[In the following essay, Fickert investigates the nature of identity in Stiller.]

The well-known opening sentence in Max Frisch's 1954 novel Stiller—“Ich bin nicht Stiller”¹—states that the protagonist, who is relating his own experiences, has been mistaken for a Swiss citizen named Anatol Ludwig Stiller and implies that he is someone else. He subsequently identifies himself as the American James Larkin White. The story he tells, in actuality a series of stories, has the purpose of establishing himself as this individual while at the same time he gathers as much information as he can about Stiller in order to disassociate himself from this stranger-self. The result of his endeavors, which fill seven notebooks and constitute the bulk of the novel, is his failure to convince anyone—the authorities, Stiller's relatives and friends, and, in the long run, himself—that he is White. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the nature of the White persona, especially in regard to the relationship between its features and Frisch's experiences as a visitor in the United States and in regard to the literary form of the various narratives which establish James Larkin White as a person.

In essence, Stiller itself questions the entire concept of characterization in the novel, which restricts identity to a compilation of words and represents a product of the imagination, a fiction. An analysis of the art of fiction is, therefore, an important aspect of Stiller (and all of Frisch's work), as Rolf Kieser has concluded: “Das eigentliche Thema des Stiller-Romans ist das Geschichtenerzählen als untaugliches Mittel der Identitätssuche.”² In testing the validity of the literary approach to the problem of encompassing the personality, Frisch explores various narrative genres, principally, in developing the characterization of White, those of the adventure or picaresque novel, the legend, and the parable in conjunction with the animal fable. Thus, three stories, the tale of the discovery of the Carlsbad Caverns, a version of the Rip van Winkle Märchen, and a parabolic study of the life of American blacks, stitched together by the recurring symbol of a gray cat, constitute both the precipitate of Frisch's experiences in America and the foundations of an identity the narrator wishes to assume.³

The use of the actual name of the caves' discoverer provided Frisch's narrative with ready-made symbolic nuances. White or Weiß, as the protagonist asks to be called in Switzerland, indicates the tabula rasa, the blank page on which the character remains to be written or come to self-realization. An elaboration of this symbolism occurs in Frisch's novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein (published in 1964); here Frisch writes about “der weiße Fleck,” the white dot, the vacant space which contains the unfathomable secret of the real self, around which the many possible but fictive selves cluster. On another level, the word white used as a verb, to whiten out or whitewash (weißeln), can convey an opposite meaning, the concealment of the actual state of affairs. Frisch begins his play Andorra (1961), which deals with the evil of hidden prejudices, with the image of someone whitewashing the scene, concealing, as she has been ordered to do, the ugliness which characterizes the community in which she lives. White's first name James or in its shortened and more familiar form Jim is prototypically American; it suggests the casual friendliness of the average American, the first-name basis of all relationships, even between strangers and currently between the young and their preceptors. The origins of this amiability among casual acquaintances would seem to lie in the circumstances which prevailed during the opening of the American West (actually for a time the Midwest). The vastness of the unknown spaces and the dangers which lurked there made it necessary for explorers and settlers to rely on one another without being cautious. Even before White emerges as Stiller's American alter ego, the emigrant Swiss—he depicts himself as a stowaway on an Italian freighter—has discovered the shallowness which at present characterizes this camaraderie. He describes the loneliness of life in New York which is concealed behind a screen of overt friendliness between strangers. The falseness of this affability is brought home to the newly-arrived Stiller when he observes on a walk through the Bowery the indifference of the passersby (sometimes a defensive measure) to the desperate and the ill who live on the street. The protagonist in Stiller finds a means to combat the sense of isolation; he invents, thus foreshadowing the entire Frisch œuvre, a fictive person with whom he can carry on “a passionate conversation.” This situation plays an important part in Frisch's cave or labyrinth story since the historic James Larkin White and the novel's Weiß are cowboys, loners who explore the untrodden landscapes of both the American plains and their own identitites. In the latter instance Frisch makes use of the familiar literary device of the double in order to depict White's search for a self; he has a close friendship with another cowboy, also named Jim. The descent of both into the underground caverns White has found while on a solitary excursion into the expanses of Texas⁴ denotes accordingly the journey into the depths of the subconscious on the part of an amorphous self and an incipient self. The adventures of the two Jims in the cave lead to an amalgamation and/or transformation; Frisch employs the symbols of the lamps and the food to represent the mental and the physical aspects of the personality: of the two lamps and two packages of food only one of each remains at the end of the story; of the two Jims only one emerges from the maze of caverns. “Die Geschichte wäre also die Darstellung von Stillers Umdichtung in eine neue Identität, vom Erlebnis einer Art Wiedergeburt” is Gunda Lusser-Mertelsmann's summary of the episode.⁵

