Minor characters, genre, and relationality: Antigone’s sister in contemporary literature

Abstract

This essay investigates the distinction between major and minor characters by analysing the contemporary literary reception of a minor figure from one of the most canonical works in world literature: Ismene, Antigone’s sister in Sophocles’s Antigone. While Sophocles’s tragedy continues to elicit a startling number of rewritings and adaptations, the last two decades have seen a remarkable increase in rewritings which bring the heroine’s sister Ismene, a minor character in the original play, to the forefront. This multilingual, multi-generic, world literary corpus engages with Ismene’s relationship to heroism and sacrifice, moving away from tragedy and instead turning to a variety of genres: monologues, short stories, non-tragic plays, comedies, as well as hybrid forms that incorporate intermedial references. While much has been written about postcolonial and feminist rewritings of canonical Western texts, very little has been said about the attachments which secondary figures might elicit in peripheral literatures and minor authors. This focus, as this essay will show, helps refine notions of agency, solidarity, and connectivity in theories of the minor. The analysis presented here underscores the aesthetic, generic, and political implications of the revisionary representation of minor figures by contrasting Jeremy Menekseoglu’s theatrical rewriting Ismene (US, 2004) and Lot Vekemans’s monologue Zus van (Sister of, The Netherlands, 2005) as two distinct modes of engaging with Ismene as a paradigmatic minor figure. Pursuing the genre-theoretical and political questions raised by what Jeremy Rosen has termed “minor-character elaborations”, this essay identifies the practice of rewriting as a key literary strategy to decentre the major position of certain figures and genres in world literature. In dialogue with Rosen’s theoretical work, I argue for an aesthetic, enunciative, stylistic understanding of genre, which is best able to raise both the question of the minor character and that of minor-character elaborations within debates surrounding the minor.

Keywords:

• Antigone
• Ismene
• Jeremy Menekseoglu
• minor characters
• tragedy
• Lot Vekemans

Introduction

Sophocles’s Antigone is one of the most undisputed works of world literature in terms of both its canonical status and the sustained worldwide circulation of its rewritings and adaptations. It continues to be extensively appropriated and transformed (Boscher et al. 2015; Duroux and Urdician 2010; Foley and Mee 2011; Steiner 1984; Van Zyl Smit 2016). Οn the margins of this decidedly major contemporary practice, this essay explores a practice that is in many ways similar but can be described as minor: contemporary rewritings of Antigone which shift the focus from the heroine towards her sister Ismene, a minor character in the original play.¹ This multilingual, world literary corpus, ranging from modern Greek and French to Peruvian, Dutch, Venezuelan as well as German, Brazilian, and US-American texts, builds upon Ismene’s minor position while simultaneously deconstructing it, thereby questioning her relationship to heroism, sacrifice, and the genre of tragedy as such. Indeed, most of these rewritings depart from tragedy and turn to other genres (monologues, short stories, non-tragic, as well as comedic plays), or else tend to incorporate intermedial references, as if abandoning tragedy were necessary, to turn this non-tragic or even anti-tragic figure into a main protagonist, narrator, or both. Most of their authors are little known, often self-published, and belong to peripheral literatures. The fact that they have turned to this same figure while being unaware of each other maps a latent network of minors, reminiscent of the “lateral networks” within or between minorities and minority discourses (Lionnet and Shih 2005, 1), of which Ismene, I argue, can serve as a mediating figure.

The significance of a minor character such as Ismene in recent rewritings of Sophocles’s canonical tragedy may be interpreted by turning to the concept of the minor, first developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature ([1975] 1986). Deleuze and Guattari originally formulated the concept of “minor literature” to describe Kafka’s literary usage of the German language and more broadly a literature which “a minority constructs within a major language” (16). While this concept has heretofore been predominantly applied to national or ethnic literatures (Bertrand and Gauvin 2003), this essay argues for its semantic extension and demonstrates its relevance in reflecting upon minor literary characters. Such an extension is all the more justified by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari themselves, in the last lines of the chapter “What Is a Minor Literature?”, already broaden the scope of its application to a vast array of categories of discourse:

How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the signifier, of metaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor. (Deleuze and Guattari [1975] 1986, 27)

Prompted by this broad and rather elusive understanding of the “minor”, in which the concept need not be restricted to literary choices but may include the discursive positioning of whole genres, styles, movements, and even theories, I contend that it can be expanded even further, and applied to genre theory and characters. Just as any discourse can both aspire to become major and create the opposite dream of a “becoming-minor”, minor characters – as well as major ones – can aspire to occupy different positions than literary tradition has assigned them to.

