VIRGINIA WOOLF, "A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN": OR RATHER, "A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN".

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: OR RATHER, A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN.

52 Tavistock Square, London, WC1, a plaque now remembers Virginia Woolf (*1882- †1941), the basement from where she ran, as from 1924, together with her husband, the Hogarth Press, and whether she also had her “writing-room”. We presume that this is where she fine-tuned the final written version of the lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1928, “On Women and Fiction”, to appear in 1929 as “A room of one’s own”, subsequent to be rescued as one of the pillars of modern “feminism”, at least in the realm of literature. Much later, in the year 2004, a bust of Woolf was added to the garden of the square.

We had the pleasure of “co-habitating” with the spirit of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square (not forgetting that of Charles Dickens, who lived in Tavistock House between 1851-1860), as the writer of these lines occupied an office, thanks to an “Honorary Position” a the University of London, between 1988-90, on the street of the square looking straight onto Woburn Place. Bloomsbury indeed, as our daily rhythm oscillated between a brief check of the post arriving at my office in Tavistock Square, a brief interlude in the garden of the square, and then a visit to the British Library, to work there, entering either from the Senate House side, or from the Great Russell Street side. The routine extended itself onto the 1990 and early 1991, including a rather rushy and fragmentary consultation of some of the main literary opus of Woolf, above all Orlando: A Biography (1928), and The Waves (1931), as appropriate as it ought to have been, in the main Reading Room of the British Library. It is precisely there where Virginia Woolf consulted the sources related to women and literature since the 16^th century:

“… a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?”¹

 

 

Let us underline that charming homage to the British Library (then hosted by the British Museum, nowadays in Euston Road, near St-Pancras), and reiterate our thanks to the personnel of that honourable institution, perhaps the most enlightening and productive “office” the author of these lines has ever had, from 1981 onward, and which has helped writers, artists, scholars and politicians from all over the world since its first opened.

Years ago, while scribbling away on a notebook the next authors who were to appear in the blog, I did engrave the name of Virginia Woolf, even taking into account that my familiarity with her literary opus should be described as rather tentative and incomplete. The fact that she appears now, much earlier than planned, is all the fault of the Greeks, as always. In 2023 I received an email, which always begins with a vibrant χαῖρε!, from Antigone. An open forum for classics², a wonderful website dedicated to the celebration (and re-interpretation) of the Greek-Roman backbone of our so-called Western world, which keeps being eroded from the inside. It was an invitation to read an essay of Virginia Wolf On Not Knowing Greek³, published first in 1923.

I was all astonishment, as I began to be assaulted by the beauty and the rhythm of such love-declaration to Classical Greek, a text whose flow does indeed reverberate the “stream of consciousness”, a narrative device which she, together with Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and James Joyce (1882-1941), was to pioneer, helping her to be considered, at least by some, as one of the most innovative novelists of the 20^th century. Above all, Classical Greek continues to constitute a refuge, for everyone wanting to be exorcised of the malheur and the aimless forwardness of the epoch, be either that of Woolf, or ours. What the Germans at the most appropriate call “Weltschmerz” (badly translated as “the pain of being in the world”), was for the Ancient Greeks a normal, inescapable, unlamented “natural state of the world”:

“There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”⁴

But it is the language in itself that perseveres, at one level the rhythm, at other the “compactness”:

“Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole ting of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the expression. Shelley (Percy Bysshe Shelley, *1792-†1822) takes twenty-one words in English to translate thirteen words of Greek.

πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἔρως ἅψηται. ⁵ (13 words)

…For everyone, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love. (21 words)

Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled.”

The key problem in Shelley’s translation is the word ἄμουσος, which he adroitly transforms into “undisciplined”, μουσος being related to the “Muses” (Μοῦσαι, the nine inspirational goddesses of the arts and science), ἄ acting as an “inverting” prefix, “those not inhaling the spirit of the “Muses”. In German we have the adjective “musisch”, derived straight from Greek, hence “unmusisch” would be a person who, alas, has not been permeated by the “Muses”. Thus, a German version, aspiring at the same “compactness” would be:

“Alle werden Dichter, selbst die früher Unmusischen, alsbald denen Liebe anfällt.“(11 words)

An even shorter version, replacing “Unmusischen” for “Unfähigkeit', and getting rid of one article and one personal pronoun, would be:

„Alle werden Dichter, alsbald Liebe anfällt, trotz früher Unfähigkeit'' (9 words)

A possible English version:

“Everyone, self those earlier unenlightened, becomes a poet, as soon Eros imperates…” (12 words)

In Spanish:

“Todos devienen poetas, incluso aquellos que eran incapaces, apenas Eros impere...” (11 words).

Yet the version which upholds the compactness of the Greek original and does not alter the substance is in Latin, provided by a Latinist, an acquaintance of the writer of these lines:

AMŌRE QVICVMQVE RAPIĀTVR, QVAMQVAM LONGISSIME A MVSIS AFVERIT, ARTIFEX FIT.  (10 words)

But was Shelley perhaps, by enlarging the number of words, just trying to extend the fragrance, to enhance the enjoyment of the “concentrated substance” contained in the Greek original? Or, as he might have been “paid” by the number of words contained in his opus, did he simply stretch the phrase as far as possible, in order to get more money? Let us be magnanimous.

So it is indeed possible to force other languages to abandon a little bit of their carcass (perhaps superfluous), but we are pushed towards such an attempt by the Greek language. It is she who is illuminating the path to be entered to obtain “semantic concentration” …

Hence Woolf’s insistence on going to the original:

“It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations. Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and associations.“⁶

“And, although it seems ungracious to add this when we have owned so much indebtedness to translators, some knowledge of the language is a possession not to be done without. With the best will in the world the translators are bound to stamp their individuality or that of their age upon the text. Our minds are so full of echoes that a single word such as “aweary” will flood a whole page for an English reader with the wrong associations. And such is the power of the Greek language that to know even a little of it is to know that there is nothing more beautiful in the world.“⁷

The last phrase “… nothing more beautiful in the world…” could sound nowadays as an excessive romantic over-appraisal. Yet that eulogy, formulated in the 1920s, has not lost its pertinence. Even more, it has been retaken and popularised, hence reaching larger audiences, over the last years. One example is the considerable success (more so taking into account the subject) of a delightful book (more than 300.000 copies sold) written by the Italian hellenist and essayist, Andrea Marcolongo, “La Lingua Geniale. 9 ragioni per amare il greco” (2016), The ingenious language. Nine epic reasons to love Greek” “ , translated into many languages, and well-received everywhere in spite of some shortcomings and errors. 

 

 

A very much recommendable Italian television programme, Otto e Mezzo, la 7, broadcasted on the 3^rd of January of 2017 the refreshing encounter, LUNGA VITA ALLE LINGUE MORTE, under the supervision of Lilli Gruber, between Marcolongo, the Latinist and professor at Oxford, Nicola Gardini, author of a book also successful, “Viva il latino, Storia et Belleza di una lingua inutile” (2016), and the art historian Vittorio Sgarbi. (…) Gardini will publish in 2021 “Viva il Greco. Alla scoperta della lingua madre”, to underline, once more, what he said in that television programme, “… il lavoro sul il latino y il greco è davvero un addestramento a la densità del significato…”, motivated by “un desiderio de parola ultima…”

 

 

I cannot but insist upon every reader of this blog to watch that programme (available in Internet), even if their Italian was too basic, and listen to that joyous, enlightening exchange between connoisseurs and amateurs of the classical languages, and how the supposedly “dead languages” help to understand the whirlwinds of our epoch, the fate of Italy and Europe, and even that of the Catholic Church. 