Although Frisch gives his adventuresome tale the aura of the myth by pointedly refusing to identify which of the two Jims remains alive at the end of their struggle underground, he identifies the victor as James Larkin White who as an American cowboy, explorer, and nonconformist is a counterpart of Anatol Ludwig Stiller (“White ist also auf der ganzen Linie das omnipotente Männlichkeitsideal …”⁶). In that name there are likewise allusions to the nature of the character. Reference to the enervating way of life, the purposelessness, boredom, the Liebeleien, which were prevalent in upper middle-class and intellectual circles in twentieth-century Europe and formed the basis of Arthur Schnitzler's work, is afforded by use of the name of his best-known character Anatol. The association of Ludwig with Beethoven suggests itself as an additional connection with a world very remote from the anti-intellectual, primitive realm of the American West. As opposed to “White,” denoting the undeveloped, the potential, “Stiller” evokes the image of someone who has resigned himself to living within the bounds which society has set for him. Indeed, at the book's conclusion, the defiant White (“I'm not Stiller!”) has become stiller. The eventual collapse of the White persona comes about because of Frisch's realization that his understanding of the American character, acquired during his sojourn in the States, is faulty and subject to the limitations which the words he writes in his travel journal have in their innate imprecision. The figure of James Larkin White, the American cowboy, has just as little viability as that of Anatol Ludwig Stiller; Walter Schmitz has pointed out its inadequacy: “James Larkin White ist eine Bewußtseins-Klischeefigur.”⁷ Frisch himself stresses the fictional and therefore flawed nature of White's characterization by allowing the storyteller Stiller/Weiß to confound his immediate audience, the prison guard, with this inconclusive conclusion to the Carlsbad Caverns narrative: “‘Sind Sie denn Jim White?’ fragt [Knobel]. ‘Nein’, lache ich, ‘das gerade nicht! Aber was ich selber erlebt habe, sehen Sie, das war genau das gleiche—genau.’”⁸

The pertinence of the Rip van Winkle story lies in its historical background, for it deals with an American version of the outsider figure, which Stiller represents.⁹ In fact, “a transference to the American scene of a common European legend, Irving's evident source being Otmar's tale of ‘Peter Klaus’ in Volkssagen (Bremen, Germany, 1800),”¹⁰ the Märchen of Rip van Winkle must have interested the auther of Stiller on two counts: in the first place, Washington Irving's portrait of an apolitical misfit and storyteller has as a salient feature an encounter with a Doppelgänger. Having been forced to acknowledge that as the result of a sleep lasting more than a score of years he has been transformed into an old man, Rip catches sight of the man he used to be in the person of his son who has adopted his father's way of life: “Rip looked and beheld a precise counterpart of himself as he went up the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged. The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man” (257). In Frisch's retelling of the fable, this incident is omitted while the theme of the loss of identity becomes central. The fact that this identity crisis came about as the consequence of a disappearance must not be overlooked in considering the relevance of the Rip van Winkle Märchen to the import of the novel Stiller; like Rip and, not incidentally, like Karl Roßmann in Franz Kafka's unfinished novel which he called Der Verschollene (and Max Brod renamed Amerika), Anatol Ludwig Stiller has vanished into the cities and plains of the United States in order to find a new and genuine self.

