Tragic Frustration and Comic Fulfilment in Romulus the Great

Tragic Frustration and Comic Fulfilment:

History and Subversion in Dürrenmatt’s ROMULUS THE GREAT

Dürrenmatt subtitles the play ‘a historic comedy without historic basis.’ Although the plot revolves around Romulus, the eponymous protagonist, the play has nothing to do with either the historical Romulus, the founder of Rome or the titular Romulus. Dürrenmatt’s Romulus is the last Roman emperor, whose Rome is preparing to be confronted by the threat of the invading Teutons. Romulus, in reality, is a means behind the playwright’s polemic towards the evolution of a certain theory of dramatic form he was working towards, and the demystification of the concept of history as a construct of mankind’s past.

The work deals with the fall of the Roman empire and the dissolution of the Roman civilisation. The Teutons are invading the empire. The whole of Rome is thirsting for action. Starting at the top of the hierarchy with the Roman patricians, down to the cook, everyone is planning their defence, sharpening their swords and knives to fight for their country. Romulus does not. He is busy farming chickens. On top of his priority is not the defence of his state, but chicken-fancying. Is he a clown or one who deliberately plots the downfall of a kingdom? To him, it is more than the fall of a kingdom. To him, Rome has become a symbol of oppression. Why?

Answering to an accusation by his wife, Julia, that as an emperor, “(he) jeopardises the state” since he “doubts the necessity of the state [sic]” (FP 94), and that he has failed in his duties “as the father of the nation,” he replies: “I don’t doubt the necessity of the state. I merely doubt the necessity of our state. Our state has become a world empire, an institution officially engaged in murder, plunder, suppression, and oppressive taxation at the expense of other people... (FP 94). Having recognised the dispensable nature of the state that lives at the expense of humaneness, he decides to become its judge.

According to Romulus, it is a question of individual freedom or collective bondage. As he says later to his daughter, Rea, “To remain loyal to a human being is greater and much more difficult than to remain loyal to a state” (FP 97). He has spoiled all efforts to save not just the nation, but has decided too, to sink the world culture called the Roman civilisation. Is he a traitor or a courageous human being? This question relates to the topic in consideration directly, for, the playwright raises basic questions: on humanity, the nature of heroism, of patriotism, free-will against the state and the rebelling individual against oppressive establishments. The play subverts the process of history by providing a case study of the unfolding of history. Juxtaposed alongside is the process of time.

Romulus the Great is plotted in four Acts. The First Act opens on the morning of the 15th of March, 476 A.D. - the Ides of March. The Second Act takes place on the same afternoon. The Third Act happens in the night and the Fourth & Final Act the succeeding morning. The action begins with a messenger arriving with reports to the king from the front. The Second Act shows the contrasting approach of the king and the citizens: while Romulus shrugs away any possibility to rescue the empire, the patriots try to organise forces to defend, and to assassinate Romulus. They see their emperor as their first hurdle and enemy, even more than the invading Germans. The Third Act is the scene of farewells on Romulus’ personal front and the assassination bid on the political plane. The Final Act shows the dissolution of the Roman empire, as desired by Romulus, but in a manner not expected by him. Although the end is what Romulus had sought, it does not come in a way he had planned. The place, throughout the span of action is the Emperor’s villa, his palace rooms and the courtyard gardens, all within a single compound. The play is structured to represent the Aristotelian unities of Time, Place and Action. While sticking to the classical construct of Aristotelian tragedy structurally, the play aspires to challenge the classic construct of History. This is where the Dürrenmattian subversion gets into action. In a surprise travesty of conquest of the empire, the play unveils its tragi-comic nature. What seems to be heading towards a tragedy ends up in a no-blood, no-gore ending, befitting a comedy.

The playwright’s intention is obvious: this is a parody of the classical tragedy. There is a king, the clash of interests or conflict, the choric messenger, tragic confrontation, perepeteia and anagnorisis and the fatal flaw; the play, in the course of the Third Act, even teeters on the edge of becoming a genuine tragedy. Romulus’ address of the patriots at the point of assassination reaches heroic heights worthy of a tragic hero at the verge of his fall due to his fatal flaw. Romulus indeed almost achieves his purpose. This is where the tragedy in the play lose itself out. At the verge of being assassinated, he is saved. The patriots are defeated and killed. The Germans prevail. Rome is vanquished, although not through the manner in which Romulus had planned. In spite of its peaceful end, the work goes through vicissitudes of moods ranging from farcical moments of witty one-liners and caustic black-humour, to grotesque and macabre episodes of assassination bids and tragic deaths.