Yet this Classical Greek tsunami keeps expanding its waves. Less than two months ago, Le Figaro, one of the major French newspapers, carry a long article, entitled “Why Ancient Greek is essential to enjoy happiness” (free translation), in which Laure de Chantal, “écrivaine et agrégée de lettres classiques”, “Si vous faites du grec, vous serez toujours heureux!”, “If you do Ancient Greek, you will always be happy!”. 

 

 

 

Whether this propaganda for Ancient Greek as the ultimate panacea for the malheurs of our epoch reflects to a large extent the current French crisis and national disorientation, which looms becoming one of the most earthshaking of the “5^th Republic”, remains a valid question mark. Whatever the answer, the embrace of Ancient Greek, either seeking refuge or seeking wisdom, emerges more and more as the last anchor in a so-called Western World which has lost its compass.

DO MATERIAL CONDITIONS NECESSARILY DETERMINE THE POSSIBILITY AND THE QUALITY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION?

A first impression, after reading Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, is that the English writer was adamant that only “economic independence” would guarantee that a woman could express herself, and be herself, in the unpredictable industry of “writing fiction”.

“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a

conclusion upon these two questions – women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. ⁸

Yet there is more than the postulate of a mechanic synergy between material conditions and literary creation. It is also a somewhat whimsical yet relevant and humour-blessed panorama of the absurdities uttered on women and their supposed inabilities over the last centuries, including Napoleon and Benito Mussolini, the latter finding women incapable, the former despising them. No wonder that these two “war lords” ended their career under lugubrious circumstances. On the “other side” were both Dr. Samuel Johnson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, admiring women and seeking their companionship, recognising their cogitations as no way underneath the level of men.

Woolf goes further, that of the two news which landed more or less at the same time, “votes for women”, and a “legacy of an aunt”, it was the legacy that counted the most. A lesser dependency on men implied also a reappraisal of their role in the world:

 

“The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened I found that she had left me five hundreds pounds a year for ever. Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. (…) So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. (…) I need not flatter any man; ...”⁹

Mrs. Woolf takes a particular interest in the Elizabethan Era, the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), considered by many as the “golden age” in English history, a sort of “English Renaissance”, with considerable achievements at all levels, in literature above all the name William Shakespeare will be engraved in gold.

“...ask the historian (,,,) to describe under what conditions women lived (…) in the time of Elizabeth. For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. ¹⁰

(…) One only has to think of those Elizabethan tombstones will all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms; to realize that no women could have written poetry then.” ¹¹

“Judith Shakespeare” appears, a fictional character created by Virginia Wool, “the sister of William”, to demonstrate that a woman with all the capabilities of the great English writer, could not have been allowed to implement all her talent, she would not be sent to school, that she would, at the end, simply die, forgotten, leaving no written traces of her artistic ambitions.

Albeit material conditions do impact upon artistic creation, it is risky at the utmost to reject the possibility of literary creation emerging even under the direst conditions, be either man or woman. As has been said, even slaves may be touched by the “Muses”, and respond by composing a song or a sonnet, precisely in order to elevate themselves above the misery and the exploitation.. A recent book by the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff, appropriately titled “Shakespeare's Sisters” disagree at strength with Woolf’s assessment of the Elizabethan epoch, proving that that era did indeed produce its share of great women writers. 

 

Let us now jump into the nineteenth century, where we will see the emergence of the British “middle class”.

“… which Miss Emily Davies a litter later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them. If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, ‘women never have an half four … that they can call their own’ – she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. ‘How she was able to effect all this’, her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have in the general sitting-room, subject to all kind of interruptions. “¹²

So, notwithstanding the lack of “a room of one’s own”, Jane Austen was capable of writing great novel. Was she perhaps just an exception?

It is in the comparison between Jane Austen (*1775- †1817 ), whom Mrs Woolf admires all heartedness, to the point of comparing her to the great Ancient Greeks, and Charlotte Brontë (*1816- †1855), where we could pinpoint the seeds of Woolf’s final formulation of his theory about women’s writing, but also her contradictions:

“One might say, I continued, laying the book beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages (Jane Eyre) had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks the jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she (Charlotte) will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly (…) She was at war with her lot.”¹³

That Charlotte Brontë had genius was recognised first by William Makepeace Thackeray, who eulogised Jane Eyre as “the work of a great genius”. I happen to disagree with Mrs. Woolf, to the point perhaps of abandoning my politeness. What the Bloomsbury lady says is that (my reformulation):

“… Jane Austen wrote, abandoning herself to simplicity and spontaneity (and humour), as a woman, without any existentialist Angst. Charlotte Brontë wrote as a woman, who kept complaining about the world treated her, hence…”

Yet where then not sufficient, solid arguments for Charlotte, and most women, to complain about the way society was treating them? And to let that transpires through a novel is to be welcomed.

Woolf’s then begins to formulate her view of how women should “exist” in literature:

“But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place. It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sees are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring our and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? ¹⁴

This is a powerful statement, and nowadays perhaps even more relevant. It is followed by another crucial warning:

“Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It its fatal to be a a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman.”¹⁵

One might be tempted to interpret the above-quoted as an indirect appeal for some kind of “androgyny" ”, yet I believe it is just another way of underlying, again, that simple, unequivocal appeal for anyone venturing into the varied avenues of the belles lettres, at times thorny, at times flowery: when you write, you should forget about your sex.

It must be said that Wool’s tour de force through the steppes and the mountains of “Women and Fiction” circumscribed itself, mostly, to the English-speaking word. In particular the French-speaking world will provide, not doubt whatsoever, a more complex, and perhaps even more intriguing panorama. From the 16^th century, French women writers (albeit almost always coming from the aristocracy, be either the well-endowed or the less fortunate regarding property and cash) would play a key role in the emergence and development of the French novel.

Even the way Mrs. Woolf used the English language does provide difficulties for other languages. The very expression “of one’s own” is almost untranslatable in many languages. In German, for example, the usual translation is “Ein Zimmer für sich allein”, which, retranslated into English, means in fact “a room for oneself alone”. Far away from the emphasis on possession, of “property”, evident in the English original, though Woolf does not specify throughout the whole essay whether that “room” should be legally “owned” by the woman.

Summa summarum, rather “A life of one’s own”, that writing would be more inspiring, more enlightening and could reach peaks of spontaneous, contagious beauty, if it is rooted in a life constructed beyond sex, beyond false allegiances, beyond fashionable disguises.

Virginia Woolf enjoys the privilege of being re-born incessantly, and sought-after as a feminist of la première heure, very much alive in our epoch. See, for example, a recent article in Le Figaro, France.

Or a most interesting podcast in the London Review of Books, by David Runciman, quite recently:

“This week our review of the greatest essays and essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, “A Room of One’s Own” (…) And how, despite all that, it sill manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.”

Some readers of this blog might ask themselves why did I begin the contribution on Mrs. Woolf by her essay on the Greek language, and not on the one providing the title of the contribution. I wanted to explain why is it that Virginia Woolf appears now, rather than much later, but above all, I wished the reader to understand that only a woman who has bathed herself in that glorious ocean of Ancient Greek, who took possession of the tools provided by that “mother of all languages”, “that were everything began”, “the language of the Gods”, could have written such a splendid and lively essay on the destiny of women, which confirms her status as one of the most intelligent, one of the most original and penetrating female minds of the 20^th century.

JCHK 2024.

1Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own”, Grafton. An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 1977, first edition 1929, Pg. 30. Out underlying.