The second aspect of Washington Irving's American fable which would have attracted the attention of an author searching for a “true” self was in all probability Rip van Winkle's countercultural bent, particularly his anti-bourgeois disposition. Irving emphasizes his scorn for the work ethic and his fondness for fantasizing, on which, of course, the entire plot hinges. Frisch, for his part, uses these motifs to transform the eccentric storyteller into an artist figure. Living in two worlds, among the industrious Dutchmen of the Hudson Valley and with the carousing spirits on a magic mountain, Rip becomes, in Frisch's version, another Tonio Kröger; he is “beladen nur mit schlechtem Gewissen” (82). He doubts that his stories represent an accomplishment: “Ein wenig, gewiß, kamen sie ihm wie die wackligen Kegel vor, diese Geschichten, die er immer aufzustellen hatte, damit die andern sie umwerfen konnten” (87). Just as Tonio Kröger accepts at the story's close his having to exist on the fringes of life, Frisch's Rip van Winkle becomes resigned to his outsiderness: “Er lebte noch einige Jahre im Dorf, ein Fremdling in fremder Welt …” (88). Frisch's perception of American anti-intellectualism, its suspicions when confronted with “artistic” endeavors, can be ascertained in his choice of the Rip van Winkle legend for inclusion in Stiller and in the use of the popular form of the folk tale which it entailed. To the trait of adventuresomeness, rebellion against traditional bourgeois values is thus added in the characterization of James Larkin White. Walter Hinderer has analyzed this aspect of the reconstruction of Stiller's personality concisely: “Stiller versucht sich als James Larkin White, als ein ‘kulturloser Einwohner der USA’ von den europäischen Rollenerwartungen zu befreien, von dem Bild das ‘man’ von ihm gemacht hat, zu befreien …”¹¹ Upon Stiller's return to Europe, he finds occasion to destroy all the sculptures which remain in his studio not only as a token of his dissatisfaction with them but also as an expression of White's iconoclasm.

The third in the series of stories which establish the character of White and thereby crystalize the results of Frisch's experiences in the United States is a narrative about his encounter with American blacks and an (imagined?) woman, a mulatto, named Florence. It is a loosely constructed story without a plot and with sketchily drawn figures which, because the points it makes are generalizations or moral axioms,¹² has the aura of a parable. Attached to the account of these exemplary events is the story of White's association with a stray cat which he calls Little Grey (Frisch is unaware that the American spelling is “gray”); thus the element of the animal fable, in which an animal or insect symbolizes some human trait, is added to the levels of meaning. The message Stiller/White seems to find in his experiences while living on the outskirts of the black world in the vicinity of the Rio Grande, in Oregon, and in a large port city addresses the problem of identity, which in one form or another is the theme of Stiller.¹³ Stiller/White's perception of black American citizens is stereotypic; he pictures them as struggling to deny their natural warmth and emotionality in order to acquire the superficial features which are (sometimes) characteristic of their “betters,” straight, lightcolored hair, a veneer of reserve and good manners—“diese lebenslängliche Bemühung, anders zu sein, als man erschaffen ist, diese große Schwierigkeit, sich selbst einmal anzunehmen, ich kannte sie und sah nur eine eigene Not einmal von außen, sah die Absurdität unserer Sehnsucht, anders sein zu wollen, als man ist” (228). In this regard the anti-bourgeois inclinations of James Larkin White, the cowboy, and Rip van Winkle, the Taugenichts, are reaffirmed. White comments bitterly on a backyard picnic to which Florence's parents, his neighbors, have invited him: “diese vollkommene Karikatur einer weißen Kleinbürgerlichkeit” (224).

Another assumption made by Frisch and assigned to his American counterpart White involves distinguishing between white women and black women (here again Frisch's appraisal of American life can be but that of a tourist). Black women, White contends from the vantage point of the sexually repressed Stiller, are all lustful; they seek men who will kill for them. Florence, representing all black women, although she is a mulatto, tires out all her partners in a sensuous dance: “Man weiß, wie Neger tanzen” (221). She becomes White's obsession, despite the fact that she at first only tolerates, then later spurns him; features of the opera Carmen are discernible in the narrative at this point. While Florence remains unattainable (except in his dreams), White has to contend with the unwanted presence of a stray cat who has attached herself to him; he treats her brutally in trying to rid himself of her. The cat is a multivalent symbol, but in relationship to Florence she designates Stiller's inhibitions and his inability to express his love for his wife; his attachment to Julika consists in large part of a desire to possess her, which results, as he senses she feels, in his mistreating her. In one of the novel's many ironies, Stiller never realizes through all the lengthy exposition of the story of his marriage to Julika that in foisting his image of a fragile, frigid woman on her he has become guilty of the sin of image-making, the very sin of which he has accused her, his friends, and the entire Swiss community; their transgression against him has indeed driven him into exile in America, where he assumes himself to be free to become the anti-Stiller, James Larkin White.

