[In the following essay, Shipe asserts that “the real subject of Montauk is how autobiographical material came to be transformed into a work of fiction.”]

Montauk (1976) is a work which invites its own misreading. Frisch seems to declare his intentions in the clearest possible fashion: Montauk is to be a work of pure autobiography, a factual account of the weekend the sixty-three-year-old Swiss writer spent on Long Island with an American woman half his age. There will be not a touch of fictionalizing, and the work will be free of the narrative complexities of novels like Stiller (1954) and Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964): “I should like to describe this day, just this day, our weekend together, how it came about and how it develops. I should like to tell it without inventing anything. In the role of a simple narrator.”¹ And what we find in Montauk seems to bear out this program: a remarkably candid depiction of a brief affair with a younger woman, interspersed with confessional accounts of his friendships, of his life as a writer and architect, and, above all, of his previous relationships with women. Indeed, after reading Montauk, one may feel that he has come to know more of the “real” Max Frisch from this than from any other work, including the published diaries. However, to read Montauk primarily as autobiography is to overlook the true thrust of the work.

The key to Montauk is its subtitle: Eine Erzaehlung. While the ostensible subject matter of the work is autobiographical, Frisch has cast it in a fictional genre.² The real subject of Montauk is how autobiographical material came to be transformed into a work of fiction. Montauk is about its own writing.³ Written in 1974-75, Montauk is the logical culmination of a development within the body of Frisch's work which began as early as the 1940's. Beginning in 1948, Frisch wrote a number of short essays containing programmatic statements on subjectivity in literature and on literature as a representation of “reality.” These essays, written for a non-specialist audience, admittedly contain nothing that is new for anyone versed in Modernist literature. Two of the essays, however, are of particular interest in relation to Frisch's own dramatic and narrative works.

The thesis of “Theater ohne Illusion” (Gesammelte Werke [hereafter cited as GW] II, 332-36), written in 1948, is that a theater which pretends to portray events objectively and which rests on the illusion that the events depicted on stage are “actually happening” is bound to fail. What theater can do is portray a character's perception of events. Frisch takes Thornton Wilder as his model for a subjective theater, a “theater without illusion” (in other writings he uses Brecht as his model). This subjective theater is exemplified in the reliving of a day in Emily Webb's life in the final act of Our Town. Such a reliving of events occurs frequently in our imaginations, and the theater should embrace its special ability to depict this aspect of our subjective lives. Frisch concludes that our subjective experience of events (“mental” or “spiritual reality”) is more suitable for presentation on stage than an objective rendition of events (“historical reality”), since the latter requires an illusionism which is impossible to achieve with the methods available to the theater. Within his own oeuvre, Frisch attempts such a subjective theater, depicting “mental reality,” in plays such as Santa Cruz (1947) and Die Chinesische Mauer (1947); a similar project in prose fiction is Bin, oder Die Reise nach Peking (1945).

Frisch extends the principles elaborated in “Theater ohne Illusion” to narrative prose in an essay of 1960 entitled “Unsere Gier nach Geschichten” (GW IV, 262-64). Here Frisch takes the notion of “mental reality” a step beyond Wilder's portrayal of a woman literally “reliving” a day in her life. Our subjective experience includes not only events which happened in the past but also events which never happened at all: “How would I feel if I won the grand lottery tomorrow? I think I know. How? I have never won the grand lottery, but I have experienced myself.” The implication is that experience of oneself is somehow prior to any particular occurrences which one experiences. And one's experience is more clearly revealed by the ability to imagine things which never actually happened than by the ability to recall accurately occurrences in the past: “By imagining how it might be, for example, if I should return to this world” after death, “that is, by inventing what has never been and will never be, I show my experience more purely than by trying to report what happened at seven in the evening twenty-one years ago.” Here, with the notion of invention, Frisch introduces the crucial phase of his argument. Experience is not sufficient; it is necessary to organize one's experience, to formulate a “model of experience” (Erlebnismuster). The only way to formulate it is to invent a story based on one's experience, which explains the universal “greed for stories” of Frisch's title. The central assumption of the essay is that “All stories are invented, games of the imagination, models of worldly experience, images, true only as images.” Frisch claims that everyone invents a story based on his or her experience, a story “which he regards as his life,” and that the distinction between the writer and everyone else is that the writer knows that he has invented his story.

