SOURCE: Brombert, Victor. “Max Frisch: The Courage of Failure.” Raritan 13, no. 2 (fall 1993): 9-32.

[In the following essay, Brombert surveys the central themes of Frisch's work, focusing on the author's concern with weakness and failure.]

Max Frisch's second diary or sketchbook, Tagebuch, 1966-1971, concludes with the image of a stubby column standing incongruously all by itself in the loggia of his Swiss country house, where he sips his coffee in the evening. Its origin is unknown, its presence inexplicable. It is an unpretentious column, made not of marble but harsh granite, with nothing festive or noble about it. It is so short that one can touch its capital, and quite ugly—potbellied and slightly misshapen. This comical column, Frisch reports, is both touching and familiar; one does not hesitate to empty one's pipe against it. Yet its plebeian presence is not only reassuring but vaguely meaningful, even poetic. It has weathered centuries, not proudly but with a quiet courage. It stands as a symbol of strength and survival, its sturdy profile drawn against the twilight and the first evening star. The last paragraph of the sketchbook plays equivocally with images of pathetic reality, fortitude, and even hints of transcendence.

Frisch's two published sketchbooks (Tagebuch, 1946-1949 and Tagebuch, 1966-1971), both steeped in the historical and political realities of the day, repeatedly indulge in ambivalences of this sort. As he visits devastated German cities immediately after the war, his reactions are typically hostile to notions of the heroic. Yet there is also nostalgia for the heroic mode. In what may be read as an emblematic scene, Frisch describes acrobats performing on trapezes and tightropes high above the ruins of Frankfurt. Their daredevil exploits culminate in a truly frightening “deathwalk” on a rope attached to the steeple of the cathedral, as the powerful search-lights weirdly illuminate the ruins of the city. What strikes Frisch is not so much the suspense and drama of a performance that appeals to his theatrical instinct, as the free courtship with death—one he describes (having recently visited Nazi death camps) as a “good death,” that is an individual death, a freely chosen “personal death,” very different from the extermination that awaited the victims of the Lager. In most telling words, Frisch speaks of the acrobats' “playful” death (spielerische Tod) and defines it as a “human death.” Implicit is the age-old idea of dignity through free will. Some pages earlier one finds indeed the terse assertion: “Human dignity, I feel, comes from choice.”

Freedom associated with a chosen death—an essentially heroic notion—is brought out more sharply in the many pages of the second sketchbook devoted to the notion of suicide. Rebelling against decrepitude and the ravages of age, Frisch imagines a hemlock society significantly named Voluntary Death Association. But heroic longings and motifs are present from the start; they inform his dramaturgical instincts. Frisch, the man of theater, understood even better than the Bishop in his Don Juan or the Love of Geometry that we all need figures who dare do on stage what we can only dream of doing in life. We want to witness the exercise of a human will; we expect heroes in literature to make decisions that play into the hand of fate, though we suspect that a presiding fate is an illusion and that life is frustratingly devoid of an ordering principle. Frisch, who is intent on participating in a modern dramaturgy of frustration, recognizes the heavy weight of the classical heritage: the dramaturgy of fate and peripeteia. Unlike his homo faber who claims not to care about the heroic myths of antiquity, Frisch is keenly aware of the heroes in the epic and tragic tradition who exercise their will and indulge their appetite for catastrophe.

Tragic and mythical figures are metaphorical presences in his work: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Ulysses, Persephone, the Erinyes. The tension between truth and heroic illusion is brought out, according to Frisch, in the conflict between Don Quixote, the glorious victim, and the world that mocks him. To state that Cervantes ends up by saying yes to the-world-as-it-is does not deny that we all love the knight's error. But the implication is that the hero finds himself allied to untruth, that the heroic illusion needs to be denounced, and more so than ever in our own times. The hero's perspective is of necessity posthumous. Aiming at transcendence or eternity, he is not engaged in the present, no matter how dramatic his action. In some interesting pages about Brecht, Frisch explicitly contrasts the commitment to the heroic hereafter with a relation to the here and now.

The antiheroic stance has obvious ethical and political implications that are brought out sharply in The Chinese Wall, a play that inveighs against the dangerous yearning for heroes in our era of mass destruction. Despite his lifelong critique of the supposedly Swiss values of caution, self-interest, and practicality, Frisch tends to use the world Held (hero) as a negative term. The Chinese Wall makes the point that heroes have done enough harm over the centuries by transforming history into a vast graveyard, that the time has come to rid the world of the conquerors responsible for mass slaughter, that the day of heroes and tyrants is over. The Emperor's daughter debunks her father's values and silly talk of victory. What matters to her is not hero worship but human survival. She knows that there is greater courage in allegiance to life, that what is most difficult is to be a genuine human being. But for every outspoken Emperor's daughter, there are the Cleopatras of this world who “believe in the victor” and are ever ready to love men who “make history.”

