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