Romulus the Great hovers between a well-made tragicomedy and the tragic form of the twentieth century, the absurd. It exemplifies ‘the coalescing of the genre boundaries in the works of art of the twentieth century, where comedy often mixes with high tragedy and the satire giving way to melodrama,’ as George Brandt explains (cf. Conclusion in Howarth ed.)

In the course of becoming a hybrid form of theatre, Romulus the Great justifies its existence, and vindicates Dürrenmatt’s dramaturgy: the paradoxical nature of things and the impossibility of pure tragedy or pure comedy in the twentieth century. In order to arrive at this point, Dürrenmatt juxtaposes the concepts of delusion and reality, history and time, and used the subversive tool of ritualising an act. This works at different levels in the work. 

First, Dürrenmatt provides a very serious exposition that parallels the opening of classical tragedies. The Captain of the Cavalry enters to deliver the news that the empire’s last line of defence has perished before the barbaric might of the Teutons. The messenger figure, as observed, is a typical choric figure in Attic tragedies. Thus, through this artifice, he creates expectation among the reader/audience. However, in this play, he is not even granted permission to meet the Emperor straightaway. The chamberlains to the Emperor, parodically named Sulphurides and Phosphoridos, insist that usual protocols of meeting an Emperor must be observed before the Messenger even gains a hearing. The bureaucratic process of the governmental machinery is being parodied here, in a bid to reduce the serious tone set at the outset. Dürrenmatt is a Swiss-German and knows very well the Germans’ proverbial love for protocols, paper work and bureaucracy. The reader/audience observes to their surprise that if they were building a routine picture of the playwright’s intent, they have been deluded.

When the Emperor himself enters, all the pomp that surround him are represented. Again, impressions are created, expectation are raised, the paegentry revolving an Emperor’s classical entry are played out. However, instead of concerning himself with the affairs of the state, the Emperor proceeds to enquire about his hens and chickens: those that laid eggs and those that did not. The playwright hints his key intention: to demystify the concept of history; how does he go about it? The hens of the empire are named after the Caesars of the past. Further, Romulus himself is portrayed as a person concerned more about selling the ancient and antique cultural artifacts of the Roman Empire so that he could pay off his cook and his chamberlains, to whom salaries were due. He also orders the destruction of the state archives which contain valuable information on the art of running the government. One can, at this point, in retrospect, see this as a presage of the fall of East German state and the last act of the state machinery: to destroy state archives. However, Dürrenmatt is, of course, alluding to the last act of the Nazi machinery: to destroy documents relating to the Nazi machinery. If the reader/audience assumes that Romulus is an insane person who cannot save his drowning empire, again they are deluded. The attempt here is to give the finishing touches to this deliberate act of dissolving a world empire, a historic civilisation. This act of Romulus prompts the Roman patriots to hatch a plot to assassinate him.

In the Third Act, the climactic Act of the play, there is a grotesque enactment of the assassination, in an apparent parody of the historic assassination of Julius Caesar; all the patriots of Rome, beginning with Emilian, the Emperor’s prospective son-in-law, to the cook are assembled. They grotesquely come tumbling and creeping out of all possible nooks, crannies and corners of Romulus’ bedroom. The question him, upbraid him and force him with arguments into confessing his guilt of having betrayed the empire. Romulus cleverly turns the tables on them with his arguments and makes them feel guilty. Those who came to attack him in the night end up being the one’s who are attacked. As he says: “You thought you were coming to a man who could not defend himself, while I now spring upon you with the claws of truth and grip you with the teeth of justice... You are not accusing me, but I’m accusing you”(FP 105). Suddenly, the listless fool, the chicken-fancying clown of an Emperor transforms into a protagonist worthy of the audience’s sympathy. However, this is too easily becoming a tragedy and Romulus is close to becoming a tragic hero; but Dürrenmatt’s purpose is different. He succeeds in his ruse. If Romulus were to get killed, he would indeed become a tragic hero. History would repeat itself. This is too banal for Dürrenmatt’s credo. According to him,

