Sophocles’ Antigone, perhaps the best-known western narrative of non-burial, illustrates the need for the grave, as chronotope, to signify the end of biographical time and transition to other temporalities. For the ancient Greeks, burial confirmed the deceased’s transferral to a separate realm: ‘Hades (from Aides, “the Invisible”) was the place where the shadow images of the dead lived on. Released from the body at death – either through the breath or through an open wound of the body – the psyche of the person became, precisely, an eidôlon, or image’ (Harrison 2003: 148). At the same time, burial marked the beginning of the process in which, Charles Segal argues, the deceased was held up as ‘an exemplar of cultural values among the living’ (2003: 215). In Antigone, Creon’s refusal to inter his disloyal nephew Polynices, who waged war on Thebes, is explicitly presented as a prohi- bition on lamentation and a withholding of honour that prevents Polynices from being commemorated and entering Hades. The anomaly of his ‘unhappy corpse’ being left ‘unwept for, unburied, a rich treasure house for birds as they look out for food’ incites his sister Antigone, in the name of familial duty and divine natural law, to try to bury him (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 7). As the seer Tiresias reveals, the non-burial has indeed angered the gods and disrupted the natural order: ‘the gods are no longer accepting the prayers that accompany sacrifice or the flame that consumes the thigh bones, and the cries screamed
out by the birds no longer give me signs (...) for they have eaten fat compounded with a dead man’s blood’ (1998: 97).
Far from remaining absent, Polynices’ grave is central to the play, staged as a drawn-out sequence of construction/deconstruction/reconstruction: first, he is given a shallow scat- tering of dust by Antigone – ‘the body is buried and yet not buried’ (Jacobs 1996: 901) – only to have this earth removed by Creon’s men. After a second, unsuccessful attempt by Antigone to bury him, Creon eventually allows Polynices’ remains to be disposed of according to the reigning customs: ‘we washed (the corpse” with purifying water, and among newly uprooted bushes burned what was left. And we heaped up a tall burial mound of our own earth’ (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 113).4 The transition from the realm of the
living to that of the dead – and the accompanying shift into an ‘idealized representation’ in cultural memory (Segal 1993: 215) – is forestalled as Polynices’ burial is stretched out in time and situated on ground that is, as a result of Creon’s proclamation, rendered inse- cure, improper, inaccessible and profane. While the entombment of Eteocles, the brother who defended Thebes, exemplifies the normative chronotope of the grave in this particu- lar historical context – ‘in accordance with justice and with custom he has hidden beneath the earth, honoured among the dead below’ (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 7) – Polynices’ fate per- verts the grave’s temporal and spatial determinations and turns it into a site of profound conflict.
This conflict derives, in part, from the challenge Creon’s prohibition poses to the grave’s potential function as heterochronotopia of compensation. That the grave, in classical Greece, took on this role is suggested by the way the realm of Hades, onto which it opens, is seen to ‘socialise and civilise death (...) by turning it into an “ideal type” of life’ (Ver- nant, quoted in Segal 1993: 215). However, in Antigone the perfect, meticulous and well- arranged space the heterochronotopia of compensation should oppose to the chaotic eve- ryday world is muddled by the way Creon ‘kept here something belonging to the gods below’ (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 103). Its lengthy postponement marks Polynices’ grave, even after it has been constructed, as a disorderly time-space not ‘utterly different from all the emplacements they reflect or refer to,’ but resembling them (Foucault 1998: 178). The same goes for the tomb in which Creon secures Antigone. His blasphemous move of ‘hav- ing hurled below one of those above’ blurs the spatial divide between the living and the dead, which is not supposed to be subject to human rule (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 101-102). From a Foucauldian perspective, Creon negates the distance and separation essential for a chronotope to function as heterochronotopia of compensation. If the dead can remain unburied while the living are entombed, neither the grave nor Hades can provide repara- tion for the troubles of Thebes.
In Antigone, the grave, rendered multiple and heterogeneous in Derrida’s sense of being ‘more than one/no more one (le plus d’un)’ (1994: xx), defies order and delays commem- oration. A similar disruption of the grave as a chronotope supposed to signal an unequiv- ocal transition from life to other temporalities and to provide the mourner with a means of ‘identifying the bodily remains and (...) localizing the dead’ can be discerned in Oedi- pus at Colonus (Derrida 1994: 9). There, the moment of burial is not extended through
deferral but through being pulled forward into Oedipus’ life, who, old, blind and exiled, pleads with the Eumenides – the goddesses whose ‘sacred’ place, Colonus, he has entered – to ‘grant me a passage and a conclusion of my life’ (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 419, 425). The way he already refers to himself as eidôlon or ‘ghost’ preposterously marks him as one of the dead (1998: 425). Since it has been prophesied that Oedipus’ tomb will offer protec- tion to those near it, the tragedy revolves around the location of his interment. Oedipus, in accordance with the grave chronotope’s normative spatial determinations, wants to be buried on familiar ground, at home in Thebes, but the Thebans will only condone his pres- ence, as ‘a parricide and a man impure,’ outside their borders (1998: 521). Angered by this exclusion, Oedipus asks Theseus, ruler of Athens, to protect him and allow him to be buried at Colonus, where, in the event of a future attack by the Thebans, it shall cause their defeat: ‘Then shall my dead body, sleeping and buried, cold as it is, drink their warm blood’ (1998: 487).
