Tag: Max Frisch

Interrogation as a Way of Life – Max Frisch’s Bluebeard

Like a suicide, a crime well investigated makes even a lazy reader pay attention, looking for clues that might explain what happened. In the Swiss writer Max Frisch’s tale Bluebeard (Blaubart), our attention is rewarded with a short but rich exploration of the consequences of one man’s experience of being under investigation for murder. Though he finds himself “acquitted for lack of proof”, the accusation of murdering his ex-wife leaves Dr Felix Schaad stuck in a kind of self-interrogative mode of thinking long after he walks free. In this way, Frisch’s tale becomes both a kind of parable about identity under threat, a challenge to all investigative legal systems, and finally a story about the relationship between truth and conviction in a world of unreliable and confused memories and witnessing.

The Crime

Dr Felix Schaad, a doctor and respected member of Zurich’s upper-middle class, is informed that his ex-wife Rosalinde was found strangled with a menstrual pad stuffed in her mouth and a tie used to finish her off. Rosalinde, now an escort, had seemingly remained on good terms with Schaad and the two had met on the morning of the crime at her house – he had been seen by two witnesses. Most importantly the tie, we learn immediately, is his. Schaad has no alibi because his excuses – walking, or being in his office – cannot be corroborated. For the courts, the question is simple – why did he do it? For the reader, inhabiting something approximating Schaad’s mind, there’s a different question – did he do it?

Interrogation as a way of life

The first thing we notice with Bluebeard is the narration. This is a short, dense book, but also a divided one. On the one hand we have Schaad, brief flashes from his own mind as he tries to play billiards or go for a walk, and on the other we have the world of his intrusive thoughts, coming in the form of memories of his time at court. This dialogue is delivered using dashes rather than quotation marks, which gives it a formal quality, as if we are reading a transcript or report. Neither section lasts more than a page or at most two before we shift into the other. At one point Schaad plays billiards. The clicking of the balls can keep his attention focused, but when he stops to use some billiard chalk on the cue, these memories burst in. Their very shortness on the page makes them feel sudden and, as it were, diegetic.

More important than the division of the text into interrogation and narration is the relative weighting of the two. Schaad is utterly dominated by the remembered, then later imagined, world of the court. “Acquittal from lack of evidence – how can anyone live with this? I am fifty-four.” This is the entirety of his introduction to us. Then we return to the dialogue. As a portrait of a man, we get very little of who Schaad is through these sections. Rather, we get a sense of how he lives – entirely in the shadow of the remembered trial. He cannot take his own life or leave Zurich, for either of these would be considered a tacit acknowledgement of his own guilt for the murder. Even as the months pass, and Schaad sells his medical practice, the trial remains in his own mind. He has left the interrogation, but it hasn’t left him.

At some point we notice that we are moving on from memories into something stranger. Schaad’s dead parents are questioned as witnesses, even Rosalinde herself is brought forth. Though he is now free, the fantastical prosecutor continues to challenge Schaad’s every action. In a way, this makes me think a little of that famous philosophical injunction to know oneself. In Schaad’s case the self-questioning becomes so dominant that it totally destroys his ability to live. He wants to be free of it, but nothing seems to help – alcohol, walking, travel. At the end of the book he is finally so broken by the questioning that he actually does the one thing that he imagines means it should stop – he goes to a police station and admits the guilt that feels is his own but, as it turns out, never was.

In Bluebeard interrogation becomes a way of life, just as the court drama changes Schaad’s life. His friends are called in to bear witness against him, his name covers newspaper headlines, and he loses his livelihood as people no longer want to be treated by him. On a simple level we can read this as a fair complaint about how being accused of murder works. Yet on another, it’s about identity and how hard it can be to maintain. All of Schaad’s secrets are placed in public view and this leaves him unable to allow himself any privacy again in case he should once more be subjected to judicial scrutiny. No independent life remains for him. He becomes fearful, trapped within the biting thoughts of his own mind. 

Truth, Guilt, and Certainty

If the effect upon someone’s identity of being dragged through the courts is one key thematic aspect of Bluebeard, another is its treatment of the matter of truth. We might want to say that the judicial system aims at truth, but really this is a desperately idealistic suggestion. Much fairer is to say that it aims at a relative certainty – a “good enough” reading of the facts that can convince the court of one thing or another. Nothing higher, no matter the evidence marshalled, is in the end determined. If truth was something so simple to establish, the philosophers would be out of a job.