Ismene as a paradigmatic minor character

The concept of the minor is apposite to describe a minor character such as Sophocles’s Ismene and the way in which the character is reclaimed in present-day theatre and literature. I claim that Ismene is not just any minor character, but a paradigmatic one. Most traditional interpretations of Antigone operate with a hierarchical and binary view of tragedy. These interpretations are generally divided into two sets (Lardinois 2012, 58–64). The first regards Antigone as the sole heroine of the play, because she is “made to represent something that transcends, in value and appeal, the political or human justifications of Creon” (59). This interpretation is consistent with Bernard M. W. Knox’s influential definition of the “Sophoclean hero” as an isolated, strong-willed individual who remains unyielding despite the opposition of a series of secondary characters seeking to undermine their resolution ([1964] 1983, 8). The second interpretation, sometimes termed the “Hegelian view”, follows Hegel’s reading in the Aesthetics, which considers Antigone and Creon to be “equally right and wrong”, that is: right in principle, wrong in their stubbornness (Lardinois 2012, 59). This interpretation adds nuance to the “heroic” reading while upholding a hierarchical and binary view of tragedy: it posits isolated main protagonists defined by and in opposition to a series of minor characters.² Both these views imply that tragic heroism needs the presence of a set of hollow, flat, minor characters against which it can stand out.

George Steiner’s statement that “[Ismene] is the blonde, hollow one” (1984, 144), however superficial and sexist it may seem, in fact aptly describes the character’s minor position, as well as the binary dynamics in which she is entangled in the tragedy. Sophocles brings out the contrast and hierarchy between the sisters by juxtaposing a heroic character with a hollow one: a major with a minor one. As linguist Östen Dahl writes with regard to languages, the concept of the minor is in itself a “minor” concept – that is, a relative one – in the sense that it is not definable by itself: “The notion of a ‘minor language’ is essentially a negative one – it is a language which lacks the features qualifying a language as ‘major’” (2015, 15). Dahl’s remarks on the relationship between “minor” and “major” languages certainly apply to Ismene as a minor character. Ismene is only definable as that which is not Antigone. She is feminine, obedient, practical, and attached to life. This forms the backdrop against which Antigone’s sacrificial heroism stands out. Sophocles’s Ismene is thus both a secondary and a minor character, inasmuch as she occupies a relative and negative position vis-à-vis the major character, Antigone. For this reason, the Antigone–Ismene pair may be used to investigate the binary and hierarchical relationship which holds between the minor and the major.

In what follows, I explore two contemporary but diverging modes of engaging with Ismene as a minor character and of grappling with the major as it is represented both by the character of Antigone and more generally by the genre of tragedy. In the two rewritings of Sophocles’s play this essay focuses upon, the character of Antigone is absent. Ismene is thus no longer cast in a strictly relative position vis-à-vis Antigone. Once released from their dependence on the main character, the minor character can be envisaged in different ways. It can either – to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s terms – aspire to the major or create a “becoming-minor”. In the second case, minority becomes a stance to aspire to, in and for itself.

In Jeremy Menekseoglu’s play Ismene (US, 2004), the shift from Antigone to Ismene as a main protagonist is accompanied by an explicit rejection of the values the playwright associates with tragedy. Menekseoglu deems the genre conservative and even oppressive, and its heroism, which is, more often than not, achieved through self-sacrifice, as morbid. Consequently, Ismene involves a recourse to an alternative, extra-literary tradition, which redefines conventional understandings of heroism and enables Antigone’s sister to fit the profile of a new type of heroine. By replacing a tragic model of heroism with a new model in which the individual strives to impose herself against predeterminism, the play illustrates what Deleuze and Guattari described (and critiqued) as a dream of becoming major. Menekseoglu’s play posits Ismene as a new heroine and as a major character by inverting her minority and giving her full-blown agency. Yet, it does so by depriving Antigone of her own. The erstwhile minor character takes centre stage, but at the cost of minoritizing the previously major one. The binary opposition between major and minor characters, which characterizes the genre of tragedy and the original play (Knox [1964] 1983; Lardinois 2012), is thus inverted but nonetheless maintained.

Lot Vekemans’s monologue Zus van (Sister of, The Netherlands, 2005) proposes what seems at first glance a less forthright subversion. Yet Sister of, a monologue delivered by Ismene, profoundly alters the hierarchical relationship between minor and major characters by reshaping Ismene’s relativity as a relationality. Sister of can therefore be said to illustrate Deleuze and Guattari’s “opposite dream” of “creat[ing] a becoming-minor”, as the monologue embraces, preserves, and honours the minor attributes of the character by using specific enunciative and stylistic features that are particularly suited to represent Ismene’s minor stance towards Antigone and her tragic, heroic values. In this text, the dream of “becoming-major” is abandoned for an entirely different stance.