2https://antigonejournal.com/

3Consult https://antigonejournal.com/2023/on-not-knowing-greek/. First edition 1923.

4Woolf (1923), p. 23.

5Woolf (1923), p. 20. Plato Symposium 196e; the phrase “even if he was formerly uncultured” is a quotation from a lost play of Euripides, Stheneboea (fr. 663)

6Woolf (1923), p. 20.

7THE PERFECT LANGUAGE. Review of the second volume of W.R. Paton’s Greek Anthology (Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1917), Times Literary Supplement 801 (24 May 1917) , following Woolf (1923 ( p. 32).

8Woolf (1929(, PP. 7-8.

9PP. 42-43.

10PP. 43-44.

11Pg. 64.

12Pg. 73.

13Pg. 76.

14Pg. 95.

15Pg. 112.

--

 

MAX FRISCH, HOMO FABER: ON THE PROBABILITY OF THE UNLIKELY

 

MAX FRISCH, HOMO FABER: ON THE PROBABILITY OF THE UNLIKELY




Paris, around the middle of 1993. At that time I used to visit the Bibliothéque Nationale, Richeliu, whose main reading-room is one of the most beautiful in the world. Now that room is only accessible to specialists, as the “main business” of the Bibliothéque Nationale moved to Tolbiac, in the two towers that bear the name of former President François Mitterrand.

                                              Sam Shepard as Homo Faber in the 1991 film

 .........................................................................................................................................................

Between the noble shelves and walls of Richelieu I acquainted a young German lady who, on the one hand, was in the process of pursuing her doctorate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. A few times we went to the lectures of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (*1930-†2004) together. It was - I think - in a small café at the corner of Rue des Petits Champs and Rue Vivienne, about eighty meters from the lateral entrance (Vivienne) to the library, where I mentioned to her that I was reading the novel Homo Faber von Max Frisch. Her face changed in an instant, her eyes grew larger and bulged like fried eggs as she said:

- The vultures! The vultures!

She was referring to the Zopilote (German), the vultures, which play an important role in the scenes in southern Mexico and Guatemala, even acting as “foreshadows” of events to come.

About the vultures and the downfall of the white races.

“What Herbert couldn't stand were the vultures, although as long as we live they don't do anything to us, they just stink, as you would expect from vultures, they are ugly, and you always meet them in droves, you cannot scare them away when they're at work, all honking is in vain, they just flutter, hop around the torn-out carrion without giving up on it (…) Once, when Herbert was sitting at the wheel, he felt a real rage. Suddenly he accelerated into the black pack, right into it and through it, so that there was a whirl of black feathers.

Afterwards we had it on the wheels.

The sweet smell accompanied us for hours until we got over it. The stuff stuck in the tire grooves and we had to work, groove after groove - luckily we had rum! - Without rum, I think we would have turned back - on the third day at the latest - not out of fear, but out of reason.
We had no idea where we are." (1)

Somewhere at the 18th parallel.” (2)

Immediately afterwards comes a paragraph that underlies the author's unique stylistic ability , and, en passant, introduces the thematic background of the novel. What might initially seem to many people to be chatter in a beer-tent, illuminated by many "crazy ideas", is in fact a humorous, funny, but precise portrayal of the world-spirit and world-weariness of that era. And maybe ours too.

“Marcel sang, Il était un petit navire, or he chatted again for half the night: - about Cortez and Montezuma (digestible, because historical fact) and about the downfall of the white race (it was simply too hot and too humid to to contradict), about the catastrophic apparent victory of the Western technician (Cortez as a technician because he had gunpowder) over the Indian soul and what do I know, whole lectures about the inevitable return of the old gods (after the H-bomb has been dropped!) and about that extinction of death (literally!) thanks to penicillin, withdrawal of the soul from all civilized areas of the earth, the soul in the Maquis, etc. Herbert woke up at the word Maquis, which he understood, and asked: What does he say? I said: artist nonsense! And we left him with his theory about America having no future. The American Way of Life: An attempt to cosmeticize life, but life cannot be cosmeticized.

I tried to sleep.

I only exploded when Marcel commented on my work, or rather on UNESCO: the technician as the last version of the white missionary, industrialization as the last gospel of a dying race, standard of living as a replacement for the meaning of life -

I asked him if he was a communist,

Marcel denied it.”(3)

The novel Homo faber. A Report (1957) by the Swiss Max Frisch (*1911-†1991) is one of the most successful German-language novels of the post-war period. Not only a global best-seller, translated into more than 26 languages, but also part of the canon, required reading in school lessons. One could even risk that more than 7 million copies have been sold to date, at least five million in German-speaking countries. Another important novel, Stiller, appeared in 1954.

Two events have brought the author Max Frisch back into the spotlight, right now. In 2022, the correspondence between him and the poet Ingeborg Bachmann (*1926-†1973) was published, a liaison that left deep, perhaps even incurable, traces in both of them.

A few weeks ago the film “Ingebor Bachmann. “Journey into the Desert” (2023) came onto the screen, directed by Margarethe von Trotta, which is largely dedicated to the turbulent relationship between the Austrian writer and the Swiss novelist. A contribution to our blog, in honour of the authoress of Malina, whose short stories inspired us in the early 1970s, has long been planned and will materialize in the next few months.

What is it about? On the surface, the text is about the Swiss Walter Faber, who travelled all over the world in the 1950s as an engineer on behalf of UNESCO, and who will soon reach the age of 50. We begin in New York, where he has an expensive place and an American mistress ("...she knew that I wouldn't get married..."(4). It's snowing, so his flight to Caracas, via Mexico, is delayed. On the plane he meets a German, Herbert, who is on his way to Guatemala, where his brother, Joachim, is said to have already started a tobacco plantation ("I don't like the Germans, although Joachim, my friend, was also German ...“(5). First one propeller stops working, then a second, a “crash-landing” is unavoidable, and in fact everyone survives a “belly-landing” of the “Super-Constellation” without any problems, somewhere in the jungle in southern Mexico. There he will receive news from Hanna, a German “half-Jewish woman (“I called her an enthusiast and an art fairy. But she called me: Homo Faber”(6), with whom he was in a relationship in Switzerland in the 1930s and whom he wanted to marry to get her a Swiss passport (“It was the time when the Jewish passports were canceled”. (7)

Out of respect for those who have not yet read the novel, we will not mention all the key events of the “tragedy” (because in the end it is a reformulation of some ancient Greek tragedies). There are numerous books and essays that critically confront the novel, so we will limit ourselves here to a more personal mise-en-valeur.