The notion that every story is an invention is central to Frisch's greatest novel, Stiller, whose protagonist rejects his old role as the Swiss sculptor Anatol Stiller and invents a new one, that of the American adventurer White, and a complete story to go with the role. More significant in relation to the essay of 1960, though, is his novel of 1964, Mein Name sei Gantenbein (A Wilderness of Mirrors), which illustrates the essay's theses and even incorporates passages almost verbatim. In that work, an anonymous narrator about whom virtually nothing is known invents three fictional roles and a series of stories for each, based on his own essential experiences. The narrator's experience is thus prior to any particular occurrences, the events of the invented stories which express his experience.

But the ultimate demonstration of the priority of experience to particular occurrences or stories and of Frisch's awareness as a writer that every story is an invention cannot be achieved through the use of a fictional narrator and fictional experiences; the author must show how he, Max Frisch, uses his own experience to invent a story “which he regards as his life.” In our discussion of Montauk, we shall see how Frisch does precisely this, first by “inventing” himself as a character within his story, then by “reinventing” his previous writings as objects within the fictional universe of the story. Finally, we shall we how Montauk is essentially the story of its own genesis.

A reader unfamiliar with Frisch's notions of the relation of experience and stories might find Montauk to be a totally untransformed presentation of events from Frisch's life: straight autobiography. However, while Frisch presumably remains faithful to factual detail, he has nevertheless succeeded in transforming himself into a fictional character, the protagonist of Montauk⁴ (designated here as “Max Frisch”). From this point of view, Montauk becomes the story of the tranformation of Max Frisch into “Max Frisch.”

The transformation begins with the partition of Frisch into an I and a he. I is the authorial narrator and he is the character “Max Frisch,” but only as he appears during the time of the main action of the story: the encounter with Lynn in New York in May of 1974.⁵ The first person is used to refer to Max Frisch in the flashbacks to earlier events in his life and in the few flashes forward to the time after the encounter. It is also used to describe the general opinions and feelings of Max Frisch, while the third person is used for the particular feelings and sensations of “Max Frisch” at the time of the main action. Thus, in reference to his relationships with women in general, he writes:

Women: sometimes I believe I understand them, and at the outset they are pleased with my inventions, with my sketch of their character. … It does not matter whether the illusions I weave around the women I love torture me or enchant me—all I want is that they should convince me. It is not the women who make a fool of me. I do that myself.

(80-81)

But describing “Frisch” and Lynn together on a Long Island beach, he uses the third person: “When he sees her trudging through the … sand … he watches her with pleasure. … As she now lies beside him in her chair, his thoughts also stray. … He is not in love. He is just pleased” (70-71). There are relatively few passages in which both pronouns are used to designate Frisch or “Frisch” within the same sentence. In most of these instances, I becomes the distanced, critical observer of he. The best example is the section headed “DO YOU BELIEVE/WHAT DO YOU THINK,” in which the narrator describes the nature of the conversations between “Frisch” and Lynn and considers in particular his use of English: “His English is modest—I, of course, know every time what he would like to say. When he happens not to translate, but to say in English what could not be similarly expressed in written or spoken German, I am surprised by what he thinks, or how he thinks it” (72). This last sentence suggests that “Max Frisch” has actually achieved a great deal of autonomy as a character. Frisch has omniscience as an authorial narrator and is thoroughly familiar with the thoughts of “Frisch” as long as these thoughts are in the language of the writer; but as soon as “Frisch” begins thinking directly in English, his thoughts become opaque to the narrator, and the character is able to surprise his author.

There are certain exceptions to the general usage of I and he. One incident from Frisch's life, his visit with a lover in a Zurich clinic, is narrated in the third person, a usage which has to do with the similarity to a scene in Stiller, which will be discussed later in connection with the presence of Frisch's earlier works in Montauk. The opposite occurs at the end of the work, where Frisch's parting from Lynn is narrated in the first person, creating a symmetry in the encounter with Lynn: Frisch also uses the first person to report his first meeting with the secretary, given as a flashback after “Frisch” has already been introduced as he with her on Long Island. This first meeting occurs before their brief affair, and the character “Frisch” exists only within the context of this affair. His identity merges with that of the author Frisch when he parts from Lynn for the last time.⁶

