Modern Morality Play

THE QUARRY (162 pp.)--Friedrich Duerrenmatt--New York Graphic Society ($3.50).

In a villa overlooking Lake Neuchatel, with Mont Blanc gleaming like a picture postcard in the background, a sedentary, stout Swiss just turned 41 lives contentedly with his wife, three children, and a collection of dogs and cats, and turns out some of the most wry and bitter writing of this wry and bitter time. Friedrich Duerrenmatt is best known for his unsettling play The Visit, in which a vengeful old lady manipulates the greed of a whole town to make its respectable citizens collaborate in the ritual murder of her former lover. In The Deadly Game, a traveling salesman joins in an after-dinner mock trial and is convicted of murder--and convinced of his own guilt. In the novel The Pledge (cinema version: It Happened in Broad Daylight), a police inspector, tracking down the murderer of a child, ends in complete moral and physical disintegration.

"I can best be understood if one grasps grotesqueness," Duerrenmatt once wrote of himself. "But here a clear distinction must be made. I am not grotesque as a Romantic, who by these terms wishes to arouse a feeling of horror or peculiarity, but a grotesque as once Aristophanes or Swift was grotesque; out of the necessity at the same time to produce a pamphlet and a work of art." Grotesque is a good word for The Quarry; its subject matter is macabre and death-directed in the Duerrenmatt tradition. And though its manner is so schematic that the book turns into more of a pamphlet than a work of art, it provides an absorbing set of clues to Duerrenmatt's philosophy.

Freedom Is Crime. The hero, Hans Barlach, is a retired Swiss police commissioner, convalescing from an operation for cancer. He comes to suspect that a notorious doctor who performed experimental operations without anesthetic in Nazi concentration camps may be the same surgeon who is running a swank sanitarium near Zurich. Barlach commits himself to the sanitarium in the hope of exposing the evil M.D., but finds himself trapped and helpless in Dr. Emmenberger's grisly suite of torture chambers.

One of the odd things about the saturnine Dr. Emmenberger is that his "patients"--both in the concentration camp and the sanitarium--submit voluntarily to his knives, saws and pliers in the hope of some kind of freedom, if only the relative freedom of another few days of miserable life. Dr. E. has his own idea of freedom: "Like the Christians, who believe in three things which are only one thing--the Trinity--I believe in two things which are one and the same, namely that something is and that I am. . . There is no justice. How could matter be just? There is only freedom . . . the courage to commit crime, for freedom itself is a crime . . . And the screams and the pain which flood toward me from glassy eyes and open mouths, the convulsing, impotent white flesh under my knife, reflect my triumph and my freedom and nothing else."

This is straight out of the Marquis de Sade, with some Sartrean existentialist glosses provided by the doctor's morphine-addicted mistress ("The world is foul, Commissioner, rotting like a badly stored fruit") and a trained nurse who has written a pamphlet titled: Death, Goal and Purpose of Our Life, A Practical Guide. In the end, Barlach sweats out the ticking last hours, minutes, seconds before the time set for the operation he knows will end in his own death under the doctor's sadistic knife. Pat to the final instant comes Salvation, in the mysterious appearance of a wandering Jew called Gulliver who has somehow survived his own torture and "execution" by the Nazis.

Tortured or Torturer. What does it all mean? There is the recurrent Duerrenmatt theme: the uncertainty of justice and the universality of guilt in a world in which "there is only one difference between human beings--that between torturers and tortured." Again there is the relish in operating on the reader without anesthetic. But in The Quarry, Duerrenmatt, who studied philosophy before he became a writer, seems to have added a new spiritual element of hope. A man's dogged, defenseless, hopeless commitment to the pursuit of justice--even, like Barlach's, to the point of sacrificing his own life--may bring a savior named Gulliver to the rescue.

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