Bringing back the “minor” in the minor character

In mobilizing a Deleuzian understanding of the minor, I argue for an aesthetic, stylistic, as well as politicized approach to what contemporary scholarship terms “minor-character elaborations”: “a genre constituted by the conversion of minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new ones” (Rosen 2016, 2). The approach I take here is itself a minor one within the contemporary theoretical discourse. Indeed, scholarship has long interpreted the feminist and postcolonial instances of minor-character elaborations in mainly political and subversive terms (Thieme 2001; Widdowson 2006). However, such politicized interpretations have recently been called into question, most prominently by Jeremy Rosen’s influential 2016 study Minor Characters Have Their Day, in which he coins the expression “minor-character elaboration” and establishes this practice as an independent genre.

Rosen’s study delineates the genre’s conventions and traces its history back to its first experimental moments in the 1960s with works such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966),³ all the way to what he describes as its all-pervasiveness in today’s literary marketplace. Despite the crucial relevance of the term “minor” for his work, Rosen defines neither “minor” nor “minority”. In the absence of such definitions, readers must either read the term as self-explanatory or supply their own meaning. More importantly, this omission causes Rosen’s book to remain outside of the theoretical discourses on the minor. This omission, however, is less surprising than it first appears when one considers that Rosen explicitly aims at downplaying the political nature of the genre and argues that progressive scholars have often proven all too ready to ascribe a subversive agenda to minor-character elaborations, and have sometimes even adopted “a narrow focus on politically oppositional texts” (2016, 5). Departing from this prior scholarship, Rosen demonstrates that, far from always criticizing the literary canon or reading it against the grain, the genre of minor-character elaboration readily accommodates a wide range of political positions. As much as some of these rewritings and adaptations do challenge the canonicity of the texts they rewrite, others pursue continuity rather than rupture: they willingly capitalize on the literary and discursive authority of their predecessors, thereby strengthening both their and the original text’s cultural capital.

Rosen’s insistence on the variety of sensitivities and political agendas that a given genre can adapt to is surely beneficial. Yet, one cannot help but notice that he at times generalizes in a way not dissimilar to the progressive scholarship he criticizes:

[A]lthough scholars who have written on individual instances of minor-character elaboration have stressed their participation in a purportedly subversive feminist and multicultural project, to consider this flourishing genre as a whole makes legible its actual significance: the genre articulates a broad contemporary commitment to a subjectivist perspectivism compatible with the reigning tenets of liberal pluralism. (Rosen 2016, 89; my emphasis)

His reasoning is upon the following lines: while studying “individual instances”, critics were bound to accentuate the texts’ subversion. However, consideration of “this genre as a whole” allows one to acknowledge its apolitical stances, or, at best, its engrained “liberal subjectivism” and democratic tendencies (91). Yet Rosen’s view is only correct if one indeed considers the genre as a whole, since such a broad perspective cannot help but neglect the particularity – indeed the uniqueness – of the gesture that informs each of these rewritings separately. As I argue here, individual minor-character elaborations are particularistic rather than pluralistic. They directly engage with the minor status of their chosen protagonist or speaker. Crucially, most of these texts identify with one given character by privileging their particular point of view to the detriment of others – and most explicitly of the major ones (Penelope will “talk back” to Ulysses, as is the case in Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad; Ismene will talk back to Antigone). Often this character is the sole narrator or speaker and gives their name to the text. While some minor-character elaborations indeed “juxtapos[e] conflicting perspectives within a given text” (Rosen 2016, 109), most of them are partial, monological endeavours. Rosen’s genre-spanning argument does not explain why individual authors continue to engage with a single minor character, even as this practice has become so widespread. These authors certainly do not do so in order to complete a general picture of the “diversified chorus of voices” that make up the democratic consensus (Rosen 2016, 152). Rather, what characterizes minor-character elaborations is the way they aim at presenting a unique – and deemed uniquely interesting – voice, which deserves to be heard, and sometimes to be heard at the expense of other voices. Rosen’s emphasis on the genre’s liberal pluralism overlooks its antagonistic, conflictual dimension. These texts are very much partial to the one character whose voice they amplify. The pluralism, thus, is primarily in the eye of the beholder, and only becomes apparent when the genre is looked at from a broad, distant – that is, from a major – perspective. Rosen’s deliberately broad and sociological perspective ultimately comes with the disadvantage of any macroscopic or generalist point of view: it struggles to deal with the particular.⁴ For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari’s own minor – understood as a (political) – stance is, I argue, a safeguard against too general and too depoliticized an approach.

A second limitation of Rosen’s definition of minor-character elaboration is that it forgoes the traditional understanding of genre (the triad novel/drama/poetry), which defines genre by enunciative criteria. While remarking that minor-character elaborations “combine multiple genres”, Rosen quickly moves beyond this question (14) and indiscriminately works with dramas, monologues, and (most often) novels, without addressing this generic and enunciative difference. Correspondingly, his discussion includes both texts where the former minor character is the main protagonist and where they are first-person narrators (sometimes both). This general view is unconcerned both with the particularism inherent in minor-character elaborations and with the way different definitions and understandings of genre intersect. Both these limitations may be remedied through the utilization of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the minor, since it involves both a politicized reading and an attention to stylistic, formal, and enunciative elements. Consequently, the approach proposed here seeks to be attentive not only to two particular instantiations of a minor character in contemporary literature, but also to their respective generic, formal, enunciative, and stylistic choices, thus introducing the question of minor characters and the texts they elicit in the debates surrounding the minor – where, I argue, they rightfully belong.

