruction: http://www.didaskalia.net/StudyArea/recreatingdionysus.html.

The theater had three parts:

Theatron: this was for seating around 14,000 spectators; it was probably at first of wood, but later it was of stone.

Orchestra: this was for the chorus to sing and dance in and for the actors, when their function was developed.

Skene: this was at first a tent-like structure that served as a scene-building, and it had a door for entrances and exits. The Oresteia requires one, though perhaps the earliest plays didn’t.

Costume was important, too, because it could be used to determine factors like status, gender, and age.

The chorus remained important in drama, especially in Aeschylus. At some point, a choregos (legend says it was “Thespis,” hence actors are “thespians”) stepped forth and became the first actor, or answerer (hypocrites). So the composer was the first participant to turn choral celebration into what we call drama, with a plot and interaction between characters. Apparently Aeschylus or Sophocles added a third actor. The former’s early plays required only two actors, but even that was enough to make for interesting exchanges between the chorus and the actors and, to some extent, between the actors and each other. With three actors, of course, the possibilities for true dramatic dialogue and action are impressive.

Audience: Would have consisted mostly of male citizens—the ones who ran Athenian democracy by participating in the Assembly. There would probably have been very few, if any, slaves or women present, and perhaps some resident aliens or “metics” and visiting dignitaries. Drama was surely a male-centered affair, as was the political life of Athens. Public speaking was vital in democratic Athens—anyone who was someone in the legal/political system needed to know how to move and convince fairly large numbers of men. Theater and political life, as we shall see from Aeschylus, were in fact closely connected: the same skills were required, and the same class of people participated (male kyrioi, or heads of households who also performed military service). So while the stuff of tragedy seems almost always to have been the ancient myth cycles, the audience watching the plays would have felt themselves drawn in by the dramatists’ updating of their significance for the major concerns of the 5th-century B.C. present. And that present was, of course, the age of the great statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.), who drove home the movement towards full Athenian democracy from 461 B.C. onwards and who at the same time furthered a disastrous course of imperial protection and aggression that had ensued from victory in the Persian Wars around 500 B.C. Greek tragedy grew to maturity in the period extending from the battles of Marathon on land in 490 B.C. and the naval engagement at Salamis in 480 B.C., on through the Second Peloponnesian War from 431-404 B.C., in which the Athenians lost to Sparta the empire they had gained during half a century of glory following the victories over Persia. Athens’ supremacy didn’t last long as such things go, but it burned brightly while it lasted, and festival drama, along with architecture, sculpture, and philosophy, was among its greatest accomplishments. So the dramas took place in one of the most exciting times in Western history – both heady and unsettling at the same time, shot through with violence, democratic and artistic flowering, victory, and great loss.

A Return to the Mask, Our Way in to the Discussion of Aristotle:


The masks tell us something about tragedy: with linen or clay masks, a single actor might play several roles, or wear several faces of the same character. Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” His quip should remind us that masks don’t discourage expression — as Kenneth MacLeish says, they had religious significance in the theater: participants in Dionysian rites offered up their personal identity to the god, and further, he continues:

Wearing a mask does not inhibit or restrict the portrayal of character but enhances it, allowing more, not less, fluidity and suppleness of movement; and the character created by or embodied in the mask and the actor who wears it can feel as if it has an independent identity which is liberated at the moment of performance – an unsettlingly Dionysian experience. (9)

That emphasis on what we might call expression is important especially because – Aristotle’s claims about plot being the soul of tragedy notwithstanding – not that much really happens in many Greek tragedies. You don’t get five chariot chases and multiple flurries of semi-automatic bow-and-arrow fire in each performance. Those things are no doubt in the plays that have been lost…. What you get, instead, is chorus members and characters “taking up an attitude” towards the few well-packaged, exciting things that take place on or off the stage. The action is important, but characters’ words and attitudes help us, in turn, “take up an attitude” towards the action. Perhaps when Aristotle emphasizes plot so much, he’s taking for granted the great power of the Dionysian mask to support the plot in driving us all towards “catharsis.” Character, he says, will be revealed through action; we might add that it will be revealed while characters relate themselves to the action, thus drawing out the action’s significance. In this way, everything still revolves around action.

