The last item I am pulling from cold storage in my Google Keep is Max Frisch, The Art of Fiction No. 113 from The Paris Review. I have not read Frisch, nor can I recall why I chose to read the interview. However, I found much that interested me.
His affectless hero is not one that I had ever read about.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first decide to create the flat, cold, “affectless” hero we have been discussing?
FRISCH
Hard to know. I think I made it not all at once, but slowly; gradually it felt more and more comfortable. Just now I think—I don’t know if it’s right or wrong—that if you describe emotions, or the hero describes his emotions, as in the work of Dostoyevsky, for instance, or Melville, or other great writers, the danger that you will fall into the conventional is very great. It was Goethe who told us how we feel if we are in love with a girl—there are forms for that. But suppose you try to establish a situation, a movement, to show gestures and faces, and not talk about it. This is closer to film than old literature was. We have learned a lot from movies about what can be expressed without words. I would be proud or happy if a reader could feel the essential situation of, say, the man in Man in the Holocene, to feel how it is to be wet in your pants, how it’s getting colder, the feeling of growing tired, of melancholy or despair. That you get without using all those words. That you feel sensually and see with your eyes. I want to give that, or I try, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
By creating these flat characters you’re also giving them the freedom to express themselves metaphorically, through objects. “What helps is billiards,” to come back to that phrase.
FRISCH
That’s right. If Herr Schaad would write a letter to a friend, “Now I am free, I can do what I want and I’m perfectly depressed, I’m desperate, and I’m poor,” I’d say, “Well, come on over, have a drink.” But if all he says is “the only thing that helps is billiards”—that’s desperation. If a friend phoned me and said something like that I’d say, “I have to go, I have to have a look at him.”
I liked how he mentioned the influence of the movies. This was an idea I came to while doing my reading in prison. I came to it through Dashiell Hammett and the adaptations of his The Maltese Falcon. We have seen affectless characters in movies, especially from the film noir movies. Then, too, there is Albert Camus' The Stranger.
Since I started this blog, I have harped on my stopping writing fiction when I was young. It was a money thing and a fear I had no talent. Far too late I found out I was mistaken not to have taken the chance. Since Herr Frisch says something along these lines, I am adding his words to this post:
INTERVIEWER
What would your advice be to a beginning writer?
FRISCH
For someone who is serious and who already has a sense of his or her own talent, I would say to continue without involving too many people who think in commercial terms. When I was younger I felt it was dangerous to talk about my work with others. In the beginning, I didn’t inform anybody at all, not my wife, not friends, not my publisher. I remember my publisher asked me when I came back from the United States, “Are you working?” “I’m working, I’m working. Wildly,” I told him. He didn’t ask what it was and I didn’t tell him whether it was a play or a novel. Then one day I arrived in Frankfurt and said, “Here it is.” “What is it?” “It’s a novel.” That was Stiller. I would also say to measure yourself by very high standards. The greatest help is to have a friend who can criticize you from high standards. I had that with Peter Suhrkamp. He had courage and another marvelous quality, which is that his judgment didn’t change according to whether something was a success or failure. In some cases he would say, “Well, well, that’s great. It got marvelous reviews, and now you think, Max, that it is a good book? I don’t think so.” He was a great man, but not an easy man. In general I’ve had more help from writers than from critics. A writer is not less critical, but he knows about empty paper. A writer like Friedrich Dürrenmatt knows, for example, “Oh, you have great possibilities here.” A critic doesn’t see the chance you have in a project. If Shakespeare had talked about the project of Hamlet with a critic, he would have been told, “Look, man, you’d better write a novel. That’s a man who can’t act. You want to do theater with that? The hero is not special; his only special quality is that he hesitates, that he can’t act and so finally he gets killed. That’s not good for theater!”
The interview brought up a surprising issue - sin. And images as a sin.
INTERVIEWER
I noticed that a central concept for you, both in this novel and elsewhere, is the idea that it is a sin to form a fixed image of a person. What Stiller does to Julika, for example.
FRISCH
I wrote that little piece first in Sketchbook—before Stiller. I said that you shouldn’t form a graven image of man. And I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a key point for my thinking and feeling. It’s found again in Andorra. An image means a prejudice. I don’t think I could as yet describe your appearance or your character, but if you came again tomorrow I would not be perfectly open; I would already have some prejudices—perhaps good ones—but I would have some. That will happen. That has to happen. It is against the tendency we have to petrify things. It’s an invitation to keep you alive, to keep you ready to rethink things and not to repeat. Of course, it’s not meant that one has to keep this openness all the time. But it’s a warning. When you meet someone for the first time, or fall in love, you say to yourself, “I’m not supposed to be able to do this, but here I am.” I could start to fly and she’d say, “That’s not at all surprising.” That’s something marvelous. That’s a real honeymoon. Later: “I know that. I know that in a difficult discussion with your father, you’re a coward. I know it, come on. I’m sick of it.”
***
FRISCH
So awful! It’s just an awful idea. But let’s take another approach to your question about sin. For me, I think sin would be a lack of capacity for love. If I’m not able to love anybody, not even myself, or my dog, not my mother, or you—this inability to love would be a sin. Perhaps not the word sin, but disaster. Therefore, the heaviest accusation I can imagine is the one I have in Triptych—that someone would tell you you are incapable of loving. So you’re a liar, you’re cruel, you’re possessive—these are minor details compared with that. Not being able to love, for me that means not being allowed to exist.
I have to agree with that idea. Not that I have ever put that in the words used above, but when I saw that it felt like a true thing.
I would also not be so high-minded in how he describes the political aspects of literature, its necessity to be subversive. I find it inspiring. It may be even more inspiring now that Donald J. Trump will return to the White House.
INTERVIEWER
I read an interview you did with Michel Contat of Le Monde in which you said that literature contradicts the discourse of the dominant class. At the end of the interview, however, you said, “The nobility of literature is simply to exist.” Which is it?
FRISCH
I think the ruling class in any system has a language. The ruling language. And this language is full of prejudices. It’s a bourgeois prejudice to say “a poor but honest man.” You could also say, “a rich but honest man.” Literature is subversive in the sense that it has another language. It’s not a counter power, but a counter position to power. To write political books that are intended to have the power of a speech on the street is a misunderstanding of the importance of art. But on the other hand, I can’t imagine a really good writer not having a political awareness. In your country I was shocked and frightened by the lack of political awareness on the part of intellectuals.
***
FRISCH
I don’t believe so. You may not know what can be done politically, but it is important that you do not accept the way it is now, nor accept the lies. At the very minimum, challenge the lie. If you write a story, or a poem, you are in a state of mind of having no good reason to hope; you’re powerless, you have lost a lot of hopes, and it is in this landscape that you write.
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