Contro l’arroganza del potere: Antigone testimone del Novecento

Abstract

The essay aims to analyse the testimonial value of the character Antigone through the different authors and the different cultural contexts in which she is used during the literary twentieth century: the constant of these representations is the obstinate struggle against the violence of the dominant power, from fascism to the South American dictatorship, through the feminist resistance against patriarchy and its most ruthless manifestations. In the rewrites of Antigone, the figure of the witness and the figure of the writer do not coincide: nevertheless, the construction and the narrative artifice have the prerogative of achieving not only a perceptibility and a transmissibility of the testimonial experience, but also, paradoxically, a greater approximation to the truth of the experience. From being a banner of rebellion and resistance, Antigone adapts to the symbolisation of different cultural instances and is moved by the desire to bear witness to and affirm the laws of justice. Among the various representations of Antigone in the 20th century is the one that sees her as the protagonist of a militant and obstinate search for female identity with Luce Irigaray, Virginia Woolf and Maria Zambrano. Grete Weil, on the other hand, makes Antigone both witness and victim of the Shoa, while Griselda Gambaro, from Argentina, proposes a rewriting of Sophocles’ tragedy in order to offer testimony to all the women devastated by the Argentinean dictatorship, mothers of the desaparecidos. Among the most recent re-uses of Antigone’s myth is the poetic text Nel letargo che seguiva l’ingranaggio dei, taken from Variazioni belliche by Amelia Rosselli, a collective emblem of the incurable wounds of History.