Pages 21-56 deal with the events in Mexico and Guatemala. The first time, because there is going to be a  second time, when Walter Faber, after confronting the tragedy and the long-hidden truths, returns to look for some light, for the future, in the traces of the “recent” past. Perhaps the most successful pages of the entire novel (one could even say that they are among the most successful pages of German-language literature of the second half of the 20th century) You simply remain enchanted, narcotised in this - artistically brilliantly reconstructed - landscape of "air like liquid glass". (8)

“All around there is nothing but agaves, sand, the reddish mountains in the distance, further away than one previously estimated, above all sand and more sand, yellowish, the shimmer of the hot air above, air like liquid glass”. (9)

On the way to Guatemala:

“Already in Campeche the heat greeted us with slimy sun and sticky air, the stench of mud decaying in the sun, and when you wipe the sweat from your face it's as if you stink of fish yourself. I said no more. Finally, you no longer wipe your sweat, but sit with your eyes closed and breathe with your mouth closed, your head leaning against a wall, your legs stretched out in front of you.” (10)

 A pause in a “hotel”:

“At least there is a shower in the hotel, a towel that smells of camphor, as usual in these parts, and when you want to take a shower, the finger-long beetles fall out of the moldy curtains- I drowned them, but after a while they kept climbing back out of the drain until I stepped on my heel so I could finally take a shower.”(11)

“We hung out in Palenque for five days. We hung in hammocks, with a beer always within reach, sweating as if sweating were our purpose in life, unable to make any decision, actually quite content because the beer is excellent, Yucateca, better than the beer in the highlands, we hung in our hammocks and drank so that we could keep sweating, and I didn't know what we actually wanted.”8 (…) “You forget everything here.” (12)

Only someone who has visited such landscapes, under those weather conditions, can bring it back to life in such a literary way. In fact, almost all of the “stations” in the text correspond to the journeys endeavored by Max Frisch himself, shortly before the novel was written. And only someone who has experienced this “eternal sweating” under a sticky sun, be it in Mexico and Guatemala, or in North Africa or in Brazil, can judge whether what is described in the novel is simply real. There is no forced or outlandish invention of the imagination. The author of these lines has had the same experience many times, of being paralysed in the "land of eternal sweating", prostrated in a plateau, whose contours are dismantled by the hellish sun, the damp haze, and by all sorts of insects and small (even large) beasts. “Waiting-time” in “no-man’s land”. You become half-blind, you do nothing, you think now and then, but what you think affects the core of your previous life, and the question of “moving on” becomes increasingly shaky and meaningless. All the “corpses in the suitcase of memory” appear again, as if the sweat was slowly but persistently pushing us to the edge of the cliff. “You forget everything here” refers to the present – and only that.

It is a way of seizing a desired brown-green “hell”, rather privileged since good beer is almost always available, “to keep distance”. But in this “hell” Walter Faber encounters his entire past and discovers the previously unknown consequences of his actions at the time. Shortly afterwards he enters his privatissime Inferno, which initially looks like a paradise.

It also acts as a "counterpoint" to the snow and glamour of New York (Studebaker, "Lipstick Red coloured included) and the boat trip to Paris, plus the charming stroll through France, Italy and Greece. No doubt, we have in our hands a very well-conceived novel, although the final version contained important variations from the first.

The amazing thing: We've barely got through (and enjoyed) the first twenty pages, when we have to admit that, thanks to one of the many flash-forwards (13), we are already in possession of the key details of the "story." The engineer Walter Faber will get to know a young woman, who will later die. He will also find out that he is a father and that his daughter (none knows about the blood relationship) will get closer to him on a ship. All events lying far outside statistical probabilities.

Why do we keep reading? Because we are dragged along by the prose, it pulls us forward, it acts like a magnet. The language is simple, sometimes even sparse, but it just flows, it is mostly a colloquial language that reaches and touches us spontaneously, we swim with it freely, alert and curious. But underneath the text there is a patchwork-quilt, the threads of which constantly offer us “position-lights” that have to do primarily with important figures from Greek and Roman mythologies. And not just those. First there is a typewriter (“… I hate handwriting”…), a “Hermes baby”. In the film it is an Olivetti Lettera 22. Hermes, as God's messenger, and we have to assume that according to Faber's mind, which is blinded by technology, even God's postman (at least Zeus) can only deliver his messages to the human beings (and minor Gods) by machine.

Nota bene: The flashbacks and flash-forwards do not disrupt the linear enjoyment of the novel. Quite the opposite.

A “modern” novel that constantly uses cleverly designed flashbacks and flash-forwards to send us crashing through the manifold levels of the present and the past, and whose “second part” (although it only corresponds to a fifth of the text) is a “Diary” written by Walter Faber as he awaits a fateful operation in the hospital in Greece. The last sentence of the novel: “8:05 a.m. They are coming". It is the end, but this “end” turns into a “continuum” since we have no concrete indication that Walter Faber died after all thanks to a botched surgical intervention. “What would have happened if? ... We, as readers, ask ourselves this question right at the beginning of the novel. And much more often after finishing reading.

“The girl with the blonde horsetail.”

Then comes the boat trip from New York to Paris. On board he meets Sabeth, “the girl with the blonde horsetail” (14) He looks for her again in Paris in the Louvre Museum (although he avoids such institutions in principle) and afterwards they decide to embark on an “educational excursion” through southern France, Italy and Greece. Sabeth, resolutely determined to take advantage of this “journey” to teach Homo Faber a taste of Italy that shall not be  reduced to the consumption of Campari.

 

Is the lady in Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" perhaps the source for the design of the figure of the "Girl with the Blonde Horsetail"?

...................................................................................................................................

The most important “signals” appear in Rome, in the Museo Nazionale Romano. Walter Faber seems to be gripped by “art” for the first time. It is The Birth of Venus on the Throne of Ludovisi, the work of art that “speaks” to him:

 

“I especially found the girl on the side, a flute player, adorable. (…) Head of a sleeping Erinye. That was my discovery (in the same side room, on the left) (…) Here I found: Great, really great, impressive, splendid, deep. It was a stone girl's head, placed so that you could look at it like the face of a sleeping woman if you leaned on your elbows. (…) When Sabeth (or someone else) stands at the birth of Venus, there are shadows, the sleeping Erinnye's face immediately appears much more awake, more alive, almost wild due to the one-sided incidence of light."(15)

 

 

Here the contrast between love and death is emphasized by the revenge goddess Erinnye, one of the Furies known to the Romans (Furia: wrath). It refers primarily to the Erinnye Tisiphone (Τισιφόνη), "the retribution", implied as she is often depicted with a dog's head. And dogs play an important role in the novel, be it in the memories of Walter Faber or in Acrocorinth, Greece, when they decided to “sleep under a fig-tree” (16) and wait for the sunrise, accompanied by “the barking of shepherd dogs “, which drive Faber and Sabeth to the top of the mountain. This “Night-Watch,” described on pages 150-152, achieves genuine, touching poetry. Why? Love (quite metaphysically) is simply at work.

About the Oedipus myth, the shattering of the one-sidedness of Homo Faber's mind and the ‒‒ completely unexpected ‒‒appearance of God.

A novel, however, that introduces us to a new “Greek tragedy” (based on an “old”...). It's about the myth of Oedipus, which is re-created here, but even adds a new facet. Is it a subtle and sophisticated discussion as to whether the subjective (consciousness, will) requires primacy over the objective (physical intercourse)? Either the father or the daughter knew, so there was no will. More like an “accident”, undoubtedly with serious consequences for the psyche of Walter Faber and his former Jewish girlfriend, Hanna, Sabeth’s mother.

Another flash-forward, page 72, although the most important stages of the tour with young lady are still to come:

“What difference does it make that I prove my ignorance, my inability to know? I destroyed my child's life and I can never make up for it. Why another report? I wasn't in love with the girl with the reddish horsetail, I noticed her, nothing more, I had no idea that she was my own daughter, I didn't even know that I was a father. Why providence?” (17).

Nota bene: Here, as Faber foretells the "tragedy" yet to come, the horsetail is "reddish". At the first encounter on board it was "blond".

 
We cannot possibly argue that Max Frisch wanted any sexual resonance to emerge from the “accident”,  a scandalous manner. The backbone of the novel is about the confrontation of that Homo Faber with an “accident” whose probability could be estimated at 1:60,000,000, i.e. an “event” that Faber would classify as “impossible”. And yet it happens.

There is indeed fate, there is “destiny”, a word that Walter Faber often used, at first pejoratively.

