Have we been chasing after "monsters" so long that we have left behind our humanity? See what the Ancient Greeks did and ask whatever happened to progress?

[lo yeeOn]

MAY 14, 2013
UNBURIED: TAMERLAN TSARNAEV AND THE LESSONS OF GREEK TRAGEDY
POSTED BY DANIEL MENDELSOHN

"Bury this terrorist on U.S. soil and we will unbury him"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/unburied-tamerlan-tsarvaev-and-the-lessons-of-greek-tragedy.html

So ran the bitter slogan on one of the signs borne last week by
enraged protesters outside the Worcester, Massachusetts, funeral home
that had agreed to receive the body of the accused Boston Marathon
bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev - a cadaver seemingly so morally polluted
that his own widow would not claim it, that no funeral director would
touch it, that no cemetery would bury it.

Indeed, even after Peter Stefan, a Worcester funeral director, had
washed and shrouded the battered, bullet-ridden body for burial
according to Muslim law, the cadaver became the object of a macabre
game of civic and political football.

Cemetery officials and community leaders in the Boston area were
concerned that a local burial would spark civic unrest. ("It is not
in the best interest of `peace within the city' to execute a cemetery
deed", the Cambridge city manager, Robert Healy, announced.) While the
state's governor carefully sidestepped the issue, asserting that it
was a family matter, other politicians seemed to sense an advantage in
catering to the high popular feeling.

"If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be
buried on our soil," declared Representative Edward J. Markey, a
Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, "then it should not be."

A legal no-man's land, perhaps, but familiar territory to anyone even
casually acquainted with the Greek classics. From its epic dawn to its
tragic high noon, Greek literature expressed tremendous cultural
anxiety about what happens when the dead are left unburied. In part,
the issue was a religious one: the souls of the dead were thought to
be stranded, unable to reach the underworld without proper burial.
(And without a proper tomb, or sema -- a "sign" or grave marker - a
dead person could not hope for postmortem recognition, some sign that
he or she had once lived and died.) The religious prohibition had
civic consequences: refusal to bury the dead was considered an affront
to the gods and could bring ritual pollution on the community. The
right of all sides to bury soldiers who had fallen in battle was a
convention of war; burial truces were regularly granted. In myth, even
characters who act more like terrorists than like soldiers -- for
instance, the great warrior Ajax, who plots to assassinate his
commanding officers but ends up dead himself -- are deemed worthy of
burial in the end. Which is to say, even the body of the enemy was
sacrosanct.

This preoccupation with the implications of burial and non-burial
haunts a number of the greatest works of Greek literature. The opening
lines of the Iliad, the oldest extant work of Western poetry, refer
with pointed revulsion to the possibility that the bodies of the
warriors who died at Troy could become the "delicate pickings of birds
and dogs", indeed you might say that getting the dead buried -- even
the reviled, enemy dead -- is the principle object of the epic's grand
narrative arc. Fifteen thousand lines after that opening reference to
unburied corpses, the poem closes, magnificently, with a scene of
reconciliation between the grief-maddened Achilles -- who has daily
defiled the unburied body of his mortal enemy, Hector, dragging it
back and forth through the dirt before the walls of Troy -- and
Hector's aged father, the Trojan king, Priam. In a gesture of
redemption for himself as much as for the Trojans, Achilles finally
agrees to release the body for burial. The gigantic epic ends not (as
some first-time readers expect) with the Wooden Horse, or the Fall of
Troy, but with the all-important funeral of the greatest of the
Greeks' enemies - a rite of burial that allows the Trojans to mourn
their prince and, in a way, the audience to find closure after the
unrelenting violence that has preceded. The work's final line is as
plain, and as final, as the sound of dirt on the lid of a coffin.
"This was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses."

As for the Odyssey, it, too - for all its emphasis on its fantastical,
proto-sci-fi adventures - reveals a telling preoccupation with this
issue. The great adventure epic features an extended visit to the
underworld, where, among other things, the flitting shades of the dead
express anxiety about their own funerals (and where Odysseus learns
how he himself will die, many years hence, "from the sea"); precisely
at the poem's midpoint; Odysseus dutifully halts his homeward journey
- and the epic's narrative momentum - to bury, with full honors, the
body of a young sailor who has died in a clumsy accident, as if to say
that even the most hapless and pointless of deaths merits the dignity
of ritual. And in the work's final, culminating book, Homer slips in
the information, ostensibly en passant but of course crucial, that the
bodies of the hated suitors -- whose gory deaths we are, to some
extent, invited to savor, given their gross outrages against Odysseus
and his family -- were duly permitted to be retrieved by their
families for burial.

But no work of ancient literature is as obsessed with unburied bodies
as Sophocles' "Antigone", a tragedy first produced in Athens around
442 B.C.: the entire plot centers on the controversy over how a
community that has survived a deadly attack will dispose of the body
of the perpetrator of that attack -- the body, as it happens, of a
young man who had planned to bring destruction on the city that had
been his home, who "sought to consume the city with fire...sought to
taste blood."

