Love, Reason and Ruin (Part 2)

Max Frisch's Homo Faber and the tragedy of the tech bro

This is the second and last part of a two-part article. Find the first part here!

Love, Reason, and Ruin

The Fateful Voyage and a New Encounter

And now Walter Faber leaves the jungle, he goes back home, he lands in New York. He meets his girlfriend, Ivy, and she hopes that he's now back for a while and they can do the usual thing that people do in a couple: they go out together, they eat. But Faber is restless. He does not want this life anymore. He feels that he needs a break, particularly after the discovery of his dead friend. And he decides to leave immediately again. He calls his boss and he says, "I want to leave earlier for the next job. I don't want a rest in New York. I want to leave. I want to go to the next job, which will be in Europe, in France somewhere. And send me immediately." And the boss says, "Yes, okay, but you will be too early. You only have to be there in two weeks. You are not supposed to go now." And Faber says, "Then I will take a ship. I will cross the Atlantic in a ship."

And this is again a particularly wild suggestion by somebody so technologically refined as Walter Faber. Because of course, you would use the most efficient means, you would use an airplane, not a ship. A ship is something, even in the '50s, that you don't use anymore to cross the Atlantic. Although there are ships that have this schedule, it's more something for old people who want to relax and they want to chill on the ship. It's not something for a young, dynamic engineer who is going to a UN project. But Walter Faber says, "I want to do this. I want to go on the ship." So Walter Faber, now already a little shaken in his worldview but unable to admit it, takes the ship and sails to Europe. And we see already – and this is the mastery of Frisch – how slowly this person starts to fall apart in a way that he himself cannot see, but we can see it from the outside.

A Modern Greek Tragedy

And now this whole thing has a very Greek, ancient Greek tragedy ring to it. And for this, it's important to know how Greek tragedies actually worked. Because the whole idea of a tragedy is that you see a person who is a good person but in some way flawed. And then the worst possible thing happens to them, but not because of an accident, not because of a random accident, but because of their life choices. Because it's the consequence, the expected outcome of their life choices. And the more they try to act against fate, the more fate comes after them. And the more what they try to avoid is what actually happens to them. And this is something you see in all these ancient tragedies. They all begin with a setup, with some situation that is there at the beginning, and you know that just consequently following this setup will lead you to the worst possible outcome, will lead you to the tragic outcome.

And this is exactly what happens to Walter in this book. We start with this person who is unable to have feelings, who is unable to be a human being, who sees everything mechanistically, everything as a machine. The whole universe is just a machine. And just following this idea to its end, to its necessary end, destroys the person.

And so now we are already underway. He is on his ship, he is shaken, he cannot admit it. He tries to have a good time, he pretends to himself that he has a good time. And when you read the book, it sounds like a good time, but you know that this person would not have behaved like this if they were indeed okay, which they are not. And so one day, as he is on the deck of the ship looking for some entertainment, for some game to play, for something to do, he meets a young woman, Elisabeth, whom he calls Sabeth. And he just notices her from a distance at the beginning, and he tries to avoid her. He doesn't want another relationship. And this again is Walter Faber trying to avoid something that is scary to him: a human relationship.

But of course, we being outside of this and looking inside like the gods we are reading this novel, we know what is going to happen. He is not able to avoid this because the whole universe of the novel will conspire to bring him into this situation where he will again meet his demons. And so this woman is not going anywhere, and they have to be scheduled together for the same table for lunch and dinner because no other places are free. And although Walter tries to avoid eating at the same table with her, in the end, they are there together. And he happens to play ping pong, and she happens to play ping pong, so they start playing ping pong. She has a boyfriend, but she soon quarrels with her boyfriend. And when they finally arrive in France, Walter Faber and the girl are friends, but nothing else happens. They separate, and they say goodbye, and the girl goes away to Paris.

Now, Walter is much older than the girl; he could be her father. And he knows this. And this is why he also knows that trying to have any kind of relationship is pointless. And so he goes his way in Paris, also away from her. But it is still too early, he still arrived too early, he still has a few days to wait. And so he looks in Paris for things to do. And of course, if you are in Paris, you go to the museum. And so he goes to the museum to see what that is about. And it is not that he's particularly interested in museums; museums are old, they are not technological, there's nothing for him to see there. But something pulls him there, something tells him to go to the museum. And here again, we have his subconscious, perhaps some subconscious wish, some urge to fulfil his destiny.

And of course, in the museum, he meets the girl again. They go have a coffee, they go eat together, and they like each other. And she feels that she can profit from his friendship because he is so much more older than her, so much more experienced. He even has a car, he has a lot of money, she doesn't have any. And so he offers, at a moment of not being himself or not thinking, or of being overwhelmed by this situation, he offers to take her in his car to Italy. And so now these two people that should never have been together are together on a car driving to Italy. And of course, slowly the thing becomes more, and they start being a couple, they start having a relationship that none of the two actually wants to acknowledge because Walter Faber doesn't want it, and the girl is also confused because this man is so much older than her.