And this “fate” is announced very early on. First the stopover at Dallas airport on the way to Mexico, he suffers a malaise, “no desire to continue travelling”, Faber barricades himself in a toilet and is then dragged back onto the plane by stewardesses. He resents already that continuing to travel could lead to an unmasking and return of the past.

Then the crash, the “crash-landing”, is considered a “sign” of a steeper, ominous “landing” that is yet to come. This hodgepodge of improbable “coincidences”, which shockingly shakes the mathematical principles of probability calculation, leads to the systematic spiritual collapse of the engineer.

 

What is a Homo Faber? Is he the father of the Homo Artificialis Intellectvs?

Is the figure of Homo Faber perhaps a little too stereotypical, too “black and white”? Are there any nuances of the color “gray” missing? At the beginning we appear to confront just an incorrigible philistine:

 “I don’t care about novels – just as I don’t care about dreams." (18)

“I don’t believe in providence and fate, as a technician I’m used to calculating with the formulas of probability.” (19)

“A person who doesn't know the Louvre because he doesn't care about it simply doesn't exist; Sabeth says…” (20)

“I am not an art historian.” (21)

Homo Faber (Latin: “craftsman”, “maker”) as an anthropological term seems to have been used by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1907. In 1928, Max Scheler specified the category of Homo Faber as a person who only has a solid practical intelligence, hence a technical skill.

Let us expand and refine the term further. Homo Faber

 

 

is constantly inventing new tools to further advance the material exploitation of the world. They want to turn the whole world into a “Fabrica” (factory). A more precise figure emerges from Max Frisch's novel, that of a person immune to the pleasures of art. There is only one thing that can nuance this person and lead him to dream: love.

It is too late. In conversation with Sabeth's mother:

“I just see,” I say, “what’s there: your apartment, your scientific work, your daughter - you should thank God!” (…) “Walter, since when do you believe in God?” (22)

The Homo Faber is now being replaced by Homo Artificialis Intellectvs, someone who believes that today's “artificial intelligence” can calculate, solve, and predict everything. But not the encounter with...

Unfortunately, Max Frisch will no longer be there.

 (1) One of the occasional syntax faults in the text,  inserted by the author to show that a "Homo Faber" cannot always write "correct" German. 

(2)  Pages 49-50. Homo faber. Ein Bericht, Max Frisch, erste Ausgabe 1957, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1977. All translations from German into English are by the author of this blog, unless otherwise indicated.

(3)  Homo faber, 1977, Seite 50. 

(4) Pg. 7.

(5) Pg. 10.

(6) Pg. 47. 

(7) It reflects the vita of Max Frisch himself. 

(8) Pg. 56.

(9) 20

(10) 34

 (11) 34

(12) 37

(13)  42

(14) Flash-forward pg. 22, pages 64 and 72.

(15) Pg. 69.

(16) The symbolism of a fig-tree is manifold.  It suffices to point out that in the Bible, as Adam and Eva are expelled from paradise, they use leaves of a fig-tree to cover their genitalia.

(17) Pg. 111.

(18) Pg.   15.

(19)  Pg   22.

(20)  Pg.  75.

 (21)  Pg. 43

  (22) Pg. 144. The underlying is ours.

MAX FRISCH, HOMO FABER: ÜBER DIE WAHRSCHEINLICHKEIT DES UNWAHRSCHEINLICHEN

 

MAX FRISCH, HOMO FABER: ÜBER DIE WAHRSCHEINLICHKEIT DES UNWAHRSCHEINLICHEN

                                      Sam Shepard als Homo Faber im 1991 Film

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Paris, so gegen Mitte des Jahres 1993. Ich frequentierte damals die Bibliothéque Nationale, Richeliu, deren Hauptlesesaal einer der schönsten auf der Welt ist. Jetzt ist jener Saal nur Spezialisten zugänglich, da das „Hauptgeschäft“ der Bibliothéque Nationale sich in Tolbiac beheimatete, in den zwei Türmen, die den Namen des ehemaligen Präsidenten François Mitterrand tragen.

Zwischen den noblen Regalen und Wänden von Richelieu lernte ich eine junge deutsche Dame kennen, die einerseits dabei war, ihre Promotion an der École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales voranzutreiben. Ein paar Mal gingen wir zusammen zu den Vorlesungen des französischen Philosophen Jacques Derrida (*1930-†2004) . Es war – glaube ich – in einem kleinen Café an der Ecke von Rue des Petits Champs und Rue Vivienne, also ungefähr achtzig Meter von dem lateralen Eingang (Vivienne) zur Bibliothek, wo ich ihr erwähnte, ich sei dabei, den Homo Faber von Max Frisch zu lesen. Ihr Gesicht veränderte sich im Nu, ihre Augen wurden größer und traten spiegeleierartig hervor, als sie sagte:

- Die Geier! Die Geier!

Sie bezog sich auf die Zopilote, die Aasgeier, die in den Szenen in Südmexiko und in Guatemala eine gewichtige Rolle spielen, sogar als „Vorzeichen“ der noch-zukommenden Ereignisse agieren.

 

Über die Zopiloten und den Untergang der weißen Rassen.

„Was Herbert nicht ertrug, waren die Zopilote, dabei tun sie uns, solange wir leben, überhaupt nichts, sie stinken nur, wie von Aasgeiern nicht anders zu erwarten, sie sind häßlich, und man trifft sie stets in Scharen, sie lassen sie kam verscheuchen, wenn einmal an der Arbeit, alles Hupen ist vergeblich, sie flattern bloß, hüpfen um das ausgerissene Aas, ohne es aufzugeben … Einmal, als Herbert am Steuer saß, packte ihn ein regelrechter Koller; plötzlich gab es Vollgas – los und hinein in die schwarze Meute, mitten hinein und hindurch, so dass es von schwarzen Federn nur so wirbelte.

Nachher hatte man es an den Rädern.

Der süßliche Gestank begleitete uns noch stundenlang, bis man sich überwand; das Zeug klebte in den Pneu-Rillen, und es half nichts als peinliche Arbeit, Rille um Rille – zum Glück hatten wir Rum! - Ohne Rum, glaube ich, wären wir umgekehrt – spätestens am dritten Tag – nicht aus Angst, aber aus Vernunft.

Wir hatten keine Ahnung, wo wir sind¹.

Irgendwo am 18. Breitengrad.“²

Sofort danach kommt ein Absatz, der die einzigartig stilistische Fähigkeit des Autors hervorteten läßt und, en passant, das thematische Hintergrund des Romans einleitet. Was am Anfang vielen als ein Gerede im Bierzelt vorkommen könnte, von vielen „Schnapsideen“ illuminiert, ist in der Tat eine humorvolle, lustige, jedoch präzise Bemalung des Weltgeistes und des Weltschmerzes jener Epoche. Und vielleicht auch unserer.

„Marcel sang, Il etait³ un petit navire, oder er schwatzte wieder die halbe Nacht lang: -von Cortez⁴ und Montezuma (das ging noch, weil historische Tatsache) und vom Untergang der weißen Rasse (es war einfach zu heiß und zu feucht, um zu widersprechen), vom katastrophalen Scheinsieg des abendländischen Technikers (Cortez als Techniker, weil er Schießpulver hatte) über die indianische Seele und was weiß ich, ganze Vorträge über die unweigerliche Wiederkehr der alten Götter (Nach Abwurf der H-Bombe!) und über das Aussterben des Todes (wörtlich!) dank Penicillin, über Rückzug der Seele aus sämtlichen zivilisierten Gebiete der Erde, die Seele im Maquis usw., Herbert erwachte an dem Wort Maquis, das er verstand, und fragte: Was sagt er? Ich sagte: Künstlerquatsch! Und wir ließen ihm seine Theorie über Amerika, das keine Zukunft habe. The American Way of Life: Ein Versuch, das Leben zu kosmetisieren, aber das Leben lasse sich nicht kosmetisieren.

