Repetition (Antígona’s Version): Going Back in Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa

Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa captures the complexities and paradoxes of post-dictatorship Argentina through its interwoven engagements with Sophoclean, Shakespearean and Latin American subtexts. In grappling with these complexities, the play deploys a repetitive structure that critics have over-simplified as a mere reference to the repeated protests of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. I suggest instead that we should understand these repetitions as forms of anastrophe, a word used by the first Guard in Sophocles’ Antigone to mean ‘going back’, but that can also mean ‘overthrow’, ‘confusion’, ‘habitat’, and in a military context, both ‘rally’ and ‘retreat’. Applied to Gambaro’s play, anastrophe describes the interwoven, mutually reinforcing and self-referencing threads of influence coming from the play’s literary, cultural and historical contexts that, despite their roots in the past, press forward into the future. Moreover, Gambaro and Antígona’s version of repetition makes clear the Madres’ demands for justice not as reparation but as a complete rejection of the society that made the dictatorship’s crimes possible. In this way, I develop a method of reading through Gambaro’s dense web of references to Sophocles, Shakespeare and Darío that increases our understanding of the political stakes of Antígona’s protest, as Gambaro says, ‘in her time and in ours’.