In a broader sense Little Grey represents not only the failure of Stiller's marriage but also the failure of all other aspects of his former self, and, since he does not succeed in driving off the cat, the incapacity to rid himself of the Stiller persona. This use of symbolism to depict “[die] Stiller in Amerika verfolgende Rolle”¹⁴ recurs in the second part of the novel, a relatively short section, purportedly an objective view of Stiller's situation as it is considered from the vantage point of an observer, Rolf, the prosecuting attorney who presents the case that White is Stiller. Rolf describes his own experience of having had a bundle of flesh-colored cloth foisted on him which he cannot sell, or give away, or abandon.¹⁵ Just as Kafka's legend of the doorkeeper and the man from the country can be taken to be a key to his novel Der Prozeß, the tale of Little Grey together with that of the skin-colored fabric, contains the nucleus of the experience which Stiller is intended to convey, the feeling of futility which results from the endeavor to create a sense of self independent of the expectations of others. The American character James Larkin White has been Stiller's attempt to fashion a free soul—a bold and uninhibited self. His efforts, depicted through the adventures of the cowboy Jim, the ne'er-do-well Rip, and the renegade White who lives among blacks, are unproductive; their failure comes about because Stiller's perception of himself and his “Umwelt,” the social setting, does not change. The characters he invents are fictions imposed on reality rather than aspects of reality. Michael Butler has aptly characterized Frisch's intent in writing a novel which consists of a series of narratives: “The stories he tells constitute an effort to preserve intact the vision of a new self and to forestall society's desire to recapture its fixed image of its ‘lost’ citizen.”¹⁶

The last story in the last section of the novel, Rolf's account of his confrontation with Stiller (and also with himself), allows Frisch to place the writer (Stiller) observing himself in the background and to let a certain amount of objectivity—that is, reality—prevail for a time. In this way he avoids ending Stiller on the note of silence—Sprachskepsis and Sinnverlust¹⁷—on which Stiller's notebooks themselves conclude. Rolf proposes that Stiller's abandonment of his quest for a new self and the conclusion of his endeavors to create art (instead of sculpture he produces “ordinary” pottery) are not the end phase but an additional one in his life: “[Er] fing an Welt zu werden, etwas anderes als Projektionen seines Selbst …” (483). Although the identification of White as the former Stiller has been confirmed by consensus, and, as readers have realized from the beginning, his masquerade as James Larkin White must come to an end because identity is never entirely independent of the perceptions of others,¹⁸ Frisch has nevertheless reaffirmed the usefulness of the negative function of assuming fictive identities. “Ich bin nicht James Larkin White” is just as much a revelation of the self as “Ich bin nicht Stiller.” The “white space” of the self prevails.

Notes

1. Frisch has related that he first inserted this opening sentence in a later version of the text; see Walter Schmitz, “Zur Entstehung von Max Frischs Roman ‘Stiller’” in Materialien zu Max Frisch Stiller (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1978).

2. Rolf Kieser, “Das Tagebuch als äußere Struktur: ‘Stiller’” in Materialien zu Stiller 127.

3. Schmitz quotes Frisch who when questioned confirmed the autobiographical nature of his work: “So ging ich von der eigenen Erfahrung aus. Ich schreibe, um zu bestehen” (32).

4. Frisch's accuracy in matters of detail indicates perhaps his inclination to consider the truth of fiction more important than fact; here he identifies the Carlsbad Caverns with Texas instead of New Mexico (although he does acknowledge that they may be approached from New Mexico). Similarly, he specifies that the food the cave explorers take with them is mutton, which the cattle-tending cowboys would find unappealing and probably unavailable. In a later work Montauk, the locale of which is a Long Island resort town, he describes it as being on the northern tip of the Island's fish-tail eastern end; Montauk is indisputably on the southern tip.

