SOURCE: "Terror as Usual in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Assignment," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 1, March 1991, pp. 86-93.

The history of terrorism has been entwined with the history of the novel ever since serialization of Dostoevski's The Possessed began in 1871. Perhaps in spite of traditional assumptions, still not entirely lost, about the clear distinctions between literary and political activities, it is inevitable that terrorists sometimes seem to resemble novelists. Marginalized plotters both, they seek to impose their own constructions on a chaotic and resistant reality, relying on their ability to move the emotions of strangers. And though terrorists attract attention through violence, their targets are almost always symbolic, and their aims must finally be explained in language. Moreover, as leftist critics frequently argue, the public perception of terrorism is itself highly constructed. To say so is not to aestheticize the cruel reality of terrorist activities—to gloss over, for example, the fate of the passengers on Pan Am flight 103—but to argue that the ways in which government officials and the press represent terrorism are remarkably similar to the ways in which popular fiction does so. The nature and inadequacy of such representations of terrorism are the subject of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Assignment, a 1986 novel in which the author's absurdist critique of contemporary politics merges with a postmodern conception of terrorism.

Before turning to Dürrenmatt, we need to look at the public conceptions of terrorism that his novel implicitly criticizes and at some of the alternatives scholars have proposed. In popular representations, the terrorist is always the other, an outsider who—if not a representative of a once-colonized people, a swarthy Islamic archfiend, say, or a grubby chain-smoking product of the Shankill Road—is at the very least a drug-crazed adolescent from a subculture that defies everything the middle class values. Clever enough to elude the police, terrorists are nonetheless usually assumed to be mad bombers, motivated more by their traumatic childhoods and personal failures than by the causes they publicly adopt. It is their deviance from mainstream values and solutions, rather than their connection to a familiar social setting or to recognizable political problems, that defines them.

In this representation, the plot of the terrorist story, whether we find it within the embossed covers of a paperback novel or in the headlines of the Washington Post, is almost reassuringly familiar; "terrorist acts are never really news." We know about bombings and hijackings, about SWAT teams and exhausted negotiators, about communiqués issued in halting English by dark-eyed men in ski masks, and we are reasonably sure, most of the time, that in the end the security forces, the orderly state, will triumph. As the other, terrorists gratify a need for an identified enemy that can only increase as differences between communist and capitalist states dissolve.

Seen as a political strategy rather than as a myth, the terrorist deed is perhaps best defined as "a symbolic act designed to influence political behaviour by extranormal means, entailing the use or threat of violence." Terrorism is a behavior of small groups alienated from conventional ways of influencing the political system, incapable of mounting a full-scale military campaign (in which violent acts cease to be symbolic and compel by sheer force alone) and unwilling or unable to take part in, for example, free electoral processes.

While agreeing with Thornton's basic definition, commentators on the political left, such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, have expressed their dismay at the tendency to label as terrorist the behavior of what they see as legitimately revolutionary groups—the PLO, say, or the IRA—and to deny the terrorizing activities of the state. Mick Taussig argues that the terrorist myth props up the unstable and violence-ridden regimes of much of the Third World, where "terror in … disruption is no less than that of the order it is bent on eliminating." The state's attempt to brainwash the population into accepting its violence as orderly seems even more futile when one recognizes that the state itself is disappearing under the pressures of modern corporations and technologies of knowledge. "Might not the very concept of the social, itself a relatively modern idea, be outdated insofar as it rests on assumptions of stability and structure? In which case what is all the talk about order about?" Terrorists, half-creations of the unstable state, serve to legitimate its own violence. "There may even arise in the political economy of news a certain 'demand' for publicized terrorist activity in order, paradoxically, to continually reaffirm the principle that the use of force rightly belongs only with the state."