It is not surprising that at the same time as he was deflating the image of the Napoleons of history Frisch also wrote an ironic play about another type of conqueror, the legendary Don Juan, incongruously emphasizing not his quest for women, but his yearning for intellectual and spiritual adventures. The very title of the play—Don Juan or the Love of Geometry—subverts the model and the legend. Don Juan's father complains that his son is not interested in women, that he spends his time in the bordello playing chess, that he is not committed to the virile arts. Though Don Juan fought at Cordoba against the Arabs, he is filled with contempt for martial exploits. As far as he is concerned, “heroes” are at best good for looting and for burning libraries. His love of geometry and chess brings him closer to being an intellectual hero. For the intellectual, Frisch explains in his postscript, the world exists to be put into question. Frisch's Don Juan does indeed love ideas far more than women; he lusts for an ideal, and even flirts with the notion of a monastic existence. What matters to him is the search for an inner life, the courage to discover or create his own authenticity. The paradox is that he entertains a narcissistic relation with his self, yet cannot take himself seriously, aware as he is of playing a role. The metatheatricality of the work stresses the tensions Frisch sets up between Being and Play. In such a ludic context, the heroic concept is evidently unstable. The risk-taking involved comes closer to pure spectacle than to a self-aggrandizing confrontation with fate. We return to the metaphor of the acrobat.

With time, the unheroic stance became more pronounced. It is at the core of Frisch's late novel, Man Appears in the Holocene (Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, 1969) which conveys a character's progressive senility in third-person narration, but as though experienced from within. Herr Geiser, a seventy-four-year-old widower living in retirement in a Ticino village, watches his advancing physical and mental decrepitude, while all around him storms and landslides provide a background that is a simulacrum of the deluge. The metaphorical setting is that of a geological time of creation, erosion, mutation, and successive extinction of species. In a Beckett-like atmosphere of non sequiturs and futile bits of encyclopedic information that recall some of the most devastating pages of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, the old man's disintegrating mind takes stock of itself as he gradually loses his sense of time and reality. Consciousness is here linked, quite cruelly, to undoing and defeat. “Heroic” allusions seem particularly ironic in the decidedly unheroic Ticino village. The legend of Hercules leading an entire people across the Alps, mythical dragons, apocalyptic images, dreams of adventurous escape and freedom, only underscore the ineffectuality of resisting the outrages of time and change.

Despite its poetic descriptions of landscape, snow, and fog, the Holocene novel is perhaps the least appealing of Frisch's works, though it is intensely revealing of his basic fears and obsessions. In a nonfictional and more personal manner, the two sketchbooks are of course more explicit. Frisch's political awareness, his capacity for indignation, the vigor of his enthusiasm for human rights, his sensitivity to the rift between culture and morality, do not dispel underlying personal doubts and uncertainties. Repeatedly, he alludes to the isolation of the artist, to his own ambivalent attitudes toward morality and violence. Self-questioning, in the form of self-addressed unanswered questionnaires, betrays his uneasiness and frustration. Suspicious of his own intellectual relation to reality, he yearns for an unmediated relation to life. He envies what he takes to be the joyful, unself-conscious, fearless physical presence of the Italian workmen he watches on his way to the beach. He, too, would love to love life. Characteristically, it is in the proximity of the Etruscan tombs that his fictional Gantenbein experiences the greatest pleasure in living.

Such joy is highly dependent on weakness and fear. Art for Frisch is not only a struggle against fear, but a hymn to it. “One sings out of fear,” he stated in a 1958 speech dealing with the writer's vocation. In a diary entry of 1949, when he was in his late thirties, he made the emphatic point that none of us has as yet experienced death, only the fear of death. That omnipresent fear goes together with the intense, bittersweet awareness of all forms of evanescence.

In this respect, his autobiographical book Montauk is most revealing. On the surface, it depicts the aging writer's weekend love affair with a young woman journalist. Oscillating between the novelistic third-person narrative and the first-person autobiographical or diary mode, Montauk recounts an escape into the immediacy of the present. At a deeper level, it is the account of how late in the game it is. Beneath the surface glow of tenderness and autumnal attachment to life, there is an underlying sense of weakness and failure, an essential difficulty in accepting or tolerating himself, a perception of his own superfluity. Time has come, Frisch feels, not only to talk of, but to face death. Fear of death and recognition of defeat inform this moving book, which can indeed be read as Frisch's third published diary.

Yet this preoccupation with death and defeat also takes on a positive value. In a key entry of his Tagebuch, 1946-1949, Frisch refers to the eternal boredom of the Greek gods, who are unthreatened by any sense of finality. Awareness of our mortality is thus seen as a precious gift. Frisch goes one step further. Understanding from the start that fear and courage go hand in hand, he writes of “courageous fear,” and in one of the most striking pages of the first Sketchbook, defines life itself in terms of fear. “There is no life without fear” is not merely a statement of fact, but a precondition. It is angst which, in an almost Pascalian sense, makes consciousness such a uniquely human attribute, and the source of our dignity.

It is not surprising that Frisch's pessimism remains ambivalent. He would have preferred, he says, not to have been born. But on the other hand, there is the joyful acceptance of the very life he did not desire, even the repeated temptation to sing a hymn of praise. The last words of the novel Gantenbein are: “Lebengefällt mir” (life appeals to me). And in the explicitly personal Montauk, we read in capital letters: “To be in the World: To be in the Light.” Ultimately Frisch never reneged on the early impulse to sing not so much the exceptional and heroic, as the ordinary human experience: “unsere Welt zu dichten.”

The courage to see one's own weakness and translate it into strength is repeatedly viewed as a high attribute. This may explain why both sketchbooks contain a number of short fictional pieces projecting figurations of the antihero. A fairly elaborate project for a film to be entitled Harlequin allegorizes the corrupting effect of power and the dehumanizing nature of hatred and fear in a burlesque fairground setting. A parody of Dostoyevski, under the ironic heading of “Glück” (“Good Fortune”), proposes the reemergence of the underground man in twentieth-century Switzerland, heavily stressing the character's self-lacerating indulgence in his own repulsiveness, absurdity, and degradation.