Just as a narrator wants to present his or her version of events, not the truth, so too does the prosecution in a legal environment. But this is a bias, an interpretative lens, that barges in and pushes truth out of the way, whenever it is inconvenient. Schaad, for at least some of the people in the court room, has murdered his ex-wife, and all that remains is to find the smoking gun. As Bluebeard comes from a time before omnipresent CCTV or DNA testing, instead the goal of the investigation is to find a psychological justification for Schaad’s actions. If the goal were interpreting physical evidence like fibres or fingerprints, perhaps Schaad’s mind might have emerged relatively unscathed. Instead, the evidence is mental, personal, psychological.

Schaad’s many ex-wives are interviewed to find proof that not only was the man subject to fits of jealousy, he also took out this rage on others. (They deny it, stating that his violence was only ever directed towards himself). Schaad’s drunken comments to a friend that he could strangle Rosalinde appear as clear evidence of his intention. But if he did not kill her nor did ever truly intend to they mean nothing except that he should watch his language better. The same can go for the notes that Schaad made or his diaries, which are likewise trawled through. Eventually, even his dreams are interpreted. (At this point we have moved beyond memory of the trial into imagined persecution, I hope). None of these pieces of evidence confirms that Schaad did it, but they aim at building enough certainty that they might ultimately displace any question of the truth.

Yet all these pieces of evidence are inherently unreliable. Just as the court tries to find its truth, or rather certainty, we see how flaky it is – which is why Schaad ultimately gets acquitted. Schaad himself cannot remember what his tie is doing in Rosalinde’s home, or account for his every movement. A witness who claimed to have seen him that morning later admits that it was actually his wife who saw him, because he himself was in the cellar. Another witness is just a child. “As witness you have to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. You know that false witness is punishable by time in prison, and in serious cases by as many as five years there.” This phrase is repeated over and over as witnesses are introduced. But it’s hard not to read it ironically, when there’s so little truth reported, and so little accurate witnessing.  

Conclusions

The power, though, of institutions like courts is that they can determine, at least to a certain extent, what is true. They get inside the head, as they do to Schaad. They turn chance remarks into dark intentions, and leave him unable to live his life. I found myself thinking as I read of another person faced with the overwhelming power of truth-determining institutions, Nellie Bly. The American journalist visited the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on today’s Roosevelt Island after posing as insane, but dropped the act once she was already in there. Yet “the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be”. Just as with Schaad, all action and speech becomes refracted through the idea that a person is guilty – of murder or in this case mere madness. To protest that one is innocent, as Schaad does, is proof that one is guilty. An innocent person, of course, has nothing to hide.

Bluebeard is short but intense. In a way, it feels like Kafka’s The Trial, in that both works are both real and both parables of justice. Both works end with their central characters admitting to a guilt that is not really there, though Frisch’s tale, being situated in something closer to the real world, is kinder, and leaves Schaad alive. To me the interest in the work lies not in the crime itself, but in the light the work throws upon those human fallibilities of memory and motive, and especially in that very real-feeling form of madness as Schaad turns his own interrogation into a way of life.

Bluebeard was the last work of fiction that Frisch published in his lifetime. Reading it, you can see how it might have felt like an end for him. What it says about the possibilities of narrative and truth-finding are just too negative, the impacts upon a life from this fact are just too stark. Still, it makes for a work worth pondering.

Writing Catastrophe – Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene

More and more we will have to ask ourselves how we might respond to natural disasters in our stories, the kind of stories they might lead us to write. What is the significance of a catastrophe? This is almost a literary question, insofar as it concerns the interplay of meanings and appearances. Man in the Holocene, a novella by the Swiss writer, Max Frisch, provides an example of how we might begin approaching the topic. Ostensibly the record of a widower’s isolation in a Swiss valley cut off by bad weather, it is really a short but intense look at humanity’s attempts to live inside a world where their power and lives are limited.

A recent widower, Herr Geiser finds himself stuck in his house in a valley in Ticino as bad weather cuts off the town from the outside world. Soon even the power goes and he has to stick to matches and canned goods. He entertains himself by building things out of crisp bread and reading. His mind is not that of a young man, however, and he has to take notes by hand to remember what he reads. A little later, he decides instead to use scissors to cut out sections from books and stick them to the wall. Next, he makes an attempt to flee on foot to a neighbouring valley, but returns home. His note-mania continues as his mind declines, with whole diagrams plastered onto the walls, and shortly thereafter the story ends.

Narration

One of the first things I noticed about the novella, which I read in the original German, is the strange narratorial voice. Readers are not close to Herr Geiser at all: to give two examples, we do not learn his first name, and through impersonal and passive constructions (“es” (it), “man” (one)) or phrases like “it is not thinkable” Man in the Holocene builds up a feeling of being almost a work of science or technology, rather than a story. It is as if we are observing some creature at the zoo, except that here the creature is an old man, shuffling about. As a result, we come to see Herr Geiser not as an individual so much as a representative of Man in general (to refer back to the novella’s title) just as the creatures we see at the zoo are supposed to embody their whole species.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, let alone as automata – I certainly do not, at any rate. But Man in the Holocene does much to force us down this route through its most distinctive formal trait – the cuttings that Herr Geiser sticks to the wall.