Ich versuchte zu schlafen.

Ich platze nur, wenn Marcel sich über meine Tätigkeit aüßerte, beziehungsweise über die Unesco: der Techniker als letzte Ausgabe des weißen Missionars, Industrialisierung als letztes Evangelium einer sterbenden Rasse, Lebensstandard als Ersatz für Lebenssinn -

Ich fragte ihn, ob er Kommunist sei,

Marcel bestritt es.“⁵

Der Roman Homo faber. Ein Bericht (1957) von dem schweizerischen Max Frisch (*1911-†1991) ist einer der erfolgreichsten deutschsprachigen Romane der Nachkriegszeit. Nicht nur Welterfolg, übersetzt in mehr als 26 Sprachen, sondern auch Bestandteil des Kanons, Pflichtlektüre im Schulunterricht. Man könnte sogar riskieren, dass bis dato mehr als 7 Millionen Exemplare verkauft worden sind, mindestens fünf Millionen im deutschsprachigen Raum. Ein anderer wichtiger Roman, Stiller, erschien 1954.

Zwei Ereignisse haben den Autor Max Frisch heutzutage wieder ins Rampenlicht gebracht. 2022 erschien der Briefwechsel zwischen ihm und der Dichterin Ingeborg Bachmann (*1926-†1973), eine Liaison, die tiefe, vielleicht sogar unheilbare, Spuren in beiden Menschen eingravierte. 

Vor einigen Wochen kam der Film „Ingebor Bachmann. Reise in die Wüste“ (2023) auf den Bildschirm, von Margarethe von Trotta, der größenteils sich dem turbulenten Verhältnis zwischen der österreichischen Schriftstellerin und dem schweizerischen Romancier widmet. Ein Beitrag für unseren Blog, zur Ehre der Autorin von Malina, deren Kurzerzählungen uns schon Anfang der 70ger Jahre begeisterten, ist schon längst vorgeplant und soll sich in den nächsten Monaten materialisiert. 

 

Vom Dschungel als Niemandsland für eine Auszeit, um die Saat des kommenden Infernos zu pflanzen.

Worum geht es? Auf der Oberfläche des Textes geht es um den Schweizer Walter Faber, der in den 50ger Jahren die ganze Welt verreist, als Ingenieur im Auftrag der Unesco,⁶ und der bald auch die Fünfziger Grenze erreichen wird. Wir beginnen in New York, wo er auf eine teure Bude und eine amerikanische Geliebte verfügt („… sie wußte, dass ich grundsätzlich nicht heirate ...“⁷). Es schneit, daher verspätet sich sein Flug nach Caracas, via Mexiko. Im Flugzeug triff er auf einen Deutschen, Herbert, der auf dem Weg nach Guatemala ist, wo sein Bruder, Joachim, eine Tabakplantage schon in Gang gesetzt haben sollte („Ich mag die Deutschen nicht, obschon Joachim, mein Freund, auch Deutscher gewesen ist...“⁸). Zuerst ein Propeller hört auf, zu funktionieren, dann ein zweiter, eine „Bruchlandung“ sei unvermeidbar, und in der Tat überleben alle reibungslos eine „Bauchlandung“ der „Super-Constellation“ irgendwo im Dschungel in Südmexiko. Da wird er Nachricht bekommen von Hanna, einer deutschen „Halbjüdin („Ich nannte sie eine Schwärmerin und Kunstfee. Dafür nannte sie mich: Homo Faber“⁹, mit der er in den 30ger Jahre in der Schweiz liiert war¹⁰, und die er heiraten wollte, um ihr einen schweizerischen Pass zu besorgen („Es war die Zeit als die jüdischen Passen annulliert wurden“¹¹.

Aus Respekt für diejenigen die den Roman noch nicht gelesen haben, werden wir all die Schlüsselereignisse der „Tragödie“ (weil es geht am Ende doch um eine Reformulierung einiger alten griechischen Tragödien) nicht erwähnen. Es gibt zahlreiche Bücher und Aufsätze, die den Roman kritisch konfrontieren¹², daher beschränken wir uns hier auf eine eher persönliche mise-en-valeur.

Die Seiten 21-56 beschäftigen sich mit den Ereignissen in Mexiko und Guatemala. Das erste Mal, denn es kommt ein zweites Mal, als Walter Farbe, nach dem Entpuppen der Tragödie und den längst versteckten Wahrheiten, kehrt zurück, um in den Spuren der „jüngsten“ Vergangenheit irgendwelches Licht für die Zukunft zu gewinnen. Vielleicht die gelungensten Seiten des ganzen Romans, (man könnte sogar sagen, sie gehören zu den gelungensten Seiten der deutschsprachigen Literatur der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts) Man bleibt einfach in dieser – künstlerisch brillant rekonstruiert – Landschaft von „Luft wie flüssiges Glas“ verhext, narkotisiert. ¹³

„Ringsum nichts als Agaven, Sand, die rötliches Gebirge in der Ferne, ferner, als man vorher geschätzt hat, vor allem Sand und nochmals Sand, gelblich, das Flimmern der heißen Luft darüber, Luft wie flüssiges Glas“.

Auf dem Weg nach Guatemala:

„Schon in Campeche empfing uns die Hitze mit schleimiger Sonne und klebriger Luft, Gestank von Schlamm, der an der Sonne verwest, und wenn man sich den Schweiß aus dem Gesicht wischt, so ist es, als stinke man selbst nach Fisch. Ich sagte nichts mehr. Schließlich wischt man sich den Schweiß nicht mehr ab, sondern sitzt mit geschlossenen Augen und atmet mit geschlossenem Mund, Kopf an eine Mauer gelehnt, die Beine von sich gestreckt.“¹⁴

Pause in einem „Hotel“:

„Im Hotel gibt es wenigstens eine Dusche, ein Handtuch, das nach Campfer riecht wie üblich in diesen Gegenden, und wenn man sich duschen will, fallen die fingerlangen Käfer aus den schimmligen Vorwand – ich ersäufte sie, doch kletterten sie nach einer Weile immer wieder aus dem Ablauf hervor, bis ich mit der Ferse zertrat, um mich endlich duschen zu können.“¹⁵

„Fünf Tage hingen wir in Palenque.

Wir hingen in Hängematten, allzeit ein Bier in greifbarer Nähe, schwitzend, als wäre Schwitzen unser Lebenszweck, unfähig zu irgendeinem Entschluss, eigentlich ganz zufrieden, denn das Bier ist ausgezeichnet, Yucateca, besser als das Bier im Hochland, wir hingen in unseren Hängematten und tranken, um weiter schwitzen zu können, und ich wusste nicht, was wir eigentlich wollten.“¹⁶ (…) „Man vergisst hier alles.“¹⁷

Nur jemand, der solche Landschaften, unter denjenigen Wetterverhältnissen, besucht hat, kann es so literarisch wieder ins Leben rufen. In der Tat entsprechen fast alle „Stationen“ im Text dem Parcours von Max Frisch selbst, kurz vor dem Entstehen des Romans. Und nur jemand, der dieses „ewiges Schwitzen“ unter einer klebrigen Sonne erfahren hat, sei es in Mexiko und Guatemala, oder sei es in Nordafrika oder in Brasilien, kann beurteilen, ob das, das im Roman geschildert wird, schlicht echt ist. Da kommt keine forcierte oder strapazierte Erfindung der Imagination vor. Der Autor dieser Zeilen hat vielmals die selbe Erfahrung gemacht, dieses sich im "Land-des-ewigen Schwitzens“ paralysiert zu befinden, jenes Dasein in einem platten Da, dessen Konturen von den höllischen Sonne, von dem feuchten Dunst, und von allerlei Insekten und kleinen (sogar großen) Bestien auseinandergenommen wird. Eine Art „Auszeit“ im „Niemandsland“.. Man wird halb-blind, man tut nichts, man denkt ab und an, aber das Gedachte betrifft knochenhart den Kern des vorigen Lebens, und die Frage nach einem „Weitergehen“ wird zunehmend wackliger, sinnloser. Alle „Leichen im Koffer der Erinnerung“ tauchen wieder auf, als wäre der Schweiß dabei, uns langsam aber persistent an den Rand der Klippen zu schieben. „Man vergisst hier alles“ bezieht sich auf die Gegenwart - und nur darauf.

