[In the following essay, Spycher examines Dürrenmatt's use of chance and coincidence, specifically in "Das Sterben der Pythia," in place of fate.]

For decades after World War II the two Swiss writers Max Frisch (b. 1911;…) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (b. 1921) were regarded as two leading playwrights of the German-language theater. But after his play Biografie (1967) Frisch did not write another for some ten years. This new play, Triptychon, was published in book form in 1978. Will there be a next one? It is an open question. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, has kept writing for the theatre at a fairly steady pace. His last success, however, was Play Strindberg (1969). His subsequent "comedies" have all been failures with the public: Porträt eines Planeten (1970/71), Der Mitmacher (The Accomplice; 1972), Die Frist (The Deadline; 1977), Die Panne (The Breakdown; 1979); also his adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1969/70), as well as his subjective productions of Goethe's Urfaust (1969/70), Büchner's Woyzeck (1971/72) and Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1974/75). He decided not to attend the premiere of Die Frist, and he reserved Die Panne for a restricted theatrical occasion.

André Müller reports: "Dürrenmatt knows his worth. He is confident that his time, the time of world theatre, will come, after his death at the latest." Rolf R. Bigler seconds: "In recent years [Dürrenmatt] was no longer timely. With his plays he was too far out in the future. He let the spokesmen of the age [Zeitgeistliche] do their preaching. Now he is becoming timely again. Not because he has slowed down his pace, but because today's reality shamelessly copies him." But Gerd Jäger voices a different opinion: "Porträt eines Planeten (at the very least) … shows that Dürrenmatt's theatre world is not the result of a transformation of the real world into theatre but that of his dramaturgic (i.e., increasingly cliché-ridden) conception of the world into theatre." Timo Tiusanen, in his discussion of Der Mitmacher, bluntly states what he thinks is wrong with Dürrenmatt's more recent dramatic work: "[Der Mitmacher] is a play demonstrating one of Dürrenmatt's basic difficulties. Where and how to find a context for the results of his macabre creative imagination? The grotesque, Dürrenmatt's forte, presupposes some kind of balancing factor, a minimum amount of everyday probability, to be effective." Maybe there is a discrepancy between Dürrenmatt's aspiration to the creation of a theatrum mundi and the often lowbrow cabaretistic media and means he employs to this end.

Dürrenmatt has announced his intention of increasingly writing for "an imaginary stage," for "the theatre of [his] imagination"; but as in the case of Frisch, it would be prudent to refrain from making firm predictions. And it is a fact that both Frisch and Dürrenmatt have continued being successfully productive as writers of fiction and of essays, Dürrenmatt moreover as a graphic artist. In an article on Dürrenmatt's book Der Mitmacher: Ein Komplex (1976) the Swiss literary critic Anton Krättli writes: "The games [Dürrenmatt] has played in this … book as an aftermath to the comedy 'Der Mitmacher' are not only richer and more stimulating, they are also more profound, they are games relevant to reality, a relevance that seems to be almost completely missing from the comedy. And in vivid contrast to the compressions and abbreviations which prevented the play from really coming alive, his dramaturgic conclusions and above all his stories ['Smithy' and 'Das Sterben der Pythia'] in his exuberant Postscript to 'Der Mitmacher' may well constitute one of his major works." Krättli praises the "novella" "Smithy" (especially its protagonist, a "courageous human being") and calls the "parodistic story" "Das Sterben der Pythia" ("The Death of the Pythia") "perhaps the highlight of the book,… a small masterpiece." I would like to adopt Krättli's judgment and illustrate it by an analysis of one of the stories, "Das Sterben der Pythia."

In "Das Sterben der Pythia" Dürrenmatt deals with a myth, that of Oedipus. In an interview with Heinz Ludwig Arnold he once said that a writer may "suddenly have an idea as to how to choose a myth and reuse it." He did this for and in his Herkules und der Stall des Augias and specifically in his "Dramaturgic des Labyrinths," in which the story of the Minotaur is told. In "Das Sterben der Pythia" he has conducted something like an experiment with a remarkably flexible myth which had been adapted innumerable times before: he wished to illustrate and demonstrate a concept that had always been close to his heart. "Having told the story of Smithy," he states, "to find out how I come across a subject matter, I told the story of Oedipus to satisfy my curiosity as to what excites me about a subject matter." What is it that excites him? Dürrenmatt: "The plot of Oedipus's story seems to be inseparably connected with the idea of fate." Dürrenmatt wants to replace fate by chance or coincidence or accident (Zufall); this is what he calls a "flight" from an action that is controlled by gods and their oracles into the human agents of an action that is continually subjected to coincidences. If there is a fate, then man is simultaneously threatened and guided, and it is at one with him; in a world of coincidences, however, man is exclusively threatened, is exclusively a victim. In Die Panne retired Judge Wucht probably speaks in the author's name when he says: "In a world of guiltless-guilty men, fate has exited from the stage, and chance or accident has taken its place. The age of necessities has yielded to the age of catastrophes."