Cuttings

These are a fascinating novelistic technique and worth dwelling on. When I say cutouts, I mean just that – real cutouts are plastered across the text. They are drawn primarily from history books and encyclopaedias, with a little of the Bible thrown in for good measure, and all are presented in their original formatting. (I never want to read Fraktur, the “German” typeface, ever again, no matter how beautiful it is to look at when you do not actually need to make sense of it.)

Herr Geiser is a man of facts, unlike his wife, who was a reader of fiction. Man in the Holocene presents Herr Geiser attempting to make sense of the world via these facts. When he reads, he reads to expand his knowledge, hence the note-taking which expands into making cuttings. This process of gaining knowledge for the process of understanding, even control over his environment, makes Herr Geiser again rather representative of humanity’s recent Enlightenment destiny as a whole. Furthermore, this entire process of meaning-making is noted explicitly in one extract as something distinctively human – in other words, Herr Geiser’s actions make him more human, even though I said above it had the opposite effect.

One reason for this is because there is more to texts than the motivation behind covering the wall with them – there is also what they say. Generally speaking, like a text by W.G. Sebald, we have a sense as we read Man in the Holocene of accumulating catastrophe. As we learn about Ticino, we read about the countless catastrophes befalling its people, through rock slides and floods and war. Mostly, these are natural catastrophes, which highlight humankind’s powerlessness in the face of nature. We also learn about flora and fauna native to the world, and as Herr Geiser explores his interest in geology we learn about dinosaurs and prehistoric times. 

A sense of scale is one thing that rather makes us seem like animals. Because we are a speck in comparison with geologic time, the significance of our significances seems like nothing of the sort. “Man appears in the Holocene” is a more accurate translation of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän – in other words, we were nothing but ashes in all the years before then, and perhaps just as fated to short lifetimes as the dinosaurs. Indeed, reading about the Tyrannosaurus Rex in particular, it’s hard to avoid making the comparison in our heads that we too are an apex predator, yet just as fragile when we consider the power of nature. Another theme of the cuttings is that we shape nature to live in it, but little good does it do for us when faced with entire valleys slipping away.

This is not the main thing, however. Herr Geiser also cuts out diagrams of dinosaurs, but the final diagram in the book is that of a human being. This kind of echoing reduces us, in spite of our investigating the world, into a creature to be investigated and no different from the dinosaurs on the pages before. Our meaning-making, in particular via religion, is also challenged through the primacy the text places upon scientific work. The Bible might demonstrate humanity’s development, but not if the sections extracted (Noah’s Ark, Creation) are contradicted by the other extracts. Instead, this makes human reasoning look further flawed.

It does not help either that by the end of the book Herr Geiser has essentially lost his mind – there’s an obvious narrative irony in the way that all these attempts to understand the world and the catastrophes befalling it bring Herr Geiser no closer to escaping or mastering them. Note-taking does not make the world take note. This is most explicit, and quite funny, in one of the novella’s central sections, where Herr Geiser endeavours, in vain, to remove a salamander that has ended up in his bathroom. After a few pages of struggling, suddenly readers instead read several extracts about the biology of salamanders – the implication seems to be that Herr Geiser believes that by understanding them a little better, he might be considered the real victor in their duel. It is, of course, not so.

In short, these cuttings are an ambiguous contribution to the novella’s network of meanings. On the one hand, they celebrate humanity as this meaning-deriving creature, driven by knowledge. On the other, they show its animal heritance, frailty and smallness. Generally speaking, they also do something else important – they force readers to put the extracts in relation to the rest of the text and interpret them for ourselves, thus increasing our participation beyond passive reading. We can even say that we join Herr Geiser even if we do not get close to him as a human – we become representatives of the “human being” too.

A Social Animal

Herr Geiser’s wife Elsbeth has died, I presume, shortly before the novella begins. The idea of human beings as social animals is one which I realise is also an important part of how the story builds its network of ideas. Herr Geiser is alone, with only his cat for company. He does visit a local inn at one point, but is largely asocial, before becoming actively antisocial as the novella draws to a close. He reads, but his reading seems pointless, especially when he finds he forgets it all. At the same time, he’s actually dependent on others, though he does not acknowledge it – to give an example, a neighbour brings him soup, without which I doubt he would be able to feed himself.