Aristotle’s theory of drama: if you would like to read something about it, please see my Fall 2007 E491 Literary Theory blog (http://www.ajdrake.com/blogs/491_fall_07/index.html), where (in the entry for Week 3) I cover The Poetics in some detail. In Aristotle’s view, a well-constructed plot that follows probability and necessity will induce the proper tragic emotions (pity and fear or terror), with the result being “catharsis,” a medical term that may be interpreted as “purgation” (of emotion) and/or as “intellectual clarification.” I should think that the tragic emotions, once aroused, become the object of introspection; thereafter, the audience attains clarification about an issue of great importance – for instance, our relation to the gods, the nature of divine justice, etc.

Antigone – Some Questions

1. Do you consider Antigone or Creon the more important character in this play? Or do you consider them both equally important? In your response, consider why one or the other, or both, might deserve the title of protagonist or tragic hero.

2. What vision of rulership does Creon set forth? To what extent does he remain true to that vision? What would you say is Creon's most important mistake, and why?

3. With what powers does Antigone align herself? Would you say that her mission has more to do with personal concerns than with religious piety, or would that be an unfair interpretation of her conduct? Explain.

4. How important is gender in this tragedy? Which of the characters treats it as an important consideration? How does Sophocles' handling of female characters differ, in general, from the way Aeschylus treats female characters?

5. Does the chorus in Antigone get to the bottom of why the two main characters suffer -- do they understand the cause and nature of the tragedy that unfolds in front of them? Explain.

6. How important are the gods in this play? Can you tell with whom they side? Or do they remain inscrutable? Explain.

7. Do you think the way Antigone treats her sister Ismene is proper, given her insistence upon familial piety? What is the basis for Antigone's harshness towards Ismene, and how does Ismene interpret Antigone's approach to the respective claims of family and state?

8. Aside from simply advancing the plot, what is the significance of the Sentry in this play? How does his conduct serve as a foil for more important characters? How does that same conduct undermine Creon's claims about the best way to keep citizens loyal?

Notes on Antigone


One immediate question is whether Antigone really deserves her fate -- it is easy to see how Oedipus brings on his own punishment, at least to some extent. But it is not so easy to see Antigone as a character with a tragic flaw. The main action she takes is simply to defend familial piety. It would seem that this action offends only Creon, not the gods. So I am going to suggest that there are really two main characters in this play. Antigone is the one who behaves heroically and suffers nonetheless, while Creon is the one who makes a serious mistake in asserting political right over the familial piety connected with Greek religion.

Creon, that is, asserts state power as something absolute and separate from religion and the family. It will be important to attend to how the play handles the opposition between state/religion, state/family, as well as gender. I do not see that Antigone's main problem is her gender; that is somewhat different than what we saw in Aeschylus. Similarly, Creon treats law and state as settled matters even though he is newly planted on the throne. It is not the case, as it was in the Oresteia, that we are moving from a primitive clan-based to a more modern conception of law and the state.

Be sure to make another contrast between Sophocles and Aeschylus: Sophocles concentrates much more intensely upon individual characters, even though he does not go so far as to say that these characters are entirely independent of the realms surrounding them. But it certainly is the case that in Sophocles, we cannot simply say action reveals character. Perhaps it is even true that Antigone is driven to exclude any possible course of action that would betray her own character. This makes her quite an absolutist.

It would be interesting to compare Antigone with Socrates later -- Socrates obeys the laws of his city, but unlike Ismene, no reproach accrues to his behavior.

A possible question concerns whether or not there is a certain amount of pride in Antigone's decision: around line 45, she sets up the struggle between herself and Creon in terms of breeding versus cowardice. It is difficult to determine whether or not Ismene is a coward or simply a good citizen, at least if we do not fully and simply accept Antigone's viewpoint.

Around 75, Ismene pleads that she and Antigone are both women and underlings. So they must obey for both reasons. And at 80, she asks "why rush to extremes?" She is not a creature of extremes, unlike Antigone. So Antigone has the capacity of all true heroes -- she is capable of behaving in extreme manner where honor is concerned.

Antigone is rather harsh with her sister. At 90, she says do as you like, dishonor the laws the gods hold in honor. She allies her decision with the gods, and around 110, she already sees herself from the perspective of the dead, who have their own rights and can affect the living. Death without glory is worse than any other fate for her.