The world today, as it appears to us, could hardly be encompassed in the form of the historical drama as Schiller wrote it, for the reason alone that we no longer have any tragic heroes, but only vast tragedies staged by world butchers and produced by slaughtering machines. Hitler and Stalin cannot be made into Wallensteins. Their power was so enormous that they themselves were nomore than incidental, corporeal and easily replaceable expressions of this power... Any small-time crook, petty government official or policeman better represents our world than a senator or president... (FP 31)

Given the above assumption, Romulus, representing the ordinary individual who utilised his opportunity to ascend to the Roman throne, is devoid of tragic greatness. Also, he is a criminal in the eyes of his fellow-Romans for the simple reason that he betrayed his country. To quote Salman Rushdie’s The Courtier here would not be out of context: “The attack of a tactician can be troublesome to meet - that of a strategist even more so. Whereas the tactician’s threats may be unmistakeable, the strategist confuses the issue by keeping things in abeyance. He threatens to threaten” (Rushdie 194). Seen in this light, Romulus’ method behind his mad behaviour becomes clear; he is as dangerous as Hitler or Stalin. Romulus breaks through the confines of the play to become a metaphor. He represents the twentieth century mass-murdering megalomaniacs. In the process of putting an end to an oppressive institution, he is willing not only to surrender and sacrifice himself to the Teutons, but also his subjects and the entire civilisation. He does not deserve a tragic ending of grand proportions. The play then must become a farce, if the playwright must avoid providing Romulus a grand tragic ending. Consequently, Romulus does not achieve his martyrdom. At the moment of the daggers falling on him, someone freakishly shouts, “The Teutons are here” and the assassins take flight to save themselves. Later, we are informed that the boat that they took flight in capsized and they died. Their heroism too is hence rendered a mockery.

Romulus survives. Nevertheless, further humiliation is in store for him, who has calmly accepted his death. He meets the invading Teutons the following morning. He finds to his disappointment that he is not going to be killed. The Teuton chief, Odoaker, too is a chicken-farmer, whose real intention behind the expedition of Rome is to surrender himself and his Teutonic army to he whom Odoaker considers the only human: Romulus. There is only one thing left. The two chiefs decide to act “as if final accounts are being settled on earth” since, even if they decide to end the oppression, Odoaker’s successor would start it. The end of the play shows Romulus being sent into retirement, having dissolved his empire and handed over the reign to Odoaker. The latter, too, would one day be supplanted by his nephew Theodoric, who would become Theodoric the Great in the annals of history. Though Romulus and Odoaker achieve their comic fulfilment, they experience too, a tragic sense of frustration. Their lives have become absurd, their efforts a grotesque parody of good intentions. Romulus had waited to surrender to Odoaker and the latter had come marching to surrender into the former. History is being striped of its meaning. This, however, has taken a long span of time, represented by the arrival of the Teutons, “who have been...coming for the past 500 years,” as one of the characters in the play puts it. 

By creating a fictional and parallel history, by using historic personae to construct an imagined history, Dürrenmatt attempts to subvert history. He shows that “history is meaningless repetition... For Dürrenmatt, the flow of historic time is synonymous with human misery. History is suffering” (Joseph Federico in Moshe Lazar ed. 19,20). If this must be validated, the historical time and accuracy must be taken out of the context, by giving it a sense of timelessness. Dürrenmatt does this by placing a historical context within the temporary boundaries of the stage. As Federico quotes Eugen Fink, “(a) play is ‘an eminent manifestation of human freedom. And ‘in the autonomy of the play action there appears a possibility of human timelessness in time” (Federico in Moshe Lazar ed. 20-21).

A play is ahistorical. “Through play, one can escape, at least temporarily, the compulsion and implacability of historical time” (Federico 21). To conclude,

Romulus the Great is a play where the theme of justice is treated as a paradox in which betrayal becomes the only virtue, where victims turn out to be their hangmen, and where potential tragedy is turned into a farce by mock-heroic parody... (Innes 110)

The play, through its as if play at the end, deprives all efforts at serious attempts by making the act of heroism a redundant ritual. 