Dürrenmatt shares with these political commentators a wish to expose the myths and explore the realities of terrorism. An experimental fiction, The Assignment points to the complex reality that lies behind the too-familiar story and suggests as well what factual studies mask, the actual experience of human beings caught up in terrorist activities. Fragmentation of identity in the novel's unstable world leads to a longing for order that asserts itself in totalitarian politics, fundamentalist religion, and documentary realism, all disciplines, in Foucault's sense, that depend on observation. Suggesting the difficulty of distinguishing between the victims and practitioners of terror, Dürrenmatt undermines the usual story of sinister Islamic terrorists. Terrorism in his novel belongs as much to the illusory order as to its half-imagined opposition; it is dispersed through government and business and can be found as well in high culture and in the representational practices taken for granted in realism and mass journalism. Yet while he thoroughly recognizes the popular critique of the letter as terrorizing, Dürrenmatt implicitly argues that a novel about terrorism can suggest what is otherwise "unpresentable" in our experience of public violence. His manipulations of the myth present terror both as an understandable private response to the conditions of late twentieth-century life and as a public practice that intensifies and conditions panic.

Although The Assignment begins like a standard thriller, with the funeral of a European woman found "dead and violated at the foot of the Al-Hakim ruin," the briefest survey of its bizarre plot demonstrates how Dürrenmatt borrows from, but quickly revises, the familiar story in order to deny the reader the comfortable satisfaction of identifying the usual culprits and bringing them to an unexamined justice. After Tina von Lambert's funeral, her husband, a psychiatrist, engages another woman, the Filmmaker "F.," to find her murderer. F. goes to North Africa, where she interviews two officials, a police chief resembling Göring and a mild-mannered "investigating magistrate" who is actually the head of the secret service. After filming the murder site and the execution of an obviously innocent man condemned for the crime, F. is convinced by the head of the secret service to help him track down the real murderer by impersonating the victim, wearing Tina's red fur coat while another woman plays F.'s part, touring the country with her film crew. On a tip from Björn Olsen, a Danish journalist who is almost immediately murdered, F. discovers that Tina is still alive and that the real victim was another journalist, Jytte Sörensen. Wandering down the road on which she discovered Olsen's body, F. is picked up by a Vietnam veteran who mans a giant observatory intended to keep track of the country's war with its next-door neighbor. This veteran and his brain-damaged friend are the real murderers of Jytte Sörensen and Björn Olsen, and F. is saved from their fate only at the eleventh hour.

F. and, very likely, the reader look for some sinister Arab as Tina von Lambert's killer, because her body was found not only in an Islamic country but at a shrine sacred to Shi'ite Muslims, a group consistently demonized in the Western press for its role in the Iranian revolution. Dürrenmatt, however, immediately complicates the case by presenting Tina's husband as "a man who had defended the Arab resistance movement and hadn't called it a terrorist organization." Although nothing in the book suggests empathy for Islamic culture or political causes—Dürrenmatt's point, indeed, is that nationalist causes have become meaningless—The Assignment refuses the stereotype of the Arab terrorist. The Shi'ite "saints" may be fanatics, starving to death as they wait for their caliph to emerge from his stone cube, but they are dangerous only to themselves. The Westernized head of the secret service, lecturing F. about Khomeini and the finer features of Islamic fundamentalism as he sips an Alsatian white wine, is a considerably more sinister figure because he is more European, more powerfully interested in weaving F. into his plots, which include turning his country's war into an "international scandal." Sörensen and Olsen are killed not by the infidel but by Americans, Vietnam veterans with names taken from Homer.

At its simplest level, the novel complicates the terrorist myth by making the identities of the victims as problematic as those of the killers. Nothing is what it seems: Jytte Sörensen, not Tina von Lambert, is the first of Polypheme and Achilles' murder victims; F., the once-detached filmmaker, nearly becomes the third. Surely few readers can have the moral certainty to decide whether a brain-damaged Vietnam veteran-turned-rapist is a victim or a terrorizer. Identity also remains problematic in part because few characters, including the protagonist, have names. The second subtitle of the original text (omitted from the translation), Novelle in vierundzwanzig Sätzen, calls the reader's attention to the artifice of constructing a short novel in twenty-four chapters, each consisting of a single long sentence or—to draw on another connotation of the German word—philosophical proposition. And this device, too, by departing from the conventions of realistic fiction and documentary journalism and by at least suggesting an allusion to the twenty-four books of the Iliad, reminds us that the text does not correspond neatly to some external reality. Dürrenmatt's mock omniscient narration, presenting everything as summary, refusing to render dialogue directly, to give the protagonist a personal history, to name the country in which the novel is set, and so on, frustrates the reader's desire to master the whole story. If it is true that "the [criminal] under-world is the phantasmagoric paranoid construction of the ruling class," surely the desire for a solid external reality, for the identities and oppositions contemporary thought and events refuse to give us, drives that construction.