The chorus. Certainly you will want to ask a question about the way in which the chorus of Sophocles differs from that of Aeschylus. But more specifically, notice how at 117, their first prayer is to the sun. So they ally themselves and their city with the light of day, while Antigone allies herself with the dark realm of Hades. They also say that Zeus does not like human pride or bravado -- which is exactly what we have just seen in Antigone. The chorus invokes Dionysus, but only in the service of the new day.

Creon asserts state power as the highest good of all. He refers several times to the "ship of State." This might be an important metaphor for the Greeks, because one can well imagine how strict discipline must have been on an Athenian trireme. And he also says that anyone who "places a friend above the good of his own country...is nothing." That would certainly include Antigone. Here one can see how a Hegelian view makes sense because both Creon and Antigone assert the absolute rights of their respective realms. Creon even forbids the relatives from feeling anything for their lost kinsmen.

The Sentry who begins speaking at 250 illustrates a consciousness centered entirely on preserving one's safety. This soldier is no hero; he only wants to tell the truth and avoid getting blamed for what has happened.

Around 320, one fault in Creon's reasoning begins to show: he really does believe that money is the root of all evil and the cause of disobedience. When the leader of the chorus dares to mention the possibility that perhaps it would be best to honor the usual funeral rites, Creon becomes insulted and begins complaining about the corruptive influence of money -- he seems almost an atheist or materialist because he discounts the participation of the gods in human life.

It is easy to see the futility of Creon's plans and his whole way of going about things by the way the Sentry takes his commands -- he came to Creon out of fear, and is happy to escape with his life. Loyalty never enters his thoughts. This is around 360.

375. A good question about the chorus -- isn't it very difficult sometimes to understand who exactly they are criticizing? Inhumanity is the charge in this speech -- I would say the term refers to Creon since Creon ignores the justice of the gods that should bind his oaths together concerning statecraft. But there is also perhaps some irony in the praises that the chorus give to mankind. It almost sounds like Shakespeare's famous speech "what a piece of work is man, how like an angel." But death comes in as the great leveler of everyone.

485. Again the Sentry shows what he is made of -- he fears death more than anything. This fear makes enable to contain within himself the contradictory feelings he describes; he can take joy in his own escape and yet feel bad because he has betrayed Antigone. He will do it nonetheless.

500. Antigone contemptuously allies herself with Hades and Zeus. She interprets herself as the agent of these great powers and their laws. Complying with Creon's edict would force her to contradict the gods.

Evidently, the leader of the chorus sees her as wild just as Oedipus was. Creon agrees shortly thereafter, when he says that Antigone is mocking him and making him seem effeminate. For him, the struggle does have a gender dimension.

555. Creon and Antigone argue their respective cases here. They disagree about what we owe the dead, since for Antigone it makes no difference that her two brothers opposed one another in life. Creon cannot forgive an enemy even in death. We have certainly seen this behavior before in the Greeks -- consider Achilles dragging the body of Hector around Troy.

660. Ismene offers to share Antigone's death, but Antigone refuses. Ask students if they find Antigone overly harsh in her judgment of Ismene. Perhaps this exchange between the two sisters shows us the nature of Antigone's familial piety -- it is hardly sentimental, but is based on a sense of obligation that overrides personal feeling.

655. The chorus sees the force of the gods as a force of nature. They also keep referring to the senselessness and rashness of the main characters' actions.

735. Here it seems that Creon does not think he is being arrogant towards the gods -- he refers to Zeus, but does not think that Zeus would find fault with him for what he is doing. His point seems to be that a man must rule his own household, Kings included. Creon will not be ruled by a woman from his own household. Creon says he must at all costs prevent anarchy.

775. Haemon seems to be respectful of his father, but his criticism is strong: in polite terms, he accuses Creon of what we would call egotism. And he will go on to say that this stubborn man mistakes his own will and self-interest for the good of the State. On the whole, Haemon sees Creon as entirely too rigid. The chorus leader agrees. At 813, Creon shows that he interprets everything said in light of the speaker’s category or rank. Here, the distinction is between youth and age. At 825, the argument boils over: Creon says that he is the State or the city, and Haemon tells him he might as well be king of a desert island if he thinks that way.

870. Creon declares that he will punish Antigone by burying her alive. She worships death, he says. Shortly thereafter, the chorus blames love or Aphrodite for everything; they assume Haemon has defied his father because he loves Antigone.