The material which Frisch the author uses for both the first- and third-person stories in Montauk comes from his own life; and this very phenomenon, the author's life as material for literature, becomes one of the fundamental themes of the work. As one might suspect from all Frisch has said before of the relationship of life and literature, it is literature which is the active agent in Montauk. Literature determines biography; fiction sets the limits for life. This is what Frisch calls the “professional disease of the writer”: “The writer is afraid of feelings that are not suited to publication; … all he perceives is considered from the point of view of whether it is worth describing, and he dislikes experiences that can never be expressed in words” (9). This is perhaps the ultimate twist on one of the classic problems of the Western novel: the subservience of life to literature. In novels such as Don Quijote, Madame Bovary, and Stiller, the problem is the determination of a character's life by the precedents of literature: the chivalric romances read by Alonso Quijano, the sentimental novels read by Emma Bovary, and the entire body of literature and sub-literature which has exhausted any possibility of original actions or modes of living for the characters in Stiller.⁷ In Montauk the dfficulty has gone a step further: the author's life is determined not by literary precedents but by future literature, specifically, by its suitability for representation in the literary works which he is to write. Frisch claims, for instance, that he, “Max Frisch,” avoids feeling jealousy because he has already written so much about that emotion that it would be superfluous to use it again in future works:

It would not be a new experience for him if he were again to give way to jealousy; as a writer, he would have nothing to say about it, nothing new. … It is true that he is a writer without very much imagination. That is why he cannot afford certain emotions, for fear of using them yet again as the emotions of a fictional character.

(82)

A corollary of this formulation of the relationship of literature and the life of an author or his characters is a new version of Frisch's old notions about the priority of experience to the series of stories which one regards as one's life. He tells an interviewer, “life is boring, … I have experiences now only when I am writing” (6). While previously experience led to the need for stories to account for it, now experience itself has become dependent on the invention of stories. The invention of stories is the only experience open to the Frisch of Montauk. As we shall see, “Frisch” first conceives Montauk as an attempt to escape from this situation, but in the end the work reconfirms it.

Frisch's line of thought requires him to justify his brief affair with Lynn as an experience suitable as literary material, which he does in two ways: explicitly with respect to love in general and implicitly with respect to his specific relationship with Lynn. He attacks the notion that love is exhausted as a literary theme:

(One is told that there is nothing new to be said about love between the sexes. Literature has portrayed it countless times in all its variations, it is no longer a valid theme. … One often reads statements to this effect—but they overlook the fact that the relationship between the sexes alters, that there will be love stories of another sort.)

(59)

Thus, love, unlike jealousy, is not one of those emotions which he must avoid because they are insufficient as material for new fiction.

What justifies the specific relationship as fictional material is the very consciousness of it as such. Here it is necessary to anticipate somewhat and point out that we must distinguish carefully between the project of Montauk as envisioned by Frisch and by “Frisch.” Only the latter sees it as the record of an escape from the limitations which literature sets on experience; only for the fictional “Frisch” is the encounter with Lynn an idyll free of the consciousness of these limitations. Frisch first met Lynn at the very interview in which he said, “I have experiences now only when I am writing.” Her reaction shows that she understands the seriousness of the remark better than the interviewer: “It was not meant as a joke, but all the same” the interviewer “laughed. She did not” (6). Lynn is conscious that the restriction of life by literature is a problem for Frisch. Her willingness to suspend her knowledge during the long weekend, to pretend that they are having a “pure” experience, makes her a suitable partner for the character “Frisch”; but her very consciousness of these considerations makes her suitable for the aims of the authorial narrator Frisch.

The concern with the suitability of life for narrative representation appears in an ironic light when “Frisch,” while driving, narrowly averts an accident. A fatal accident would have been, in a conventional sense, an appropriate ending to the story of the encounter. The encounter would have been perfectly narratable: “That would be it: two fatal road casualties, a young American woman (full particulars) and an elderly Swiss (full particulars). The story of their weekend at the coast could be told. Our weekend” (727/114). Apart from the obvious disadvantage that someone other than Frisch would have to do the telling, the story would be suitable for narration only in what is for Frisch an inferior sense: as a factual account, a newspaper report, in which “full particulars” (die genauen Personalien) count for something. Narratively convenient traffic deaths do not occur in Frisch's stories; they are only alluded to, as here and as in the accident scene near the beginning of Gantenbein, as possibilities rejected precisely because they are overly convenient.

