[In the following essay, Koepke finds parallels between several of Frisch's narrators and protagonists.]

Herr Geiser, the narrator and protagonist of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979; Eng. Man in the Holocene),¹ is in a situation customary for Max Frisch's first-person narrators: he is in a place from which he cannot escape and is forced to take stock of his existence—past, present, and future. Stiller was confined to a comfortable Swiss prison and compelled to hear what others had to say about him; Walter Faber sits in the shade of an airplane in the Mexican desert and begins, very reluctantly, to become aware of his repressed past; in a more urbane way, the famous writer Max spends a weekend at a seaside resort in Montauk to relax with a woman companion and get away from his duties, but he cannot help thinking of past relationships with women as the hours of the present fly by without much weight. Now Herr Geiser, a widower and a retired businessman from Basel, lives alone in a house outside a village of the remote Ticino valley, and it has been raining for days. The only road connection seems to have been interrupted.

Usually the world, both past and present, penetrates into the prison or retreat of these narrators. Typically, the Tagebuch 1966-1971 (1972; Eng. Sketchbook 1966-1971) describes Frisch's country house near Berzona, in Ticino, whither he returns periodically from his many trips to the Soviet Union, the United States, and major European cities such as Rome, Paris, Zürich, and Berlin. Into this very quiet valley, where urban visitors are shocked by the calm,² the present world and its history never cease to penetrate: young visitors repeatedly confront the aging writer with their uncertainties and their urges to change the world; disturbing news is brought by neighbors or via radio and television: the military dictatorship in Greece, the war in Israel (1967), Russian tanks in Prague (1968). The valley itself, however, seems to withdraw from the present. Its only worthwhile economy, “basket work” (Strohflechterei), has become obsolete since the appearance of Japanese goods at the markets in Milan. Early in 1971 the house is buried in snow: “Only television, Televisione Svizzera Italiana, confirms that the world is still going on,” and since everything continues elsewhere as before, “There's no need for panic.”³ There is no reason for groundless fear, for deeper anxiety. The Sketchbook, devoted most of all to a commentary on the dangerous times, the problems of the youth revolt, and the phenomena of aging—especially through the various episodes of the Voluntary Death Association—ends with a meditation on a granite column in the Berzona house: how it came to be made in the first place, its relative timelessness, its place within its natural environment, its place in the author's life as well (see p. 533 of this issue). After all this rather hectic commotion and these abrupt changes, a durable item, comforting yet at the same time opening up perspectives which might make human life and history appear very transitory and insignificant.

Man in the Holocene takes up these open questions. Herr Geiser's house seems identical with that in Berzona, and certain phrases are integrated from the Sketchbook: for instance, the “basket work.” The idea that the house and the village might be cut off from the rest of civilization is transferred from winter to summer. Herr Geiser, in his musings, is glad that there is only rain and not snow. This time, however, the forced retreat outside the current of history does not lead to the narrator's confrontation with his own past—not directly, in any case. Indeed, memory itself is the problem. Herr Geiser is retired, and it does not really matter whether he is cut off from history: “Geiser has time to spare” (3). Time has changed from one-dimensional clock time to an endless or at least indefinite duration. During the emergency, the clock on the church tower stops, and Herr Geiser becomes confused about the weekdays, until he feels that it does not really matter. However, the “panic” which seizes him, the gradual inner terror and anxiety, is real and has several dimensions. In Frisch's Voluntary Death Association the members agree to commit suicide when it is certain that they have become senile. This is largely a question of memory, of attention span, and of mental flexibility. Herr Geiser, like Frisch's examples in the Sketchbook, fights desperately for his survival—that is, the survival of his memory: “No knowledge with memory” (6), no identity without memory. His confrontation with his own lonely self does not evoke past events and guilt feelings toward other human beings, but instead signals a struggle to survive as a conscious and rational human being. In this increasingly desperate struggle, basic questions of human existence and of life and death emerge. As the rain emergency takes its expected benign course until the road is reopened and everything returns to normal, Herr Geiser withdraws more and more from the world of human affairs. Television, Frisch's link to the world, stops functioning altogether in Herr Geiser's case. The black-and-white figures turn into streaks and disappear. He ceases to communicate with other people and finally answers neither the doorbell nor the phone.

This withdrawal runs parallel with a decrease in attention to the present and in short-term memory. The shorter and longer notations of which the story is composed change from actual descriptions of the present to its reconstruction: Herr Geiser thinks at one point, for example, that since he is wearing a hat, he must have wanted to go out. Progressively he loses his grip on the present; it slips away. His notes and observations, which try to pin down reality, become tentative suppositions.