Terrorism in the novel deviates, then, from the story we already know to become what Taussig calls "terror as usual," a dispersed and decentered phenomenon of the postcolonial world. His phrase provides a pale suggestion of the nightmarish confusion of the apparently normative and social with terror that Dürrenmatt's novel develops. In the streets of his fictional North African country one finds "a multiracial thicket of travelers all busily photographing and filming each other and forming an unreal contrast to the secret life inside the compound of the police ministry, like two interlocking realities, one of them cruel and demonic, the other as banal as tourism itself." Yet the presence of a Grand Hotel Maréchal Lyautey, with its large portrait of that quintessential empire builder, suggests that tourism is colonialism by other means and as such is not only banal but cruel in its indifference to the "secret life" of local people. The state is unstable: the mild, bespectacled investigating magistrate turns out to be the head of the secret service, locked in a power struggle with the chief of police, "who didn't even know who the head of the secret service was."

One of the accomplishments of The Assignment is to depict "terror as usual" as more than a political phenomenon and to communicate to the reader an anxiety corresponding to the symptoms of postmodernism as Jean-François Lyotard diagnoses them. In a world incommensurable with our desires and conceptions, something unrepresentable always remains outside art, and though we long for the consolations of form and order, we must make up the rules as we go along. Such views are not, of course, an invention of the twentieth century—Lyotard himself refers to Montaigne's essays as possessing some of these qualities—and in The Assignment they are represented by a passage from Kierkegaard and enacted in the fate of the three Europeans killed in North Africa. When F. discovers the quotation from Kierkegaard, it is in Jytte Sörensen's handwriting and in her native Danish, which F. parses out, believing that she has discovered a code. The fuller quotation forms the novel's epigraph:

What will come? What will the future bring? I do not know. I have no presentiment. When a spider plunges from a fixed point to its consequences, it always sees before it an empty space where it can never set foot, no matter how it wriggles. It is that way with me: before me always an empty space; what drives me forward is a consequence that lies behind me. This life is perverse and frightful, it is unbearable.

The quotation evokes the conditions of life lived in a period of frequent terrorist attacks, a radical insecurity conditioned by a historical past, as well as the familiar existential angst felt by the human moving forward into a future at once unknowable and deeply determined. The now-dated slogans of "alienation" become fresh in the experience of Europeans encountering in North Africa not oriental romance but the cruelties of a world where they have lost all familiar points of reference and every benign expectation is crushed. Reducing a human being to a short-lived pest is not only unwelcome but Kafkaesque.

More precisely, like Jytte Sörensen, who came to North Africa to track down a story, and F., who came to find the killer of a still-living woman, the spider is a weaver of traps, in popular lore a plotter, in Swift the very image of the "modern" scholar with his dictionaries and footnotes, ready to strip a rich traditional culture of its living grace. It would be hard to construct a better metaphor for a documentary realism that seeks to "capture" the real in its web, at the risk of destroying its mysterious, unpresentable life. And when F., almost as if the message were in code, begins to identify with Jytte Sörensen, walking off "helpless as a spider" along the road that leads to Polypheme's cave, "a consequence of her whole life", she does so as the representative of a certain kind of art, of a documentary realism whose premises began to explode for her the day she filmed the burial of Tina von Lambert.

