SOURCE: "Crimes of the Mind," in New Republic, Vol. 200, June 5, 1989, pp. 39-41.

[In the following review, Birkerts looks at the mind games and plot twists which Dürrenmatt has placed in The Execution of Justice and The Assignment.]

Friedrich Dürrenmatt is best known on these shores as one of Switzerland's two world-class playwrights, the other being Max Frisch. Both came to prominence after World War II, tilling the then-fertile soil of European malaise. Both filtered an existential pessimism into refined, often paradoxical investigations of good and evil, guilt and accountability. Politically neutral, culturally Germanized, the status of these Swiss writers seemed to mandate that ambiguity of thought and deed should be their proper subject. Dürrenmatt's two best-known plays, The Visit and The Physicists, reconnoiter precisely this terrain.

But Dürrenmatt, like Frisch, also turned his hand early on to novels, and to non-fiction prose of various descriptions. The Execution of Justice, which appeared in Germany in 1985, addresses many of Dürrenmatt's familiar themes—just as the title suggests. Nothing, however, can prepare us for the innovations of The Assignment, which was released the very next year. Careers, too, can make quantum leaps.

In 1950 Dürrenmatt published a short novel, The Judge and His Hangman, enormously successful, which was the first of many speculative crime novels, what Graham Greene might call "entertainments." Here, using an intricate pattern of reversals and revelations, Dürrenmatt pried away at appearances to show what quick and unpredictable currents ran beneath the routine procedures of a police investigation. Punishments, like crimes, were matters of destiny: if the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, it is because his capture is a necessary fulfillment of the deed. The novella was in no way an innovation, but it pressed its episodes forward with a confident rigor.

The Execution of Justice could almost stand as a companion piece to The Judge and His Hangman. It, too, marks no great stylistic or conceptual advance. Indeed, it belongs to the era of the earlier book; Dürrenmatt tells us in a short postscript that the work, originally titled Wheels of Justice was begun in 1957; he took it up and abandoned it a number of times before rewriting it entirely in 1985. Once again we have a crime and an expectation of the echoing call of justice. But now there is a difference: the killer steps free, apparently untroubled by even the slightest pang of remorse. (In English, the title can be read as a pun on the two meanings of "execution.")

Perhaps by temperament, and perhaps, too, because of his experience as a writer for the stage, Dürrenmatt is impatient with all the niceties of descriptive evocation or transcription of inwardness. The Execution of Justice, like the earlier novel, cuts its way forward in the terse, flat cadences of a police report. The conceit, in fact, is that this is a report, a confession set down by a dissipated lawyer named Spät in anticipation of his murder of the murderer—an execution he will ultimately be unable to carry out.

The plot (don't be deceived by the slimness of the book) is as complicated, maybe as impossible to pin down, as Faulkner's screenplay of The Big Sleep. Time frames and identities keep shifting; new relationships between subsidiary players emerge at every turn. But the motion of this "wheel" revolves around a fairly simple core premise. One March day in 1955, as Spät reports it, a well-known Zurich councilman, Dr. h.c. (honoris causa) Isaak Kohler, walks into a crowded downtown restaurant, and after a ritual exchange of greetings, shoots one Professor Winter at his table. Then, as calm as can be, he leaves, and resumes his busy life as a man-about-town. When Kohler is later apprehended at the concert hall, he gives himself up without protest. He is tried, found guilty, sentenced to prison. The whole city is baffled by what seems to be a purely gratuitous crime.

But Kohler, we soon learn, is something of a scientist, an experimenter. One day he summons Spät to the prison and offers him a rather peculiar commission. He asks the lawyer to reinvestigate his case under the presumption that he was not the murderer. Spät does not understand. "You are to create a fiction, nothing more," directs Kohler. He then tries to explain his reasoning:

You see, my dear Spät, we know very well what reality is, that's why I'm in here weaving baskets, but we hardly know what possibility is. Possibility is something almost limitless, while reality is set within strictest limits, since, after all, only one of those possibilities can become reality. Reality is only an exception to the rule of possibility and can therefore be thought of quite differently too. From which follows that we must rethink reality in order to forge ahead into possibility.

In a matter of days, Spät has plunged into a thicket of possible clues and motives so dense that he has no hope of extricating himself. The sequence of revelations defies detailing. Suffice it to say that Spät is able to construct a tissue of plausible circumstance that implicates another man, whereupon the case is brought to appeal. And when the other man—a former fencing champion named Olympic Heinz—commits suicide, Kohler is freed.

Spät cannot endure the miscarriage of justice that he has abetted. He resolves to murder Kohler and then to take his own life; his confession, he is sure, will explain everything. In the end, his plan fails. He winds up a besotted lawyer in a small farming village, regaling the locals with his extraordinary tale.

Dürrenmatt then appends to Spät's confession an epilogue in his own person (the device, I would guess, that finally allowed the author to finish the novel). He tells how some 30 years later he chanced to be at a gathering where ancient, wheelchair-bound Dr. Kohler was telling the guests the story of his crime and his release. His outrage has become something charming:

Renewed laughter, people were having a great time, strong coffee was served, cognac. All that was left, the old man began once more, while concentrating on the ash of his cigar, which he had not knocked off but was carefully allowing to grow, was the moral question. Suddenly he was a different person. No longer a hundred years old but timeless. Whether he had killed or only intended to kill, he said, in moral terms it was the intent that counted, not the execution…. Everything can be justified dialectically, and thus morally as well.