Aspiring to the major? Jeremy Menekseoglu’s Ismene

Ismene was written in 2003 by playwright and director Jeremy Menekseoglu. A production of the Dream Theatre Company, of which Menekseoglu was the founder and director, it premiered on 8 January 2004 at the Journeymen Theatre in Chicago, under the stage direction of Mia Kuziko.⁵ The play’s tension relies on whether or not Ismene, its main protagonist, will yield to tragedy. Intertwining a literary, meta-discursive understanding of the term “tragedy” with its more ordinary sense as an all-powerful destiny, Ismene raises the question of whether the individual can free herself from familial determinism and from a literary tradition deemed oppressive. Ismene, the only survivor of the cursed Oedipal family in the Sophoclean hypotext, is its protagonist of choice. This choice, however, is in no way self-evident, nor is it a first choice. Menekseoglu’s foreword presents Ismene as supplementing Antigone as a more obvious initial heroine:

Originally this play was to be a retelling of Antigone …  In this version, Antigone triumphs over Creon’s decree, not by disobeying it or through self-sacrifice, but by following it to the letter. By not only letting Polynices rot outside the gates of Thebes, but by bringing all to see his corpse and tell them his story … But … Antigone was not the heroine for that kind of story. [Jean] Anouilh describes her in his play as a girl who does not think, only feels. Does not reason, but acts. This girl had no place in my play. Since Sophocles wrote her story 2500 years ago, Antigone has always been treated as a symbolic champion for [t]he Laws of God over the Laws of the State. It is a story about morals that cannot be questioned. Arguments that cannot be won. Reason that relies on mystical beliefs whether you speak of the will of the gods or the will of the state. They are the same thing. They both rely on human sacrifice whether for [the] good of god or the good of the people … No, Antigone was not the right heroine. But who in the story spoke of reason? Who in the story spoke of life? … Who spoke of the past as a tragedy and the future as a place of hope? Ismene. (Menekseoglu 2011)

Ismene is chosen because of the very characteristics which tragedy minoritizes and which traditionally disqualified her as a tragic heroine (Steiner 1984, 144–151; Rawlinson 2014): reason instead of feeling, the choice of life instead of sacrifice, hope instead of a morbid fascination with catastrophe. Ismene’s survival is a characteristic inherited from the Sophoclean hypotext, as Antigone proclaims: “You chose to live, and I to die” (Sophocles [1888] 2010, l. 607). This antithesis establishes Antigone as a heroine while minoritizing Ismene as a coward. However, Ismene’s survival distinguishes her not only from Antigone, but from the whole Labdacid family. After Jocasta hangs herself (Œdipus Rex), and Oedipus dies at Colonus (Œdipus at Colonus), and Eteocles and Polynices succumb at each other’s hands, and Antigone commits suicide, closely followed by her betrothed Haemon and his mother Eurydice (Antigone), Ismene is the only remaining member of the family: a survivor par excellence. In the foreword, Menekseoglu reinterprets Ismene’s survival as a positive distinction: surviving the catastrophe of Antigone singles her out from the entire cast of Sophocles’s tragedy, Creon included. The list of characters similarly singles her out: Ismene is the first to be listed, as “youngest daughter of Œdipus” (Menekseoglu 2011); the defining relationship is to her father rather than her sister. Menekseoglu’s play thus accentuates her position as both marginal and singular within the Labdacid family. In so doing, the play moves beyond a binary and hierarchical understanding of Ismene as a minor character by granting her a place within the continuum of a “tragic” genealogy, while at the same time attributing to her an undeniable individuality and freedom of choice.

Ismene is set in the aftermath of the catastrophe rendered in Sophocles’s play. Ismene is harassed by the chorus, a sinister, zombie-like collective eagerly awaiting the catastrophe to finally engulf her as well. Creon sends Ismene away to what seems to be a boarding school. The first act starts after an earthquake has killed the chorus pursuing Ismene. The only survivor, she arrives at the boarding school, which is gradually revealed to be a sanctuary for female survivors of the Greek mythological world (among them Iphigenia, Procne, and Philomela, here called Philomena). This strictly female cast is then joined by a male figure named Te, a so-called Messenger. His presence becomes increasingly threatening, before he reveals himself to be a sadistic, manipulative version of the god Apollo. He has come to precipitate Ismene’s death and thus conclude the “tragedy” – that is, the curse he himself cast on her family. After dispensing with the school’s residents, Apollo renders them into a new chorus who serve his objective to bring about what the play terms “Ismene’s tragedy”: Apollo encourages Ismene towards suicide by presenting her with the needles which Oedipus used to blind himself. Yet, understanding that the god had used similar tactics to manipulate the rest of her family to succumb to tragedy, Ismene is the first to resist.