"I am being watched," writes Tina in her journal, and the problem of being watched and its relationship to identity enters a political and philosophical context when the logician "D." ruminates on these matters. D., apparently a disciple of Derrida, for whom he may even have been named, lectures F. about the impossibility of self-identity, for "everyone was subject to time and was therefore, strictly speaking, a different person at every moment." Given this insight, portrayal becomes impossible; the human self is a fiction, an "accumulation of shreds of experience and memory, comparable to a mound of leaves." The novel then presents the process by which late twentieth-century human beings struggle to understand each other, the world outside the ego, with no certainty of achieving more than "reconstruction, raking together scattered leaves to build up the subject of [a] portrait, never being sure, all the while, whether the leaves … actually belonged together, or whether, in fact, [one] wasn't ultimately making a self-portrait."

Therefore, although no novelists stalk Dürrenmatt's pages, although no one ever reads or quotes from a novel or play, The Assignment again and again demonstrates a concern with the problematics, and especially with the political implications, of literary realism. The novel's first subtitle, Or on the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, recalls a Shakespearean phrase that had, by the late nineteenth century, become ominous; given "the depersonalized relations of the information society … the condition of being 'the observed of all observers' [is] no longer a compliment, as it was intended for Hamlet, but a threat of exposure."

Made sensitive to such threats by Michel Foucault, at least two recent critics argue that realism fundamentally depends on a "fantasy of surveillance" that corresponds to nineteenth-century developments in, for example, psychiatry and urban sociology. In the extreme case, the representational practices of realism are seen as another way of policing, enforcing social norms and denying aberrations. Trollope, for example, just because he seems so tolerant, not to say boring, forces the reader to accept his own highly detailed moral code, and the problem in reading him is "to render as such, and not merely repeat, the terroristic effects of the banality that Trollope, as a matter of principle and program, relentlessly cultivates."

One might protest that realistic and naturalistic novels were often destabilizing, that Hard Times did help change the divorce laws. Dickens's novels generally might, in the mystery and undecidability they grant to working-class characters such as Jenny Wren of Our Mutual Friend (sunbeam? witch?), be taken as rather less complicit with state terror than, say, the Nazi remake of Jew Süss. The whole argument that the conventions of nineteenth-century realism reproduce a taken-for-granted consensus about what constitutes reality, and therefore stifle dissent, weakens when we consider Mikhail Bakhtin's persuasive arguments to the contrary. Unlike poetry, which traditionally avoids "actual available social dialects," the realistic novel, says Bakhtin, constantly posits a difference between the narrator's language and intentions and those of the dramatized characters, "a freedom connected with the relativity of literary and language systems." Reproducing in part the variety of the world's languages, the novel brings about "a destruction of any absolute bonding of ideological meaning to language, which is the defining factor of mythological and magical thought."

Nonetheless, despite the frequency with which recent theorists cite Bakhtin, the critique of realism as allied with official views of reality and with the suppression of dissent remains a key point in the post-modernist program, for which Lyotard is a prestigious and articulate spokesperson, and it is one that Dürrenmatt obviously takes seriously. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard argues that "terror" is "the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him." In his peroration he argues eloquently for an experimental, postmodern art that preserves the living contradictions and incompletion of the world:

It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. And it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language games (which, under the name of faculties, Kant knew to be separated by a chasm), and that only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them into a real unity. But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality.

Lyotard's theory goes some way toward explaining the significance of the paired themes of terrorism and literary realism in The Assignment. The holes in Dürrenmatt's plot, the unanswered questions about unnamed characters, the fragmentary glimpses of landscapes, interiors, motives, and political contexts are as so many refusals of "the transparent and communicable." The effect is perhaps not so antimimetic as it might seem; refusing transcendent illusions, the novelist suggests an elusive dimension of personality or experience that withers under the harsh floodlights of documentary realism.

F.'s goal for many years has been to create a documentary, a "total portrait … of our planet," a goal that leads her to film Tina von Lambert's funeral and then to agree to the psychiatrist Otto von Lambert's request that she find his wife's killers. But even before F. leaves Europe, her faith in representation is shaken by her reading of Tina von Lambert's journal, in which Tina has recorded her husband's every minute action with Balzacian intensity. Yet her descriptions have not given but destroyed her husband's identity, putting into question the old humanistic idea of the unique person:

Reading this journal was like being immersed in a cloud of pure observations gradually condensing into a lump of hate and revulsion, or like reading a film script for a documentary of every human being, as if every person, if he or she were filmed in this manner, would turn into a von Lambert as he was described by this woman, all individuality crushed out by such ruthless observation.