The young man in question is Polyneices, a son of the late,
spectacularly ill-fated king Oedipus who, after a power struggle with
his brother Eteocles, fled the city, eventually returning with an
invading army (the "Seven Against Thebes") to make war on his
homeland. At a climactic moment in the battle, the two brothers slay
each other, but the invasion is ultimately repelled and the city
saved. In the opening lines of the play, we learn that the body of
Eteocles, the defender of the city, has been buried with full honors,
but, according to a decree promulgated by the new king, Creon (who is
the young men's uncle), no one, under pain of death, may bury or mourn
Polyneices, whose corpse is to be left "unwept, unsepulchered, a
treasure to feast on for birds looking out for a dainty meal." (The
particular horror, expressed from the Iliad on down, that humans could
become the food of the animals we normally eat ourselves is
noteworthy: a strong signal of a total inversion in the scheme of
things of which the unburied body, the corpse that remains above
rather than below ground, is a symptom.)

Creon, like the Senate candidate from Massachusetts, cares a great
deal about public opinion, as we later learn; but it's certainly
possible to argue that his edict is grounded in a strong if
idiosyncratic morality. When confronted about his rationale for
enshrining in the city's law what is, after all, a religious
abomination, the king declares that Polyneices' crime against the city
has put the young man beyond morality that while burial of any dead is
a religious obligation, it is impossible to imagine that "the gods
have care for this corpse," that one might ever see "the gods honoring
the wicked." As he sputters his final line in this debate, you sense
that he is acting out of a genuine, if narrow, conviction that evil
men do not merit human treatment: "It cannot be." ("It should not be"
so Representative Markey, apropos of the burial that offended the
sensibilities of Massachusetts voters.)

But just as strong as Creon's convictions are those of his niece
Antigone, sister to both of the dead young men - Eteocles enshrined in
his hero's tomb, Polyneices lying naked on the ground, his nude,
weapon-torn body exposed to the elements, to the ravenous birds. From
the moment she appears on stage, outraged after having heard about the
new edict, Antigone's argument is for the absolute imperative of
burial -- indeed, for the absolute. For her, burial of the dead is a
universal institution that transcends culture and even time itself:
the "unwavering, unwritten customs of the gods... (not some trifle of
now or yesterday, but for all eternity." (She mockingly asks whether
these can be overruled by the mere "pronouncements" of Creon.) This
conviction is what leads her to perform the galvanizing action of the
play: under cover of night she goes to the desolate place where
Polyneices' body lies out in the open and performs a token burial,
scattering some dirt on the body.

It is to this symbolic burial that a terrified soldier -- one of the
guards whom Creon had set around the body, to make sure no one would
inter it -- presumably refers later on, when he anxiously reports to
Creon that someone has performed the rite. Enraged, Creon orders the
man to go back and "unbury" the body: to strip off the thin covering
of dirt and expose the corpse once more to the elements. It is upon
his return to the foul-smelling site that the soldier discovers
Antigone, who at that moment is arriving, and who cries out in despair
when she sees the denuded corpse. She is taken prisoner, has her great
confrontation with her uncle (from which I quote above), and, in one
of the diabolically symmetrical punishments so beloved of Greek
tragedians, is herself buried alive as punishment for her crime of
burying the dead -- walled into a tomb of rock, to expire there. (By
not actually killing her, Creon, who has the master bureaucrat's deep
feeling for the small procedural detail, hopes to avoid incurring
ritual pollution.)

There she does die - imperious to the end, she hangs herself, rather
than waste away as anybody's victim -- but not before Creon has been
persuaded of the folly of his policy. As often happens in tragedy, the
persuasion takes its final form as a heap of dead bodies: not only
antigone's but those of creon's son, the dead Girl's fiance, who has
slain himself over the body of his beloved, and Creon's wife, too, who
kills herself in despair at the news of their child's violent end. The
king who had refused to recognize the claims of family is, in the end,
made horribly aware of how important family is.

"THe claims of family" is just one way to describe what Antigone
represents. The titanic battle between her and Creon is, in fact, one
of the most thrilling moral, intellectual, and philosophical
confrontations ever dramatized; inevitably, it has been seen as
representing any number of cultural conflicts. Certainly in the play
there is the tension between the family and the community, but there
is also that between the individual and the state, between religious
and secular worldviews, between divine and human law, feminine and
masculine concerns, the domestic and political realms.

