Homo Faber - Max Frisch
Posted on Aug 12, 2008 under contemporary literature |
Max Frisch’s novel didn’t seem to me as written in a cold, impecable, exact manner. Just like the protagonist, Walter Faber, is the victim of his own confidence in reason and science, the author is caught in his own style. His shortcomings- a possible identification with the character, a verse in the narration, a highly improbable painting- mean more, I believe, than what is rigurously and clearly written.
“I am an engineer and I have taught myself to see things the way they are” is Walter Faber’s own description. After a plain crash, an incredible encounter with his bets friend’s brother, a few weeks in Mexico and a late falling in love, Faber realizes that things the way they are do not exist. The repugnant German from the plane is his friend Joachim’s brother; Hanna, his highschool sweetheart, has married Joachim; his minutely planned trip changes its course from day to day; the girl he falls in love with is his daughter, about whom he doesn’t know anything. Connected to the latter there is a relevant fragment which puts homo technicus, Walter Faber, in another light:
“Sabeth once again on the dam, this time standing, and she is singing, our dead daughter, with her hands still in her pockets, she thinks she is alone and she is singing, but she doesn’t hear herself.- The spool is gone.”
The events mentioned above, which seem like taken from an adventure book, show the way Walter Faber is trying to live differently, how his life becomes free of logic, while the sequence of incredible goings-on leave the impression of “it was meant to be”. Complying his character to a strong criticism of reason and writing against the god of technology Max Frisch might fall to the extreme of over-demonstration.
What saves the novel from being a thesis is exactly the imperfection: although Frisch’s character is meant to be a rational cinic who becomes a person with weaknesses, a victim, his cinism is not authentic from the beginning, just like the events he goes through don’t change him radically. Moreover, about a sensitive issue like the incest, the author doesn’t write explicitly or moralising, his tendency is towards criticism of society rather than of the individual and to demonstrate how little does homo faber control the world and himself.
In this context, the creative man is nothing more than a moved irony. Creator of circumstances, of objects more or less useful, creator of context or of worlds, man fails to control all these, is what Max Frisch’s novel demonstrates. The inevitable question is why would man want to be in control.
Written by Mihaela