DUERRENMATT

My fiction / literature / non-policy / non-historical reading over the past few years has been concentrated on a few authors: Chuck Pahlanuik, Richard Dooling, Elmore Leonard (thanks, John!), John Le Carre, and Friedrich Duerrenmatt. The library here had its annual sale over the past few days and in addition to some ex-library copies of some good stuff for real cheap, including Hurst's study of the lumber industry in Wisconsin, I found a copy of Duerrenmatt's Herkules und der Stall des Augias. I also cleaned out the Duerrenmatt section of the Second Story Books warehouse in Rockville, MD, the last time I was in DC.

A comparison of Pahlanuik and Duerrenmatt is instructive, for me at least. Both are very funny. You also get the sense that for both (and for Leonard and Dooling, for that matter), comedy is not an idle choice. For Pahlanuik, it's the dark comedy of the continual failure to resolve the problems of nihilism. But Pahlanuik's characters inhabit what you might call a world of ideas -- however much those ideas are made concrete with respect to the details of the contemporary antiques market in Lullaby, or the facticity of homemade explosives in Fight Club, his narrator is stuck with the general problem of meaning but without any attempt to come to terms with the particular nature of twentieth-century politics and how the problems of meaning arise out of their context. In Lullaby you get the Law; in Fight Club you get the Police. Of course the people who act as agents of the Law or the Police are Americans, but they really don't rise much above the level of the caricature that results from the lack of a felt need to take account of any particular historical events.

Rather than being concerned mostly with the psychological reserves that are necessary to make sense of postmodern life (what I take to be one of Pahlanuik's main themes), Duerrenmatt is concerned with actually employing a reinterpretation of mythical tropes and stories that in some unspecified, fragmentary way can aid in developing the psychological reserves necessary to make sense of postmodern life, or post-WWII life, or however you want to describe the fact that we live in a hypercommercial society after the totalitarian century. This last sentence may seem like a non-sequitur, but I am only describing my own reading habits.

Duerrenmatt is serious in a way that Pahlanuik is not, because for Duerrenmatt there is an overwhelming sense of the need to come to grips with the phenomenon of responsibility. It may be a responsibility that rests on a slender existential reed, but its seriousness also exerts an attraction that is undeniable. There is something particularly Swiss about Duerrenmatt's work, of course; its themes include Swiss neutrality in the face of the Nazis, the guilt of the Swiss banking system, the self-understandings of Swiss democracy. Duerrenmatt places the story of Herkules and the stables in a thinly disguised Swiss mountain village (and the comic thread that runs through the story is that this village is covered in mountains of manure). That said, you should still read Duerrenmatt even if you've never been to Switzerland. I haven't, except on the train and in the airport. Start with Romulus the Great, Duerrenmatt's play about the final Roman emperor and his seemingly irresponsible focus on the fertility of his chickens. Maybe it's Duerrenmatt's willingness to engage political subjects in a specific fashion that makes him ultimately more human than the (probably) theologically-minded Pahlanuik.

NOTE: See this site on the Hercules play, in english, by translator Alexander Gross. Gross's essay is also worth a read.