The (hitherto very few) critics have characterized "Das Sterben der Pythia" as the author himself has done so. Anton Krättli, for example, writes: "Since Dürrenmatt no longer believes in the possibility of tragedy, he sets out to offer an altered interpretation of the myth: it was not fate but chance that guided Oedipus along his ghastly paths." Jan Knopf, intriguingly enough, formulates a Dürrenmattian "theory of chance" (in a discussion of König Johann); "The theory of chance carries itself to an absurd extreme in that chance appears in accordance with a plan whenever a plan made by a human being is to be thwarted. Now the law is the following: the more planning, the more interfering by chance…. Chance assumes the meaningful function of creating madness.

What may the story of the Pythia conceivably have to do with the comedy Der Mitmacher? One link may be this statement by Dürrenmatt: "In contrast to the dramaturgic tactic of treating chance with care so that chance would remain what it is, chance, in Der Mitmacher chance happens again and again" (my emphasis). Is this perhaps conscious or unconscious self-criticism with regard to the comedy? The fact is that in the comedy chance plays too massive a part, whereas in the story chance is parodistically thematized, on the one hand, and unmistakably kept within limits on the other—so much so that the figures here are plausible characters, indeed are apt to arouse a psychological interest. Krättli notes too that there may be something other than just the question of fate or chance involved; he says: "[Dürrenmatt] does not directly aim to refute the thesis that it was the curse of the gods that drove the son of the king of Thebes into a trap. But he harbors doubts and thinks it is possible that a quite different authority, one behind the gods or even farther out in a mysterious realm, is responsible for what happens. Again, he pleads for the existence of a mystery."

In the story an intimate familiarity of the reader with the classical Oedipus matter is obviously presupposed; otherwise the story could not be a parodistic tragicomedy. As far as I am concerned, I have to presuppose the reader's familiarity with Dürrenmatt's parody, which fairly bursts with witty themes and motifs and ingenious variations and metamorphoses; any attempt at a summary would probably fall far short of its purpose and would be too clumsy.

Dürrenmatt's contention that, in his story, "It is no longer the oracle that counts but the person who proclaims it, the priestess of Apollo, the Pythia," and that one could posit, as a point of departure, "that Oedipus might, for instance, fall prey to a Pythia who happens to be in a bad mood" is not altogether correct. What matters is who formulates an oracle, in what spirit, with what intent—and also who hears it and how he reacts to it, as, say, in Der Meteor, where the miracle of the divinely ordained resurrections of Schwitter is assessed in very diverse ways by Schwitter himself and the other characters in the comedy. In "Das Sterben der Pythia" (as in "Smithy") Dürrenmatt abundantly employs the device of the interior monologue (erlebte Rede); seldom does the narrator speak in his own name. It is important for the reader to recognize the different narrative perspectives and to avoid confusing the opinions of individual figures with the fictional facts of the story. The story as a whole, it should be borne in mind, consists of real or imagined conversations held, in retrospect, between actual or potential shades of the characters involved in the history of the kingdom of Thebes with a disillusioned Pythia, Pannychis XI, who is weary of life and looks forward to her death.

The "de-mythologizing," "de-heroicizing," "de-bunking" narrative style naturally recalls that of Herkules und der Stall des Augias or Der Froze um des Esels Schatten or Grieche sucht Griechin but is, by and large, more casual, more mellow, wiser, more cognizant of the "moral frailty of the world." It closely resembles that of "Dramaturgic des Labyrinths." The very beginning of the story sets the tone for it as a whole.

The Delphic priestess, Pannychis XI, tall and haggard like most of her predecessors, being annoyed by the monkey business of her oracles and by the credulity of the Greeks, had listened to the youth Oedipus; ah, again someone who inquired whether or not his parents were his parents, as if that could so easily be ascertained in aristocratic circles, really, after all, there were wives who pretended to have had sexual intercourse with Zeus, and husbands who were even willing to believe this…. Today she was positively disgusted with everything,… and thus, be it because she wanted to cure him of his superstition with regard to the art of proclaiming oracles, be it because it simply occurred to her, as a byproduct of her momentarily ugly mood, to annoy the blasé prince from Corinth, she prophesied for him something supremely nonsensical and improbable which, she was sure, would never materialize, for, so she thought, who on earth would be able to murder his own father and sleep with his own mother—she considered those incest-laden stories about gods and demigods to be fairy tales anyhow.

