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This week's look (Thursday and Saturday) at Hegel, tragedy, and (short) short fiction continues with a look at Hegel's third tragic condition—the fact that it's impossible to satisfy all the wills of the world.

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When I teach Antigone, I turn the students in their chairs into unnamed gods and goddesses. The Post-It notes I give to them tell them the rules by which they are to measure mortals. Mortals must fear death. Mortals must be brave. Mortals must obey their kings. Mortals must remain loyal to family. Mortals shouldn't think they know what the gods want. According to the rule, they are to cheer and boo the actions enacted before them.

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Antigone and Ismene, these last children of Oedipus, begin the play. A CPR dummy at the other end of the classroom plays the role of their dead brother, a traitor who attacked his own city, a body the King said belonged to him, not them.

There is something we must do, the student playing Antigone says.

You go girl, a god yells out. You'll pay for that, shouts another. [Here, the mystery of the Post-It notes adds to that tragic sense. We want to—no, need to—know what the notes say, but we cannot, ever, for we are not permitted to know why the gods cheer or boo us.]

Antigone stares at the lifeless dummy, her brother, rather than at her sister.

Her sister Ismene cries out, what of King Creon. He'll kill us. Surely.

You tell her. Death is nothing to take likely! Come on. Show some backbone.

We are just women, Ismene says, what can we do against men?

That's right! You weakling! You know your place! Pathetic!

So that's your excuse, Antigone answers her sister. Do whatever you think you should As for me, I am going to bury my brother.

Yeah! Now, you're talking. Watch it, Antigone! You sure you want to do that? Anarchist. You'll be the death of us all.

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The cliche "you can't please everyone" becomes something more complex when the "everyone" expands to include the forces within both the world and us. If indeed satisfying those wills that require satisfaction is impossible, then how does one act in such a world? Such a world forces upon us the need to choose which wills will be satisfied at the same time it denies us the ability to know if our actions will certainly fulfill the chosen will(s). Thus, we act uncertain of whom we must satisfy and what specific actions are required to obtain that satisfaction. Even more frustrating is the possibility that the action that satisfies one force will simultaneously enrage another.

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Consider the following example, Diane Williams' "Science and Sin Or Love and Understanding," from her collection This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate.

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I am not going to look it up in a book or do research. There are those of you who probably know why the small switching tail of a small animal makes me remember how I want to copy lewd people.

If the answer to the question is: Animals set an example for people, then I accept the answer. Do I have a choice?

I gave my husband no choice.

The last time I shoved something down my husband's throat was when I cheated on him. Now I say to him, "I didn't want to shove anything down your throat."

"It's because I love you," was the puny thing to say. It was puny compared to the size of the power which had made me say it to him.

The power had made me see things too. The power had turned him into the shape of a man wearing his clothes so he could leave me in the dark, standing beside his side of it, our bed. I knew I was seeing things.

He said, "I hear you."

I may or I may not cheat on him again. But the last time, I was standing up when I knew I was going to do it. I see myself on the street, deciding. I am holding onto something. Now I cannot see what it is. This is no close-up view. I am a stick figure.

I am the size of a pin.

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So many wills, so many desires, so that any action—to cheat, not to cheat, to confess, to speak, to choose silence—is unable to provide the answer that will satisfy that "power" and make everything all right again. It won't be. It'll never be. "I see myself on the street, deciding." At the end Williams' character travels outside of herself, at that key moment when thought turns into action. And those desires—those unappeasable wills—transform her into a figure, a kind of puppet, and diminishes her in contrast to the "size of the power" which compels her into this action. It's as if the gods of Greek tragedy have been internalized, so that these personified images of our internal competing desires continue their endless conflict within our selves. Such power reduces us to the "size of a pin." That distance that ends Williams' story—"this is no close-up view"—corresponds to the bird's-eye long shot of film, a shot Hitchcock made famous, one that transforms the characters into puppets, being moved around by forces whose will can only be guessed at.

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So again we return to our own writing. Yes, in fiction, character creates destiny, but don't forget that fate exerts its power too. Imagine that these forces want something, that the world demands something of a character, something the character cannot fully fathom. In satisfying one will, the character "un-satisfies" a different will, thus creating a sense of doom.