In a more caricatural vein, Frisch conceived the character of Kabusch, an avatar of the eternally ineffectual and victimized schlemiel. This Kabusch, appearing in various social and professional guises in a Swiss setting, always misses out, always is the butt of jokes, always gets things wrong. Superfluous, yet somehow needed by the group, such a Kabusch, according to Frisch, would have to be invented if he did not exist. When one Kabusch disappears, another has to be found.

At times, these antiheroic silhouettes include objectively successful types such as the slightly balding surgeon/lover in “Sketch of a Mishap,” who, on a pleasure trip with his mistress, is propelled toward the silly car accident in which he kills his companion. Similarly, a section called “Statics” delineates the self-doubting, self-denouncing, and self-denying figure of a pathetic professor of mechanics in a school of architecture, a figure weighed down by incurable clumsiness and riddled by indeterminate guilt.

These fictional projections are not mere digressions or inserts. They are related to personal concerns, to a not-so-vague feeling of inadequacy and even guilt concerning his craft and vocation as writer. For what is the writer's mandate? Frisch seems to ask. As time goes on, he appears increasingly aware that language implies a deadly separation from shifty reality, that it represents a mediating system which condemns us to stereotypes and prejudice. The paradox of language is that it not only fails to tell the “truth” (immediacy being always betrayed), but that, aware of its own emptiness, it is committed to expressing the inexpressible. Revealingly, the very page that develops this paradox of language as separation and falsehood also refers to the Tower of Babel. The result is a tragic challenge. “One cries out because of the terror of aloneness in a jungle of unsayable things,” Frisch confided in a speech given in Zurich in 1958.

The awareness of language as separation and negativity goes with another discomfort Frisch develops thematically in his sketchbooks and fictional writings: the concern over the nefarious effect of image-making. The oft-repeated word Bildnis (image, effigy, likeness) significantly appears on the page that associates the Tower of Babel with the mendacity and alienating power of language. Image-making is seen as essentially hostile to the mystery of life and love which must remain ungraspable, thus leading Frisch to invoke the Mosaic prohibition that would seem to question artistic representation itself.

The anxiety about language and image-making is ultimately related to the mystery of the self and the problem of identity. It casts light on the dialectics of silence and language so important in all of Frisch's work, in particular in his major novel Stiller. The desire to communicate with the inexpressible is at the root of one of the most paradoxical statements in that novel: “We possess language in order to become mute. He who is silent is not mute. He who is silent hasn't even an inkling who he is not.” This self-seeking, self-creating rather than self-describing potential of language is to be understood in the light of the novel's two epigraphs from Kierkegaard, which deal with the difficulty of choosing oneself. Such a choice is difficult because it clashes with the ultimate impossibility of becoming another.

The paradoxical double project seems to imply mutually exclusive thrusts: to get to the self, and, in a more ludic mode, to construct or even invent this more imaginative self as if it were another. This self-creating quest would explain why the figure of Montaigne looms larger over Frisch's work than even Kierkegaard. In his second Sketchbook, Frisch quotes a passage from Montaigne's essay “On Experience” that describes aging as a process of transformation and elusiveness. “Thus do I melt and slip away from myself.” The largely autobiographical Montauk is even more manifestly placed under the sign of Montaigne. The prefatory remarks addressed to the reader end with an invocation that includes the date Montaigne gives in his own foreword to the Essais: “Mit Gott denn, zu Montaigne, am ersten März 1580.” Intimacy of subject and object in Montauk is illustrated by the constant alternation of first- and third-person narrative—the Ich-form and the Er-form about which he speculated in the Sketchbook. Seeing the self as a role to be played or tried out is not only part of a self-deciphering enterprise (“to write is to read myself”) and of a constructive playfulness that underlies the fiction-making process; it suggests the philosophical dimension of the identity quest. Drawn to the notion of homo ludens, Frisch expressed the belief that “play,” in a speculative as well as dramaturgical sense, represents a higher form of existence—a belief he placed in an existential perspective in the postscript to his Don Juan play, where he drew a distinction between Play and Being.

A link somehow connects Montaigne, Kierkegaard, and Huizinga, the author of the well-known book that has given currency to the concept of homo ludens. This seemingly incongruous mental network lends particular significance to Gantenbein, one of Frisch's most experimental texts, in which he successfully rivals some of the boldest practitioners of the roman nouveau. The novel, whose full title is the hypothetical Let My Name Be Gantenbein (Mein Name sei Gantenbein), has at its center a character who, in a supreme form of role-playing, pretends to be blind. The metaphor of blindness operates on a variety of levels. Love makes one blind, as the saying goes; and Gantenbein, up to a point, protects the happiness of his marriage, for nothing really remains hidden from him, and he hardly needs to be jealous. He has in fact true vision, enjoying as he does an unadulterated view of all the acts and arts of deception. But behind the metaphor also lurks a bitter political significance. The world needs people who are silent about what they see or know.