Kohler continues in this vein long enough to establish the relativity of all moral constraints, then asks his daughter to wheel him away. A fitting place to end. But it is not the end. Dürrenmatt then describes his visit to Kohler's daughter, who was briefly Spät's lover, and she gives him an astonishing account of how she was raped and humiliated by a group that included Professor Winter. The elaborate architecture of her father's supposedly gratuitous crime collapses upon itself: Kohler turns out to have had an excellent motive.

I have not been able to do more than hint at the circles within the circles of connected depravities that Dürrenmatt ultimately parades before us. Perhaps it was his intent to show that the fretwork of social and personal justice cannot be safely supported by any private or collective standard, that all pretense to the contrary is sham. Well, we take the point. But somehow we are not as shocked or as distressed as we ought to be. The whole of the novella feels like a conceit that has been whipped up logically and then set to the page. The characters all have a predictable police-blotter flatness. Their thoughts and arguments, Kohler's especially, read like a writer's notebook musings on the paradoxes of morality.

What's more, we've absorbed all of these reversals and inversions before, by way of Dostovevsky, Sartre, even Frisch, who dissected similar notions in I'm Not Stiller and a half-dozen other works—to say nothing of Dürrenmatt himself. The Execution of Justice suggests that the provocations of postwar European literature may no longer provoke; that they long ago shattered the complacency that Dürrenmatt would here assault. How startling, then, to turn to Dürrenmatt's next novella. The Assignment, which has been subtitled: On Observing the Observer of the Observers.

This work is sui generis, a late-modernist legend that pushes past the usual conceptions of self and society and finds a whole new way of rendering disturbance. While the clever circularity of the subtitle (which is not part of the book's German title) suggests the thematic concerns of the narrative, it gives a sportive ring to what is, in fact, a most chilling recognition: that our electronic technology has entirely deformed our self-conception and our behavior. When Rilke wrote in his "Archaic Torso of Apollo" that "there is no place that does not see you," he was not, presumably, referring to electronic surveillance, but his conclusion—"You must change your life"—would still apply. Dürrenmatt would probably say that for the culture at large it's too late.

Reading The Assignment is like taking a head-first tumble down a staircase made of words. The book has 24 chapters, each a single sentence that builds velocity from phrase to phrase. Once again we have a murder and a search for a killer. But this time the crime is less a central subject, more a pretext for the creation of a futuristic scenario that will allow Dürrenmatt to expose the changed terms of our contemporary situation.

Psychologist Otto von Lambert, who has written a well-known book on terrorism, learns that his wife's body has been found at the site of the Al-Hakin ruin in an unnamed Arab country. Lambert ships her body home for burial and at the funeral hires the filmmaker F., who is working on an idea of "creating a total portrait, namely a portrait of our planet, by combining random scenes into a whole." F. is to go to the site with her crew to film the investigation of the murder. Not an everyday request, but then F. is clearly a woman who lives for such adventuring—a kind of Laurie Anderson of the dark side. What's more, the hyper-ventilating prose creates a climate wherein the extraordinary seems the expected.

But before jetting off, F. must consult with her friend D., a logician at the university. D. hears her out, then tells a story of his own. He has been watching people through a telescope in his home. He has observed that these same people have been looking at him through field glasses. As soon as they realized that they were being watched, they ran off—a fact that prompts D. to make this Gertrude Steinian peroration:

anything observed requires the presence of an observer, who, if he is observed by what he is observing, himself becomes an object of observation, a banal logical interaction, which, however, transposed into reality, had a destabilizing effect, for the people observing him and discovering that he was observing them through a mirror telescope felt caught in the act, and since being caught in the act produces embarrassment and embarrassment frequently leads to aggression, more than one of these people, after retreating in haste, had come back to throw rocks at his house.

D.'s little story, his "banal logical interaction," is, in a sense, the metaphorical pivot for the rest of this strangest of novellas: only the scale and application of its point keep changing. Briefly: F. flies to the unnamed Arab country; she instantly finds herself in a nightmare world of cubicles and interrogations. She films, and her filming is filmed. The plot flashes forward, chapter-sentence by chapter-sentence, obeying only the paralogic of dreams. Until at last the intrepid filmmaker finds herself in what might be seen as the Urlocation of our modern world: a fortified, automated monitoring site for high-tech weaponry. World powers are testing their new weapons by proxy in a staged desert war. Everything is filmed—even the satellite filming the site is being filmed by another satellite. In the back room, under lock and key, is a fighter pilot gone mad named Achilles, who reads Homer in the Greek and lives only to rape and destroy.

Trust me, Dürrenmatt's narrative is far more compelling than any precis can indicate. The improbable plot is pressured by a sense of ominous inevitability: F. is led remorselessly to her rendezvous with the rough beast, the extrusion of what Yeats called the "animus mundi." Moreover, the ruling conceit—observer and observed—is true enough to the way things are to activate the paranoid strain in most readers. We bother less with F. and her fate, but we are riveted by the implications of the trope. For Dürrenmatt has hit upon a very real connection between exposure and aggression. D.'s insight about embarrassment leading to violence only grazes the surface.

The real issue, we come to see, revolves around identity and the authentication of existence. The more we watch and are watched watching, the less we are able to hold a self-boundary in place. And the diffusion of the sense of the real, like the sleep of reason, breeds monsters. Marshall McLuhan, the antic theorist of a world transformed by electronic technology, remarked on this very thing: "The meaningless slaying around our streets is the work of people who have lost all identity, and who have to kill in order to know if they're real." The Assignment finds this same horrifying logic of compensation at the heart of our late-century doings. Dürrenmatt's edgy musing may seem futuristic, but so does the daily news.