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Selected Writings, Vol. 3: Essays
The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
Dürrenmatt’s essays, gathered in this third volume of Selected Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt’s best-known essays, such as “Theater Problems” and “Monster Essay on Justice and Law,” as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States “increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism”). This third volume of Selected Writings also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as “The Winter War in Tibet,” a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth—a Plato’s Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.
Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
Dürrenmatt’s essays, gathered in this third volume of Selected Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt’s best-known essays, such as “Theater Problems” and “Monster Essay on Justice and Law,” as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States “increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism”). This third volume of Selected Writings also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as “The Winter War in Tibet,” a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth—a Plato’s Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.
Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
184 pages, Hardcover
First published October 13, 2006
39 people want to read
About the author
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
408 books1,024 followersFriedrich Dürrenmatt (1921 – 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist.
Dürrenmatt was born in the Emmental (canton of Bern), the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather Ulrich Dürrenmatt was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began to study philosophy and German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. In 1943 he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career. In 1945-46, he wrote his first play, "It is written". On October 11 1946 he married actress Lotti Geissler. She died in 1983 and Dürrenmatt was married again to another actress, Charlotte Kerr, the following year.
He was a proponent of epic theater whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author gained fame largely due to his avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire. One of his leading sentences was: "A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn". Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten.
Dürrenmatt was born in the Emmental (canton of Bern), the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather Ulrich Dürrenmatt was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began to study philosophy and German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. In 1943 he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career. In 1945-46, he wrote his first play, "It is written". On October 11 1946 he married actress Lotti Geissler. She died in 1983 and Dürrenmatt was married again to another actress, Charlotte Kerr, the following year.
He was a proponent of epic theater whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author gained fame largely due to his avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire. One of his leading sentences was: "A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn". Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten.
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July 4, 2010 Here is a review I wrote which appeared in the Colorado Review a few years back.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 1: Plays
Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Fictions
Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 3: Essays
University of Chicago Press, 2006
reviewed by Evan Lavender-Smith
The contrast of the drama and the prose presented in this collection clearly demonstrates, perhaps for the first time in English, that Friedrich Dürrenmatt's greatest achievements in literature were not, as commonly supposed, the plays, but rather the fiction and the essays. There is no doubt the plays are all quite a lot of fun; yet they are ever little more than fun. We have great difficulty feeling the Dürrenmatt play. Must we be moved by a play? Perhaps Beckett has so spoiled us in this regard—with his plays' uncanny confluence of profundity and levity—not to mention Brecht, who always seems to move us despite himself—the confluence of didacticism and lyricism—that we've come to unfairly expect something more than the literary laughs offered us by Dürrenmatt's drama. We demand a most serious dialectic at the heart of our most serious theater. In his famous essay "Theater Problems" (1958), Dürrenmatt opposes a conception of contemporary theater as "museum" to that of "field of experimentation," and indeed, Dürrenmatt the playwright's was that same anxious post-WWII/pre–Cold War moment—cohabited by his transatlantic counterparts John Barth and Robert Coover—pressurized by a need for formalized artistic self-reflexivity. "Power in our time becomes visible," says Dürrenmatt, "only when it explodes, in the atom bomb . . . Art as a human creation fails in the face of this reality, for the bomb itself is a creation of man. Two mirrors reflecting each other remain empty." Dürrenmatt's dramaturgy posits a formulation of dramatic art as, in the first instance, a reaction to the usurpation of the "visible world"—traditionally the raw material of theater—by the hegemonic power of the state. Pure tragedy is no longer possible because state-power has poisoned the pure world that tragedy would presuppose: "The tyrants of this planet are not moved by the works of poets, they yawn at their lamentations." The playwright's solution, then, is to find in comedy a subversive tool with which he may fashion the world anew. Hence all the comic political subversiveness of the Dürrenmatt play. But, as this collection of writings proves, Dürrenmatt is most relevant when he subverts an artistic, rather than a political, rule. He concludes his essay on theater looking forward to the possibility of "making art where no one expects it"—the possibility of the artistic "mystery novel"—in anticipation of the near total break he would make with dramatic writing in 1970 lasting until his death in 1990, two decades during which he would fully blossom as an artist and produce his most beautiful and enduring works—all in prose.
