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MICHAEL ROLOFF
timeless philosophical realm, Frisch in his latest novel internalizes the
quest for identity completely. The never ending cycle of the assertion and
destruction of egos, the state of permanent flux, becomes the activity of
the novel itself.
"A man has been through an experience, now he is looking for the
story to go with it-you can't live with an experience that remains
without a story and I often used to imagine that someone had exactly
the story to fit my experience." The narrator of
A Wilderness of Mirrors
"tries on stories like clothes," as "sketches for an ego." Since to find the
story which fits properly would mean he must commit himself to a
single ego, to isolation and deep continuity, as it were, the one true story
behind the various imagined ones (the identity behind the conflicting
fragments) is intimated to us through the organized disarray and so
assumes the vague outlines of an Everyman. The various roles the nar–
rator tries on contain implicit comments on each other's unsuitability;
the futility of the endeavor to find the one true story is parodied
throughout.
At first it appears that
A Wilderness of Mirrors,
like so many novels
written in German during the fifties and early sixties (Johannes Bob–
rowski's
Levin's Mill
would be a good example), derives its artistic
strength from its emphasis on the narrative element as a device used at
the writer's discretion for critical purposes or for maneuvers designed
to countervene empathy. But that is not the case here. The breaks
in
the narrative do not suspend the reader's perhaps too eager belief in the
story, since the stories are admittedly false to begin with and obviate the
need for disruption of empathy. The breaks do not reflect on anything
outside the book, but only back upon the narrator himself. Brecht's
estrangement technique, to which Frisch has admitted being deeply
attracted, devoid of Brecht's overt didactic purposes, turns into
an
artistic device per se. As a completely internalized psychological drama,
A Wilderness of Mirrors
also lacks the tension that marks, for example,
H . E. Nossack's
The Impossible Proof,
a novel of insomnia which repre–
sents one of the most brilliant formulations and critiques of the split
between a conservative existence and the utterly nihilistic view of life on
which such an existence bases itself.
A Wilderness of Mirrors
lacks ten–
sion because there is nothing at stake. What matters to the narrator is
the very process of trying on roles, of trying them out on himself.
That is what has become of the very act of choosing himself; trying
on stories, a moderate blessing. In his diary
(Tagebuch
1946-49, a
beautiful and interesting document of that period) Frisch offers us
an
explanation for the insufficiency of stories: "For truth is not a story.
