Switzerland would seem the country least likely to be ruffled by dialectic. Who can forget the quip put into the mouth of the unscrupulous Harry Lime in “The Third Man”: “In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” But Orson Welles, who inserted this clever caricature into Graham Greene’s original script, got it wrong. The cuckoo clock is a German invention. More to the point, Paul Klee, Le Corbusier, and a long line of brilliant novelists and poets — all Swiss-born — from Gottfried Keller in the 19th century to C.F. Ramuz, Max Frisch, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the 20th, prove that Alpine placidity is no obstacle to artistic genius.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990), the most mercurial of modern Swiss authors, went so far as to question that half-millennium of democracy as well. An ample selection of his plays, fiction, and essays has now appeared in three volumes, all elegantly translated from the German by Joel Agee. Volume one, edited by Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago, 334 pages, $35), contains five plays, including the first uncut translation of “The Visit,” in its definitive final version of 1980. Volume two, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski (388 pages, $35), presents eight brilliant novellas and stories, together with the novels “The Pledge” and “Greek Man Seeks Greek Wife.” The third volume, again edited by Mr. Northcott (222 pages, $29), is perhaps the most interesting, for it reveals Dürrenmatt the idiosyncratic essayist. In fact, the nonfiction, which blends apocalyptic parable with philosophical musings, is quite unclassifiable.

In “Switzerland — A Prison,” a speech Dürrenmatt gave in honor of Václav Havel, President of hte Czech Republic, in 1990, he presented Swiss democracy as a kind of prison. It must have startled Mr. Havel, not so very long after his own release from actual jail, to hear of Switzerland that “there is only one problem for this prison, namely that of proving that it is not a prison but a bulwark of freedom, since seen from outside, a prison is a prison and its inmates are prisoners, and prisoners are not free.” If Switzerland is a prison, it gives new meaning to the term “maximum security.” Has any other European people ever been so coddled and swaddled from the crib to the tomb? Of course, this is in part what Dürrenmatt meant. But a reading of his non-fiction, where the governing presuppositions of his creative work are starkly revealed, suggests that the slammer Dürrenmatt knew best was little more than the prison of paradox.

In a 1976 interview, Dürrenmatt stated that “writing is a dialectical motion.” In his plays and fiction, the thrust and parry of thesis and antithesis works to great effect. But it’s disappointing to realize that the underlying contrasts were in fact quite simplistic. “The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi,” a play written in 1950 and continually revised until 1980, turns on the clash between justice and mercy, a fruitful antithesis. Unfortunately, it also entails a contrived opposition between the Calvinism of Dürrenmatt’s childhood and a Marxism which he could still envisage, in defiance of fact, as representing some ideal justice. Only a mind numbed by Alpine mists could consider the “cruelties of Calvinism” worse than the documented horrors of Marxism. And yet, the play works well, at least on the page, but only as long as you accept the logic of its extremes.

The child of a pastor, Dürrenmatt suffered from what he called “the Schadenfreude of village life”; he was always expected to be better, and always proved to be worse, than he really was. Perhaps the dramatist was born out of this painful disparity. Dürrenmatt’s characters, like the detective Matthai in “The Pledge,” move us most when they hover above mere paradox. Taken too far, the dialectic reaches dead ends. This is most obvious in his “Sentences from America,” a series of jottings made during a visit in the 1970s. Obsessed with the antithesis “America vs. Russia,” Dürrenmatt discovers sinister machinations everywhere; the government “is permeated by the Mafia” and so entices the young to become drug addicts. In New Orleans, “black women often join together to raise an enormous swarm of children whose fathers are allegedly unknown to them.” A moment’s thought might have suggested that this was a worse slur on black mothers than on the welfare system. Wherever he goes, this Helvetian Mr. Magoo sees nothing but what he expects to see.

In his finest work — “The Visit” and “The Physicists” among his plays or his unforgettable novel “The Pledge,” as well as in the terrifying short stories and fables — Dürrenmatt gave paradox the slip. A gifted visual artist, he thought best in images. He called writing a form of “thinking that works with analogies” and stated that “images are the answers one gives to reality.” Images sidestep logic but only they could unlock the iron doors of his cherished prison.

eormsby@nysun.com