We cannot assert that what the oracle Pannychis communicated to Oedipus was a chance oracle. First, Pannychis "wanted to use her oracles to mock those who believed them"; thus she herself does not believe in gods, or certainly not in their faculty of inspiring oracles; but from her longtime experience, she should know that her cocky oracles only tend to make "devout people even more devout" and thereby decisively contribute to Delphi's economic boom with all its gaudily opulent features. Also, those paid-for oracles that seers like Tiresias formulate for or against prominent persons and that the Pythia thereupon has to recite, have nothing to do with chance: "They were meant for a certain purpose; there was corruption behind it all, maybe even politics." We will learn what the political angles of the oracles of Tiresias are. And second, Oedipus, the devout believer in gods and oracles, has strong motives of his own to see the oracle which Pannychis has just communicated to him come true: much later, he confides to her, "I hated my real parents more than anything else; they wanted to cast me before wild beasts, I did not know who they were, but Apollo's oracle solved the problem for me." His parents, "according to the oracle,… were bound to be those upon whom the oracle would be executed," and "I wanted to become king of Thebes, and so did the gods, and I triumphantly slept with my mother…. The gods had made this monstrous decision, and therefore it was to be implemented." In this sense, Tiresias fittingly says about Oedipus: "It was he himself who chose his fate." (From the point of view of the Pythia, however, who does not believe in gods, let alone in oracles, the fulfillment of her oracle is "a grotesque fluke hit.") Even the trial Oedipus eventually conducted against himself and his subsequent self-punishment were a triumph for him, because from that time on he could give free rein to his hatred for his parents, his ancestors and the gods. As a blind beggar, accompanied by his daughter Antigone, he now wanders around in Greece, "not in order to exalt the power of the gods, but to scoff at them." Hatred and rebellion against his progenitors, this is Oedipus's case, a kind of triumphantly exploding Oedipus complex.

Each one of the figures has psychologically plausible motives and intentions and suffers whatever consequences may derive from them; Menoikeus, who deems himself socially superior to Laios, nourishes "the hope that he or at least his son Creon would accede to the throne." The oracle bought by him for a high price from Tiresias—"If a son is born to [Laios], he will murder [his father]"—is supposed to work for him as a "deterring oracle." His final self-sacrifice, dictated to him through an oracle that has been arranged for by Laios, suits him well because he has irremediably gone bankrupt. Assuming that Tiresias's oracle has been directed against him, Laios nonetheless wants to maintain his autocratic regime for himself and perpetuate it for posterity, but he makes mistakes or has bad luck: his wife Jocasta bears him a son who has been fathered either by him or by the commanding officer of his royal guard, and somewhat irresolutely he has the infant cast out rather than killed; and on an earlier occasion, perhaps it was he who begat the Sphinx with Hippodameia, the wife of Pelops, who thereupon took his revenge by castrating him; he, Laios, forced his carriage driver Polyphontes to rape the Sphinx in order to produce a grandchild that might become his heir and successor, and through all those actions he drew the deadly hatred of the members of his family upon himself. In her first night of love with Oedipus, Jocasta recognizes him as her son but is more than willing to buy his lies about his "parents," Polybos and Merope, in Corinth, and makes no attempt at enlightening him. Why this behavior? She tells Pannychis: "I fainted with sexual delight; never was it more intense than when I gave myself to [Oedipus]." Was this incestuous perversion? Maybe. But certainly also and above all it was satisfaction of her feelings of revenge toward Laios, who once had had her son cast out. Having taken her revenge, she gladly allows herself to be hanged from the beam of her bedroom door by one of her jealous guard officers. In her encounter with the Pythia Pannychis she proudly claims or pretends always to have acted in accordance with the gods' decrees—which, to be sure, always corresponded to her very own wishes.

The episode about the Sphinx is quite a special matter. One could raise the question whether Dürrenmatt here did not indulge himself too much in spinning his yarn, but it seems to be preferable to suppose that he has both lit up a fireworks of fantasy and intentionally carried the complications of the story to an absurd extreme. Be that as it may, to present a summary of the Sphinx's biography would be tantamount to extinguishing fireworks with water. Suffice it to note that the Sphinx insists her own son is the genuine Oedipus and that she lived with her son, except that she, the Sphinx, and her son Oedipus remained unaware of their mutual identities. Thus we are offered a choice between two Oedipuses. But we are thrown into further confusion: "Perhaps there is a third Oedipus," says Tiresias to Pannychis. "We do not know whether or not the Corinthian shepherd handed over to Queen Merope his own son rather than the son of the Sphinx—if he was the son of the Sphinx—after having pierced [his own son's] ankles too, and having cast the genuine Oedipus, who, after all, was not the genuine one either, out to the wild beasts; [and we do not know] whether or not Merope threw the third Oedipus into the sea in order to present her own son, to whom she had secretly given birth—his father possibly having been an officer of the guard too—as a fourth Oedipus to her guileless husband Polybos." Under such circumstances it is probably best to leave alone "what actually was different and will be different again and again the more we investigate."