Ismene explicitly moves away from the genre of tragedy, and it does so by referencing and transforming two central tragic elements: the chorus and the messenger. These elements lose their traditional dramaturgical functions. The chorus is no longer in charge of commentary upon the action, but is repurposed as a threatening crowd of undead. The messenger no longer narrates off-stage action but becomes the villain: a symbolic stand-in for the patriarchal literary tradition of tragedy.⁶ With these changes, I argue, Menekseoglu activates a second, extra-literary intertext: that of the teen slasher horror film. This intermedial reference redefines heroism as an act of surviving dreadful events. Through this redefinition, Menekseoglu moves away from tragic heroism, a part of which is reliant upon a hero’s willingness to face and invite death as a glorious outcome. Instead, Menekseoglu’s Ismene instantiates Carol J. Clover’s concept of the “Final Girl”, the slasher’s typical heroine, whose heroism is found in survival:

The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril. … She is abject terror personified. (Clover 1992, 35)

The Final Girl’s survival is her only and most prized achievement. As the villain in the film Scream 4 (2011) puts it: “How do you think people become famous anymore? You don’t have to achieve anything. You just gotta have fucked up shit happen to you”. Surviving “fucked up shit” is indeed also, mutatis mutandis, the one and only feat of Sophocles’s Ismene, the sole survivor of the Labdacid family at the end of the play. Menekseoglu’s rewriting enhances the trait of survival in two ways: first, by having Ismene enter the stage as the only survivor of another catastrophe, the earthquake which engulfed the chorus; and second, through the subsequent killing/hypnotizing of her peers in the boarding house. A survivor of multiple catastrophes, Ismene is all the more likely to triumph over the tragedy instigated by Apollo and to become the Final Girl of Menekseoglu’s rewriting. She achieves this through her will to survive and her practical intelligence – the very qualities which disqualified her as a tragic heroine. These also happen to be the Final Girl’s most distinctive qualities.⁷ In her final confrontation with Apollo, Ismene’s common sense is her only ammunition to preserve her mental integrity and resist sacrifice. As Apollo makes himself known and tells of the curse he cast on the Labdacids, Ismene makes clear that his prophecy no longer holds for her and triumphs over him.

Menekseoglu’s shift away from the tragic model of heroism is also of consequence to the character of Antigone herself, although she is absent from the play. His positive re-evaluation of Ismene’s survival simultaneously and symmetrically redefines Antigone’s sacrifice as a weak capitulation to prophecy: Antigone succumbed to tragedy, like the rest of her family, whereas her sister manages to resist. In Ismene, Antigone loses her singularity as a tragic heroine. She is cast aside with the rest of the family and recedes from the foreground which Ismene now occupies.

Ismene instead of Antigone, and Ismene against Antigone: one may ask whether this apparent reversal of values does not still uphold the binary dynamics of major versus minor. For though the play actively departs from the determinism of tragedy, it nevertheless retains both the binary dynamics of the genre and its fascination with a single hero(ine) isolated from a mass of secondary and almost interchangeable characters. By shifting genres, Menekseoglu’s rewriting points to an alternative model of heroism while endowing Ismene with the solitude and distinction of the tragic hero(ine). Replacing one heroine with another, and pinning one genre against another, Ismene decidedly remains in a binary confrontational aesthetics similar to that of tragedy, even if the author critiques this aesthetics in his foreword. It grants Ismene agency but ultimately fails to truly remove hierarchical relations, which it only reverses, and thus remains entrenched in what Deleuze and Guattari call a “dream” of becoming-major.

Embracing the minor: Lot Vekemans’s Sister of and the stylistics of minority

The second rewriting I would like to examine is Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans’s Zus van (Sister of), which, I argue, illustrates the more radical Deleuzian “dream” of creating a “becoming-minor”. Like Menekseoglu’s play, this monologue draws on Ismene’s survival in the hypotext. Yet, instead of isolating her from Antigone and the rest of the Labdacids so as to recast her as a newly defined heroine, Zus van upholds and emphasizes her relative character as well as her minor position:

It’s not that I’m asking for pity

Or even understanding

I’m just trying to tell you my side of the story

The whole story

Not what’s left after a hundred years

Or a thousand years

A footnote in a book

Ismene, colon:

