Homo Faber by Max Frisch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Swiss Heart of Darkness

An engineer with an engineering outlook on life, the eponymous Homo (Walter) Faber believes in the randomness of existence. But he fails to recognise that such randomness is equivalent to a kind of cosmic spontaneity. And that such spontaneity implies some sort of spirit. He insists on the absolute disjunction between spirit and matter. The former is emotional, sentimental and soft. The latter is masculine and what constitutes reality, what can be measured, assembled and disassembled, and kicked with one’s foot. “Technology instead of mysticism,” is how he puts it.

That there should be any sort of continuity between physical matter and emotional spirit is not a consideration for Walter. Art bores him; ancient ruins are merely old. Consequently, neither does he comprehend the possibility of love. If strictly random materiality is all that exists, casual affection can be a fact, but certainly not self-less love. A silent declaration sums him up:

“Caresses in the evening, yes, but I can’t stand caresses in the morning, and frankly more than three or four days with one woman has always been for me the beginning of dissimulation, no man can stand feelings in the morning. I’d rather wash dishes!”

Homo Faber, true to his name, is above all practical, a maker, a fixer, at least in those aspects of life he regards as real. He can repair things like automobiles, turbines, and electric shavers. He knows the theories of cybernetics, plumbing, and electricity. He knows his way around the engine room of a ship.

But Walter is aesthetically and emotionally dead to most of the world around him. While a companion quietly appreciates a tropical sunset, Walter’s only thought is sarcastic: “Herbert stood there, still experiencing.” And he can neither commit to, nor abandon his married girlfriend. He can’t decide what relationship he wants with a young girl who is, unknown to them both, his daughter. He even dithers repeatedly about where he intends to go and why.

Walter records everything from Mayan ruins to the harbour of New York with the latest high-tech cameras, but he doesn’t know why, and he has no use for the results. He has had exactly one one friend in his life, whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. And the daughter he knew nothing about had been raised by this one friend, who had married her mother. The friend is found, by a series of improbable coincidences, dead by suicide in a remote Central American jungle. Equally improbably, Walter encounters the daughter on his voyage home to Europe.

Faber‘s monadic existence he finds not in the least unpleasant. He has freedom - to travel, to think, to meet others - that any sort of close relationship would impede. But the encounter with his daughter disturbs his equilibrium. Although only fifty, he feels suddenly old, tired, irrelevant in her presence. But the discovery that she is quite possibly his daughter is understandably even more de-stabilising. The order of his existence is torn apart, its logic made nonsensical.

The possibility that Walter has had sex with his daughter is the ultimate dislocation. The mother’s question is precisely the reader’s: “How far did you go with the child?” Randomness must be accompanied by something of the spirit and not a small degree of love for his life to retain any coherence whatsoever.

Frisch has more than a touch of Patricia Highsmith: of Studebaker and Nash automobiles, transatlantic sea voyages, post-war Mediterranean exoticism, as well as of her sexual ambiguity, incipient incest and public homosexuality. He has produced a period piece to rival even hers.

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