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.