At the same time, Herr Geiser sees himself in an ever-wider context. Survival at first is an entirely practical consideration. Does he have enough food for an emergency? Matches? What should he take, if he has to leave the house? But then, at an inn, instead of asking for matches, he asks what day of the week it is; later he gives away the contents of his freezer when the electricity is off. He begins to read about past disasters in the region—floods, mudslides which have buried entire villages—and about the biblical Flood and creation. From the history of natural disasters and the determination of the people to rebuild and resettle, Herr Geiser goes back to the history of the earth, its geologic periods, its rock formations, the appearance and disappearance of oceans, mountains, forests, dinosaurs. He remembers Iceland, where he had visited a long time ago, and the very elemental scenery there: glaciers, volcanoes, life on a new volcanic island: “Probably the fish will outlive us, and the birds” (53). The human race, a very late arrival on earth, might soon be extinct; older types of animals such a fish or birds will perhaps survive the catastrophes which eradicate human life.

So far, Herr Geiser assures himself, there have been no human victims in his valley; the human race will survive this time. As the large perspectives become clearer to him, however, he grows more and more alienated from his present environment. To support himself in his new orientation, he pastes essential items of knowledge to the wall. He first copies them from books and the encyclopedia, but then turns to the method of cutting out pages. He creates a new environment to assure himself of survival through knowledge, but then he reaches the limit where the walls are full and he is unable to find specific items on the wall. At this stage, not only is he glad that nobody visits him, but he also removes the portrait of his dead wife.

Just as the novels about Stiller and Walter Faber were accounts of ill-fated attempted escapes, so too does Herr Geiser here try to leave. He climbs up a mountain pass in an effort to reach the next town. He reaches the pass but then gets lost in the fog and turns back, lucky to survive. Increasingly, his notations and reflections are repetitions. He repeats himself probably without noticing it. Thus more and more emphasis is given to essential matters such as: “The Bible and the fresco of the Virgin Mary do not prove that God will continue to exist once human beings, who cannot accept the idea of a creation without a creator, have ceased to exist; the Bible was written by human beings” (78). In other words: the human perspective on nature, determined by religion and the need for a creator, may not at all agree with natural processes; it is a projection, a hypothesis which will die with the human race. Moreover, “Only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes” (79). Catastrophic events appear that way to human survivors; they are part of natural processes. Herr Geiser, searching for a path from his mountain pass, may consider himself the last surviving human being, trying to preserve the memory of the human race but realizing how much this memory of human history, even of the prehistoric existence of the human race, is really a short-term memory. When he decides, “Geiser has no wish to leave the valley” (84), and asks himself, “What use would Basel be to him?” (83), he consents to an inevitable fate and ceases to impose his human will on fateful events, which happen anyway.

The climax of the story, coinciding with the end of the natural emergency, remains implicit, since it directly affects Herr Geiser's ability to express himself and to communicate: a stroke. He can only try to reconstruct events which he does not remember, and more and more he turns in verbal circles, repeating and trying to find himself. Suddenly events from fifty years ago come back: for example, a dangerous episode with his brother Klaus. His daughter Corinne comes to look after him: “Why does she talk to him as if he were a child?” (106). Why indeed does she treat him like a child? Yes, he relapses into childhood; time is going backward, and he understands that he does not matter, that the human race does not matter: “All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory” (107). The village and its environment, as this concluding passage shows, is unchanged, untouched. The human race is transitory. Herr Geiser has made the switch from a human, an individual, perspective to that of nature, which needs no names, no words.

Though the rest should be silence, the story goes beyond Herr Geiser's perspective. He is the narrator, but there is a good reason why his narrative is not in the first person, unlike those of previous Frisch narrators. Max in Montauk had already alternated somewhat surprisingly between “he” and “I.” Here Herr Geiser is seen in a double vision, from the inside and with a distant ironic eye from without, the eye of the severe judge of senility in the Sketchbook. Herr Geiser's struggle against the end of life approaches both the sublime and the ridiculous. He regresses as much as he progresses. While confirming the symptoms, Frisch seems to alter his verdict on senility, or at least on the state of consciousness of old age. One might argue that Herr Geiser is just another one of the characters of the Sketchbook who do not want to admit that their time has come. That would be misleading, however, although Man in the Holocene, like all other narrative texts by Frisch, contains a good dose of irony and self-criticism. Aging is rather the gradual process of retreating from an active participation in human affairs, precipitated by the experience of a Kafkaesque imprisonment without escape. Whether the novella opens the way to a new idea of death as an end of human consciousness and a return to nature, which needs no words, is a matter for meditation.