Frisch’s ideas of gender are a smidgen dated, I have noticed, but the function of Elsbeth’s memory within the text, I think, is to demonstrate how incomplete Herr Geiser’s life is when he is alone. His wife, who we learn reads fiction, symbolises an emotional interaction with the world just as Herr Geiser, through his encyclopaedia mania, symbolises a technological engagement with the world.

Neither, on its own, is sufficient for a fully human life. Man in the Holocene demonstrates how poor Herr Geiser’s single life is by showing how, alone, he declines. (Dementia develops faster in people with less regular social interaction). This is a further irony, because this decline as a human being, into a kind of animal or child, comes even as Herr Geiser continues his knowledge-obsession. The more notes he takes, the less sense he himself makes or can make as a human being.

Through the cutouts which praise human subjugation of the natural world, and the very fact of the town’s existence – “the Federal and local government do everything to ensure the valley does not go extinct” – we have a sense that even though human endeavour seems ultimately insignificant on a geological timescale, it is still better to try to work collaboratively to build human habitable worlds, than just to retreat into ourselves as Herr Geiser does. In this sense, the text is not entirely nihilistic.

As a Novella

With that said, it is hard not to read Man in the Holocene as an overall depressing, nihilistic work. It is a work where we humans simply do not matter. The cutouts, and the descriptions of nature, paint us as utterly insignificant and totally vulnerable to disasters. “Only man knows catastrophes, and only if he survives them; nature knows no such thing.” The relentless repetition of geologic facts emphasises the shortness of our lives, even the lives of homo sapiens as a whole.

We do not even need the cutouts, however. Man in the Holocene is a novella, and it shares many of the central ideas that form has gathered around itself during its storied history within German-language literature, such as madness in the protagonist. In terms of humanity’s smallness, however, another novella trope is important – a serious interest in time and its movements. In Frisch’s story, this comes across in the idea of cyclicity. Throughout the novella we get a sense of the valley as functional unit, with the post bus with its hooting in particular coming to be the obvious symbol for this. But at the novella’s end, all of these things are described in a long panoramic section without Herr Geiser being mentioned once. In other words, we loop back to the story’s beginning, and find that nothing has changed once we remove its central character. We do not need geologic time – even in the short timeframe of the novella we see how easily we are wiped away and replaced without a change to the world’s essence.

In the Context of Frisch’s other works

Man in the Holocene is my third Frisch, after Homo Faber and Montauk. While it shares themes of aging with the latter, in its concern with humanity’s development the more obvious point of comparison is with the former novel. I remember Homo Faber as being critical of humanity’s technological development through the figure of its narrator, who was obsessed with his electric razor, but ultimately struggled to experience emotions, leading to a kind of ruinous personal life. Like Herr Geiser, Walter Faber in his novel tries to understand his world through statistics and facts, but unlike Herr Geiser Faber finds strange coincidences and love forcing him out of his comfortable worldview.

Where Homo Faber was ultimately a cautiously optimistic work, describing a kind of way out of an entirely mechanistic worldview through emotional engagement, Man in the Holocene is no such thing. This is not merely because Herr Geiser’s mental decline is permanent. Rather, what is important here is that it simply does not matter. Humans may change the world however they will, but in the end it will all be washed away by floods, or crushed under heavy stones.

The world has existed since so long ago that we cannot even conceive it, and it will continue long after we have all gone extinct. The result is that nothing matters, even the attempt to write about it or gain knowledge about it, even the attempt to write blog posts about it. Because Elsbeth is dead, there’s no way out for Herr Geisler. Instead, there’s just a nature that is beautiful, but completely indifferent to him and all of us.

Depressing or not, I found it very interesting that the work demonstrated one way we might approach writing about things like climate change. A way that is probably morally irresponsible, but still valid – to write about life in this geological timeframe, showing how meaningless human endeavour is. This is the voice of a climate pessimist, or even a sceptic. The climate is changing extremely fast, geologically speaking and compared to historical changes to the climate, but the effects are felt the same way they are described here in Frisch’s work – as something huge, unstoppable, and utterly indifferent to us. A few weeks ago we had wildfires in California, last year my family’s house in Switzerland was itself flooded and the village cut off from the outside world. At least in the latter case we had insurance.  

When we think of nature, once we stop thinking about it in a Romantic manner – as a source of sublime beauty – we get to this sense that it is indifferent and cruel. (Of course, this is part of what the Romantics meant by sublime, but there is a slightly different emphasis). Clearly we must go a little bit further still, to find some way of writing about catastrophes and human insignificance which does not rule out human agency to make some small positive contribution against them. Without hope and ensuring action against these great impersonal forces and the human forces behind them, Frisch’s book, and humanity as a whole, may find themselves ashes, not some great interplanetary species.