But perhaps a broader rubric is applicable, too. For you could say
that what preoccupies Antigone, who as we know is attracted to
universals, is simply another "absolute": the absolute personhood of
the dead man, stripped of all labels, all categories -- at least those
imposed by temporal concerns, by politics and war. For her, the
defeated and disgraced Polyneices, naked and unburied, is just as much
her brother as the triumphant and heroic Eteocles, splendidly
entombed. In the end, what entitles him to burial has nothing to do
with what side he was on -- and it's worth emphasizing the play is not
at all shy about enumerating the horrors the dead man intended to
perpetrate on the city, his own city, the pillage, the burning, the
killing, the enslavement of the survivors -- but the fact that he was
a human being, anthropos. (This tragedy is, indeed, famous for
expressing a kind of astonished wonder at what human beings are
capable of, accomplishments for which Sophocles uses the ambiguous
adjective "deina", which means both "Terrible" and "wonderful" -
"awesome", maybe, in the original sense of that word.) This is why,
during her great debate with Creon, while the king keeps recurring to
the same point - that Eteocles was the champion of the city, and
Polyneices its foe, and that "a foe is never a friend" -- such
distinctions are moot for Antigone, since the gods themselves do not
make them. "Nonetheless", she finally declares, putting a curt end to
another exchange on the subject, "Hades requires these rites". The
only salient distinction is the one that divides gods from men --
which, if true, makes all humans equal.

It was hard not to think of all this -- of the Iliad with its grand
funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so many
burials, and of course of "Antigone" -- as I followed the story of
Tamerlan Tsarnaev's unburied body over the past few weeks. I thought,
of course, of canny politicians eyeing the public mood, and of the
public to whom those politicians wanted to pander. I thought even more
of the protesters who, understandably to be sure, wanted to make clear
the distinction between victim and perpetrator, between friend and
foe, by threatening to strip from the enemy what they saw as the
prerogatives of the friend: humane treatment in death. The protesters
who wanted, like Creon, not only to deny those prerogatives to an
enemy but to strip them away again should anyone else grant them - to
"unbury the body". I thought of Martha Mullen, a Christian, who
insisted that the Muslim Tsarnaev, accused of heinous atrocities
against innocent citizens, be buried just as a loved one might deserve
to be buried, because she honored the religious precept that demands
that we see all humans as "brothers", whatever the evil they have
done.

This final point is worth lingering over just now. The last of the
many articles I've read about the strange odyssey of Tsarnaev's body
was about the reactions of the residents of the small Virginia town
where it was, finally, buried. "What do you do when a monster is
buried just down the street?" the subhead asked. The sensationalist
diction, the word "monster", I realized, is the problem -- and brings
you to the deep meaning of Martha Mullen's gesture, and of Antigone's
argument, too. There is, in the end, a great ethical wisdom in
insisting that the criminal dead, that your bitterest enemy, be
buried, too; for in doing so, you are insisting that the criminal,
however heinous, is precisely not a "monster". Whatever else is true
of the terrible crime that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is accused of having
perpetrated, it was, all too clearly, the product of an entirely human
psyche, horribly motivated by beliefs and passions that are very human
indeed -- deina in the worst possible sense. To call him a monster is
to treat this enemy's mind precisely the way some would treat his
unburied body -- which is to say, to put it beyond the reach of human
consideration (and therefore, paradoxically, to refuse to confront his
"monstrosity" at all).

This is the point that obsessed Sophocles' Antigone: that to not bury
her brother, to not treat the war criminal like a human being, would
ultimately have been to forfeit her own humanity. This is why it was
worth dying for.

Sometimes, a less elevated instinct, a raw practicality, could lead
the characters in Greek plays to a version of the same conclusion:
that because we will all want to be treated like human beings at some
unimaginably low moment -- because we all die - we must treat the
"monsters" thus, too. This, too, is a possibility worth considering
right now.

It is in fact, the point of the tart ending of another play by
Sophocles -- one he wrote about Ajax, the good soldier turned evil
terrorist. At the end of this tragedy, written not long before
"Antigone" was composed, a conflict arises over whether the body of
the criminal should be buried. His enemies - Agamemnon and Menelaus,
the leaders of the Greek expedition, whom Ajax had plotted to murder -
insist, of course, that his body be cast forth unburied, like the body
of an animal, "food for the birds". (Again.) Yet unexpectedly, there
springs to his defense a man who also had been his enemy. That man is
Odysseus, who in a climactic confrontation with the two Greek generals
-- who are his allies and commanding officers -- persuades them that
to pursue their hatred after death would be grotesque. Rather
typically for this type, the swaggering Agamemnon worries that to
relent would make him appear "soft"; but Odysseus, wily as he always
is, argues that "softness" is nothing more than justice -- nothing
more than acting like a human being. Then he makes his final, stark
point, one with which, you suspect, even Creon wouldn't argue:

AGAMEMNON: You will make us appear cowards this day. ODYSSEUS: Not
so, but just men in the sight of all the Greeks. AGAMEMNON: So you
would have me allow the burying of the dead? ODYSSEUS: Yes; for I too
shall come to that need. Or, as Antigone put it, "I owe a longer
allegiance to the dead than to the living, for in that world I shall
abide forever."

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author, most recently, of "Waiting for the
Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture", a collection of
his essays for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, which
was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His
other books include two memoirs, "The Lost" and "The Elusive Embrace";
a translation of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy; and a study of
Greek tragedy. He teaches at Bard College.

Painting by Nikiforos Lytras, Antigone in front of the dead Polynices
(1865), National Gallery of Greece-Alexandros Soutzos Museum.