In the mid-70s, Dürrenmatt's narratives depart from more familiar and comfortable terms toward more strangely beautiful conditions of heightened disequilibrium and disproportion. The seeds of this change are there to be found in the early works. In his novella The Pledge (1958), for instance, Dürrenmatt subverts the conventions of the detective novel, going even so far to provide, just before the story's end, meta-commentary on our suspended and soon-to-be-upset generic expectations.
The standard-fare progression of the detective novel, which has been more or less preserved until this moment, is suddenly disturbed, ruptured—disequilibrized—and we find ourselves spiraling from a strange and unexpected metafictional narrative space into an even stranger, metaphysical one.
Such radical formal movement typifies Dürrenmatt's procedure of iterative subversion—i.e., subverting a narrative convention, then subverting the newly created convention of subversion—that he will later perfect in such works as The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers: A Novella in Twenty-four Sentences (1986) and his collection of quasi-autobiographical writings published in German as Stoffe (1981, 1990). Like The Pledge, these works tend toward moments of narrative or generic rupture, often occasioned by a spiraling non-sequitur progression, which then results, at Dürrenmatt's best, in passages of sustained narrative disequilibrium/disproportion. In "The Winter War in Tibet" (from Stoffe, 1981), for example, the narrator, having scratched his narration into the walls of an underground tunnel system beneath the Himalayas, interrupts his story of the events leading up to World War Three in order to describe, at great length, the physical process by which a star the size of our sun might become a black dwarf. His inscription again suddenly breaks off to be continued in another tunnel. He imagines his audience, an extra-terrestrial reader come upon his narration billions of years in the future.
The narrator proceeds to force an extended analogy and conflate the language of astronomy and political economy to summarize the prelude to World War Three in terms he is sure an extra-terrestrial reader will understand—the terms of star-death—resulting in pages of sublimely awkward sentences.
Details of World War Three, narration on cave walls beneath the Himalayas, aliens from a distant future . . . Is this an essay? The primary difference between the works in the second volume and the works culled from Stoffe which appear in the third volume of this collection is, finally, a matter of our conception of the category fiction—nothing more than the name given to the sum of our prejudices, as Dürrenmatt would say of craft—being unable to withstand the pressures of narrative disequilibrium and disproportion applied by the author. What we struggle to classify—that's an essay. The new dominance of the motley category essay (more fashionably, lyric essay) is, in part, a product of the conservatism with which the literary majority conceives the parameters of the category fiction. In "The Bridge" (from Stoffe, 1990), generic categories are fully permeable; narrative transition and generic subversion coincide. The writing begins as philosophy, a meditation on the nature of truth and interpretative reason, finding in the image of a falling meteor illustration for the unpredictability of life. Which metaphor is then relayed to autobiography, a narrative reverie of the author as a young philosophy student, F.D., staggering home over a bridge, drunk, killed by a falling meteor. But autobiography, suddenly unable to accommodate the complex truth of F.D.—the intangible of the "cerebral cosmos"—gives way to something resembling fiction, a depiction of the many permutations of F.D: F.D. 2, the painter and writer who hesitates to step foot on the bridge from artistic wonder; F.D. 3, the logician paralyzed by his perception of the faith required to cross the bridge; F.D. 5—a variation on F.D. 4, who is, in turn, a variation on 3—who abandons logic and philosophy at the foot of the bridge and returns home. . . . After 12 variations of F.D., the author summarizes the general philosophical problem confronted by them all—the dialectic of rational and irrational belief—only to commence a sustained meditation on nuclear disarmament, in the polemical style we associate with that category of writing called politics. Likewise, in "The Brain" (from Stoffe, 1990), philosophy, mythology, history, fiction, autobiography and politics combine to found a creation story which begins in a universe inhabited only by a single "pure brain" and ends with the atrocity of Auschwitz. Genre is fluid, flowing back and forth yet always in the direction of the human; the existence of the world and the story of the world are sustained by the vital force of human imagination. Insisting on the possibility of a post-generic writing bound only by the limits of this imagination, Dürrenmatt remains the exemplary bricoleur in these mature prose works: now a philosopher, now a scientist, now a lover, now a politician—always a poet.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 1: Plays
Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Fictions
Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 3: Essays
University of Chicago Press, 2006
reviewed by Evan Lavender-Smith
The contrast of the drama and the prose presented in this collection clearly demonstrates, perhaps for the first time in English, that Friedrich Dürrenmatt's greatest achievements in literature were not, as commonly supposed, the plays, but rather the fiction and the essays. There is no doubt the plays are all quite a lot of fun; yet they are ever little more than fun. We have great difficulty feeling the Dürrenmatt play. Must we be moved by a play? Perhaps Beckett has so spoiled us in this regard—with his plays' uncanny confluence of profundity and levity—not to mention Brecht, who always seems to move us despite himself—the confluence of didacticism and lyricism—that we've come to unfairly expect something more than the literary laughs offered us by Dürrenmatt's drama. We demand a most serious dialectic at the heart of our most serious theater. In his famous essay "Theater Problems" (1958), Dürrenmatt opposes a conception of contemporary theater as "museum" to that of "field of experimentation," and indeed, Dürrenmatt the playwright's was that same anxious post-WWII/pre–Cold War moment—cohabited by his transatlantic counterparts John Barth and Robert Coover—pressurized by a need for formalized artistic self-reflexivity. "Power in our time becomes visible," says Dürrenmatt, "only when it explodes, in the atom bomb . . . Art as a human creation fails in the face of this reality, for the bomb itself is a creation of man. Two mirrors reflecting each other remain empty." Dürrenmatt's dramaturgy posits a formulation of dramatic art as, in the first instance, a reaction to the usurpation of the "visible world"—traditionally the raw material of theater—by the hegemonic power of the state. Pure tragedy is no longer possible because state-power has poisoned the pure world that tragedy would presuppose: "The tyrants of this planet are not moved by the works of poets, they yawn at their lamentations." The playwright's solution, then, is to find in comedy a subversive tool with which he may fashion the world anew. Hence all the comic political subversiveness of the Dürrenmatt play. But, as this collection of writings proves, Dürrenmatt is most relevant when he subverts an artistic, rather than a political, rule. He concludes his essay on theater looking forward to the possibility of "making art where no one expects it"—the possibility of the artistic "mystery novel"—in anticipation of the near total break he would make with dramatic writing in 1970 lasting until his death in 1990, two decades during which he would fully blossom as an artist and produce his most beautiful and enduring works—all in prose.
In the mid-70s, Dürrenmatt's narratives depart from more familiar and comfortable terms toward more strangely beautiful conditions of heightened disequilibrium and disproportion. The seeds of this change are there to be found in the early works. In his novella The Pledge (1958), for instance, Dürrenmatt subverts the conventions of the detective novel, going even so far to provide, just before the story's end, meta-commentary on our suspended and soon-to-be-upset generic expectations.
. . . all we need is for Matthäi to be on the right track, let him capture the murderer in the end, and bingo, we've got a terrific novel or movie script. . . . I think this variant of my story is so uplifting and positive that I predict it will just have to be published or turned into a film in the near future.
The standard-fare progression of the detective novel, which has been more or less preserved until this moment, is suddenly disturbed, ruptured—disequilibrized—and we find ourselves spiraling from a strange and unexpected metafictional narrative space into an even stranger, metaphysical one.
. . . my story ends on a particularly sad note—it's just about the most banal of all the possible 'solutions.' Sometimes that just happens. Sometimes the worst possible thing also takes place. . . . [T:]he only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, which is here to stay and will necessarily show itself more and more clearly and strongly, and the only way to make a reasonably comfortable home for ourselves on this earth, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations. Our rational mind casts only a feeble light on this world. In the twilight of its borders live the ghosts of paradox. . . .