List of Abbreviations:

• FP - Four Plays

References:

1. Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. Romulus the Great (trans. Gerhard Nellhaus) in Four  Plays. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964.
2. _______________________. Problems of the Theater (trans. Gerhard Nellhaus) in  Four Plays. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964.
3. Federico, Joseph A.  “Time, Play and the Terror of History in Dramatic Works by  Dürrenmatt” in Play Dürrenmatt ed. Moshe Lazar. Malibu, CA: Undena  Publications, 1983.
4. Howarth, W.D. (Aut. & ed.) Comic Drama: The European Heritage. London:  Methuen, 1978.
5. Innes, Christopher D. Modern German Drama. Cambridge: CUP, 1979.
6. Rushdie, Salman. “The Courtier” from East, West. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994.
7. Steer, Alun. “Delusion and Reality in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Romulus the Great.”  Journal of European Studies, 18,4,72 (Dec. 1988): 233-251

- Krishna Kumar. S, Research Scholar, 

Dept of English, University of Madras, 

31.01.’97

The Play in NAGA-MANDALA

The Play in NAGA-MANDALA

the bitter-sweet headache of identifying the protagonist

Presented as a Paper at a Symposium on Indian Literature in English held at the Department of English, University of Madras, Madras on 11th March, 1994.

Lionel Abel, in his book Metatheater: A New View of Dramatic Form, writes that [it is] “the necessary form for dramatizing characters who, having full self-consciousness, cannot but participate in their own dramatization” [fall into the canon of meta-characters]. Citing this, Joesph Federico says that the heroes of the metatheater have “the consciousness of a dramatist as well as that of a character...” This implies that it leads to a conscious role-playing by the character that cannot participate, and also cannot but participate. Is this ambiguity or ambivalence? That is the question of the day.

When the idea of finding what actually Naga-Mandala is all about came, I was confounded, like so many scholars who still break their heads about the chicken or the egg question regarding Paradise Lost: ‘Who is the hero?’ My trouble was, is there a hero in Naga-Mandala at all? Is the story-teller in the play the hero? After all, the meta-play is about his predicament. Or is it either of the two - Naga and Appanna - in the story told? Or is the story-teller without the play - Girish Karnad, the author - himself? The second question was easily solved - neither Naga nor Appanna could be the hero since, if we went by the normal norms of tragedy, Naga does not have any fatal flaw. First and foremost, Naga-Mandala is not a tragedy; second, Naga is only an instrument. Appanna is too unrounded a character and again a sort of an instrument to explore Rani’s drama that his character lacks any weightage. Then, he cannot be a hero. If we can take the story within the story, or the play within the play more seriously than the Man’s story, then Rani stands to qualify as the protagonist. However, since the story of Rani is only a story told by ‘the Story’ to the Man on grounds of mutual help, it really does not qualify for any further discussion. What can be noticed already are the various layers to the play that makes this Chinese box a fascinating conundrum.

The story of Naga-Mandala is more a story of ‘the Man’ and ‘the Story.’ Of the two, the dominant role is that of ‘the Man’ since the crux of the argument is about his predicament and his imminent death, if he does not keep himself awake at least for one full night. It is obvious, the situation, as the Man says and I quote:

I may be dead within the next few hours. I am not talking of ‘acting dead.’ Actually dead. I might die right in front of your eyes. A mendicant told me: ‘You must keep awake at least one whole night this month... If not, you will die...’ [...] I asked the mendicant what I had done to deserve the fate. And he said: ‘You have written plays. You have staged them. You have caused so many good people... to fall asleep...’ (N-M, pg 1 - 2)

It is a matter of life and death for him, whereas, for ‘the Story’ it is not so crucial. Of course, a story lives only when it is retold. That is the quintessence of oral tradition and that is one of the drive-home points in the play. But then, if ‘the Story’ could not narrate the story that it possesses that particular day, it could be done some other day. For ‘the Man’ though, as he says, ‘Tonight is the only chance.’ Without the Man, the Story-teller, the playwright, the story could not be passed on. Hence we can safely conclude that the play is about the Man.

