BOO KS
311
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
A WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS.
By
Max Frisch. (Translated
by
Michael
Bullock.) Random House. $6.00.
I Am Not Stiller,
the best-known of Max Frisch's four novels,
is prefaced by two quotes from Kierkegaard that read like succinct
summaries of the problems Frisch has written about throughout his
work: "Look, that is why it is so difficult to choose oneself, because in
this choice absolute isolation is identical with the deepest continuity,
because this choice eliminates any chance to become someone else, or
rather, to transform oneself into something else." And: "As the passion
for freedom awakes in him (and it awakes in the very choice and is a
prerequisite of the act of choosing) he chooses himself and fights for
this possession as for his blessing, and that is his blessing." Indeed,
Stiller's blessing consists entirely of his assertion of the freedom to be
himself; conversely, of his violent denial of being wh:lt others insist he
was and is. Stiller's decision is existential and abstract, and the more
problematical for not involving a commitment to something outside
himself. Moreover, Frisch's existential hero refuses to make himself a
new self after having sloughed off the old one, since doing so would
immediately curtail his freedom. He exists in a state of vacuous freedom
and flux; his passion is to be absolutely free and unnamable. But by
emphasizing these purely negative ramifications of Stiller's choice, by
making the passion for freedom indistinguishable from an irrational
reaction, by making Stiller's choice of himself synonomous with the
possession of nothingness, Frisch so weakens his protagonist's position as
to make his eventual capitulation to the status quo both inevitable al1d
comprehensible. The stages of Stiller's revolt and submission parallel
the vicarious and purposeless revolt of and eventual submissiveness of
middle-class youth, particularly in Germany.
Two of the possibilities inherent in the choice as described by
Kierkegaard are fanaticism and madness. Theological and psychological
implications overlap. Frisch is as fearful of these consequences as the
bourgoisie has been traditionally afraid of genuine revolutions. In
Stiller,
therefore, Frisch merely demonstrates the desire for and impossibility of
the identity revolution.
Whereas the psychological drama of Stiller is wrenched into a most
improbable realistic arrest and investigation framework, an instance of
the difficulties novelists can have with protagonists whose inner life over–
whelms plot and environment and in fact exists in an abstract and