5. Gunda Lusser-Mertelsmann, “Die Höhlengeschichte als symbolische Darstellung der Wiedergeburt” in Materialien zu Stiller,” 166.

6. Ibid. 597.

7. Walter Schmitz, “Die Wirklichkeit der Literatur: Über den Roman ‘Stiller’” in Materialien zu Stiller 13.

8. Max Frisch, Stiller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1954) 202. Further page references are given in the text.

9. Some critics have been inclined to disregard the importance of the Rip van Winkle narrative; see Max Rychner, “Stiller” in Materialien zu Stiller 405: “Andere Einschübe, wie die Erzählung Rip van Winkle, könnten wegfallen, ohne daß der Bau litte.” On the other hand, Hans Mayer in his article “Max Frischs Romane” in Max Frisch: Aspekte des Prosawerks, ed. Gerhard P. Knapp (Bern: Lang, 1978) 54, attributes to Frisch himself the remark that “das Märchen von Rip van Winkle [ist] eine der Keimzellen des Stiller-Romans …”

10. The Oxford Anthology of American Literature, ed. William Rose Benet & Norman Holmes Pearson (New York: Oxford, 1938) 250 n.

11. Walter Hinderer, “Ein Gefühl der Fremde: Amerikaperspektiven bei Max Frisch” in Amerika in der deutschen Literatur, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger, Horst Denkler & Wilfried Malsch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975) 360. The interior quotation is by Friedrich Dürrenmatt in a review of Stiller.

12. The Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1964) makes the point that “the incident [which the parable relates] has little point without the moral” (297).

13. See Karlheinz Braun, “Die Tagebuchform in Max Frischs ‘Stiller’” in Materialien zu Stiller 101: “Der Zweck des Romans ist das Wiedererfinden der Identität.”

14. Horst Steinmetz, “Roman als Tagebuch: ‘Stiller’” in Materialien zu Stiller 113.

15. See Gertrud Bauer Pickar, “Kann man schreiben, ohne eine Rolle zu spielen? Zur Problematik des fingierten Erzählens in Stiller” in Max Frisch: Aspekte des Prosawerks 98: “Die Rolle, die Stiller/White im Schreiben angenommen hat, ist keine andere als die, die er verworfen hatte. Genau so wenig wie Rolfs Paket fleischfarbigen Stoffes könnte sie nicht endgültig verleugnet werden.” In a related way, the story of Rolf's package of cloth can be associated with Stiller/White's adventure in the cave, since that, too, pertains to the search for a new identity. See Michael Butler, The Novels of Max Frisch (London: Wolff, 1976) 84: “Thus the story of the ‘parcel of flesh-pink cloth’ with its labyrinthine motif, is presented as a rough equivalent to the metaphorical expression of Stiller's experience in the Carlsbad Cavern story.” This part of Butler's book has been reprinted in translation in Materialien zu Stiller; see page 197. The analogy with the fable of Little Grey seems to me, however, to be closer.

16. See Butler 56. See also Horst Steinmetz, “Roman als Tagebuch: ‘Stiller’” in Materialien zu Stiller 112: “Stiller ist es in Amerika nicht gelungen, sich von seiner Rolle zu befreien. Davon zeugen alle Erzählungen.”

17. See Schmitz, “Die Wirklichkeit der Literatur …” 21: “Die versuchte Auseinandersetzung mit der ‘herrschenden Realität’ mündet in Sprachskepsis und Sinnverlust.”

18. See Siegfried Lenz, “Ruiniert durch Erkenntnis: Bei einer Wiederbegegnung mit Stiller und Faber” in Elfenbeinturm und Barrikade (München: dtv, 1986) 144: “Das Unternehmen Identitätssuche, auf das sich fiktive Personen stellvertretend eingelassen haben, endet mit der Erkenntnis, daß es immer die anderen sein werden, die zu unserer Identität entscheidend beitragen.”