At this stage of my analysis, a new ambiguity arose, a new temptation to question: Can Karnad qualify as the protagonist of the play? Even as Shakespeare used to play with the modal ‘Will’ in his plays and poems in multifarious ways to imply to him in a playful conceit, is Karnad playing with the idea of the story-teller, playwright? The reasons are not far to seek. The Karnad of the Haya-Vadana who wrote in 1972 that ‘... there is our large-hearted audience. It may be that they fall asleep during a play sometimes,’ and the Karnad of Naga-Mandala who writes in 1988 that ‘[I] have caused so many good people... to fall asleep, twisted in miserable chairs...’ are two vastly different playwrights. That is the journey. That is his curve. The Bhagavata of 1972 has evolved into the Man, the Story-teller of 1988.

The very English diction, despite the Indianness of his folk-tale rendition, albeit verbal than oral, of Haya-Vadana has metamorphosed into the quintessential oral more than verbal folk-tale rendition. He has in the sixteen in-between years found the oral idiom and has also effectively fused it into the Western experimental play-within-a-play theatrical tradition. This is not to negate the fact that the objective Prologue rendered by the Stage Manager is a Natya-Sashtra tradition and hence the play-within-a-play is nothing new to the Indian milieu. In fact, Karnad largely approaches the Scheherazade paradigm of keeping the audience awake with a story that travel within and within which there is further story, which again can be mirrored in the Kathasarithsagara and others of similar plumage. To stress this, come to think of it, most oral traditions have the Chinese Box in them. From Mahabharata to Homer’s twin epics, The Aeneid to the Chinese myth of The Monkey King. Such is the scope of inference in Karnad’s work, in general and Naga-Mandala, in specific. 

In Naga-Mandala, not only that, the oral mode is untopographised. Not only is it given a cross-generical treatment, also does the story-telling cross the parochial Kannada limits from where he gets his base story (via A.K. Ramajunan’s collection: A Flowering Tree and other Folk Tales, OUP), and reaches out for a oneness of national cultural flavour. This is achieved not just through what Karnad describes the folk-theatre style in the following words: ‘...although it seems to uphold traditional values, it also has the means of questioning the values... (allowing) for a “complex seeing”.’ It is achieved through the simplicity and disarming way in which he names the characters. The relative word for ‘The Fair One,’ ‘ The Dark One,’ ‘Rani’ (meaning Queen) or ‘Kurudavva’ (meaning ‘The Blind One’) exists in all Indian languages. This ubiquity has evolved with Karnad’s evolution itself through the last 16 years. Also to be mentioned as Karnad’s greatest triumph, to use the words of our honoured Chairperson for the day, Dr. Raju, is ‘the story and the flames. They are invested with recognisable personalities.’

Despite these reasons, there are also certain pitfalls in calling Karnad the protagonist of the play. The first reason, in a slightly amusing way, is to be found in the following lines uttered by the Man: ‘I swear by this absent God... I shall have nothing more to do with themes, plots or stories. I abjure all story-telling, all play-acting.’ (NM, pg 2) If these words are taken literally as those of Karnad in the garb of the Man, it is contradictory in that in order to survive that night, he proceeds as a narrator to relate a tale and he says: ‘I suppose I have no choice... I have no choice. Bear with me, please. As you can see, it is a matter of life and death for me.’ (NM, pg 5) 

The second and more serious reason is the fact that he acknowledges in the Preface that he has only weaved two oral tales that he heard from A.K. Ramanujan. Here again, he is just an instrument or a catalyst bringing together two existing elements to evolve a third element. So, going back to our original argument, it is obvious that the final remaining candidate is the Man; but then, uncertain clouds mar this supposition when we acknowledge a fact. ‘The play’ has been so carefully crafted that ‘the Man’ does not really get to his Act of leading this play till the end. The moment he explains, although apologetically, why the play is being done, he ceases to hold our attention. The Story takes over. The Man becomes a mere audience: an audience beyond the real audience. How then can he be the protagonist?

Naga-Mandala is more about this audience, an audience-within-an-audience than about a play-within-a-play. At the same instance, the narrator, the playwright and the leading character all become audience to the unfolding spectacle. This, in fact, could be the very crux of Post-modern western theatre whose preoccupation has come more to be identified on a generic front - the focus on the form. The very form of the theatre is an attempt to confront the hostile world by turning inward. It results in two things: one is, it results, as can be seen in the contemporary German plays by Peter Handke, in ‘total autistic withdrawal into an imaginary role;’ two is, it results in a ‘capitulation to a social mask. In either case, the true self succumbs to an artificial existence.’ The self-conscious narrator or the confronting playwright becomes an actor.

