Ubu in chains
Ubu in chains (French: "Ubu enchaîné") is a drama in five acts by the French writer Alfred Jarry and, alongside King Ubu and Ubu Hahnrei, represents the third part of his Ubu trilogy, which was designed in 1899 and published in 1900 September 1937, 30 years after the author's death, premiered at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The sets were by Max Ernst .
content
Ubu in chains is conceived as a continuation and in large parts as a revival of Jarry's scandalous success King Ubu . The protagonist is again the cowardly, voracious, ruthlessly egomaniacal Père Ubu , who - now in France - renounces his royal ambitions and instead actively and consciously practices his self-degradation into a slave .
He pursues this goal with the same radicalism and ruthlessness that distinguished him during his tyranny in Poland (see King Ubu ). The services he offers are primarily about “de-braining”, “twisting the nose” or “inserting a small piece of wood into the ears”, for which he also charges a considerable fee. Consequently, Ubus's search for a “master” becomes problematic and ultimately leads to the massacre of the harmless (and incidentally later revived) Pissembock. After Père and Mère Ubu kidnapped his unconscious niece Éleuthère and seized Pissembock's property, including his house, they set up a reign of terror there under the motto "Only the slaves command here". Soon, however, they are held accountable for their crimes, convicted by the French judiciary and thrown into dungeon, which the Ubus see less as a punishment than as an advancement and gradual realization of their slave ambitions.
The effect of this semantic "reinterpretation" of slavery by the Ubus (chains, neck irons and lead balls become venerable attributes; imprisonment a luxury and the epitome of freedom) is so great that they assemble an army of convicts behind them who have escaped from the dungeon to push out and onto the galleys of the Turkish sultan in order to achieve the highest "rank" of slavery as galley slaves. While Père Ubu, who is now celebrated as the acclaimed king, sets off for the Bosporus with his convict army, Mère Ubu remains behind in the dungeon, but is eventually driven out by the advancing army of the "free".
In “Sklavonien” there is finally a battle between the two armies. The Ubus were able to save themselves in their course to the Bosphorus, but the Sultan refused to take the dreaded Père Ubu (who has now proven to be his lost brother) in his country and instead had him shipped with an indefinite destination. In response to Mère Ubus's accusation that even Ubus's plan of a submissive slave existence had blatantly failed, since ultimately nobody wanted to be his master and he was even celebrated as king, he replied: “I am beginning to understand that my belly is bigger and more worthy of my worry is than the whole world. From now on I will serve him exclusively. ”With these auspices, the Ubus travel to a still unknown country at the end of the piece, which is“ certainly extraordinary enough to be worthy of us. ”
Interpretative approaches
As can already be seen from the synopsis of content, the piece is a revival of King Ubu with opposite signs. The pieces are largely structurally analogous, with only the semantic occupation of the individual structural areas shifting (tyrannical slavery, palace dungeons, etc.). The formal implementation is also comparable to that in King Ubu : parodic elements, comic language and carnivalesque motifs are just as prominently represented in the piece, Jarry's a-mimetic theater aesthetic is just as dominant.
Thus the genuine creative performance of the piece must be sought on other levels. On the one hand, the deconstruction of a normative “ideology of freedom”, as embodied by the ridiculous “trois hommes libres”, whose fanatically defended “freedom” consists only in dogmatically pursued, consistently practiced disobedience. In this context, Ubus's radical reinterpretation of the term slavery must also be understood:
- “I am a slave, Potz Wampenhorn! Nobody will stop me from doing my slave duty. I will serve mercilessly. Kill, remove the brain! "
On the basis of these two motifs (freedom as a compulsion to disobey; slavery as radical self-empowerment) the play makes it clear to what extent precisely terms that are so powerful in political and social discourse, such as those of “freedom” and “slavery”, are mere statements that can be instrumentalized at will and led to absurdity in their function.
By showing the mutual interpenetration of the two terms (compare also the statement "La liberté, c'est l'esclavage"; "Freedom is slavery") and the connection between their respective meaning and concrete social power structures, the piece raises questions which have by no means lost their topicality.
Furthermore it is noticeable that Ubu in chains tends to self-referentiality and metatheatricality even more than King Ubu . The piece begins with Ubus's refusal to utter “the word” ( i.e. the famous merdre , a corruption of merde = shit; cf. King Ubu ) because it has caused him (the protagonist - or the author?) Too much inconvenience. In the second act he remarks on the use of the toilet brush that he used it as a king to make small children laugh, but has now discovered that what makes small children laugh can scare adults - what in the Subtext can be read unambiguously as an author's comment. The piece therefore constantly reflects the conditions of its own creation and thus promotes a mixture of fictional and lifeworld levels.
Ubu in chains can be read as a complement to King Ubu , who can also let the former appear in a new light through the chiastic interlacing of the structure and the semantics of the two pieces.
output
- Alfred Jarry: King Ubu / Ubu Hahnrei / Ubu in chains , dtv (1984) ISBN 3423054263
literature
- J. Grimm: "The Jarrys Theater", In: J. Grimm: The avant-garde theater of France. 1885-1930 , Munich 1982, pp. 269-300. ISBN 3-406-08438-9
Web links
- Gabriele Killert: On the beauty of the monstrous. in DIE ZEIT from November 1, 2007
Individual evidence
- ^ Lothar Fischer: Max Ernst , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1969, p. 84 f.