The major opponent to Frisch's tendency to live only what is narratable is his wife Marianne. Frisch quotes her emphatic prohibition immediately after disobeying it: “I HAVE NOT BEEN LIVING WITH YOU TO PROVIDE LITERARY MATERIAL. I FORBID YOU TO WRITE ABOUT ME” (70). She refuses to become a fictional character, but Frisch makes her just that, one of the main characters of Montauk. However, he also finds, in the use of the second person, a way of satisfying Marianne's prohibition. By calling her du, he makes her his implied reader as well as a character; he is writing to her rather than about her.

Marianne's prohibition is a new variation on an old self-conscious device: the refusal to narrate. Here with a refusal to be narrated, the result is the usual one: the matters in question are narrated anyway. A milder form of the prohibition appears as parental advice; Frisch's mother tells him, “You shouldn't write so much about women, for you do not understand them” (72)—a piece of advice which Frisch is clearly incapable of heeding.

Frisch mentions various aspects of his life which he has not described in his works: his presence at the births of two of his children, the abortion of several others, his relationships with his father, his brother, and his sister. Because of his avoidance of what is not suitable for literary representation, these unnarrated experiences have lost their place in his life story: “I live, not with my own story, but just with those parts of it that I have been able to put to literary use” (107). Here Frisch seems for a moment to share with “Frisch” the desire to escape the bounds of literature, to live his “own life, his “real” life. Significantly, Frisch speaks here not of his “own life” but of his “own story.” The heading for this section comes from Gantenbein: “I TRY ON STORIES LIKE CLOTHES.” The works Frisch has written become the equivalent of the stories which the narrator of Gantenbein invents. These stories reflect only a part of his experience; and what Frisch is positing is the existence of his “own story,” a sort of Ur-Max Frisch, the original, complete version of Frisch's story, of which he has presented in his works only imperfect fragments, which have exposed Frisch but have also altered the Ur-Text “to the point of non-recognition.” When Frisch says, “I have never described myself, I have only betrayed myself,” he means that he has been unfaithful to the perfect Ur-Text of his story.⁸

Perhaps Frisch is setting himself an impossible standard, for like the “real” story behind the fragments imagined by the narrator of Gantenbein, the Ur-Max Frisch can be no more than a hypothetical reconstruction. With the various stories pertaining to Frisch the authorial narrator, Montauk attempts just such a reconstruction. We are put on guard against thinking that Montauk is the true reconstruction, that we have here, at long last, the “real” Max Frisch. The work's epigraph, from Montaigne's preface, warns of the intensely personal nature of the contents and claims, “THUS, READER, I AM MYSELF THE MATTER OF MY BOOK.” Near the end of the work comes an ironic comment on its own claim to honesty. Frisch again quotes Montaigne's “THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER” and follows it with the question, “and what does it keep concealed? And why?” (136). Let us not trust Frisch to give us a complete, faithful version of his own Ur-Text.

Frisch's concern with the limitations which literature imposes on life quite naturally makes his own previous works play a significant role in this one. Frisch's presence in America as a visiting writer provides a perfect opportunity to elaborate, within the action of the story, on the problematic nature of his role as author. The acceptance of this role has been claimed to be the necessary assumption for a direct presentation of the I in Montauk,⁹ but as we have seen, the technique of Montauk does not involve a direct presentation of the I but a fictionalization of the I—its transformation into a fictional character, he, and a fictional narrator, I. The character “Max Frisch” tries, briefly, to escape the authorial role; the fictional narrator accepts it but also plays with it when he realizes that Lynn has read none of his work. During the lunch at Sweet's restaurant—a lunch occurring within the context of their business relationship, before the real beginning of their affair and the invention of “Max Frisch”—Frisch indulges in a game at Lynn's expense, intentionally contradicting what he says in his published essays: “Since Lynn has read none of my writings, I enjoy for once saying the exact opposite: I am not interested in politics at all. … I write for myself. … The public as a working partner? I can find more reliable partners” (18). Frisch continues in this vein, contradicting some of his most publicized opinions—contradicting even the titles of two of his prose pieces (“Ich schreibe fuer Leser” and “Oeffentlichkeit als Partner”). Lynn's ready acceptance of what he says surprises him: “Lynn does not protest; it sounds more convincing (to me as well) than I had expected.” Her reaction and his ability to convince himself imply the possibility of escape from the established authorial role and presage the invention of the he character. As a visiting writer, Frisch has contact with people who are concerned in various ways with his works. He meets actors who had previously performed his Graf Oederland in New York and who introduce themselves by their fictional names in the play—“I AM THE WIDOW, I AM THE MURDERER” (45). He answers questions of graduate students interested in his works.