Such radical formal movement typifies Dürrenmatt's procedure of iterative subversion—i.e., subverting a narrative convention, then subverting the newly created convention of subversion—that he will later perfect in such works as The Assignment; or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers: A Novella in Twenty-four Sentences (1986) and his collection of quasi-autobiographical writings published in German as Stoffe (1981, 1990). Like The Pledge, these works tend toward moments of narrative or generic rupture, often occasioned by a spiraling non-sequitur progression, which then results, at Dürrenmatt's best, in passages of sustained narrative disequilibrium/disproportion. In "The Winter War in Tibet" (from Stoffe, 1981), for example, the narrator, having scratched his narration into the walls of an underground tunnel system beneath the Himalayas, interrupts his story of the events leading up to World War Three in order to describe, at great length, the physical process by which a star the size of our sun might become a black dwarf. His inscription again suddenly breaks off to be continued in another tunnel. He imagines his audience, an extra-terrestrial reader come upon his narration billions of years in the future.
Some observations suggest that changes have occurred in the sun's interior, which in the course of the next ten million years will make the earth forever uninhabitable, but there is a chance that the Himalayas will be preserved on the moon-like earth, just as there are mountain ranges on the moon. And there is a chance, admittedly a ridiculously small one, that in the course of the many billions of years during which the burned-out earth will revolve around the white dwarf we now call our sun, and the countless billions of years the earth will revolve around the black dwarf that the sun will have become, space travelers of another, future world will set foot on the earth. And there is another, inexpressibly smaller chance, a chance that is actually improbable, that these alien beings will discover and explore the system of caves beneath the Himalayas. My inscription will be their only source of knowledge about humanity. It is with this improbable prospect in mind that I have committed my thoughts to writing.
The narrator proceeds to force an extended analogy and conflate the language of astronomy and political economy to summarize the prelude to World War Three in terms he is sure an extra-terrestrial reader will understand—the terms of star-death—resulting in pages of sublimely awkward sentences.
Just as the sun is an accumulation of hydrogen, the state is an accumulation of people. . . . The state's density grows, its inward-directed pressure increases. . . . The superheavy stars did not want to conquer the world, but thanks to their weight, they blackmailed the world. . . . More and more, politics became an activity that took place on the surface of the sun . . .
Details of World War Three, narration on cave walls beneath the Himalayas, aliens from a distant future . . . Is this an essay? The primary difference between the works in the second volume and the works culled from Stoffe which appear in the third volume of this collection is, finally, a matter of our conception of the category fiction—nothing more than the name given to the sum of our prejudices, as Dürrenmatt would say of craft—being unable to withstand the pressures of narrative disequilibrium and disproportion applied by the author. What we struggle to classify—that's an essay. The new dominance of the motley category essay (more fashionably, lyric essay) is, in part, a product of the conservatism with which the literary majority conceives the parameters of the category fiction. In "The Bridge" (from Stoffe, 1990), generic categories are fully permeable; narrative transition and generic subversion coincide. The writing begins as philosophy, a meditation on the nature of truth and interpretative reason, finding in the image of a falling meteor illustration for the unpredictability of life. Which metaphor is then relayed to autobiography, a narrative reverie of the author as a young philosophy student, F.D., staggering home over a bridge, drunk, killed by a falling meteor. But autobiography, suddenly unable to accommodate the complex truth of F.D.—the intangible of the "cerebral cosmos"—gives way to something resembling fiction, a depiction of the many permutations of F.D: F.D. 2, the painter and writer who hesitates to step foot on the bridge from artistic wonder; F.D. 3, the logician paralyzed by his perception of the faith required to cross the bridge; F.D. 5—a variation on F.D. 4, who is, in turn, a variation on 3—who abandons logic and philosophy at the foot of the bridge and returns home. . . . After 12 variations of F.D., the author summarizes the general philosophical problem confronted by them all—the dialectic of rational and irrational belief—only to commence a sustained meditation on nuclear disarmament, in the polemical style we associate with that category of writing called politics. Likewise, in "The Brain" (from Stoffe, 1990), philosophy, mythology, history, fiction, autobiography and politics combine to found a creation story which begins in a universe inhabited only by a single "pure brain" and ends with the atrocity of Auschwitz. Genre is fluid, flowing back and forth yet always in the direction of the human; the existence of the world and the story of the world are sustained by the vital force of human imagination. Insisting on the possibility of a post-generic writing bound only by the limits of this imagination, Dürrenmatt remains the exemplary bricoleur in these mature prose works: now a philosopher, now a scientist, now a lover, now a politician—always a poet.
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