Jealousy is of course not so easily avoided or repressed. Frisch himself seems haunted by the memory and pain of it. Referring to Othello, he comments at some length in his Sketchbook on the fear of feeling one's inferiority, on the horror of imagining that which may never have happened. At the same time, the experience of jealousy provides a link with the fiction-making process, exacerbating inventiveness. “I lust for betrayal,” says Gantenbein. Role-playing, in this perspective, becomes distinctly nonheroic; the focus is on nonoccurrence, on that which literally did not take place. Gantenbein is punctuated throughout by the formula “I imagine …” (Ich stelle mir vor …), a formula suggesting an imaginary spectacle.

The concept of a nonoccurrence, or nonstory, comes close to Flaubert's stated wish to write a book about nothing, a book that would achieve significance through structure and style alone. There is mention in Gantenbein of a type of film “that has no story at all,” in which the only event is the “movement” of the camera itself. Paradoxically, the absence of a specific story implies the multiplication of stories. The premium is on invention—Erfindung. “What you are telling us is a lot of inventions,” complains one of the characters, and Gantenbein agrees. Adventures of stories replace stories of adventures. The anonymous corpse floating away “without a story” at the end of the novel signifies a farewell to traditional narrative in favor of a narrative process of enigmatization requiring role-playing as well as the encouraging gullibility of a listener such as the cocotte in Gantenbein or the prison warder in Stiller. What is at stake is the need for stories.

Prison and language are at the heart of Frisch's key novel Stiller. The story begins in a Swiss jail where the sculptor Anatol Stiller is busy writing an account of the circumstances that brought him to such an unheroic setting. Language is, however, at the same time logocentric and incapable of leading to anything but silence and negativity. Stiller finds that there are no words for the reality of his self-alienation. The novel predictably dismayed many of his Swiss readers.

The clean, well-lit Swiss prison cell, where Stiller stubbornly denies that he is Stiller, is like a symbol of the prisoner's country. The totally functional, allegedly humane Swiss prison, a model of hygiene and respectability, provides no apparent ground for indignation—not even the traditional cobwebs or mildew on the walls. This is no Bastille to be stormed! The denunciation is all the more damaging because this smug guiltlessness and “Swiss innocence” are seen to be the opposite of genuine freedom and spiritual boldness. The cell is a reminder not only of the oppressive and hemmed-in nature of modern society, but of a collective dedication to false freedom, which is not the monopoly of Switzerland. If all of Switzerland feels like a prison to Stiller, it is because it illustrates the broader unconcern with the problematics of freedom, a spiritless satisfaction and lethargy of the soul.

A sociopolitical reading of the novel is both unavoidable and misleading. The critique of society quickly veers toward a quest for private salvation. The redemptive thrust is prepared by the Kierkegaard epigraph, the early fear of repetition, the ascetic impulse to equate necessity with free choice, the difficulty of choosing oneself, the monastic dream merging with the prison motif. Self-centeredness and logocentricity are obvious impediments to the salvational process. That is perhaps why the structural and rhetorical devices of the novel so consistently serve disjunctive and decentering strategies, tending not so much to dissolve the assumed ties between the word and the world as to challenge a logocentricity symbolized by the prisoner status. Dreams of flight correspond to yearnings to become the other. Condemnation to the inner jail leads to a desire for metamorphosis. This hope for a liberating transformation may at first appear to be an attempt to break out of sterilizing solipsism. The refusal to be trapped in a given identity may even be construed as a heroic drive, a form of existential courage. But this would-be heroism soon degenerates into the heroics of false freedom. Ultimately Stiller comes to understand that the hope to escape is his true prison.

The prisoner in his cell writes and talks compulsively about himself; yet this self is radically called into question. Though indulging in self-seeking games, Stiller refuses to acknowledge his identity. Sought by the Swiss police after abandoning his wife and disappearing, this degraded Odysseus has now been arrested, upon his return to his hometown, in possession of a suspect American passport carrying the symbolically blank name of White. Odysseus also, at one point, claimed to have no name.

The figure of Odysseus pervades Frisch's novel, as does the Odysseus-motif of the homecoming. Stiller-White, abandoning and then returning to his Julika-Penelope, brings to mind the model of one who was also a cunning storyteller, a master of disguises. Only the fact that there is a model of some stature spoils it all. In fact, the presence of models is perceived throughout as an oppressive reality, a threat to genuine responses. Fixation on the “model” condemns one to inauthenticity.

The tyranny of models is a function of the larger tyranny of imitation. “We live in an age of reproduction,” observes Stiller. “We are tele-viewers, tele-hearers, tele-knowers”—all by proxy. Even our so-called inner life, it would appear, is second hand. The writer, in his cellular privacy, is perhaps the one who knows this most acutely. How indeed, he wonders, is he to prove that he does not know jealousy through Proust, Spain through Hemingway, the labyrinthine quest through Kafka? A double question lurks behind this perplexity. Is unmediated experience possible? Is it desirable? Involved is the very nature of artistic representation—mimesis—and its potential betrayal of life. For artistic form fixates and imprisons the flow of life, denying mobility and becoming.

For Stiller's prison cell is not the only image of incarceration in the novel. Almost every setting assumes carceral characteristics—whether it is all of Switzerland or the crowded hold of a ship, the New York Bowery, a confining hotel room, or the Magic Mountain-like sanitorium where Julika, Stiller's tubercular wife, lies wrapped in blankets on her veranda-jail. The prison motif invests the novel, extending—beyond the locales—to psychological states: the discomfort of being in one's own skin, the yearning to break out of one's ethnic or racial group, the desire to elude condemnation to the prison of self. Love and marriage are perceived as particularly grim forms of imprisonment, servitudes that condemn the partners, unable to save or even reach each other, to live behind their private walls or, like two people enchained, each choking the other with murderous possessiveness. The artistic impulse, which might be deemed liberating or sublimating, only intensifies the denial. Writing binds. Significantly, Stiller is not merely a spinner of tales, but a professional sculptor—a Bildhauer, a hewer of images—transmuting living reality into the cold rigidity of stone.