900. Antigone shows genuine emotion now that she has been condemned. It seems she is not so eager after all to leave the world of light. Now that the heroic action has been taken, she is free to lament. Certainly, this is what Aristotle means when he refers to pity and fear being aroused in an audience. Look up the story about Niobe. At 940, Antigone says she is a stranger and that she has no home. She really does not belong to the living or to the dead. At 946, Antigone reveals that she feels the curse of her house deeply, feels the alienation it entails from her own city. She is caught in a net of family misdeeds, and yet is bound to observe familial piety.

Creon seems wrong at this point -- he would preserve himself from any taint of impurity, but he is killing Antigone nonetheless.

1000. Antigone declares that while other family members could be replaced her brother is irreplaceable since both her parents are gone. This shows, according to our introduction by Bernard Knox, that Antigone is really motivated by private reasons, not by reverence for the gods and for the family unit as a whole. The difference between her and Creon is that he betrays the values he set out to defend, while Antigone suffers for what she defends, even though it is not her primary motive, so she is a truly heroic character -- something we see Sophocles exploring in many of his plays. Knox also talks about the mysteriousness of the gods in Sophocles; we never learn what they really think of it all. I like the passage on page 51 -- Sophocles "Explores...the destinies of human beings who refuse to recognize the limits imposed on the individual will by men and gods, and go to death or triumph, magnificently defiant to the last."

Week 12, Poetry -- Harlem Renaissance

Introduction to The Harlem Renaissance

In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois had written not only about the “talented tenth” he expected to move things forward for black people but also about the “doubleness” inherent to the consciousness of black Americans: they belong here and yet don’t really feel at home, thanks to centuries of repression and mistreatment. The Harlem Renaissance, I suppose, is in part the fruit of that double consciousness. In the main it was predicated not on withdrawal and isolationism (as in “separatism”) but rather in the strong belief that black Americans needed to break through to full equality and take the recognition that had always been denied them by white citizens and of course the white power structure in law, politics, and social life. One of the main things about this Renaissance was the need of various artists to avoid simply playing to white expectations and stereotypes; the work they produced had to be their own, not something inflected and warped by what white people wanted. At the same time, they wanted to engage with a broader white audience, which implies some degree of mediation in thinking “black” culture. Then too, there was the basically Arnoldian issue of the extent to which art needs to see itself as a medium for change, as something directly political and broadly social – Matthew Arnold had insisted (and in doing so I’d say he followed the German author Friedrich von Schiller) on a formulation that’s since become known as “the paradox of Anglo-American humanism”: namely, only by not promising to accomplish anything beyond the realm of art, only by stubbornly not making themselves useful to the masses, could artists hope to make a difference at some future date. Jumping into the fray would only cheapen the arts to the level of a political tract or a billboard, Arnold might say if he were around today. Well, the authors of the Harlem Renaissance by no means avoided political or social critique, but at the same time they knew they couldn’t just churn out “works of protest.” Only really good art and sound reflection makes much difference – what they produced was indeed a splendid and diverse body of work both in fiction and non-fiction. I would suggest that a big and remarkable part of American culture is due to the influence and genius of black people; much of it has been wrought in and through suffering, with its basis a long history of vicious abuse at the hands first of white slavemasters and then, in the Jim Crow era, white racists and their supporting institutions.

Why should art forms like blues, jazz, church music, and poetry be so important to such a group of people? Well, in part because, we should realize, that group had no direct outlets for their grievances: if the bad guys control the law, what can you do? Go complain to the jailor and you’ll end up in prison, as the gospel phrase goes. There are certainly strong stirrings towards insistence on full legal and political and social equality before MLK Jr’s Ghandian campaign (called non-violent direct action) in the 1950s – A. Philip Randolph is a good name to mention here, and of course W.E.B. DuBois never for one minute ceased advocating full rights for all Americans. Try reading his book on Reconstruction – it’s a fascinating read, and it amounts to genuine history, not a dismissal or a whitewash as so many southern and white-written studies of Reconstruction have been. None of this is intended to wish away or deprecate the injustices committed against other groups in the USA – it’s just that outright slavery is the rawest deal you can get anywhere, and that happened to black people here for centuries. It doesn’t get any worse than that, and yet they persevered and took an overwhelmingly constructive route towards full recognition as citizens and contributors to American history. The project may not be complete yet, but it’s getting closer.