Es ist eine Art, sich einer erwünschten braun-grünen „Hölle“ zu bemächtigen, eher privilegiert da gutes Bier fast immer vorhanden ist, um Abstand zu nehmen“. Aber in dieser „Hölle“ begegnet Walter Faber seine ganze Vergangenheit, und entdeckt die, bisher, unbekannten Konsequenzen seines damaligen Agierens. Kurz danach tritt er sein privatissime Inferno ein, das am Anfang wie ein Paradies aussieht.

Es fungiert auch als „Kontrapunkt“ zu dem Schnee und Glamour in New York (Studebaker, „Lippenstiftrot“, eingeschlossen) und der Schiffsreise nach Paris, plus das charmante Flanieren durch Frankreich, Italien und Griechenland. Zweifellos ein seht gut konzipierter Roman, obgleich die letzte Version wichtige Variationen gegenüber der ersten vorzeigte.

Das Erstaunliche: Kaum haben wir die ersten zwanzig Seiten überstanden (und genossen), da müssen wir zugeben, dass, dank einer von den vielen Flashforwards (Vorausblenden)¹⁸, wir im Besitz all der wichtigen Einzelheiten der „Story“ des Romans sind. Der Ingenieur Walter Faber wird eine junge Frau kennenlernen, diese wird doch später sterben, er wird auch erfahren, dass er Vater ist, und dass seine Tochter (keine weiß von der Blutsverwandtschaft) ihm auf einem Schiff näher kommen wird. Alle Ereignisse liegen weit außerhalb der statistischen Probabilistik.

Warum lesen wir vorwärts? Weil wir von der Prosa weiter geschleppt werden, es zieht uns voran, es wirkt wie ein Magnet. Die Sprache ist schlicht, manchmal sogar karg, aber sie fließt einfach, es ist meistens eine Umgangssprache, die uns spontan erreicht und berührt, wir schwimmen mit ihr unbeschränkt, heiter und neugierig. Aber dem Text liegt ein Flickenteppich zugrunde, dessen Fäden uns ständig „Positionslichter“ anbieten, die vor allem mit bedeutenden Figuren der griechischen und römischen Mythologien zu tun haben. Und nicht nur diejenigen. Zu erst gibt es eine Schreibmaschine („… ich hasse Handschrift“…), eine „Hermes-Baby“. Im Film ist es eine Olivetti Lettera 22. Hermes, als Gottesbote nun, und wir müssen davon ausgehen, dass nach dem von der Technik geblendeten Verstand Fabers, selbst der Postbote Gottes (zumindest Zeus), nur maschinell seine Botschaften den inferioren Wesen überreichen kann.

Nota bene: Die Flashbacks und Flashforwards stören nicht den linearen Genuss des Romans. Ganz im Gegenteil.

Ein „moderner“ Roman, der ständig mit klug konzipierten Flashbacks (Rückblenden) und Flashforwards (Vorausblenden) uns durch die mannigfaltigen Ebenen von Gegenwart und Vergangenheit karambolieren lässt, und dessen „zweiter Teil“ (obgleich der nur einem Fünftel des Textes entspricht) ein „Tagebuch ist, geschrieben von Walter Faber, als er im Krankenhaus in Griechenland wartet, einer schicksalhaften Operation entgegenkommend. Der letzte Satz des Romans: „08.05 Uhr. Sie kommen“. Es ist das Ende, aber dieses „Ende“ verwandelt sich in ein „Kontinuum“, da wir keinen konkreten Hinweis haben, Walter Faber sei doch, dank einer missglückten chirurgischen Intervention, gestorben. „Was wäre denn passiert, wenn? … Diese Frage stellen wir uns, als Leser und Leserinnen, schon am Anfang des Romans. Und viel öfter nach dem Abschluss der Lektüre.

„Das Mädchen mit dem blonden Roßschwanz.“

Dann kommt die Schiffsreise aus New York nach Paris, an Bord trifft er auf Sabeth, „das Mädchen mit dem blonden Roßschwanz“¹⁹ Er sucht sie wieder in Paris im Louvre Museum (obwohl er prinzipiell solche Institutionen vermeidet) und nachher entschlosen sich zusammen, eine „Bildungsreise“ durch Südfrankreich, Italien und Griechenland zu unternehmen. Sabeth, resolut entschlossen, diese „Reise“ auszunutzen, und dem Homo Faber einen Genuss Italiens beizubringen, der sich nicht nur auf den Konsum von Campari reduziert.

Ist die Dame in der „Geburt der Venus“ von Botticelli vielleicht die Quelle für die Gestaltung der Figur des „Mädchens mit den blonden Roßschwanz?

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Die allerwichtigsten „Signale“ erscheinen doch in Rom, im Museo Nazionale Romano. Walter Faber scheint zum ersten Mal doch von „Kunst“ ergriffen zu werden. Es ist Die Geburt der Venus auf dem Thron Ludovisi, das Kunstwerk das ihm doch „zuspricht“:

„Vor allem das Mädchen auf der Seite, Flötenbläserin, fand ich entzückend. (…) Kopf einer schlafenden Erinnye. Das war meine Entdeckung (im selben Seitensaal,links) (…) Hier fand ich : Großartig, ganz großartig, beeindruckend, famos, tief. Es war ein steinerner Mädchenkopf, so gelegt, dass man drauf blick wie auf das Gesicht einer schlafenden Frau, wenn man sich auf die Ellbogen stützt. (…) Wenn Sabeth (oder sonst jemand) bei der Geburt der Venus steht, gibt es Schatten, das Gesicht der schlafenden Erinnye wirkt, infolge einseitigen Lichteinfalls, sofort viel wacher, lebendiger, geradezu wild“.²⁰

 

 

Hier wird der Kontrast zwischen Leben (Lieben) und Tod betont, durch die Rachegöttin Erinnye, eine von den Römern genannten Furien (Furia: Wut). Es bezieht sich vor allem auf die Erinnye Tisiphone (Τισιφόνη), „die Vergeltung“, angedeutet, da sie häufig mit Hundekopf dargestellt wird. Und Hunde spielen im Roman eine gewichtige Rolle, sei es in den Erinnerungen Walter Fabers o oder in Akrokorinth, Griechenland, als sie sich entschlossen „unter einem Feigenbaum zu schlafen“²¹, und auf den Sonnenaufgang zu warten, begleitet von „das Gebell von Hirtenhunden“, die Faber und Sabeth in die Höhe des Berges treiben. Diese „Nachtwache“, geschildert in den Seiten 150-152, erreicht echte, berührende Dichtung. Warum? Da ist die Liebe (ganz metaphysisch) einfach am Werk.

