BOO KS
313
All stories are invented. Games of the imagination. Every person, even
if he is not a writer, invents his own story. The one and the same
incident serves a thousand experiences." That then is what becomes of
the unending circle of the assertion and destruction of egos. It dissolves
in
the flux of an artistically imagined series of roles.
In his essay on Leskov, Walter Benjamin described the growth
process of fables by saying that "Ennui [the German
Langeweile
con–
notes both boredom as well as an extended period of time organized in
natural cycles; hand-weaving Benjamin felt was analogous] is the dream–
bird that hatches the egg of experience." Frisch's novel belongs to the
very opposite tradition, the individualistic novel in the advertising age:
fragmentation, disruption of time, misgivings about the nature and
capacity of the imagination and the very perceptions in which the
imagination has to trust to be able to function creatively; a spectrum
of identities which all hint at the presumed, longed-for, but nonetheless
distrusted whole self, which appears to be unidentifiable yet whose most
vigorous characteristic is its unfettered craving for self-consciousness.
But, in the same way as it only adopts the manner of an effective con–
temporary narrative technique, the novel only toys with the more dan–
gerous implications of its subject.
This comes out most clearly in the role the narrator prefers to that
of any other, the role of Gantenbein (a translation of the German title
would read: "My Name be Gantenbein"). Gantenbein wears blind man's
glasses though he is not blind, in his marriage assumes the role of the
wife though he is not homosexual, through his dark lenses sees the
violet-colored emptiness around him; but, since he knows he is merely
playing a role and is but an empty shell himself, he feels no need to
step out of his role or act on the basis of what he sees. It is clearly
futile to do so. As the narrator puts his favorite daydream character
through his paces-the narrator tests Gantenbein in every standard
human situation-he proves to Gantenbein, and himself, how disastrous
the consequences are when Gantenbein does leave his role. The role to
which Gantenbein is married thus becomes his fate.
This view is pessimistic and self-indulgent in the extreme, which
may be the ultimate consequence of an abstract and negative quest for
an
identity and absolute freedom as it is described so forcefully
in
Stiller.
The divorce of imagination from outward existence is completed. A
civilized existence protects a richly developed inwardness, a phantom
world of suppressed longing.
Michael Roloff