Image-making, Stiller's profession, is thus presented as the prison of art, a principle of repression and death. The Penelope figure, in one of the symbol-laden anecdotes, is transformed by the narrator into the mythological figure of Niobe, the woman metamorphosed by Apollo and Artemis into a stone image. The image-making process, including the mental images we impose on those we claim to love, is seen as a sin against life, a form of psychological and spiritual incarceration.

The religious connotations are inescapable. A young Catholic seminarian, a fellow patient in the sanatorium, explains to Julika that it is a sign of nonlove and spiritual death to form an image of the other. The ultimate reference is to the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any image. …” Revealingly, when the guilt-ridden Stiller translates his awareness of being the murderer of his wife into a nightmare, he imagines a crucifixion scene in which, under the surveillance of German soldiers, he fixes a photograph of Julika to a tree with drawing pins.

Prison motifs correspond throughout to life-killing forms—specifically to image-making, whether interpersonal or esthetic. But confining walls, literal and symbolic, also galvanize imagination and serve vision. “I sit in my cell, look at the wall, and see Mexico.” From within his prison house, Stiller in fact sees further and deeper, into the very bowels of the earth, as well as into the recesses of his psyche. In an extraordinary episode omitted in the American paperback edition, Stiller recounts to the gullible turnkey his discovery and perilous descent into what turns out to be the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. The omission is inexcusable, since Frisch himself refers to this cave as an underground “arsenal of metaphors.” The cave in which the two explorer-friends are trapped becomes the mythical setting for a tragic escape feat. It is compared to Orpheus's Hades, to Ariadne's labyrinth, to a fairy-tale nightmare. During this journey to the end of night, familiar reality appears inverted; the first large cavern recalls the nave of Notre Dame. But it also provides an analogue to the sculptor-protagonist's existence and problems, with its inhuman forms of stone and the entrapment of the two friends—the symbolic couple—culminating in the murder of the one by the other.

Imprisonment thus stands in a paradoxical relation to mythical and heroic models. Nostalgia for the heroic is found to be a form of escape, and the heroic quest an illusion, just as flight or hope for escape only reveals a sense of false freedom. What Stiller comes to understand, against the imaginary heroic backdrop he conjures up in his cell, is his own essentially unheroic nature. Better still, he comes to see nonheroic human truth as a fundamental value. This discovery takes courage, honesty, and time. Stiller's painful memory of what he calls his “Spanish defeat” makes him relive indefinitely the intense humiliation of that moment during the Spanish Civil War when he failed to live up to his own heroic expectations. His failure to fire a gun at a critical moment becomes for him the haunting symbol of his inadequacy and nonvirility. It takes a woman to question his heroic assumptions. Sibylle, hearing him blame himself for being a failure, cannot understand why he should choose to feel ashamed of being as he is. After all, who asked that he be a fighter or a warrior, that he be what he is not? She puts it in more general terms: “You men, why do you always try to be so grand?” The implied feminine critique of so-called virile attributes once again underlines the danger of models. It also suggests the value of nonheroic virtues.

These values in turn militate against heroic concepts and poses. In depth, they seem to harmonize with latent religious motifs: apprenticeship in humility, surrender to a higher authority, willingness to emerge from the prison of self as an insignificant and powerless person, renunciation of the proud claim to be one's own savior. Pride, heroically or theologically conceived, seems indeed to be the target. At one point, Stiller and his rival/friend the public prosecutor Rolf, in discussing the excessive demands we make on ourselves, refer to the well-known line in Goethe's Faust—“Him I love who craves the impossible!” (Den lieb ich, der Unmögliches begehrt!)—and agree that this “ominous” line could only have been uttered by a demonic figure.

Stiller's private quest transcends his critique of modern society. Through the problematics of freedom, the unheroic hero reaches a new level of consciousness, if not a revelation. Stiller explicitly rebukes his fellow citizens for not sensing that freedom is a problem. Other writers, Stendhal for instance, have shown that between diverse orders of freedom there exist profound incompatibilities. Freedom understood in political terms easily clashes with a notion of inner freedom. But no one more suggestively than Frisch has related the freedom of the inner life to a kind of silence. This silence is inscribed in the name Stiller, in his muteness, his stammer, his eventual withdrawal from the world and the word. He is fully aware that the four walls of his artist's studio are a monastic enclosure protecting a “hermit's” existence. Pursuing a monastic freedom dream in prison, he gradually learns to value the prison of the inner life, and to want to reach the still center of the self. The willful acceptance of prison corresponds to the understanding that necessity can be freely chosen. Hence, the prayer for nonescape, the recognition that flight is not freedom.