This terroristic "ruthless observation" that ends by destroying the identity it seeks to establish, what Lyotard might call the "unpresentable" in the person, resembles the medical jargon that turns us into unflattering synecdoches of ourselves, the ruptured appendix in 412B, the morbidly enlarged liver in 413A.

In von Lambert's notes on his wife, whom he fears having seen as a case, we find such observations carried to the point that they are no longer

observations at all but literally an abstracting of her humanity, defining depression as a psychosomatic phenomenon resulting from insight into the meaninglessness of existence, which is inherent in existence itself, since the meaning of existence is existence, which insight, once accepted and affirmed, makes existence unbearable, so that Tina's insight into that insight was the depression, and so forth, this sort of idiocy page after page.

Neither journal nor case notes—both like documentary-film allotropes of literary realism and the faith in communicating observation—provides F. with insight into Tina's motives for running off to North Africa, and she is left feeling like some adjunct of the contemporary information system, "one of those probes they shoot out into space in the hope that they will transmit back to the earth information about its still unknown composition."

Because its representations are closest to a commonsense, consensus notion of reality, Dürrenmatt sees a realistic art as potentially dangerous. Its illusions appear graphically when F., having found the address of a famous, recently dead painter in Tina's journal, goes to his studio. Its floors and walls are lined with paintings that recall F.'s own project of creating a "total portrait … of our planet": a whole gallery of the city's more disreputable citizens. "At the feet of these figures who were no longer present except on canvas stood smaller pictures, representing a streetcar, toilets, pans, wrecked cars, bicycles, umbrellas, traffic policemen, Cinzano bottles, there was nothing the painter had not depicted, the disorder was tremendous."

As in the von Lamberts' writings, but here presumably only because of the riotous juxtaposition of the paintings, a representational art suggests what its critics say it is intended to repress, the underlying chaos of the world. F., turning to let in light from a window, sees a portrait of a woman in a red fur coat that she "at first took for a portrait of Tina von Lambert, but which turned out not to be Tina after all, it could just as well be a portrait of a woman who looked like Tina, and then, with a shock, it seemed to her that this woman standing before her defiantly with wide-open eyes was herself." Yet when she returns later in the day the "portrait" is gone, and the apparently real studio turns out to be a "reconstruction" made for a film crew and intended to "give an impression … of how the studio had looked when the artist was using it." And indeed, at the end of the novel, F., who has barely escaped rape and murder in North Africa, realizes that the woman in the portrait must have been Jytte Sörensen and the one standing in front of her Tina von Lambert; "no doubt the director was her lover."

The dangerous illusions of realism have more specifically political implications. F.'s "total portrait … of our planet" would indeed be that kind of totalizing, totalitarian art that Lyotard deplores. In The Assignment, the political terrors of realism are seen at their simplest in North Africa when the police chief steals F.'s film of the execution of the Scandinavian prisoner and replaces it with an official "documentary," complete with shots of cheerful cadets at a police training academy, which might be equally convincing to a European audience. Such documentaries seem to carry out the logical implications of nineteenth-century realism:

Photography did not appear as a challenge to painting from the outside, any more than industrial cinema did to narrative literature…. The challenge lay essentially in that photographic and cinematographic processes can accomplish better, faster, and with a circulation a hundred thousand times larger than narrative or pictorial realism, the task which academicism had assigned to realism: to preserve various consciousnesses from doubt.

Indeed film, while clearly an art form for F., often associates itself directly with the police and with surveillance in The Assignment. F., to take one example, rides to Al-Hakim in a convoy of "policemen and television people."

More nakedly still, the complex technology on which F.'s art depends can be separated almost entirely from human agency. The ultimate surveillance of the novel's last chapter, for example, depends on a series of cameras, each operated by a computer, watching each other observe the world. Achilles spoke of that nightmare in Vietnam, where he flew a computerized bomber: "Their plane was a flying computer, programmed to start, fly to the target, drop its bombs, all automatic, their only function was to observe." Discipline, in short, becomes the only human function, reducing a person to an observer of machines made pour surveiller et punir.