The most interesting use of Frisch's earlier works in Montauk is the portrayal of events explicitly analogous to the contents of previous writings. These incidents function in one of two ways: as correction of fiction or as events prophesied by fiction. The best example of the first is the story of Frisch's Jewish lover, Kaete, the model for the relationship of Walter Faber and Hanna in Homo Faber (1957). Here Frisch appears to be true to the Montaigne epigraph, “THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH. … MY DEFECTS WILL HERE BE READ.” In fictionalizing the experience, Frisch suggests, he was too easy on himself and feels obliged to give the “true story”:

The Jewish fiancee from Berlin (during the Nazi period) is not named HANNA, but Kaete, and they are not at all alike, that girl in my life story and the character in a novel he wrote. All they have in common is the historical situation and, within this situation, a young man who later is unable to explain his behavior. The rest is art—the art of exercising discretion toward oneself … How had it really been?

(727/114) (Italics mine, ellipses Frisch's)

In the Montauk version of the story, Frisch is much less discreet with respect to himself, not in that the young Frisch's conduct seems more reprehensible than that of Faber, but rather in that he has not fictionalized his experience beyond recognition: the “new” version is a more faithful rendition of the “story which he regards as his life.”

One is quite right in warning against inferring from such passages that Montauk is meant as “a sort of roman a clef … as if ‘reality’ and autobiographical truth were being played off against poetic fiction and earlier ‘lies,’ or as if his life as lived, i.e., ‘authentic’ life, were being set aright with respect to previous alienations.”¹⁰ In the context of Montauk, even the story of Kaete, the “true” story behind that of Hanna, must be considered a fiction. The difference between the two is that the story of Kaete is, as a fiction, a truer representation of the basic experience of the narrator, who is less sparing of himself than the author of Homo Faber. Even so, he leaves himself one form of mitigation in his use of the third person. While he refers to the affair with Kaete as an event “in my life story,” the person who commits the reprehensible actions is referred to as “a young man,” and the author of Homo Faber is called he—practically the only place in Montauk where one of Frisch's works is attributed to the character “Max Frisch.” In this way, the narrator places with his fictional character not only the responsibility for his conduct toward Kaete but also the responsibility for the falsification of that experience in a novel.

A similar instance is the portrayal of Frisch's relationship with Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the sources of Mein Name sei Gantenbein as well as of Bachmann's novel Malina. The story of Bachmann differs from that of Kaete, though, in that its relationship to Gantenbein is not made explicit in Montauk. Frisch depends here to a certain degree on public knowledge, with only a few direct hints in the form of incidents analogous to those in Gantenbein. These incidents include a planned visit to the theater thwarted by the beginning of the love affair (in Gantenbein it is Mozart's Don Giovanni; here it is the Paris premiere of one of his own plays that Frisch misses) and the reading of another man's letters to her, an incident which appears in both Gantenbein and Malina (60-61; 102).¹¹ Without extrinsic knowledge, one might take the Frisch-Bachmann affair not as a source of Gantenbein but as something anticipated by the novel. The story thus represents a transitional stage to the other function of analogy in Montauk, fiction as prophesy or prefiguration.

That Frisch should have experiences which were foretold in his fiction is the ultimate instance of the determination of life by literary considerations. Like other events in Montauk with counterparts in earlier works, the “foretold” incidents have mostly to do with Frisch's relationships with women. They occur both in the stories of the authorial narrator and in those of the character “Frisch.”