Daughter of

Sister of

That’s all that remains of me

A name with no substance

A name that exists only in relation to

In relation to my family (Vekemans 2005, 16)⁸

The practice of rewriting a text from the canonical tradition has often been described through the metaphor of voice, a recurring topos, both in the texts, the paratexts, and in scholarship. This is particularly the case as far as feminist and postcolonial rewritings of the canon are concerned, and especially when the rewriting in question is focused on a secondary character who is perceived as having been marginalized in and by the original text. Jeremy Rosen is singularly critical of the metaphor according to which rewritings focused on a minor character are “giving a voice” or “restoring the voice” of characters “silenced” by their first authors or by the texts in which they first appear. For Rosen, the fictional nature of characters exposes the naivety of the claim that a text is able to “give” a voice (2016, 86–87). If anyone can be said to be “speaking” in minor-character elaborations, he argues, it is Margaret Atwood or Christa Wolf rather than Penelope or Cassandra:

Someone, this language suggests, has been granted agency, autonomy, the freedom to speak – “a voice with which to speak of her own experience” … Lost is attention to representation … : to the fact that a literary depiction of a “voice” has been constructed by a contemporary author, who is writing on behalf of the formerly minor character. … Conflating literary representation with democratic self-representation, with autonomous free speech, authors and critics who describe minor-character elaborations as “giving voice to the silenced” understand the redistribution of narrative attention as a kind of justice. (Rosen 2016, 87)

The reminder that the “justice” thereby given to the formerly minor character is little more than a poetic justice is salutary.⁹ Still, Rosen’s downright rejection of this metaphor purely because it is a metaphor (characters do not really speak; their speech, as well as themselves, are mere representations) is strangely matter of fact. Questions of enunciative posture, of style, of narration – questions that have always been at the heart of the discursive analysis of narrative – have time and again been understood in terms of voice. In the Genettian analysis of discourse and narrative ([1982] 1983), for instance, voice is a key category. The metaphor of voice seems all the more justified in the case of a monologue. It should come as no surprise that the monologues are used remarkably often in minor-character elaborations. While not literally “giving a voice” to the character herself, the genre of the monologue, particularly when intended for the stage, turns the metaphor of the recovered voice into a corporeal reality. As I have argued earlier, an approach that is mindful of genre in its many intersecting dimensions needs to pay attention to elements of enunciation and style. Voice, understood enunciatively, is certainly one of these elements.

As in Ismene, the departure from tragedy in Sister of is tenacious. However, this monologue is much more consistent in rejecting the agonistic binary of the tragic conflict. The conflictual dialogism of the tragedy’s agon gives way to a fragmentary narrative monologue in free verse, a form which is better able to convey the indeterminate linearity of survival. In this case, survival continues into the afterlife, as Ismene speaks from an indefinite, limbo-like space, from which she revisits the events of Sophocles’s Antigone in front of the audience. The monologue is a form marked by the centrality of its speaker. It presupposes a (re)appropriation of enunciation, the wilful choice to make a voice heard – in this instance, a voice hitherto minoritized by and within the genre of tragedy. In Sister of, however, this independent enunciative form is at odds with the figure of Ismene as its speaker. On the one hand, the character seems to announce a subversive agenda, a reclaiming of the narrative, such as when she states, “I’m just trying to tell you my side of the story”. On the other hand, Ismene is far from being a triumphant speaker, as she regularly undermines her own speech, making it conditional on what she thinks the audience might expect, which is to hear about Antigone:

Why don’t you tell me what you’d like to hear

There’s a whole load I could tell you

About dogs

A whole load

And about flies

Likewise

Or about the past

My father

My brothers

My sister

Naturally

My sister (Vekemans 2005, 6)

Ismene’s speech is caught in an ambivalence between the desire to be heard and a deeply self-conscious discursive stance. Dependent upon the attention and expectations of her audience, her speech wavers between attempts to reclaim her narrative (“But I do want to tell my story / My story / Exactly as I lived it” [10]) and a relational and dialogical posture which borders on self-effacement (“But I would like to know what’s expected of me / Here / And now / What’s expected of me in the here and now / And I’d do just that” [3]). Ismene even questions the very relevance of her presence and of her speech: “I don’t know what I should say / … / You all know what happened then” (22–23). Even alone on stage, this Ismene remains a “Sister of”. She remains irredeemably relative, with respect to Antigone but also with respect to the audience or the reader, whose approval she seeks, whose boredom she dreads, and at whose disposal she places herself entirely. By casting Ismene in a relational enunciative posture, Vekemans does not attempt to obviate or counter her minor status but rather accentuates it.

Whilst it is always best to avoid the slippery slope of speculating upon authorial intention, a parallel can be drawn between the conflict at play in Ismene and the ambivalent position of minor-character elaborations and of their authors. Ismene “do[es] want to tell [her] story / [Her] story / Exactly as [she] lived it” (10), all the while knowing that she mostly owes her audience’s attention to her status as a “sister of”, and to the audience’s expectation to hear, once again, about “[her] sister” (6). In a similar fashion, Vekemans’s rewriting seeks to find an originality and an enunciative independence from the hypotext while summoning that hypotext’s authority and capitalizing on its canonicity. Vekemans proposes an original reading without disappointing the expectation of an audience or readership which has partly come for Antigone. Both playwright and character are caught in a form of minority and relativity which they do not escape entirely.