In the case of Naga-Mandala, by the time the tale of Rani begins, the Man, a playwright by profession, is condemned to be an audience - moves from one mask to another. Overcome by an impotence, faced with extinction, he accepts to face the same treatment he has been meting out to so many in the audience. It is not just a tactic he is adopting, it is his fate. It is an end in itself and a means to survival.

We might, so, be tempted to ask, in what way is it new, if this play has features like other western plays? The difference is, whereas in most other plays the narrator turned actor-cum-audience’s presence is felt continually, in this play, the moment the play-within-the-play begins, till the Story that narrates Rani’s story says: ‘Rani lived happily ever after...,’ we forget the Man’s existence. Also, it is at this point that Karnad’s main card is played. The Man does not want to give up. The dawn is round the corner. If he can be awake till sunlight, he will live. The story-teller in him does not give up. On two counts. One is the fact that it is an opportunity to live, which is actually peripheral to our consideration. The other is, it is his natural proclivity. At the point the Story ends the story, he says: ‘No one will accept this ending.... Too many loose ends.’ (NM, pp 40-41) He knows he has survived the worst. He can get back to business. He goes about tying the ends. The story-teller in him does not allow loose-ends to the narration. He tries ending after ending, in a bid to hand out impartial treatment to others in the tale - Appanna and Naga. Surely, Karnad’s coup-de-theatre! Karnad does not make the commitment for an overall happy ending come from the Man/Playwright. He makes one of the Flames question the Man. ‘Why can’t things end happily for a change?’ The Flames are also subverted into role-playing here. They sound as though they are a section of the audience asking for a satisfactory ending. This shows traces of the play approaching the Brechtian Epic Theatre.

This in fact, is one other element of the oral tradition, because, at the end of it all, it is difficult to imagine the play as a piece written work. The work, couched naturally in intense Indian images and felt words, does not come through as a read-piece. If the words are not to be felt, as they come from a teller’s mouth, then the work fails. Thus, this has to succeed. After all, as he maintains, Karnad has fused two oral folk tales to his convenience. If the Man / Playwright’s presence is not there, if the Story’s presence in physical terms is absent, the play cannot exist, because the whole edifice on which the work is built is the oral mode. However, the paradox lies here. The tellers are there only to give life feel to the story.

From such a point of view, the problem simplifies. The work depends on the narrator only in as much as it needs a person to say it. On this basis, the narrator is himself a connecting link between the word and the audience, the sound and the audience. Then, neither is the Man in Naga-Mandala the protagonist. For we have too many narrators, too many action-furtherers: the playwright Karnad who combines two folk-tales into one, the Man in the main plot whose personal story he unfolds, the Flames which animatedly gossip the stories of their respective households, the Story’s sad story, the story of Rani as told by the Story, Kurudavva who gives a magic root to Rani in an attempt to make Appanna enamoured by Rani, Kappanna who carries around Kurudavva (playing an indirect action-furtherer) and the story that Rani herself narrates in her story. So what / who then is the true protagonist? Here, it is not what is told or by whom it is told that is important, but how. It needs to be told, to be acted, to be sung; in short, to be vocalised.

The actual protagonist in this work then is the oral tradition, the act of vocalising itself; and it stems from the soil of culture. Everything else is comprised and subsumed in this generic form. It was there at the beginning of civilisation and at the beginning of a culture. It has been existing in its transmission from generation through generation, individual to individual. It has found, from time to time the need to equip itself in order to live, to be retold. And in this work of Karnad, the Indian oral, folk tradition has found a very potential existence, having been combined with the needs of an essentially western-oriented style of theatre. Although Karnad states that “it also owes much to hte Western playwrights as Bertold Brecht and Jean Anouilh who delved into classical stories... and retold them in a Western context,” this work has to be acknowledged as a new contribution to Indian Drama in English, since it transcends both the Western theatrical form and the Indian folk-theatre’s narrative style even while fusing both approaches.

I would conclude by saying that Naga-Mandala needs to be baptised as to its genre, for it is to Indian Drama in English what Midnight’s Children is to contemporary Indian Fiction in English.

- S. Krishna Kumar, Research Scholar

Dept of English, University of Madras

11 March, 1994