An instance of the former is Frisch's visit to his lover, just before one of his earlier trips to America. She is confined to a clinic, and he is abandoning her. Walking with her in the woods, he has a sense of deja vu: “He does not know why this walk, this hour, already seem so familiar” (105). The younger Frisch may not know, but the reader of Frisch certainly does. The scene seems familiar to Frisch because he had written about it several years earlier in Stiller. The walk in the woods outside the clinic, the announcement that he is leaving her, his disbelief in her illness, all were part of Stiller's last two visits to Julika at Davos, before his departure for America. Here the use of the third person to describe the earlier Frisch, another of the deviations from the normal procedure of Montauk, takes on a special significance. As another instance of the narrator's tendency to distance himself from his more reprehensible past actions by attributing them to his fictional character, it duplicates perfectly Stiller/White's procedure as the narrator of his own story. White, writing his protocol in prison, refuses to recognize his identity with the Stiller of seven years before, the man who behaved so abominably to Julika; and he tells Stiller's story entirely in the third person. The narrator's procedure here is, if anything, more devious than that of the narrator of Stiller; the latter rejects his earlier identity entirely, while Frisch takes refuge in the third person primarily for actions in his earlier life the responsibility for which he would like to evade.¹²

Frisch the author-narrator, then, in his own life relives stories which he had invented for characters in his novels. That his experience remains limited by literature is his main reason for inventing “Max Frisch,” the character who has the brief affair on Long Island. “Frisch” is invented as the character who can escape Frisch's authorial role, escape repetition, and have an experience independent of literature. But this escape proves impossible even for him; “Max Frisch,” too, repeats what is prophesied in Frisch's fiction. Most notably, the affair between an older man and a younger woman was prefigured nearly twenty years earlier in the affair between Faber and his daughter Sabeth.¹³ Again, the use of Homo Faber as the prefiguring novel is especially appropriate: Homo Faber is a reworking of the Oedipus story; in trying to escape the fate prophesied for him, Oedipus instead fulfills the prophesy. Walter Faber, disbelieving in fate and prophesy, shows the inescapability of fate by repeating the experience of Oedipus. “Max Frisch,” trying to escape the determination of life by literature, shows the inescapability of literature by repeating the experience of Faber. The chain of literary cause and effect shows no sign of relenting.

A special form of analogy with previous works is direct quotation. By quoting from his previous works, the narrator makes explicit his awareness of the analogy between his or his character's situation and the situation he has depicted in fiction. The direct quotations generally appear in the boldface section headings and are related to the situation described in the preceding or following section.

One of the most significant instances of direct quotation in Montauk is the phrase from Gantenbein which we have already mentioned, “I TRY ON STORIES LIKE CLOTHES,” which heads the section in which Frisch describes how portions of his own experience which he has not “tried on” as stories have been lost to his own life story. The analogy is clear: the condition of the narrator of Gantenbein is the condition of the narrator of Montauk; both live solely through their invented stories.

The longest direct quotation in Montauk is from Homo Faber. The first sentence of the original passage, given here, is omitted from the quotation in Montauk:

Arrangements in case of death: all written evidence such as reports, letters, loose-leaf notebooks, are to be destroyed, none of it is true. To be alive: to be in the light. Driving donkeys around somewhere (like that old man in Corinth)—that's all our job amounts to! The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt, and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.¹⁴

The passage from Faber's journal juxtaposes his recognition of the incompleteness of his life before his encounter with Sabeth (reflected in the documents he has produced) with his memory of his recent experience on the beach near Corinth with the younger woman. In the context of Montauk, it has much the same significance for Frisch, recalling his experience of “pure present,” of “eternity in the instant,” with Lynn (69). The omission of the first sentence of the passage suppresses the other side of the contrast, the realization of the incompleteness of the author's life as reflected in the writing he has produced. The problem comes immediately to the surface in the next phrase: “Living in quotations.” Again we have the basic problem of Montauk, the inability to live independently of literature. Even the supposedly pure experience of “Max Frisch” with Lynn on the Long Island beach, his attempt to live for just a few moments free of the tyranny of literature, proves to be itself a replication of what was already described in Homo Faber; indeed, the very expression of his freedom confirms his lack of freedom by being itself a quotation: “Frisch himself has become a quotation.”¹⁵

Frisch as narrator has realized the hopelessness of “Frisch's” attempt to escape the bounds of literature, but the character has not realized it. The latter first conceives the project of writing Montauk, but the work planned by “Frisch” has little in common with the work actually written by Frisch. “Frisch's” initial conception of the project was quoted earlier. Later references to the projected work show the same essential concerns:

He realizes … what … he is at the moment thinking: … I want to know what I notice and think when I am not thinking of possible readers.

