Euro
British Pound
Product Description
Set in the seventh century BC, I, ANTIGONE purports to be Antigone’s biography of her father, Oedipus, as she attempts to set the record straight on his life and death and restore his reputation.
With this astonishing version of Oedipus' famous demise, Gébler dismantles the polarisation and absolutism of our time. By tracing the histories of Oedipus and his parents Laius and Jocasta, as well as the peripheral characters of the plays who had a central role in him fulfilling his destiny, Antigone’s ‘biography’ causes us to re-evaluate the extent to which any of us can be entirely blamed for the actions by which we will be defined.
The book ultimately meditates on the illusion of free will, and the warning that context is everything, I, ANTIGONE IS a major contribution to the reclaimed classics.
I, Antigone, have closed my eyes.
My voice is deep and quiet, dark and slow, like a river moving over rocks, never stopping, never ceasing, endless.
He was wholly at fault, and he was entirely innocent.
This is true of us all if we only knew it. His fate is everyone’s.
I, Antigone, have opened my eyes.
When I began writing forty years ago I was interested in what was made up. Then, as I got older, I turned towards literature that engaged with the known or the factual. I became particularly interested in life stories, or biography, the telling by one of another’s life story in order to celebrate or exonerate the biographee. In I, ANTIGONE I have tried to bring my love of fiction and my love of biography together under one roof, or between two covers if you prefer.
I imagine Antigone, who is a character from myth, as an early biographer – or perhaps even the ancient Greek world’s first biographer. The text is her narration of the life story of another character from myth, her father and half-brother, Oedipus. In her biography, Antigone tells her father’s story as she believes it to have been. However, she is no hagiographer: she doesn’t deny his wrongs yet she also wants us to know – and this is her thesis – that though we might like to think actions are self-generated and self-directed, when the facts are excavated it isn’t nearly so straight-forward. Yes, choices might be made by malefactors like Oedipus but sometimes their choices are made for reasons outside their control, and often these reasons are ancient, unknown, historical, and impersonal. In other words, the wrong do wrong, but it’s no good saying they did wrong and apportioning blame and meting out punishment and dispensing justice on that basis alone. It’s complicated, Antigone argues – and thousands of years after she first examined this issue, we are still grappling with it. This is why this old story continues to mean so much in the present. Blame, punishment and justice remain as problematic and contested as they ever were.
— CARLO GÉBLER
PUBLISHED BY NEW ISLAND BOOKS, DUBLIN, SEPTEMBER 2021.
Hardcover - in one of the best dustjackets I've seen , designed by the very talented Anna Morrison.