In addition to this profoundly relational enunciative posture, Ismene’s voice is marked by what could be termed a “minor style”. Her speech is filled with stylistic traits which signal an acutely self-conscious enunciative posture – going so far as to undermine her authority as a speaker: interrogative forms of expressions (“What was I meant to do? / What was I meant to do?” [24]); negative forms of expressions (“So I didn’t bury my brother / … / I didn’t pay him the final respects / She did” [21]); and apophases (“But I won’t dredge up all that history again / About my father Oedipus / Sleeping with my mother, who was actually his mother too” [10]). One may also note the prevalence of truisms (“Ultimately, life goes on” [15]), in which one may interpret the speaker to relinquish enunciative responsibility by repeating what has already been uttered by so many speakers before her, and by hiding, as it were, behind other people’s words. Through these stylistic and rhetorical devices, Ismene’s voice is not only listened to but represented and enhanced in all its fragility, awkwardness, relativity towards Antigone, and dialogism vis-à-vis the audience.

Menekseoglu, as I showed, seeks to extricate Ismene from the minor position she is bound to occupy in tragedy as a relative figure through a change in genre which establishes her as the one and only heroine at the cost of turning the tables on and minoritizing Antigone. Vekemans, in contrast, emphasizes her speaker’s relationality – both stylistically, as has just been demonstrated, and ethically, exploring Ismene as a relational, even caring figure. As defined by Carol Gilligan, the concept of care implies “seeing a world comprised of relationships rather than of people standing alone, a world that coheres through human connection rather than through systems of rules” ([1982] 1993, 29). Vekemans’s Ismene embodies this relationship-oriented ethical position:

I thought

Hoped

That after everyone had died

Father, mother, brothers

She’d maybe draw closer to me

After all, we were family

The only two in the family left alive

You’d think that would hold some attraction

But no, not to her

She cared more about her dead brother than about me

Her living sister

Because she had to prove that the laws of the gods take precedence over the laws of man (Vekemans 2005, 18)

From Ismene’s point of view, the familial relationship alone should have been reason enough to motivate Antigone’s concern for her. But Antigone acts according to what care theoreticians call the paradigm of justice, which focuses on universal rules and principles in dealing with moral questions (Gilligan [1982] 1993; Tronto 1993). Even though Antigone has been interpreted as a champion of familial relations against political law (Butler 2000; Hegel [1835] 1998; [1807] 2018), her sense of relationship is entrenched in a very abstract understanding of relationship.¹⁰ Vekemans’s Ismene, in contrast, exhibits a commitment to “a network of connection, a web of relationships that is sustained by a process of communication” (Gilligan [1982] 1993, 32). Not only does she include the audience in her own speech but she also insists upon maintaining her relationship with Antigone. By writing Ismene in such a way, Vekemans reaffirms a trait latent but fundamental in Sophocles’s text: Ismene consistently seeks to uphold the primacy of relationships. Antigone reacts to Ismene’s refusal to join her in burying their brother Polynices with an act of verbal violence aimed at severing the connection between them.¹¹ Ismene’s reply, in contrast, aims to preserve that connection. She repeats word for word an earlier formulation used by Antigone, which excluded her from the bond of philia, which was reserved for her brother Polynices.¹² In her response, Ismene dismisses Antigone’s exclusionary philia with an unconditional and inclusionary philia, which cannot be put into question by decisions taken, principles followed, or values defended. Ismene thus personifies a non-exclusive ethics of care.¹³ In this regard, Vekemans’s rewriting highlights and re-evaluates traits which are both existent and minoritized in the hypotext.

To make sense of Ismene’s unyielding preservation of relation in Vekemans’s monologue, it may be helpful to apprehend the minor through a musical metaphor. In musicology, the minor, as well as the major, are understood above all in their reciprocal relationship as two counterparts of the same key signatures, as the expressions “relative minor” and “relative major” attest: “Every major-key is called the relative of such minor key, and every minor-key the relative of its third above, taken in the major-mode” (“Relative” 2022). Although the expression “relative minor” is more widespread than its counterpart, nothing in the musical system indicates a hierarchical ranking as both modes are relative to each other. Jean-Pierre Bertrand and Lise Gauvin have put forward the musical metaphor as an example of non-hierarchical relationship and as a means of understanding the relationship between major and minor languages and literatures: “[The major and the minor] are part of a language and a codification which, to be sure, reproduce patterns of precedence, but without any hierarchy or principle of domination” (2003, 13; my translation). To apprehend the major/minor relationship in musical terms allows us to conceive of a mutual, reciprocal relativity and to soften the antithetical and inherently hierarchical relation of the major/minor dichotomy. By emphasizing relation over division, Vekemans’s text acts to dissolve an all-too-hierarchical binary.