(94)

AMAGANSETT

So that is the name of the little place where he decided yesterday to describe this weekend: … Completely autobiographical—without inventing a single character; … without taking refuge in inventions of any kind.

(106)

The nature of the project is clear: he will restrict his subject matter to the events of the weekend with Lynn; he will render it as pure present; he will use a straightforward narrative viewpoint; and above all he will invent nothing. A document meeting these conditions would be the ultimate demonstration of the character's successful escape from the tyranny of literature. As we have shown, none of these conditions is satisfied by the Montauk written by Frisch.

The realized Montauk is described not by “Frisch's” project but by comments Frisch has made elsewhere concerning another ostensibly “nonfictional” work obsessed with the problems of the authorial role and the mutual influence of factuality and fictionality: Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night. Several years before his encounter of 1974, Frisch had read Mailer's book and noted the author's portrayal of himself in the third person:

Norman Mailer's method in The Armies of the Night is curious: he describes his experience at a demonstration in front of the Pentagon, where he was arrested, in the third person—Norman Mailer laughed, in this instant he hesitated, … etc. After his arrest, he expresses his astonishment that the policeman does not know his name and spells it out: M-A-I-L-E-R.¹⁶

Frisch, then, was aware of Mailer's work as a precedent for the fictionalization of the self and for the author's self-consciousness of his public role as author.

Like Frisch, Mailer sets out to write a factual account but finds that, because of the problematic and subjective nature of what we call “fact” (or “history”), he is writing a novel instead. In an interview Frisch makes a comment about “documentary literature” which clearly refers to Mailer's account of the march on the Pentagon:

Our problem of fictionality relates to our doubts about factuality. I can proceed in a documentary manner by stating precisely, this happened at exactly that time; I was then in Washington, taking part in that particular rally; there were two thousand demonstrators or two hundred thousand or approximately three hundred thousand. … All this looks like fact. But even if we knew exactly how many people were there (which nobody does) such a figure would mean nothing. … The facts as such never declare themselves. We always manipulate them, and it is impossible to cover all of them. … The selection of facts already means interpretation, representing an intent.¹⁷

The project of writing a purely objective factual account is frustrated by the very nature of “facts,” be they “historical” like the march on the Pentagon or “autobiographical” like Frisch's encounter with Lynn. What one can do is write fictional stories which render one's subjective experience of events, stories like The Armies of the Night and Montauk.¹⁸ In such a story, the author himself, whether he realizes it or not, becomes a fictional character. The Armies of the Night and Montauk tell the same story: how the protagonist planned a work of nonfiction and wrote, instead, a novel.

Notes

1. Max Frisch, Montauk, tr. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 54. Subsequent references are to this edition. References to Frisch's works in German are to Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, ed. Hans Mayer with the collaboration of Walter Schmitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), cited as GW. Where emendation of Skelton's translation has been necessary, the page numbers of both the German and English versions are cited: (671/54), the first number referring to GW VI. Translations from Frisch's essays and from secondary literature are my own.

2. Uwe Johnson, in a letter to Frisch, “Zu Montauk,” in Ueber Max Frisch II, ed. Walter Schmitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 449, suggests that a reader in the distant future, unfamiliar with the author's name, would probably assume Montauk to be an entirely invented story. Rudolf Hartung, “‘Schreibend unter Kunstzwang’: Zu der autobiographischen Erzaehlung Montauk von Max Frisch,” Die Neue Rundschau, 86 (1975), 713-17; rpt. in Schmitz, p. 440, claims that Montauk is, like any work of autobiography, an invented story because the author has selected material from his life and arranged it in an artistic manner. Although true enough, we shall see that Frisch's notion of a life story as an invented story goes much deeper. Werner Stauffacher,“‘Diese duenne Gegenwart’: Bemerkungen zu Montauk,” in Frisch: Kritik—Thesen—Analysen, ed. Manfred Jurgensen, Queensland Studies in German Language and Literature, Vol. 6 (Bern: Francke, 1977), 57-58, on the other hand, commenting on the subtitle (Eine Erzaehlung), draws a connection between fiction and narration on the one side and between autobiography and description on the other. He thus sees Frisch's apparent decision to write pure autobiography as a choice of description over narration. Stauffacher finds a tension between the subtitle (implying an intention to fictionalize, to “narrate”) and the epigraph from Montaigne's famous preface “To the Reader” (implying an intention to write autobiography, to “describe”). While the tension between autobiography and fiction certainly is central to Montauk, Stauffacher's equation of this with a tension between description and narration seems to rest mainly on a coincidence in terminology (German erzaehlen = to narrate; Erzaehlung = story, work of fiction).