Bontemps, Cullen and Grimké’s selections remind us of the complexity implied by DuBois’ reading of American history. In the Bontemps poem, a simple agricultural metaphor that traces all the way back to the Bible becomes a focus for hope and frustration alike: a promise of bounty cast to the future, but at the same time a promise that the “fruit” of the harvest will have a bitter taste. Cullen describes it as “curious” that in a world filled with race hate and oppression, God would “make a poet black, and bid him sing!” His “Saturday’s Child” sounds like the blues, while “From the Dark Tower” promises in a quietly apocalyptic vein that “We were not made eternally to weep.” Grimké’s “Tenebris” is brooding in the way that it depicts the black person’s growing bitterness casting a shadow over the white person’s house. As so often, we see the metaphor of a tree to characterize black historical experience and the sentiment drawn therefrom: something deep, rooted, consequential. Billie Holliday, after all, later sang of lynched black men as “strange fruit, hanging from the trees.”

Langston Hughes is probably the most obviously modernist of the Harlem Renaissance writers – his forms are often experimental, based on jazz and blues music. “What happens to a dream deferred?” his poem “Harlem” asks – does it get transformed for better or worse, or decay into a putrid once-organic mass, or does it retain its content intact and go off like a bomb? The dream deferred, of course, is equality and fulfillment in America for black people. There are a number of metaphors you’ll run across in African American literature that speak to this deferral: MLK Jr. spoke of what the Founders had promised in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a “blank check” that’s still good, if we can just all cash it together. “The Weary Blues” tells us that the blues don’t make your problems go away, and in fact they run through your head even when you sleep – yet they let you sleep “like a rock.” Well, that’s something – expression of sorrow is necessary even when it doesn’t make the sorry disappear. Expression is just plain necessary, and that’s that. Most “black” art isn’t about evasion or pie in the sky; it comes from and speaks to suffering. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a fine way to say that people of African descent have been present at the beginning of many civilizations – a black person’s understanding of time, I’ve always thought, has to be somewhat different from that of the average white person: the arc is longer, slower; patient strength is of the essence. What was it that MLK Jr. said? “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” There’s a lot of history behind even Hughes’ simpler poems – in “I, Too,” we may hear something of Lincoln’s rather confused way of talking about the relationship between black and white – in opposing slavery, he said he didn’t know that blacks were his equal but that he was certain they were his brothers: that’s something to build on for future realization, unlike the way the Southern slavemasters and their sympathizers talked. Here in this positive modern poem, Hughes gestures towards the white folk’s shame over not living up to values they themselves profess: justice and equality for all.

The selections by Claude McKay show considerable anguish and despair – the dark-skinned prostitutes who walk the streets of Harlem at night become the subject of the poet’s anguished reflection, centuries of oppression evoked by their weary steps. “If We Must Die” is a call to sacrifice, if it comes to that: there were, indeed, horrible instances of white mob violence against black people in Jim Crow times. “The Tropics in New York” describes the City, so often seen as a mecca for experimentation and liberty, as a harsh and alienating place. “The Harlem Dancer” pays tribute to the dancer’s alienation from the dance and the place of the dance, while “The White House” reminds to speaker to preserve his spirit from “the poison of your deadly hate.”

James Weldon Johnson’s Preface covers the need to avoid falling into the trap of representing black people as creatures of “humor and pathos” – you know, the old stereotypes that white people find touching and sometimes funny: “Mammy” in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is a worthy character and gives the white folk a chuckle, but that isn’t the model for modern black art. “Negro dialect” won’t serve. This isn’t to say that early representations of black people in film, television or radio are to be despised: they were at least a way to get a foot in the door. No looking down on “Amos and Andy” too harshly, I suppose – even though its “black” actors were in fact two white guys. I mean, somebody had to pave the way for Sanford and Son, right? By any means necessary.

Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925) describes the Harlem phenomenon not primarily in terms of the burden of past oppression, heavy as that was, but rather as something more positive: a “new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom…” and a “deliberate flight . . . from medieval America to modern” (966). If this is assimilationism, it isn’t a weak kind that’s called for – one in which a people are swallowed up into a larger whole; rather, “The American mind must reckon with a fundamentally changed Negro” – black people are, in other words, re-creating themselves as they go, reconstituting their identity in a way that isn’t chained to past resentments and suffering. There’s also something of a critique in Locke of black thinkers who, he apparently thinks, cling to the status of victimhood rather than moving beyond it. Locke also does a good job of characterizing black self-development as more international than national, yet at the same time it’s filled with implications for American culture and democracy: if some aren’t fully free, none truly are.

