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The Visit

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Switzerland) Pronounce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQvIDb1KnpM

The Visit Audio Book

Act One <iframe width="1239" height="697" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t1J0X5OgY7Y" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Act Two<iframe width="1239" height="697" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CANPsGfZCC8" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Act Three <iframe width="1239" height="697" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cHv4P_EeoAg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The Trailer of the Movie The Visit, 1964

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit is a dark story of revenge brought to the screen with Ingrid Bergman starring as an enormously wealthy woman who makes her way back to her enormously poor home town. She had been driven from there years earlier after having an affair (and a child). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBPro73nbt0

The Visit, a tragicomedy - which means that there are elements of both ways of examining reality - attempts to examine the rise of European Fascism. Dürrenmatt uses Expressionist and Absurdist techniques to confront the horror. A typical tragedy would reflect the typical responses. By adding situations and appeals that border on the on the humorous because they are so irrationally out of normality, the reader or audience member must see the tragedy through a different lens. Reality no longer works. The mind becomes numbed by horror over time. There are no more fixed boundaries between experience and empathy. The grotesque and tragicomic serve this purpose in The Visit.

Viktor Emil Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, and Holocaust survivor, was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He founded logotherapy, which is a form of existential analysis, the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy."

Finding meaning in difficult times (Interview with Dr. Viktor Frankl)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlC2OdnhIiQ

Meaning https://russjamieson.com/lessons-from-mans-search-for-meaning-viktor-frankl/

Why Believe in Others https://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_youth_in_search_of_meaning

Consider:

1. How does the play reflect the rise of European Fascism?

2. Identify changes in the townspeople.

3. Notice perspective. Zachanassian does not forget. Others do.

4. Anton Schill is the sacrificial victim. Does he come to terms with his situation from a moral perspective?

5. Which, if any, are moral characters?

6. Zachanassian has been directed toward revenge her whole adult life. Once she has her revenge, what next? Her life now has no meaning or does it?

7. Reflect upon Durrenmatt referring to himself as an “uprooted Protestant.”

8. How does Durrenmatt use an artificial counter reality in the play?

9. Discuss the concept of the “fall of man” in terms of the play.

10. Reflect upon the grotesque and absurd in the play.

11. How does the town’s name reflect the town?

12. Consider that each person may be considered an inmate in his/her own world in the play. He/She is given reprieve. Is he/she still imprisoned? And why?

13. Examine Expressionism. Relate its character to the play.

14. Examine Absurdist techniques and relate them to the play.

15. What are elements of Fascism in the play?

16. Apply Frankl’s approach to the play.

17. There is art in Zachanassian’s revenge. Track this.

18. The transitional names Clara and Claire are significant. Why?

19. The perception of justice is significant to the plot. Offer insight as to how this is developed.

20. Notice the lying and avoidance of truth. Share how those undergird the frailty of man.

21. Discuss the relevance of Zachanassian’s physical description.

22. Work with symbols and images in the play.

23. Discuss foreshadowing in the play.

24. Notice the gradations of bribery. Comment.

25. Comment upon Schill’s “fall from grace.”

26. Explicate the nuisance of the title.

27. Rationalization abounds in this play. Develop.

28. The play’s style is “over the top.” How does that work to communicate its message?

29. Notice the use of the railroad. How does this function?

30. Sound punctuates the play. Comment on its relevance.

ARISTOTLE & THE ELEMENTS OF TRAGEDY

https://nisd.net/sites/default/files/pdf/summer_reading/Warren%204%20AP%20APD%20Aristotle.pdf

Definition of Tragedy (From the Poetics of Aristotle [384-322 BC]) "Tragedy, then, is a process of imitating an action which has serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude; by means of language which has been made sensuously attractive, with each of its varieties found separately in the parts; enacted by the persons themselves and not presented through narrative; through a course of pity and fear completing the purification (catharsis[*], sometimes translated "purgation") of such emotions."

a) "imitation" (mimesis)[*]: Contrary to Plato, Aristotle asserts that the artist does not just copy the shifting appearances of the world, but rather imitates or represents Reality itself, and gives form and meaning to that Reality. In so doing, the artist gives shape to the universal, not the accidental. Poetry, Aristotle says, is "a more philosophical and serious business than history; for poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars."

b) "an action with serious implications": serious in the sense that it best raises and purifies pity and fear; serious in a moral, psychological, and social sense.

c) "complete and possesses magnitude": not just a series of episodes, but a whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The idea of imitation is important here; the artist does not just slavishly copy everything related to an action, but selects (represents) only those aspects which give form to universal truths.

d) "language sensuously attractive...in the parts": language must be appropriate for each part of the play: choruses are in a different meter and rhythm and more melodious than spoken parts. e) tragedy (as opposed to epic) relies on an enactment (dramatic performance), not on "narrative" (the author telling a story).

f) "purification" (catharsis): tragedy first raises (it does not create) the emotions of pity and fear, then purifies or purges them. Whether Aristotle means to say that this purification takes place only within the action of the play, or whether he thinks that the audience also undergoes a cathartic experience, is still hotly debated. One scholar, Gerald Else, says that tragedy purifies "whatever is 'filthy' or 'polluted' in the pathos, the tragic act" (98). Others say that the play arouses emotions of pity and fear in the spectator and then purifies them (reduces them to beneficent order and proportion) or purges them (expels them from his/her emotional system)

The Tragic Hero The tragic hero is "a [great] man who is neither a paragon of virtue and justice nor undergoes the change to misfortune through any real badness or wickedness but because of some mistake."

a) a great man: "one of those who stand in great repute and prosperity, like Oedipus and Thyestes: conspicuous men from families of that kind." The hero is neither a villain nor a model of perfection but is basically good and decent.

b) "mistake" (hamartia): This Greek word, which Aristotle uses only once in the Poetics, has also been translated as "flaw" or as "error." The great man falls through--though not entirely because of--some weakness of character, some moral blindness, or error. We should note that the gods also are in some sense responsible for the hero's fall.

III. Plot Aristotle distinguished six elements of tragedy: "plot, characters, verbal expression, thought, visual adornment, and song-composition." Of these, PLOT is the most important. The best tragic plot is single and complex, rather than double ("with opposite endings for good and bad"--a characteristic of comedy in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished). All plots have some pathos (suffering), but a complex plot includes reversal and recognition.

a) "reversal" (peripeteia): occurs when a situation seems to developing in one direction, then suddenly "reverses" to another. For example, when Oedipus first hears of the death of Polybus (his supposed father), the news at first seems good, but then is revealed to be disastrous.

b) "recognition" (anagnorisis or "knowing again" or "knowing back" or "knowing throughout" ): a change from ignorance to awareness of a bond of love or hate. For example, Oedipus kills his father in ignorance and then learns of his true relationship to the King of Thebes. Recognition scenes in tragedy are of some horrible event or secret, while those in comedy usually reunite long-lost relatives or friends. A plot with tragic reversals and recognitions best arouses pity and fear.

c) "suffering" (pathos): Also translated as "a calamity," the third element of plot is "a destructive or painful act." The English words "sympathy," "empathy," and "apathy" (literally, absence of suffering) all stem from this Greek word.

COMEDY