Dürrenmatt clearly agrees with Foucault that such observation is a fundamental condition of twentieth-century life: his Arab jail is positively Benthamite, with its courtyard that looks like a shaft and its series of peepholes. As D. puts it, "A very suitable definition of contemporary man might be that he is man under observation—observed by the state, for one." Yet D. argues that such a Foucauldian discipline is not only necessary but deeply desired. Fundamentalism, both religious and political, has revived because "many, indeed most, people could not stand themselves if they were not observed by someone." Nuclear weaponry, requiring spy satellites and at best eventuating in mutually agreed on-site inspections, enacts the same need, "which was why they basically hoped to be able to keep up the arms race forever, so that they would have to observe one another forever, since without an arms race, the contending powers would sink into insignificance."

If the novel could have a center, then, it would be the terrifying underground observatory, equipped with the latest cameras, from which the half-crazed Vietnam veteran nicknamed Polypheme observes the desert border war that is the mainstay of this unnamed country's economy. It is the ultimate panoptical war, Undershaft-gone-mad, existing only to be observed for the benefit of the people who really run things, that is, the sellers of weapons: "the war effort was constantly seeking out new battlefields, quite logically, since the stability of the market depended on weapons exports." Polypheme himself, the camera his one eye, links the most ancient violence with the problematics of modern identity: "Nobody injured me." His original purpose had been to provide such close documentation of the weapons that he could make "espionage obsolete," but "he really wasn't needed anymore, he had been replaced by fully automated video cameras, then a satellite had been launched to a permanent position above the observation center."

Polypheme exists at a disquieting nexus between immemorial violence and its contemporary manifestations. During the Vietnam war, his life was saved by his closest friend, a classics professor and bomber pilot nicknamed Achilles. In a world of automatic weapons, where computers do most of the work, Achilles had complained that "the idea of a human being was an illusion, man either became a soulless machine, a camera, a computer, or a beast," and he "sometimes wished he could be a real criminal, do something inhuman, be a beast, rape and strangle a woman." Horribly brain-damaged in the war, Achilles is locked in a V.A. hospital, from which he occasionally escapes to rape and murder women, and since it is the only pleasure he is able to feel, Polypheme feels obliged to procure it for him after he liberates his friend and installs him at the observation center. In his case, "terror as usual" takes the form suggested by Robin Morgan, who argues for a direct link between the old classical heroes and modern terrorism, the "sexuality of violence," the capture and rape of women that is, in fact, taken for granted in the Iliad. By suggesting that terrorism has an affinity with beautiful and durable monuments of Western, not Islamic, culture, Dürrenmatt reminds us of Benjamin's famous observation that there is "no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

Better than any political analyst, Dürrenmatt draws us close to understanding the emotional and intellectual costs of living in the late twentieth century, when even terrorism cannot be counted on to correspond to our conceptions of it. Otto von Lambert's insight that "Auschwitz … was not the work of terrorists but of state employees" is well supported in this novel. Terrorists serve the need to believe that there are centers of resistance against a well-established order, yet as this novel amply demonstrates, the very notion of a center is illusory. The new physical terror of computerized bombing and the old one of rape correspond to a condition in which late twentieth-century human beings live and move, their identity fragmented by new philosophical conceptions of memory and the self but also by new technologies that violate their privacy or reduce their importance in traditional roles, such as that of the warrior. Surveillance and observation, intended to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war or successful terrorist attacks, are oppressive but desired. F., ironically, is at last saved from Achilles because a camera crew rises up in the desert to film her (Taussig explains how a friend in Bogotá warned him to "always make sure that if anything happens to you there will be publicity. Make sure there are journalists who know where you are going"). Fear of nuclear holocaust feeds the conventional weapons industry; the barbarous high-tech warfare of Vietnam turns a highly civilized man into a primitive rapist; computerized satellites observing other computerized satellites make a mockery of human observers and of the idea of God; "the world [is] spinning back to its origin," that is, to chaos.