Unheroic self-acceptance and acceptance of failure in Stiller represent a deeper sense of homecoming than seems at first implicit in the Odysseus motif. There are hints at self-love that acquire a spiritual, if not religious dimension. One of the characters points out that the injunction to love our neighbor as ourselves implies axiomatically that we must love ourselves as we were created. Such an acceptance of self means accepting and even loving the prison of selfhood. To accept oneself, we are told, requires the most vital of life forces. What is more, only this self-acceptance can set one free. Many of the detailed accounts in the novel, including the apparently extraneous Genoa episode of the flesh-pink cloth Rolf carries like a symbol of permanent humiliation, have a religious potential.

Stiller himself is perfectly aware of a latent monastic wish. Who has not had the desire to become a monk? he asks himself. Less explicit, though no less evident, is the hagiographic perspective on what could be defined as negative sainthood. From this perspective, it is only fitting that Stiller's ultimate withdrawal from the world should be accounted for by a witness-scribe, the public prosecutor Rolf who imagines that his now silent friend, the author of the prison notes, is now ready to provide a sequel to be entitled “Notes in Freedom.” But Stiller remains silent.

This sense of incompleteness is a reminder that Stiller, a typically decentered fictional construct, depends on agile and resourceful reading. Friedrich Dürrenmatt aptly observed that Frisch's novel could hardly be read or understood without the reader's playful participation. The ironies of a book in which the protagonist's defense counsel is insensitive to him, while the public prosecutor turns out to be a comprehending friend, presupposes indeed a putative or hidden reader capable of glimpsing a different form of courage behind the worn-out, discredited modes of heroism and sanctity. In Camus's The Plague, published only a few years earlier, one of the protagonists had raised the question of whether it was possible to be a saint without God. The narrator's answer was that he did not aim at being either hero or saint, that he felt more fellowship with the defeated than with saints and heroes, that what interested him was to be a human being—perhaps a more demanding task. Judged in such terms, Stiller himself might have agreed that his life has been a failure. But such a failure, the reader is given to understand, holds both a meaning and a promise. That a larger image of the human is on trial appears very clearly from the title of Frisch's next novel.

That title, Homo faber, points to failure of another kind. It stands in clear distinction to Homo sapiens, the biological species of primates capable not only of reason, but of knowledge and wisdom. It also differs from the notion of homo ludens—playful, speculative, artistic man. At best, homo faber suggests a partial, specialized, technological human capacity. Once again, Frisch's narrative technique points to scriptural compulsion. After Stiller's seven notebooks, we have in Homo faber two retrospective reports or bundles of notes also meant to be read by a reader in the text. In either case, the story is told by an unreliable first-person narrator; but in Homo faber the instabilities and ironies of retrospective narration bring out a sense of inevitability or fate. Classical allusions to Oedipus, the Oresteia, the Erinyes, Demeter and Persephone, further underscore the sense of tragic irony.

The obsessive travel motif here takes on regressive characteristics as Walter Faber, the pragmatic UNESCO engineer, finds himself unexpectedly impelled, first to the Guatemalan jungle and a confrontation with the primeval scene, then to Italy and Greece and a return to classical antiquity and the world of myths. What seems like a series of chance events turns out to be a fated quest in search of origins, a return to the sources of nature and culture. On the way, he encounters various figurations of death and nothingness which help him discover or retrieve his true being and a meaningful sense of the mystery of life.

The narrative devices in Homo faber may at first appear less complex than those in Stiller. But Frisch's handling of the first-person narration, with its built-in unreliability colored ironically by the presence of a hidden reader (Hanna, the wronged mother), further stresses the specifically tragic irony inherent in retrospective foreshadowings, and deftly pits the apparently accidental against a growing awareness of the workings of fate. Faber's rational or technological approach to life leads him to interpret exceptional events and coincidences in light of the law of probability, as chance or contingency, as occurrences to be reassuringly accounted for in statistical terms. He would never admit, at least not in the early stages, that a higher necessity might be at work, and that this bizarre string of coincidences represents instead the rigorous concatenations of a fate that leads him to incest with his daughter Sabeth, whose existence had never been revealed to him, and for whose tragic death he must hold himself responsible.

The theme of incest, the age-old prohibition, unavoidably recalls Greek tragedy and the story of Oedipus, whose myth brings home, among other things, the paradox of insight and blindness. Frisch obviously set out to tap the resources of Greek mythology. Hanna as a young girl dreamed, we are told, of traveling through the world like Antigone, leading a blind old man. There are allusions to other figures: the Erinyes vengefully pursuing the guilty, Agamemnon murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, the keen memory of his having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. The metaphor of blindness occurs repeatedly in Faber's account. He feels “like a blind man”; he is perceived by Hanna as “stone blind.” The mythical reference becomes almost explicit when Faber, horrified by what he now knows, yearning for self-obliteration, contemplates blinding himself. “I sat in the dining car thinking. Why not take these two forks, hold them upright in my hands and let my head fall, so as to get rid of my eyes?”

As Walter Faber and Sabeth, having met on an ocean liner, set out on their “honeymoon,” which carries them from Paris all the way to Greece, he at first does not know that she is the daughter of Hanna, the woman he almost married twenty years earlier, much less that he is her father. All along the journey through Provence, Tuscany, and the region of Rome, museums and archaeological sites are reminders of mythological antiquity. Though Faber claims to be insensitive (“blind,” as he puts it) to art and ignorant about mythology, he is nonetheless impressed by Etruscan sarcophagi, by a relief representing the birth of Venus with a lovely flute player at her side, above all by the stone head of a sleeping Erinys who, in a certain light, seems disturbingly awake and quite wild. But the most revealing classical reference, a clear proof that his self-proclaimed blindness is only partial, occurs after the “homecoming” to Greece, when the whole truth is about to be known. As Faber takes a bath in Hanna's apartment in Athens, he is assailed by the vague fear—no doubt a memory of Clytemnestra's vengeance—that she may enter the bathroom and kill him from behind with an ax.

