Tragic Elements in a Duerrenmatt Comedy

TRAGIC ELEMENTS IN A DUERRENMATT COMEDY FRIEDRICH DUERRENMATT'S The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi (1952) has links with both earlier and later plays. It is the first of the early three in which appear Jacobean elements such as the revenge motif; in which, in the worlds depicted, power is used madly or is held by the mad; but in which, also, the melodramatic intensity can approach the border of tragedy. The revenge motif appears, of course, in An Angel Comes to Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar is related to Mr. Mississippi, just as Akki, the bearer of restorative values, is to Count Ubelohe of The Marriage. Finally, The Marriage belongs with the earlier group in that Duerrenmatt calls it, without qualification, a "Comedy" (p. 20).1 Comedy, Duerrenmatt says, "supposes an unformed world," and in his view "the comical exists in forming what is formless, in creating order out of chaos" (p. 32); to comedy he assigns a very profound role indeed, one that really takes him into, or makes his play a commentary upon, other genres. On the face of it we might say that in The Marriage Duerrenmatt is writing a melodrama of disaster: a symbolic room on whose importance he lays great stress-all the actions occur in it-is in ruins at the end of the play. This room, which strongly suggests modern civilization, "stinks to high heaven." (p. 129) Not only is the room largely laid waste by mob action in a Communist-led uprising, but, in a Jacobean slaughter, three of the four major characters meet death in it-one shot by Communist party executioners , and a husband and wife poisoned by each other. The only survivor exists peripherally, the alcoholic and disintegrating Count Ubelohe. Yet it is through him that the play is turned from a melodrama of disaster, in our terms, to a comedy in Duerrenmatt's terms. For the Count has tried in various ways to love mankind, both in the person of Anastasia (whom another lover calls "that whore of Babylon ") and through charitable efforts in Europe and in Malaysian jungles. By ordinary standards he has always failed, been "vanquished -the only role in which man again and again appears." (p. 163) "Even my love for you," he tells Anastasia, "has become absurd. 1 Critical statements by Duerrenmatt are made in "Problems of the Theatre," which, translated by Gerhard NeUhaus, appears in Four Pla,'s I957-I!j6:J (London, 1964). Quotations from the text of the play are from Michael Bullock's translation in the same volume. 11 12 MODERN DRAMA May But it is our love. We must bear its absurdity.'" (p. 175) He states the meaning of his love: "Nothing but the hope that the soul of my beloved is not lost so long as I love her; nothing but this faith!" (p. 183) He loves her, not "for her works," as her husband does, ~'but as a woman who is lost." (p. 184) Nevertheless, Anastasia rejects him; for her, "Fear was greater than love" (p. 188), and she is at best capable only of transient fidelity to transient holders of power. The Count goes off to become a homeless, ruined, sodden wanderer, to "plant" his never-weakening love, "in whose name I am resurrected again and again," in "the countries through which I shall now roam" (pp. 188-89)-a cousin, less well but somehow less fragile, of Eliot's Celia Coplestone and Harry Monchensey. He is "nailed upon the cross of my absurdity, ... a lost Christ." (p. 189) Though Duerrenmatt chooses to unheroicize and even sidetrack his "comic hero," he shows how much importance he attaches to the Count by having him reappear in a brief dream epilogue and speak the closing twenty-five lines of verse: now he is Don Quixote,2 who still "defies'~ the windmills "filling your belly with nations / hacked to pieces by your wing that is dripping with blood." (p. 204) Accepting his actions as" an "eternal comedy," he concludes the play thus: "Let His glory blaze forth, / fed by our helpless futility." If Duerrenmatt is, as the Count argues in an address to the audience in Part I, inquiring "whether ... God's...