Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch

First published:Der Mensch erscheint im Holozan, 1979 (English translation, 1980)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Ticino, a canton of Switzerland in the Alps near Italy

Principal Character:

• Geiser, a retired businessman, age seventy-three, living alone in an Alpine village

The Novel

Man in the Holocene takes place during the last few days of a major rainstorm which has caused a road blockage and some interruptions of power and telephone service. The story records the protagonist’s response to his isolation during the storm and to the broader isolation of old age.

In the opening scene of the novel, Geiser attempts to ignore the sound of the rain as he builds a pagoda out of crisp bread, but he finds himself turning to the encyclopedia, reading the entries on lightning and thunder and making lists of the nine types of thunder he has been able to distinguish. Although he continually reads the books in his house for distraction, his reading inevitably returns to subjects that relate to weather, local geography, and geology. These topics reinforce his concern with landslides and avalanches, which historically have recurred in the Alps. His obsessive reading also becomes a way for him to test his memory, which he fears is fading. In fact, some of the articles he reads in his encyclopedia have to do with memory loss and other dimensions of aging. In addition, he does some research on Iceland, dinosaurs, and the human condition. Many short excerpts from Geiser’s reading are included verbatim in the novel, and the author includes sources for the quotations as if to assure the reader that they, too, are not fictional.

For a period, Geiser makes notes on his reading, but finally he decides that it will be more efficient simply to cut the relevant pages out of his books and tack them to the walls of his house. He reflects that his wife, who has been dead for some years, would not have approved of the holes in the plaster. Soon every available space on his walls is masked by clippings. He even takes down a portrait of his wife at nineteen in order to find more space to cover with the clipped pages that quickly begin to curl up in the humid air. When neighbors come to check on him or offer soup, he refuses to answer the doorbell because he does not want to reveal his transformed house.

Geiser finds that the evening passes with excruciating slowness, and he understands why someone would consider suicide to escape the sound of his own footsteps. In the morning, he picks up his rucksack, raincoat, and umbrella and embarks on a hiking expedition along a mountain path he has traveled in previous years. The footing is tentative and in places running water blocks the path, but Geiser presses on. Initially, the reader does not know why he has taken this hike. Only when Geiser decides to turn back is it clear that the town toward which he was heading would have provided means of transportation to the city Basel, his former home and the present home of his daughter and son-in-law. In turning back, Geiser accepts the isolation of his mountain home, and once he has returned, he ignores the ringing telephone, which he presumes signals calls from his daughter.

Geiser discovers himself lying on the floor beside an overturned chair, feeling dizziness and a numbness in part of his face. His thoughts and actions become erratic: He imagines that he resembles a newt, and he roasts his pet cat as if to eat it for dinner. He cannot bring himself to eat the cat, however, and buries her in the garden. As he drifts into a long reminiscence of a perilous mountain climb that he made fifty years earlier, his daughter, Corinne, arrives from Basel to make sure that he is all right and to restore order to the strangely altered household. The sun has come out again, and Geiser’s final reflections suggest that his world has returned to normal, that he recognizes the reassuring continuity of life in the valley, from earlier historical epochs to the present day. Nevertheless, it is evident that his fears and meditations during the past few days have reinforced his sense that individual human beings are essentially alone and essentially inconsequential compared to the grandeur and longevity of nature.

The Characters

Man in the Holocene is a one-character novel, and its action occurs mainly inside the protagonist’s mind as he awaits catastrophe caused by the interminable rain. The novel is written in a very limited third-person point of view, almost as if its reflections were confined strictly to Geiser’s own mind. Because of this technique, the reader is sometimes forced to extrapolate information about what has happened to Geiser when Geiser himself is disoriented or unaware. This is particularly true toward the end of the novel when Geiser begins to behave eccentrically. The evidence of his behavior and physical symptoms suggests that he has had a stroke. Near the final page, this intuition is confirmed by the final quotation, an excerpt on the subject of apoplectic stroke. Evidently, Geiser himself was sufficiently aware of his changing condition to do some medical research in the same encyclopedia which had provided his clippings about dinosaurs and geology.

Despite the close connection between the point of view and Geiser’s mind, the narration is spare and objective. The reader sees only what Geiser sees but is rarely told how the protagonist feels about his experiences, his memories, or his reading. The dominant emotion in the book is Geiser’s fear that an avalanche will destroy his house or his village, but even this fear is conveyed indirectly—for example, by the collapsing pagoda of crisp bread that Geiser is constructing when the book begins. Later, he watches the rock cliffs that surround the village, searching for cracks. Shadows, snakes, or running water may momentarily seem to him to be a fatal crack in the earth.

Oddly, the most emotional moments in the book come neither in connection with Geiser’s present fears nor with respect to any memories relating to his wife and children but in his description of the long-ago climb of the Matterhorn, undertaken with his brother, Klaus. The two men managed the ascent with ease, but they made an error in descending, trapping themselves on a narrow ridge of snow. It was decided that Klaus, as the elder, would take the risk of climbing back upward to surer ground from which a rope could be lowered to his brother. If this plan did not work, Klaus would descend by himself and go for help. Geiser knew that he could not wait for hours on the narrow ledge and that he would allow himself to fall before he could endure the long, cold isolation. Luckily, Geiser was rescued within short order by this method. About the experience, he tersely remarks that Klaus was a good brother. Yet, from this episode, the reader understands Geiser’s love and admiration for his brother as well as Geiser’s own physical courage. It is also apparent that Geiser is willing to confront the loneliness and potential death inflicted by the world of ice which surrounds and underlies his Alpine homeland. He recognizes, too, the thin line between life and oblivion.

Critical Context

Man in the Holocene has two distinctive features: It is peppered with excerpts from reference works and it is very short. Both of these features place the work outside the realm of the traditional novel, edging it closer to a genre sometimes called antifiction. Antifiction characteristically uses devices that call attention to the structure of the work or to the authorial presence behind the text. Traditional fiction, on the other hand, tries to create a fully imaginative world or alternative reality in which the reader can lose himself. For the writer of antifiction, the very idea of fiction as an escape is romantic and inappropriate. The style of Man in the Holocene, then, is consistent with its theme; both the form and the content of the book are rigorously unsentimental and economical. No doubt some readers would also find that these adjectives seem appropriate for the work of a Swiss writer.

In the context of Frisch’s other work, Man in the Holocene perpetuates the theme of the quest for identity found in his earlier works. Whereas earlier works explored the possibility of adopting a new identity as easily as a new name, Man in the Holocene ultimately repudiates the very meaning of identity in the face of eternity.

Man in the Holocene is likely to remain one of the most widely read of Frisch’s novels; it is an important contribution to the relatively small canon of Swiss writings known outside the German-speaking community.

Bibliography

Butler, Michael. The Novels of Max Frisch, 1976.

Petersen, Carol. Max Frisch, 1972.

Probst, Gerhard F., and Jay F. Bodine, eds. Perspectives on Max Frisch, 1982.

Weisstein, Ulrich. Max Frisch, 1967.

The Yale Review. Review. LXX (Winter, 1981), pp. 273-283.