That Hanna herself should be aware of mythology is of course hardly surprising; she is a trained archaeologist and works in an archaeological institute. She feels at home, as it were, with Oedipus, the sphinx, and the Erinyes. But the vengeful Erinyes play a more personal and threatening role in her life. For Hanna is not without her own heavy guilt. She has, after all, withheld the truth about Faber's fatherhood from him. Worse still is her particular form of hubris, for she has transgressed a natural law by her desire to have a child without a father, one that would belong exclusively to her. This possessiveness appears as a fundamental protest against all men, against the very presence of the male principle in the world. So as not to have any children with the man she did finally marry (Faber's old friend!), she had gone to the extreme of having herself sterilized.

Hanna's story illustrates, in her own terms, an essential gender conflict. Man sees himself, as she explains, as “master of the world”; woman is forced, though to no avail, to learn “the language of the master.” This feminine resentment goes beyond the problem of interpersonal relations. Hanna feels that as long as God is masculine, woman is “the proletarian of Creation,” that she is downtrodden, disinherited, exploited. The sources of her anger lie deep. There is the memory of the time when, as a child, she wrestled with her brother, was thrown on her back, and made a vow never to love a man. Her anger was in fact not with her brother but with God, who made girls weaker than boys. She even founded a secret girl's club dedicated to abolishing Jehovah.

Hanna's story has an implicit mythological referent. She herself cannot be unaware of the legend of the Greek earth goddess Demeter, worshipped as a mother goddess, and of her daughter Persephone, also known as Kore, the maiden who was abducted and made queen of the Underworld by the god Hades, while Demeter, in maternal grief and wrath, made the earth barren.

At the novel's literal level, Faber's compulsive rationality makes him a limited, flat, singularly unheroic character. His addiction to machines and gadgets (electric razors, typewriters, cars, turbines, robots, movie cameras) determines his outlook to the point where technological metaphors color his perceptions. As he helps Sabeth climb down a ladder in the ship's engine room, he compares the feel of her strong and slender hips to that of the steering wheel in his Studebaker. His is a case of impeded vision: the movie camera becomes a substitute for reality. But this willed blindness is also the symptom of a pride that takes on a distinct anthropocentric, misogynic, and Western hegemonic form. Faber is appalled by the travel companion in the jungle who keeps talking about the decline of the white race. He himself is convinced not merely that a technological profession is a “masculine profession” and science a “masculine monopoly,” but that man-the-engineer can and must be the master of nature. His Swiss background makes him reject the German notion of a “master race”; yet he comes close to something objectionable in the way he praises the idea of population control, and even goes so far as to state that man must snatch procreation out of God's hands.

A whole world of values and meanings is closed to Faber. His lack of interest in dreams, folklore, literature, art history; his lack of imagination and his indifference to myths and demons (he only knows of Maxwell's demon, so named after the famous British physicist)—all this is symptomatic of a broader absence of curiosity whose worst feature is his indifference to the other, whether women or “natives.” Contempt and fear characterize his attitude toward what he views as the primitive. His horror of elemental forces is telling. His encounter with the slime of the jungle is for him a traumatic experience. Revealingly, he compares the mire of fertile decay to pools of menstrual blood, and later remembers the French saying that death and the earth are both feminine (la mort est femme, la terre est femme), an association foreshadowing the Demeter motif.

The critique of the technological ideology is appropriately formulated by a woman. Hanna tells Faber that he has lost a spontaneous, unmediated relationship to reality, that the technologist's “worldlessness” is the negative skill of so ordering the world that one need not experience it. She sums it up with the somewhat enigmatic statement that technologists attempt to “live without death.” What the statement implies is that Faber, living by the time of clocks and timetables, understands neither the qualitative nature of temporality, nor the value of life made precious by an awareness of vulnerability and death.

Hanna acutely senses what the reader comes to realize, namely that Faber's account is given in bad faith. He repeatedly claims not to have known, to have been surprised by events, when all along it is clear that he suspected, yet falsified and justified the unjustifiable. The unreliable first-person singular narrative is a particularly useful resource, for it allows Frisch to project a consciousness at the same time self-deceptive and self-revealing.

Faber's bad faith as the “technological” man, willfully indifferent to mystery and mythology, is brought into sharp relief in the bathroom scene in Hanna's apartment, when he so dramatically conjures up the memory of Agamemnon's death. But to be self-deceptive also means to be partially aware. Ironically, it is self-deception that makes the revelatory moment possible. And revelation can lead to conversion, even if it comes almost too late.

Such a conversion and ensuing new vision are prepared in Homo faber by the early, unsettling experience of the forced landing and the confrontation with the jungle. Nature seems to take its revenge against arrogant technology as Faber faces the elemental slime, the inhuman heat, the vultures, the stench of fecundity and oxymoronic “blossoming decay.” The apparently senseless proliferation of life and death offends him as though the jungle's ability to swallow up everything meant the defeat of Western culture and the surrender to nothingness. All along the novel's trajectory he encounters figurations of death: his own death-mask face in the lavatory of the Houston airport, the death's-head laugh of the terminally ill Professor O., the funeral mound near the via Appia, the tomb of Caecilia Metella in the Roman Campagna, his vivid yearning for nonbeing.