Frisch's first stories were shaped by the experience of nature. His wartime and postwar experience was apocalyptic, above all in The Great Wall of China: the human race was not able to destroy itself. Again and again, existential or even mythical structures emerged behind his accounts of historical conflicts, as in Andorra, The Firebugs,, and Stiller. This relationship of human history and a permanent framework of existence, however it may be defined, has always involved in Frisch's case the idea of life stages: childhood, youth, middle age, old age, and their accompanying perspectives. It seems that the perspective of old age goes beyond the life cycle of human beings and confronts it with the life and death of inorganic and organic matter and nature. It is a meditation on the life cycle of the human race as a whole. Herr Geiser does not speak directly of the threat of atomic bombs or global wars. On the surface, Man in the Holocene is a very private story, autobiographical in setting, without pretense, not claiming to treat global problems. It is a retreat from the claim of the writer to be a mouthpiece of society. This narrator speaks for himself, yet, within this idyllic setting, he again takes up fundamental problems.

The religious dimension is more openly included than before. Herr Geiser and the author avoid any dogmatic statements. They concede the need of a divine presence for the human race, but they question whether nature knows of God or requires a deity. Religion is a purely human concern, and so are language, knowledge, memory, even survival. This dimension, like the others, brings into focus what the story may be about: the question of a fundamental orientation and of human values.

The ending is open and ironic. The author avoids exerting any direct influence on the reader. One should not pity Herr Geiser, nor should one laugh about him; rather, a mixture of the two is appropriate. One should also be aware of new experiences open to people of a certain age. The reader's “normal” perspective is tested: he is supposed to see himself in a new light. At the same time, the notion of “action” changes. The account of a few days in the life of a retiree who reads, walks to the village, tests his strength and memory, and does a few silly things is not very exciting in itself. It is the style which contains the action: notations, like diary entries, but written down increasingly to preserve continuity and the sense of reality. Though the conditions of life create no cause for alarm to other people, they test Herr Geiser's strength and prove to be too much for him. The irrationality of this rationality may be part of old age; the novella is, in any event, the story of the perception of reality by an old person for whom time and matter, in a fashion, become transparent, but who locks himself away from communication with other people and transcends the categories of ordinary life. Is this senility? Is it a way of life to be rejected or to be accepted?

The appeal of Max Frisch has always been in his characters, who are outsiders yet experience archetypal situations, as well as in his open endings. He treats his characters with both irony and sympathy. This double-edged attitude is more perceptible than ever in Man in the Holocene. The archetypal situation is that of the human being sliding back into complete loneliness and confronting the rest of nature as the lone survivor of the species. The ending is definite in social terms: Herr Geiser will be confined to a home, where he will be cared for, and he will lose the ability to make his own decisions. The same ending is uncertain in terms of the human species, however: will mankind survive Herr Geiser's loss of memory? Analogously, is God dead if the human race is extinct?

Just like the earlier Sketchbook 1946-1949, the Sketchbook 1966-1971 contains quite a few outlines for future stories, especially about aging. It is doubtful, however, that their author still has the same perspective on such ideas as he did fifteen years ago; time has done its work. Time, which seems to be in suspension during the retreat of the narrators, suddenly shows its power. It changes the present to a past and makes the past appear more real than the present. It makes facing the future impossible. The idyllic appearance of the village survives, but for Herr Geiser, life has become profoundly threatening. This was so for Stiller and Walter Faber as well, for different reasons, but the threat for Herr Geiser is exclusively age, time itself. This is why Frisch's story does not need “action” and can be of the utmost simplicity.

Herr Geiser is not a first-person narrator. His individuality, his identity is in doubt, and his experiences are not experiences that can be called “personal”: they are everybody's story, inevitably. In this instance Frisch has been able to give esthetic integration to a story of disintegration and a personal style to an anonymous story. The feat is a real balancing act, and the reader wonders where one may go from here. Be that as it may, Man in the Holocene is an example of a very surprising pattern of continuity and variation in an author's life and career.

Notes

1. Max Frisch, Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1979; Man in the Holocene, Geoffrey Skelton, tr., New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Subsequent quotes are from the U.S edition and are indicated by page number.

2. Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1966-1971, Geoffrey Skelton, tr., San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, p. 12: “Town visitors immediately exclaim, ‘Oh what air!’ and then, rather nervously, ‘And how quiet!’”

3. Ibid., p. 279.