Where does this uncertainty, mutually experienced among the various figures and also by the reader, come from? Well, all the figures tell either lies or "only the approximate truth," in part on purpose, in part unconsciously, in part out of ignorance. Besides, the author of course enjoys turning the order he has created into disorder so as to have his "labyrinthine reality" and to baffle the reader. In spite of all the psychological plausibilities, which I have deliberately dwelled on, the fact remains that, from a viewpoint negating the existence of gods, the story abounds with chances and coincidences. (One of the more comical ones is the fact that Oedipus happens to kill all his conceivable fathers: Laios, Polyphontes and Mnesippos.) Nevertheless, of the three main oracles pertaining to the Theban monarchy—1) if a son is born to Laios, the son will murder his father; 2) Oedipus will murder his father and marry his mother; 3) the plague in Thebes will go away if Laios's murderer or murderers are found and punished—only the second, the one improvised by Pannychis, is due to chance. Interestingly enough, its effect on Oedipus is not, as in the classical myth, a tragic one but, instead, a deeply satisfying one (Oedipus as the husband of Jocasta satisfies his feelings of revenge against his parents) or an enchanting one (Oedipus as the lover of the Sphinx experiences idyllic happiness with her). Dürrenmatl thinks that he could not penetrate to the center of his own personality by employing psychoanalytical methods, but admits that he could not, of course, prevent other people from psychoanalyzing him. I, for one, suspect that a psychoanalytical interpretation of "Das Sterben der Pythia" would yield valuable insights.

But back to the oracles! The first and the third oracle were conceived by Tiresias for a political purpose. Tiresias, like Pannychis and indeed much more than she, is "a rational human being"; "I too do not believe in the gods," he says, "but I believe in reason, and because I believe in reason, I am convinced that irrational faith in the gods has to be used in a rational way." According to his own confession, Tiresias is a "democrat." He takes sides, not so much for Laios, a corrupt but nonideological tyrant, as against Creon, who would, if he were to become king (Menoikeus's hope!), establish a totalitarian state modeled on Sparta. Tiresias's first oracle was intended to advise the castrated and homosexual Laios to adopt a son—for instance, the decent General Amphitryon. Laios, we recall, fails to understand this advice. Tiresias's other oracle (our third one) is based on an error: he mistakenly believes that it was Creon, not Oedipus, who murdered Laios (Jocasta had concealed the truth from the seer). Tiresias would like to use his second oracle to focus the people's attention on Creon as the suspected assassin in order to prevent him from overthrowing Oedipus (the real assassin of his father and husband of his mother!) and replacing him as king of Thebes (262 f.). Unfortunately. Tiresias's oracle has the opposite effect: Oedipus abdicates, and Creon becomes king.

Pannychis and Tiresias, not Oedipus, are the actual protagonists of the story. At the end Tiresias says to Pannychis: "Both of us faced the same monstrous reality, which is as opaque as man, who creates it." If the gods existed (but they do not), they would probably have "a certain, if superficial, general overview." How have Tiresias and Pannychis reacted to this monstrous, opaque reality? Pannychis "with imagination, with whimsicality, with high spirits, even with a virtually irreverent insolence, in short: with blasphemous jocularity"; Tiresias "with cool reflection …, with incorruptible logic, again in short: with reason." Paradoxically, Pannychis's "improbable" oracle turn out to be failures. Tiresias has acted as a rationalist, as a "utopian," who perceives the world as "a monster." This, at any rate, is what Dürrenmatt has Tiresias proclaim. Yet Tiresias, in contrast to a rationalistic would-be reformer of society like Bertolt Brecht, recognizes the problematic nature of his philosophy and the desirability of its being supplemented by imagination. At the end of the story Tiresias explicitly raises the question of Oedipus's fate: is it determined by the gods, or through Oedipus's "breach" of "certain principles that lend support to the society of his times" or through some chance triggered by Pannychis?

It seems to me that what is discussed in "Das Sterhen der Pythia" is not so much Oedipus's fate (which brings him satisfaction and fulfillment) as the question of the effect of the whimsical imagination of the irreligious Delphic priestess Pannychis XI in a chaotic world; above all, however, is the fact that the irreligious seer Tiresias, a rationalist working for the establishment of a rational and preferably democratic order (under Oedipus's guidance), makes a bad miscalculation, causing the establishment of a tyrannical order under Creon), and thus checkmates himself—not unlike, e.g., the Bastard in König Johann, "Exzellenz" in Die Frist, the private court and Traps in the comedy Die Panne and the dramatis personae in Der Mitmacher, To quote Anton Krättli once more, "Here it is again, the theme of Mitmachen: to commit or not to commit oneself in the affairs of the world, that is the question." But as I have observed already, "Das Sterben der Pythia" has an advantage over Der Mitmacher: the story is told with imagination, wit, urbanity, suspense, elegance and—"with humor!"