3. Hans Mayer, “‘Die Geheimnisse jedweden Mannes’: Leben, Literatur und Max Frischs Montauk,” Deutsche Zeitung, 21 November 1975; rpt. in Schmitz, p. 446: “Montauk tells … of the genesis of a story with the same title.”

4. Mayer, in Schmitz, p. 445: “Here it is a question of an invented character named Max Frisch.”

5. Later we shall consider another use of the third person, a deviation from his norm, which serves a particular function for Frisch the narrator.

6. Gerhard vom Hofe, who has written the most detailed critical piece on Montauk, “Zauber ohne Zukunft: Zur autobiographischen Korrektur in Max Frischs Erzaehlung Montauk,” Euphorion, 70 (1976), 374-97, finds the use of third-person narration intrusive and distracting. The play of I and he is to him “more an artistic mannerism than a necessity justified by the narrative technique,” and the merging of the two perspectives at the end of the work seems to him to underline a oneness that has been obvious throughout (p. 389). Hofe's misgivings stem, I think, from a misunderstanding of the basic nature of the I/he partition. He sees the division simply as that between “remembering I” and “remembered I,” the former being disguised as a third-person narrator in a sort of sleight-of-hand trick to impress the reader. Stauffacher (p. 58) comes much closer to the point when he remarks that both the I and the he of Montauk are roles which denote different attitudes of the novelist toward himself, one of critical distance, the other of identification. What is important in Stauffacher's argument is his insistence that the I is not to be regarded as identical with the actual author. What I am suggesting is that the role of the I is precisely that of a fictional narrator and he that of a fictional character.

7. For this reading of Stiller, see Hans Mayer, “Anmerkungen zu Stiller,” in Duerrenmatt und Frisch (Pfullingen: Verlag Guenter Neske, 1963), pp. 38-54; rpt. in Ueber Max Frisch, ed. Thomas Beckermann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), pp. 24-42.

8. Stauffacher (p. 56) sees an ambiguity in the usage of the word verraten, which he suggests could mean either that Frisch has unwillingly revealed a part of his inner life or that he has betrayed it by falsifying it. Given the context of the expression, however, Frisch certainly intends the word in the latter sense: he has misrepresented himself by rejecting all aspects of his life not suitable for literary representation.

9. Hofe, p. 386.

10. Hofe, p. 377.

11. For the relationship between Gantenbein and Malina and their common sources in the love affair of Frisch and Bachmann, see Lore Toman, “Bachmanns Malina und Frischs Gantenbein: Zwei Seiten des gleichen Lebens,” Literatur und Kritik, 115 (1977), 274-78.

12. Cf. Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1966-71, tr. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 238: “There are sentences that work objectively only in the first-person form; transformed word for word into the ingenuous third person they begin to look evasive.”

13. The relationship between Lynn and Sabeth is pointed out by Manfred Jurgensen, Max Frisch: Die Romane, 2nd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1976), p. 262, and by Peter Wapnewski, “Hermes steigt vom Sockel: Gedanken zu Max Frisch in Montauk (anlaesslich des 15. Mai 1976),” Merkur, 30 (1976), 459.

14. Max Frisch, Homo Faber, tr. Michael Bullock (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), p. 210.

15. Jurgensen, p. 262.

16. Frisch, Sketchbook 1966-71, p. 238.

17. Rolf Kieser, “An Interview with Max Frisch,” Contemporary Literature, 13 (1972), 8. The first ellipsis occurs in the published interview.

18. Cf. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: Signet, 1968), p. 241: “Then he began his history of the Pentagon. It insisted on becoming a history of himself over four days, and therefore was history in the costume of a novel. He labored in the aesthetic of the problem for weeks, discovering that his dimensions as a character were simple: blessed had been the novelist, for his protagonist was a simple of a hero and a marvel of a fool, with more than average gifts of objectivity.”