The grave, therefore, functions less to mark the end of Oedipus’ biographical time (which seems to have run out already) or to facilitate his transition to Hades than as a place from which his body will continue to act as part of human history rather than just an afterimage to be manipulated by the living. In essence, the play charts Oedipus’ inscription into his- torical time through the chronotope of the grave, but with the burial site marking this inscription before death has even occurred. Harrison associates Oedipus’ grave with a foundational act: ‘Athens needed the presence of Oedipus’s grave in its vicinity to assure its founding and good fortune into the future (...) we may perceive in its myth a poetic character of the founding power of the hero’s grave’ (1998: 23-24). Since Athens has already been founded, it is more accurate to say that Oedipus’ grave consolidates it, con- firming the Athenians’ collective cultural identity.
But of what precisely does Oedipus’ grave consist? When Zeus’ thunder tells Oedipus that ‘the end of life that was prophesied has come upon this man,’ he tells Theseus he will lead him to the place where he must die to locate ‘the sacred tomb where it is fated for this man to be hidden in this earth’ (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 569, 575). There, ‘the things that are taboo and that speech must not disturb’ will be revealed to Theseus and become his to guard, with their location only to be revealed to his successor (1998: 573). What will be found and what exactly will offer protection (the sacred tomb, Oedipus’ remains, the mysterious ‘things’) remains ambiguous. Moreover, the moment of identification/localisation never arrives as Oedipus’ death, recounted by a messenger, evades knowledge and perception: ‘when we had departed, after a short time we turned around, and could see that the man was no longer there, and the king was holding his hand before his face to shade his eyes, as though some terrifying sight, which he could not bear to look on, had been presented’ (1998: 583). Oedipus’ demise is miraculous and mysterious, and while Theseus refers to ‘the sacred tomb that holds him,’ Ismene suggests that ‘he descended with no burial, apart from all!’ (1998: 597, 593). Thus, the grave appears, in Andreas Markantonatos’ words, only as a ‘narrative gap,’ a site of uncertainty, confusion and deferment (2007: 115). Oedipus’ enigmatic fate disrupts the normative chronotope of the grave: he dies on alien land unattended by and inaccessible to next of kin, while the rituals supposed to facilitate
his transition to Hades are curtailed and conducted before his death.5 Personal mourning
and memory are invoked when Oedipus takes leave of his daughters and they lament his impending death together, but cannot fully be indulged as the site of localisation/identifi- cation remains foreclosed; when Antigone asks to ‘see the home beneath the earth’ where her father rests, Theseus tells her it is not permitted (Lloyd-Jones 1998: 591). Moreover, Oedipus commends himself not only to the memory of his daughters but also, more emphatically, to that of Theseus: ‘Come, dearest of strangers, may you have good fortune, yourself and this land and your attendants, and in prosperity remember me when I am dead for your success for ever!’ (1998: 575). This confident statement invokes Pierre Nora’s description of ‘an integrated, dictatorial memory – unself-conscious, commanding, all- powerful, spontaneously actualizing, a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth’ (1989: 8). The way the logic of the play requires Antigone to relinquish her wish to see the grave signals that memory here is not individualised but social, collective and ultimately non-separable from history as not yet historiographical but still a ‘tradition of memory’ (Nora 1989: 11).
In chronotopical terms, the secret grave can never conclusively mark the terminus of bio- graphical time and, as such, hinders personal-familial commemoration. It is, however, effective in inscribing Oedipus into historical-memorial time, as knowledge of the site of his death is bound to the Athenian succession. Oedipus’ resting place becomes a historical force – not just a force in history or something locked in the past, but a force of history capable of influencing the outcome of future events. In this elaboration of the grave chro- notope, then, its participation in historical time (here intimately connected to the divine temporality of prophecy and to collective memory) is made primary.
As in Antigone, the grave’s potential function as heterochronotopia of compensation is complicated. On the one hand, the distant location of the gravesite renders it utterly ‘other,’ while prophesy assigns it an explicit compensatory function (the grave will reward Theseus for helping Oedipus). On the other hand, it is questionable whether a grave of which the reality cannot be affirmed, which is not ‘actually localisable’ except by Theseus (and even he seems unable to bear its sight), and which does not remain sep- arate from but is thoroughly embroiled with messy politics (of which it becomes the stake) can provide the sense of order and comfort the compensatory heterochronotopia presup- poses (Foucault 1998: 178).