In the rewritings discussed here, Ismene’s relativity and minority in relation to Antigone in Sophocles’s tragedy is grappled with in two diametrically different ways. Both Menekseoglu and Vekemans tackle the character’s minor and minoritized traits in the Sophoclean hypotext. Both grant a passive and relative figure what the introduction to this special issue calls “aesthetic agency”. Both move away from the grandeur of tragedy and emphasize what could be termed a minor agency. Yet, Menekseoglu’s version does so in oppositional terms, which invert but ultimately uphold the binary relation of major and minor in tragedy. Ismene thus remains entrenched in an oppositional reversal, positing one heroism against another: the heroism of survival which characterizes the slasher’s Final Girl against the heroism of sacrifice which characterizes Antigone. Hence, Ismene ultimately illustrates a dream of becoming-major. Vekemans’s Sister of, however, opts for an aesthetic re-evaluation of minority that does not aim for a triumphant revenge. It embraces Ismene’s minority and relativity, both enunciatively and stylistically, and underlines the relative, as well as relational, dimensions of the minor. In Minor Transnationalism, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih deplore that “[t]he minor appears always mediated by the major” (2005, 2). As has been suggested here with two contemporary appropriations of Ismene, minor characters may work as mediating figures, within, as well as between texts, and may embody a non-dominant, non-sovereign form of mediation between similar yet diverse endeavours and positions towards the major.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I will restrict the use of the term “adaptation” to intermedial adaptations and that of “rewriting” to written texts, even though some of the literary rewritings discussed in this essay do allude to and incorporate references from other media.

2 Contrarily, Lardinois shows that both these views are somewhat monolithic and argues for an attentiveness to the ambiguities within the two characters’ discourses and the reversals of these discourses throughout the play (2012, 62–64).

3 Rhys’s novel is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and is narrated from the point of view of Mr Rochester’s first wife.

4 The book’s default Anglophone position also contributes to this generalizing view, and prevents it from being truly mindful to the specific ways in which minor and peripheric literatures might engage with minor characters. The appendix of Minor Characters Have Their Day omits many non-Anglophone minor-character elaborations.

5 An expanded version of the following analysis of Ismene has appeared in Neeser Hever (2022b, 106–112), which addresses the postmodern aspects of Menekseoglu’s play, as well as the gendered aspects of the heroism it develops.

6 The predatory behaviour Te exhibits towards Ismene has palpable sexual undertones.

7 Valerie Wee describes the Final Girl as an “intelligent and competent female survivor” and a “resourceful young woman who manages to prevail over a difficult past … and defeat her attackers” (2005, 55).

8 Zus van was first staged on 7 January 2005 at the Toneelschuur Theater in Haarlem (Netherlands), starring Elsie de Brauw under the stage direction of Allan Zipson. To my knowledge, it has been translated into German (by Eva Pieper), French (Alain Van Crugten), Afrikaans (Chrisna Beuke-Muir), Russian (Irina Mikhaylova), Romanian (Valentina Tírlea), Slovenian (Mateja Seliskar), and English (Paul C. Evans). The English translation quoted here is not yet published. I am grateful to Lot Vekemans for personally communicating this unpublished English translation and permitting its publication as part of this essay.

9 Rosen’s criticism of the metaphor of voice becomes particularly pertinent in light of allegations of moral and sexual harassment brought against Menekseoglu by several actresses of his company, a company which claimed to give acting opportunities to debuting actresses and to have “no poor roles for women” (Douglass 2018). This case reminds us that “giving voice” to a minor female character from the classical tradition does not prevent the disempowerment of real women, least of all the women playing those characters (and thus – literally – lending them their voice).

10 By invoking “the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven” (Sophocles [1888] 2010, ll. 454–455), which she opposes to Creon’s “decrees,” Antigone sets one law against another.

11 “If thus thou speakest, thou wilt have hatred from me, and wilt justly be subject to the lasting hatred of the dead” (Sophocles [1888] 2010, l. 94).

12 Compare Sophocles ([1888] 2010, l. 73), “I shall rest, a loved one with him whom I have loved” with Antigone, ll. 98–99, “Go, then, if thou must; and of this be sure, – that, though thine errand is foolish, to thy dear ones thou art truly dear” (my emphasis).

13 Vekemans’s Ismene even prioritizes the concrete caring and tending to living relations. She goes as far as to take daily and continuous care of Creon, her aging uncle responsible for the death of her sister. For a more detailed exposition of the ideas expressed in this paragraph, as well as a proposal to interpret the contemporary rewritings focusing on Ismene as literary acts of care, see Neeser Hever (2022a).