Rudolph Fisher gives a balanced view of white interest in the artistic goings-on in Harlem – I think he’s fully cognizant of white America’s propensity for co-opting everything around. Later on, of course, jazz gets rechristened “swing” when it broadens to white audiences. And in general a commercial society finds a way to co-opt and monetize any sort of cultural phenomenon – even images of radicalism end up on advertising billboards, like the poster of Che Guevara I once saw promoting some radio station at a bus stop in Fashion Island, Newport Beach.

DuBois has little but scorn for the latest production by Claude McKay – the intellectual finds it to be exactly the sort of “unrestrained” representation of black people as racy primitives that thrill-seeking white folk love to hear: pandering, in other words.

Zora Neale Hurston provides a reflection on the “sentiment” involved in being black – when does one feel one’s color, the power of definition closing in? But she also deals with what she finds to be genuine racial/cultural differences: she experiences music differently than her white friend, for instance. Her sentence, “But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propoed against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red, and yellow” is a strange but effective way to conjure a sense of racial identity. It’s a jumble put there by others, and some of it is worthwhile, I think she’s saying, but in the end all the paper bags contain pretty much the same jumble of things.

Langston Hughes gives a balanced, not overly sentimental or lionizing portrait of major intellectuals and artists from the Harlem Renaissance era. He finds genuine genius and perhaps a hint of opportunism in said figures.

JESUS, THOREAU, GANDHI, KING: AGAPE, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, SATYAGRAHA AND NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION

The basis of Martin Luther King, JR’s philosophy is Christian. King began his career as a Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama, even though events in that city quickly swept him into the historic crusade for civil rights in America and worldwide liberation from colonial domination. I’ll discuss the main Christian influence first, though it might be said that King’s philosophy comes just as much from the black church’s tradition of resistance dating back at least to the nineteenth century. The relevant Christian concept comes from the New Testament—agape, or love. The term agape does not refer to erotic love (sexuality); it refers to a much broader kind of affection. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy points out that the word at first referred to early Christian fellowship gatherings. The word (whose Latin equivalent is caritas, charity) now refers to "brotherly or selfless love" (18).

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy adds that agape is "unselfish love for all persons" (12). In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus makes the following statement that illustrates this definition and brings out its implications for those who must act in a wicked world:

6:27 . . . Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
6:28 Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
6:29 And unto him that smiteth [strikes] thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also.
6:31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.
6:32 For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.
6:36 Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

To a narrow mind, such words would mean something like "pray for those who mistreat you so you will go to heaven and they will go to hell." But I think that Jesus means something more in line with the notion of agape mentioned above: all human beings are endowed with a soul, and so their potential for spiritual regeneration must be acknowledged. That is why he says, "pray for them which despitefully use you."

King’s philosophy of "direct nonviolent action" is in accord with agape in that both concepts aim to dramatize the gravity of the wrong done and the necessity for the wrongdoer to reflect upon the possibility of redemptive action. If I merely strike you back when you strike me without cause, the idea goes, neither of us grows from the experience--you do not see that you are wrong, and I become as hateful as you. But if I dramatize the wrongness of your action by "turning the other cheek," I force you to confront that wrongness and challenge you to respond to it. Needless to say, countless people have died waiting for their oppressors to offer such responses, but Jesus remains firm in his belief in the power of confrontation joined with love. Notice that he does not say, "If your enemy strikes you, flee in terror"; you cannot turn the other cheek if you’re in full flight. He speaks of nonviolent confrontation, not cowardice. What King wants to do, then, is to put Jesus’ strategy to work in segregationist Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, as well as, later, in northern states. And he wants to put it to work in an organized, concerted way: the mass demonstration comprised in acts of direct nonviolent confrontation with representatives of state-sanctioned oppression. Recall those film clips of protestors being attacked by police dogs and walloped by club-wielding cracker (i.e. white trash) policemen. That is what happens when you engage in nonviolent action, King would say. You yourself don’t engage in violence; instead, you bring to the surface the hatred that racists inwardly harbor. What comes to the surface will be captured by the modern camera and sent out for the world to see, sent out to do its work on all consciences intact enough to be affected by injustice. The segregationists called this behavior "outside agitation" and "communism." They would say that, but King knew that Jesus was just such an outside agitator and revolutionary. And as for obedience to harsh laws, Jesus, it is often said, transformed the Law of Moses by willingly suffering for having challenged it--somewhat as the participant in a modern civil disobedience movement does.

