The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Mystery of Representation

Look at any word long enough and it becomes absurd. Such a recognition isn’t illusion but appreciation. Words are absurd. When we consider them as what they really are, it is clear that they are merely arbitrary sounds or signs on paper, often ugly and grotesque in their presumptuous arrogance of an independent existence.

And if for words, why not the users of words, the speakers and writers who treat others, or even themselves, as if they were the words used about them? Are not they absurd as well?

It is so easy to become the words used about us when they are used again and again, and with relentlessly refined precision. As F, the investigator and documentary film-maker hired to determine the reason for a murder, recognises. The professional notes keep on the murder-victim by her psychiatrist husband “weren’t observations at all but literally an abstracting of her humanity.” The victim is portrayed inhumanely by her closest relation. Those described thus become ugly and offensive regardless of the intentions of the describer. The words extract the existence from their target, which is literally observed to death.

This is the theme - if there is one, who can be certain of anything with this story? - of Durrenmatt’s Assignment: How we destroy existence with words. Not just the personal existence of other people, but the existence of whole cultures. Words, no matter how precisely they are employed, inevitably create a stereotype, a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing, a part that masquerades as a whole.

This is the formal definition of heresy. Heresy easily becomes prejudice, especially when we are unacquainted with the person or thing in question (but even sometimes when we know them intimately). Our responses are to words not to other human beings. It is from this absurd connection between words and things that Durrenmatt creates his ‘mystery’, not a who-dunnit but a what-happened, or more accurately is-anything-in-this-story-to-be-taken-at-face-value.

“The meaning of existence is existence, which insight, once accepted and affirmed, makes existence unbearable.” A psychological insight like this one can create a psychological illness. In Tina’s, the apparent victim’s, case the result is severe depression, brought about by her husband’s observation of not only her behaviour but her own words written in her private journal and intruded upon by him. This is the ultimate iatrogenic risk for a psychiatrist’s wife. And the ultimate crime for a psychiatrist, even if there is nothing to prosecute.

But the situation is actually more complicated. Observers provoke observation of themselves. The wife notices her husband’s ‘objective’ attention and responds in kind. Through observation of his various quirks and idiosyncrasies, she grows to hate him. So too, F muses, might the Gaia of the planet observe its objectification and respond to its human inhabitants. Observers too, therefore, are turned into words, numbers, signs.

So what ethics should apply? Unobserved men and women do not exist. Nor can they. There is no such animal as a human being without his fellow, who watches, anticipates, measures, values and responds to him, most frequently using words. Even a person who is totally alone reflects on himself. A quandary therefore. Is the psychiatrist (or his wife) guilty of bad observational technique or of simply being human? The mystery looms larger still.

And it’s not just words which are problematic. Art, particularly visual art, has all the same issues as language. It claims to represent. What exactly? The ‘object’ of art is as illusive as the denotation of a word. A painting can be as pejorative as a rumour. Even more so since the artist can claim interpretive license. Tina had an artist listed in her journal. Did he have something to contribute to her death?

Arriving in North Africa, the scene of Tina’s death, F finds her own camera crew being filmed while filming. Yet another problematic mutual observation that affects both parties. The site where Tina’s body was found, an ancient Shi’ite monument, is guarded by dead, rotting, silent ‘saints’ who had protested the place’s excavation and expired in situ. Among these corpses Tina’s body had been discovered, half consumed by the local wildlife. The monument itself is perhaps the ultimate cipher, a huge black cube of polished stone, mostly buried in the sand.

The presence of the observing camera crew of course provokes the local police into a transvestite investigation of their own in which various suspects, or rather their testimony, are presented. One is shot. He was, after all, nothing more than his confession, coerced or not. Unfortunately all the documentary footage mysteriously disappears. But would its recording of the statements of prisoners have made any difference? To whom? The story is that Tina’s murder was revenge by someone’s security service for her husband’s soft stand on terrorism. Why not, it’s a good story.

F persists. She finds a clue, a coat that looks like Tina’s. Is a found clue more authentic than a word, or a portrait, or a confession? She is drawn into a conspiracy with some of the locals, in which she is replaced by a ‘double’. She becomes in other words her own representation. She is unaccountably mistaken for Tina because she wears her coat. She becomes yet another representation.

Her co-conspirator provides ‘testimony’ that the murder victim wasn’t Tina after all. She is alive and with her husband according to the gossip magazines. More symbolic representations of ‘reality’. But yet another corpse is certainly real, the cameraman who mistook F for the dead woman - either Tina or her surrogate is unclear. Yet another cameraman is assigned to F by her conspiring friend. Named Polypheme - literally: abounding in tales and legends - he is nothing but a representation of things not himself.

Polypheme leads her to a sophisticated, underground desert hideout. The place is a virtual warehouse of film and photographs. Stills cover the walls, rolls of film are strewn about the floors. Polypheme, true to his name, tells F a long complicated tale of his background and reasons for his trajectory from the Bronx to North Africa. This tale may have meaning, but it has nothing to do with the history or identity of Polypheme.

The desert hideout, F learns from Polypheme, is in fact an observational bunker to monitor nuclear armament developments globally, using mainly satellites to observe the world, and other satellites to observe the observing satellites. Abandoned now except for Polypheme, the bunker is now the possible target of nuclear weapons. Explosions can be heard intermittently somewhere outside.

Their bunker-chat becomes theological: “If God we’re a pure observer, could he remain unsullied in the observation of his creation?” And if not God, then what about a lowly human cameraman? The discussion turns, appropriately for a Swiss author, Barthian: “... a god who was observed is no longer a god, God was not subject to observation, God’s freedom consisted in being a concealed, hidden god, while man’s bondage consisted of being observed... “ This bondage has become more oppressive as it is not people but now machines, computers, that do the observing. These computers were “gods watching each other.”

Polypheme it turns out has film of the murder because he arranged it using his insane ex-Vietnam American pilot-friend as the instrument. The victim wasn’t Tina but a Danish journalist who used her passport. She resembles F, not just in appearance but also in her obsessive but fruitless search for truth. Trying to get past representations is a dangerous business. Indeed Polypheme has the same motiveless intention for F as he did for his previous victim. But at the last moment she is saved by a police-chief-ex-machina. Polypheme and numerous others get it on film.

Reversing my opening remark: Perhaps if one looks long enough at the absurd, it develops coherent meaning. This is, after all, the fundamental principle of Kabbalah (See for example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). I can only hope that such meaning emerges for me at some point from this rather chaotic ride through semiotics. Durrematt makes Umberto Eco look like a slouch when it comes to opaque complexity. The Assignment is not for the weak or faint-hearted.

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