The real conversion occurs late in the novel, after Sabeth's accidental death, when Faber, returning from a second visit to the jungle, stops over a few days in Havana. This Cuban episode culminates in a revelation; it also brings about a transformation and a resolve. The revelation has to do with the sudden awareness of the luminous beauty of the indigenous population: their flowing walk, their voluptuous skin, their provocative hips, their animal-like sexuality. What Faber experiences is more than erotic desire: it is rather a kind of metaphysical lust rooted in his sense of inadequacy. His sexual fiasco in Cuba only intensifies a new appetite for intimacy with the world. Faber discovers the epiphanic joy of being here and now, and for the first time catches himself in the act of singing the praises of life.

The psychological metamorphosis and craving for deeper harmony with the physical world is typified by Faber's newly acquired metaphorical verve. With Sabeth, he used to play a verbal ping-pong game of inventing metaphors to describe the landscape, but he always lost the competition. Now he continues to play the game of metaphors by himself and has become good at it; and this metaphoric perception of reality, panharmonic in its nature, is closely bound up with Faber's new resolve to which he himself alludes in terse, poetic terms:

My resolve to live differently.
My joy.

The lesson and the resolve bring the novel to its full-circle conclusion. As Faber flies back to Athens, this time not like the blind man he was when he flew out of New York in the snowstorm, he vows never to fly again. His wish now is to walk on the earth, to smell hay and the resin of the pine trees, to “grasp the earth.” The yearning is for the hic et nunc of a close embrace of life, the celebration of some vast nuptials that might help him conjure away the time by which he has lived. This epiphanic view of life brings Faber close to an almost religious vision: the experience of “eternity in the instant.”

We return to the mythical dimension of the book. It is a return indeed: the cyclical and recurrent time of myth, holding up hope for retrieval, renewal, and survival, stands in opposition to the linear, progress-oriented time, which is homo faber's time of obsoleteness and supersedence. Faber's ultimate rejection of what he himself qualifies as the “American way of life” must be interpreted in this light. The denunciation of this “linear” way of life is to be read not as a political, but as a psychological and moral critique of modern Western society, and thus as a form of self-denunciation. The gawky “Coca Cola people,” the backslapping gadget-lovers and vitamin-eaters who stand with their whiskey glasses and broad grins at cocktail parties and view themselves as the protectors of the world, become the emblem of our technological world with its obsessive notion of efficiency and fake youthfulness, its cosmeticized corpses, its self-blinding optimism spread out “like a neon carpet in front of the night and death.”

Faber ultimately seems to agree with the young travel companion in the jungle who kept chattering about the decline of Western technological man. This notion of a fall from a sense of plenitude and nonfragmented reality probably accounts for the novel's pervasive recourse to mythology. Hanna, who lives in daily professional contact with the figures of myth, explains that her archaeological job means patching up fragments. “I stick the past together.” The image makes sense at the literal level. But it is also a symbol of a more fundamental attempt to rescue forms and values from time and ruination—a typically modern struggle for spiritual survival summed up in a memorable line of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

The question of modernity is central to Frisch's work, though he voices it in a less strident and theoretically less provocative fashion than some of his contemporaries. Throughout his writings he posits a void that asks to be filled, a negativity that signals the need for an absent plenitude. At the core, there is the awareness of fragmentation and discontinuity. In spite of the scope and flow of Frisch's prose, one may appropriately speak of an esthetic of the fragment. In some remarkable pages of the first Sketchbook, Frisch in fact developed a brief theory of modernity based on the preference for the fragment and the sketch. He argued that a late civilization such as ours, suspicious of the sterility of closed forms, puts its trust instead in open-endedness, momentum, and the dissolution of inherited forms.

The use of the diary form, with its mobile present indicative, is not limited to the sketchbooks. In his fiction as well, Frisch repeatedly exploits the stylistic and thematic resources of the diary and the notebook which allow him to stress the elusive, the transformational, the polyvalent. Hence, the special significance of the Hermes figure appearing in the form of lecture material at the center of Gantenbein. For Hermes, as the passage explains, is a figure of “multiple meanings,” a vieldeutige Gestalt: god of thieves, rogues, and merchants, notorious for his craftiness and cunning, Hermes is the joyful bringer of good luck and opportunities, but also a misleader (literally seducer, Irreführer), a silent guide of dreams and messenger of the gods, as well as the invisible harbinger of death. Polyvalent rather than ambivalent, the figure of Hermes, as evoked in Gantenbein, corresponds at the mythological level to the notion of homo ludens, and participates in the playful subversion of myths.

Such playfulness is hardly frivolous. The unheroic, strictly human dimension requires special courage. Already in The Chinese Wall of 1947, Frisch called for the end of “heroes,” who always are on the side of violence and lies. The really courageous task was to resist the seductions of might and murderous victories in order to become what is most difficult: a human being. Once again, one is reminded of Dr. Rieux's refusal, in Camus's The Plague, to side with heroes and saints; of his low-key, yet proud desire to be both less and more: “être un homme.” How different this rings from Malraux's haughty affirmation that man's true fatherland is where the darkest clouds gather. Frisch, like Camus, prefers to be more modest: “Our homeland is the human being”—“unsere Heimat ist der Mensch.”