The Christian foundation of King’s philosophy is firm, but more recent ideas add to the strength of that foundation. We must, then, examine Thoreau’s notion of civil disobedience and, more important still, Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha. I’ll comment on Thoreau first, then move briefly to Gandhi, and finally come back to finish my remarks on King. Thoreau is now among America’s most celebrated writers, though he did not attract so much notice during his lifetime. He belonged to the group of authors known as the Concord Transcendentalists. These writers (among them Emerson, Whitman, and Hawthorne) were diverse in their thinking, but they generally shared Emerson’s belief that individual intuition could lead to a grasp of transcendental truth. Emerson believed that by contemplating oneself and the world of nature, a person could arrive at a truth beyond the ordinary world of the senses and physical things. Something of a pantheist, Emerson also located the divine within each human being, not outside as a potentially hostile, punishing force. Most important to Thoreau’s argument in favor of civil disobedience is the Transcendentalist notion that the individual and his or her conscience are of the highest importance.

Some memorable quotations from "Resistance to Civil Government" (or "Civil Disobedience") will show the tenor of Thoreau’s thinking about the capacity of the individual to confront and transform an unjust, overbearing government. Summing up his case, Thoreau argues that "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly." Of course, the State of Thoreau’s day is too busy waging unjust wars against Mexico and reaping the economic benefits of southern slave labor to recognize any such power in the ordinary citizen. What, then, is a conscientious person to do when the tax-gatherer comes around each year, asking for money that will surely be used to wage Mexican Wars and oppress black southerners?

The issue comes down to hard analysis of two cornerstones of American democracy: obedience to the laws of the land, and willingness to respect the will of the alleged majority. Thoreau undermines both. As for the first, he says that "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." As for the voting many, says Thoreau, "A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men." When the tax-gatherer knocks on the door, then, the citizen must politely but firmly refuse to pay; one just person’s individual conscience has more right to judge the matter than the thousands of voters bent on doing the most expedient and profitable thing.

But isn’t that folly, we may ask? The power of the State and the majority is massive, and the individual is small and weak. How can one oppose such power any more than one would challenge a hurricane or an earthquake or an avalanche? Thoreau’s answer is admirable: "just in proportion as I regard [the State, the majority] . . . as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men . . . I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves." If those appeals fail, well then, argues Thoreau, "Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

Thoreau’s own act of resistance was not exactly the first shot of a bloody rebellion—all he did was refuse to pay an annual poll tax, and most of his neighbors probably considered him a harmless eccentric. And it’s true that Thoreau, a white citizen in a northern town, did not have to confront bullets, police dogs, billy clubs, or water cannon spray. The Klan didn’t come looking for him with twenty feet of well-oiled rope, either. He is only asserting, at base, that the individual of conscience is bound to obey something like a citizen’s Hippocratic Oath: "at least do no harm." Still, readers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, JR did not treat Thoreau’s essay as the effusion of an inconsequential crank; it contains the seeds of full-scale civil confrontation and massive political effect. It may be so that only one in a thousand people are willing to do more than mouth opposition to State tyranny, but the power of individual conscience, of moral absolutism, is not to be underestimated: "Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine." The disturbing force Thoreau attributes to the individual conscience is enormous, and his advice to any right-thinking minority of people is that "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose." Modern theorists may disagree with Thoreau’s contention that "the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses," but the practical Gandhi and King found Thoreau’s faith in conscience inspiring and valuable.