Über den Mythos Ödipus, das Zerbrechen der Einseitigkeit des Verstandes des Homo Faber und die ‒‒ ganz unerwartet ‒‒Erscheinung Gottes.

Ein Roman, jedoch, der uns eine neue „griechische Tragödie“ (basiert auf eine „alte“...) vorstellt. Es geht um den Mythos Ödipus, der hier re-kreiert wird, sogar aber dem eine neue Facette hinzugefügt. Geht es doch um eine subtile und raffinierte Diskussion, ob das Subjektive (das Bewusstsein, der Wille) Primat über das Objektive (der körperliche Beischlaf) verlangt? Entweder der Vater oder die Tochter wussten es, daher gab es keinen Willen. Eher doch ein „Unfall“, zweifellos mit gravierenden Konsequenzen für die Psyche des Walter Fabers und seine ehemals jüdische Freundin, Hanna, die Mutter von Sabeth.

Wieder eine Flashforward, Seite 72, obwohl die wichtigsten Etappen der Wanderung mit der jungen Dame noch bevorstehen:

„Was ändert es, dass ich meine Ahnungslosigkeit beweise, mein Nichtwissenkönnen? Ich habe das Leben meines Kindes vernichtet und ich kann es nie wiedergutmachen. Wozu noch ein Bericht? Ich war nicht verliebt in das Mädchen mit dem rötlichen Roßschwanz, sie war mir aufgefallen, nichts weiter, ich konnte nicht ahnen, dass sie meine eigene Tochter ist, ich wusste ja nicht einmal, dass ich Vater bin. Wieso Fügung?“²²

Nota bene: Hier spricht Faber von einem "rötlichen Roßschwanz", obwohl bei der erster Begenung auf dem Schiff geht es um einen "blonden Roßschwanz".

Es ist unbestreitbar nicht der Fall, Max Frisch wolle irgendwelche sexuelle Resonanz aus dem „Unfall“ skandalös hervortreten lassen Es ging, vor allem, um die Konfrontation jenes Homo Fabers mit einem „Zufall“, dessen Wahrscheinlichkeit als 1:60.000.000 beziffert werden könnte, also ein „Ereignis“ welches für den Homo Faber als „unmöglich“ eingestuft wird. Und trotzdem passiert es.

Also nun, es gibt doch Schicksal, es gibt „Fügung“, ein Wort, das Walter Faber oft anwendete, zuerst abwertend.

Und dieses „Schicksal“ wird schon sehr früh annonciert. Zuerst der Zwischenstopp im Flughafen Dallas, auf dem Weg nach Mexiko, eine Maladie tritt ein, „keine Lust zum Weitereisen“, Faber verbarrikadiert sich in einer Toilette, und wird dann von Stewardessen zurück ins Flugzeug mitgeschleppt. Im Innigsten wird gefürchtet, dass das Weiterreisen zu einer Entlarvung und Wiederkehr der Vergangenheit führen könnte.

Dann der Absturz, das „Crash-Landing“, es gilt als „Vorzeichen“ einer noch-zu-kommenden, steiler, ominösen „Landung“. Dieses Sammelsurium von unwahrscheinlichen „Zufällen“, das die mathematischen Prinzipien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, der Probabilistik, schockierend erschüttert, führt zum systematischen geistigen Zusammenbrechen des Ingenieurs.

Was ist ein Homo Faber? Ist er der Vater des Homo Artificialis Intellectvs?

Ist die Figur des Homo Faber vielleicht ein wenig allzu stereotypisch, allzu „schwarz-weiß“? Fehlt es denn da an irgendwelche Nuancierungen von der Farben „Grau“? Am Anfang steht da fast ein unverbesserlicher Banause:

„Ich mache mir nichts aus Romanen – so wenig wie aus Träumen“²³

„Ich glaube nicht an Fügung und Schicksal, als Techniker bin ich daran gewöhnt mit den Formeln der Wahrscheinlichkeit zu rechnen.“²⁴

„Ein Mensch, der den Louvre nicht kennt, weil er sich nichts draus macht, das gibt es einfach nicht; Sabeth meint…“²⁵

„Ich bin kein Kunsthistoriker.“²⁶

Der Homo Faber (Latein: „Handwerker“, „Verfertiger“) als anthropologischer Begriff scheint schon von dem französischen Philosophen Henri Bergson in 1907 angewandt worden zu sein. Max Scheler präzisierte in 1928 die Kategorie des Homo Faber als einen Menschen, der nur eine solide praktische Intelligenz bezieht, daher ein handwerkliches Geschick.

Lassen wir uns den Begriff weiter ergänzen und verfeinern. Der Homo Faber erfindet ständig neue Werkzeuge, um die materielle Ausnutzung der Welt weiter voranzutreiben. Also die die ganze Welt denn in eine „Fabrica“ (Fabrik) zu verwandeln. Aus dem Roman von Max Frisch entsteht eine präzisere Gestalt, diejenige eines unmusischen Menschen. Es gibt nur Eines, das diesen Menschen nuancieren und zum Träumen führen kann: Die Liebe.

Es ist zu spät. Im Gespräch mit der Mutter von Sabeth:

„ich sehe nur“, sage ich, „was da ist: deine Wohnung, deine wissenschaftliche Arbeit, deine Tochter - du solltest Gott danken!“ (…) „Walter, seit wann glaubst du an Gott?“²⁷

Der Homo Faber wird heutzutage von dem Homo Artificialis Intellectvs ersetzt, jemand der glaubt, dass die heutige „künstliche Intelligenz“ alles kalkulieren, lösen, voraussagen kann. Nicht aber die Begegnung mit …

Leider wird Max Frisch nicht mehr da sein.

1Einer der „Syntaxfehler“, die manchmal im „Bericht“ auftauchen, vom Autor als Beweise konzipiert, dass es einem „Homo Faber“ nicht gelingen kann, immer „gutes Deutsch“ auf den Tisch zu legen.

2Seiten 49-50. Homo faber. Ein Bericht, Max Frisch, erste Ausgabe 1957, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1977,

3Sollte eigentlich „était“ sein.

4„Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, „Generalgouverneur von Neu Spanien zwischen 1521 und 1530. Der Vorname kann auch als Hernando oder Fernando angegeben, der Familiennamen auch als „Cortez“.

5Homo faber, 1977, Seite 50.

6Ob die Montage von Turbinen in Venezuela und ähnliche Aktivitäten mit der „Unesco“ verbunden werden konnten, bleibt ein Fragezeichen.

7Seite 7.

8Seite 10.

9Seite 47.

10Entspricht auch dem vitae Max Frisch’.

11Seite 56.

12 Zum Beispiel, Manfred Leber: Vom modernen Roman zur antiken Tragödie. Interpretation von Max Frischs „Homo faber“. De Gruyter, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-11-012240-5

13Seite 20.

14Seite 34.

15Seite 34.

16Seite 37.

17Seite 42.

18 flash-forward 22 Seite. 64 72

19Seite 69.

20Seite 111.

21Sete 150. Um nur die Symbolik des „Feigenbaums“ präziser darzustellen brauchen wir mehrere Seiten. Es genüge, zu erwähnen, dass als Adam und Eva aus dem Paradies rausgeworfen wurden, trugen sie Feigenbaumblätter, um ihre Genitalien zu bedecken.

22Seite 72.

23Seite 15.

24Seite 22.

25Seite 76.

26Seite 42.

27Seite 144. Gespräch mit Hanna. Unsere Unterstreichung.