Bernhard Malkmus (Ohio State/IFK Wien): Man in the Anthropocene: Max Frisch's Environmental History
Seminar at ELTE, Institute of Hungarian Literary and Cultural Studies, Budapest, 12.12.2014
Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene (1979) is about a dementia patient’s attempts to restore his vanishing memory and life by furnishing the walls of his domicile in the Swiss Alps with excerpts from natural histories, encyclopedias, and textbooks. His futile miniature orders of knowledge are manifestations of the irretrievable loss of a connection between the mind and the environment. When a mudslide cuts off his alpine valley, he embarks on a hike across the mountains with the aim to reach a neighboring valley, which he never does.
The novella is a secular meditation on eschatology, overdetermined by meteorological images. Gradually, Herr Geiser, a name reminiscent of a goat herder, becomes absorbed by the forces of the elements, an aspect already suggested by the quasi-homonymy with the word ›Geyser‹. Herr Geiser’s mind is eroded by oblivion; the civilization of the valley is eroded by torrential rainfall; the ecosystems of the region are eroded by the loss of biodiversity and tree diseases that reach back centuries.
This presentation provides a close analysis of Max Frisch’s eschatological meteorology that speaks to us in powerful ways today: In an age when humans begin to change the world on a geological scale, the weather becomes the most potent reminder of the fact that humans, in spite of this power, are not in control. Frisch presents us with a viable aesthetic response to ›the end of the world of sense‹ (J.-L. Nancy) and the related end of the sense of the world. His text-image collage is a reflection on the Anthropocene avant la lettre.
Hanna Hamel · 7. Januar 2015, 15:55 Uhr