While Thoreau was not one to lead the masses, Mohandas K. Gandhi knew how to turn the many into a nonviolent army composed of everything from "foot soldiers" who simply withheld their cooperation from the Raj (the name for British India) to highly disciplined "lieutenants" who put their bodies and lives on the line for the cause of Indian freedom. That nonviolent army was powerful enough to do what even Napoleon couldn’t: thoroughly defeat the British. Gandhi’s main weapon consisted in the deployment of the force or concept that he called "Satyagraha." Of this term, Gandhi has the following to say:

Passive Resistance . . . has been conceived as a weapon of the weak and does not exclude the use of physical force or violence for the purpose of gaining one’s end, whereas [Satyagraha] . . . has been conceived as a weapon of the strongest and excludes the use of violence. . . .

Its root meaning is holding on to truth, hence truth-force. I have also called it Love-force or Soul-force. In the application of Satyagraha I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. . . . And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self.

But on the political field the struggle on behalf of the people mostly consists in opposing error in the shape of unjust laws. When you have failed to bring the error home to the lawgiver by way of petitions and the like, the only remedy open to you . . . is to compel him by physical force to yield to you or by suffering in your own person by inviting the penalty for the breach of the law. Hence Satyagraha largely appears to the public as Civil Disobedience or Civil Resistance. (Mohandas K. Gandhi: Non-Violent Resistance, New York: Schocken, 1961, 6-7.)

Satyagraha as a practice is varied, extending, as I say above, from direct nonviolent confrontation that breaks an unjust law and invites the penalty thereof to less demanding acts of non-cooperation—withholding taxes and boycotting the oppressors’ courts, schools, merchants, and those social and political functions from which resisters may safely withdraw without inhumaneness. (Gandhi would not, for example, advocate refusing anyone medical attention or basic food supplies—that would be cruelty, a kind of violence.) You can see that Satyagraha is not merely an abstract concept. Instead, it is such a dynamic combination of love and power that British imperialism’s controlling institutions found it advisable to grant India and Pakistan their autonomy. Gandhi died in 1948, and Pakistan and India fought an awful war in 1971, but his nonviolent nationalism certainly helped to gain for India its freedom from Britain.

As a divinity student at Crozer College in Georgia, King had studied Gandhi, and he came to see the usefulness of this modern prophet of nonviolence in the African American struggle for civil and, more generally, human rights. Like Gandhi, King places great faith in the power of love in motion, as his borrowing of the term "soul-force" indicates. Human conscience, King argues, has no "color," and therefore it should be possible to appeal to that faculty even in "Alabama, with its vicious racists" or in "Mississippi, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification [i.e. with states’ rights slogans]." The appeal, of course, King attempts to make by the same basic, structured means that Gandhi employed: direct challenges by a disciplined minority of volunteers and less confrontational, yet still effective, non-cooperation on the part of the African American majority. If the appeal should fail to reach the stony consciences of George Wallace and less prominent racists, well, there’s a whole world of television viewers to receive that appeal, and, as Jesus says in the parable of the sower, some seed may land in good earth, and yield fruit. (Matthew 13:08).

There’s a final, and sad, chapter to add to King’s role as an American moral leader. The last few years of King’s life were too often filled with depression—a feeling that surely came over him not only because he had, like so many leaders, to confront fierce egotism and infighting within the Civil Rights Movement as a whole and even within his own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but also external harassment by FBI thugs and proponents of the war in Vietnam that he outspokenly opposed. Add to these worries the at times overwhelming sense of despair at the complex challenge presented by northern states that oppressed African Americans not so much by outright brutality as by malignant neglect, political machination, and economic injustice. It’s no wonder, then, that King was an unhappy, if still determined, man by the time of his assassination. He had already begun to advocate a more international movement that would link up, as Malcolm X and he himself had long suggested, with the then-current worldwide struggle on the part of Asians, Latinos, and Africans for freedom from colonial rule. And he had also moved closer to promoting a non-Marxist version of democratic socialism--a society in which goods would be distributed not solely on the basis of a supposedly "free" market but instead with a view to elemental human spiritual and material needs. More and more, he appears to have come to think that appeals to conscience alone were not enough and that in urban areas like Chicago, "Southern"-style protests and aims would not generate enough movement to transform America. If America wouldn’t respond to such tactics, perhaps it needed to be brought to a virtual economic and political standstill before it would change its ways. King seems to have become more and more radical in his tactics and goals in his last few years, though it’s vital to realize that he did not in any way advocate racial violence. Before King had much time to do develop his newest positions, a bullet put an end to his participation in what he must have seen as an ever-changing dialectic of black protest, progress, and opposition by white power.