The Inescapable Truth

So now, little by little, Faber pieces together the background of the girl. And it turns out that this girl is the daughter of one of his friends from when he was young. And here we have this echo from the beginning of the book, where he met in the airplane this other person who knew his girlfriend while he was young, while he was a student, and who knew this other guy who killed himself in South America, who was also a friend of his from his study days. And now the girl mentions her mother, and the name of the mother is a name he knows. And he not only knows her mother, but it turns out that – one very crucial moment in the novel, a very big moment in the novel – he realizes that this is his girlfriend from the times of his studies, Hanna.

And now, because this is in the '50s, and if you go back 15, 20 years, you end up in Nazi Germany. And so this is exactly now what happens to him. Twenty years before, when he was a student (now he's a middle-aged man), he was in Nazi Germany, and this woman, this girl then, his girlfriend, was called Hanna, and she was a Jewish woman. And because it was Nazi Germany and she was a Jewish woman and he was not Jewish, he was a non-Jewish German, "Aryan" German as they called them, they are not allowed to have a relationship, they are not allowed to marry. And Hanna doesn't want them to marry because she doesn't want to endanger the career of Walter Faber, who is going to have a career as an engineer. And if he married her, he wouldn't get a job, and he would be considered a friend of Jews, which was the worst thing you could be in Nazi Germany, and it would even perhaps endanger his life. And so they separate. And Hanna gives up Walter for his own benefit. And this again is a moment where Walter behaves horribly to her, like he behaved horribly to the woman in New York, because he accepts her sacrifice. His career is to him more important than the relationship to Hanna. And he's okay with leaving her and her child. And I think he knows that she is going to have a child, but he leaves her anyway. He studies, he has his career, and Hanna is out of his life.

But now he meets this daughter of Hanna. And he starts calculating, and eventually, he works out that she must be his daughter. But he's unable to admit it to himself. And so a large part of this beautiful relationship between the two is travelling through the countryside in Italy on this sports car and being in the sun and having all these touristy experiences. And it's beautiful, and it's a happy time – the '50s in Italy, everything is nice and cheap and sunny and beautiful and carefree. Nobody has anything to do. She's on a trip to eventually visit her mother who lives in Athens; he is just waiting for his job to begin. And so nothing bad is happening externally to them. But internally, of course, this thing destroys him, the thought that this could be his daughter. And he keeps calculating on the back of cigarette packages and on the back of napkins, trying to add up whether this child is the child that he had with Hanna, whether she could be. And he arrives in the end at the conclusion that it's not possible, it just doesn't work out. She must be the child of somebody else. And this is also what her mother told her. Her mother didn't tell her about Walter because she separated from Walter in order to not implicate him in this. She told her that her father was somebody else.

And now they continue in this way, and she tells him about her mother, and he says, "I knew your mother." And they decide to go to Greece to visit the mother who is living in Greece. And of course, the choice of Greece again is a great move by Frisch because he wants to go to this Greek tragedy motive. He wants to show us that this is a Greek tragedy. This person Walter Faber is going to be destroyed in the way of the Greek tragedy.

Catharsis: The Cleansing Power of Tragedy

And the whole point of the Greek tragedy – now perhaps we should mention this – is the catharsis, what Aristotle calls catharsis. Catharsis means cleansing, cleaning, ritual cleaning. And what happens in the tragedy, according to Aristotle, is that we see these people suffer, and through their suffering of the characters in the tragedy, we are cleaned internally from our bad thoughts, from our bad psychological situation. And we emerge renewed and clean and stronger and with more understanding and more compassion for others. So this cleansing is a process of growth. And this growth is crucial for Aristotle and is the whole point of the tragedy. So if you have a tragedy, it's not about seeing people suffer; the point is, through the suffering of the people, you should see the world and yourself in a new light. And this should make you a better person.

And this is the same thing that Frisch wants us to do. He sees that every one of us is to some extent Walter Faber, and we are all guilty of this. And by steering Walter Faber through his life, through his past, towards his final resolution in Greece, towards this catharsis, he makes a statement about all of us. Why are we like this? And why are we all of us so technologically determined? Why are we so mechanical? Why are we neglecting our human qualities in favor of being these automatons, robots that neglect their humanity in order to have a more comfortable life, like Walter Faber does?

And so Walter Faber in the end meets his destiny, and it's not a good one. They go to Athens, and there his daughter, who still doesn't know that she is his daughter (she wants to present him to her mother as her new boyfriend, as her partner), is bitten by a snake. And so now he has to bring her to a hospital. He manages to bring her to a hospital in this Greece of the '50s where, of course, there are no mobile phones, there's no way to call for help on a remote beach. He has to carry her, he has to find a truck to bring her to the hospital. And now you have this situation where the mother arrives at the hospital after she's being informed that her daughter is there, having been bitten by a snake, and her boyfriend is there. And now she meets this boyfriend, and this is her own boyfriend from 20 years prior, Walter Faber. And they now finally all realize what's happening and how impossible the situation is.

I won't spoil the ending for you. Perhaps I have already, because I told you the whole point of the tragedy is to lead to the worst possible outcome for all in order to achieve this catharsis. So go read the book. But in the end, of course, none of this turns out well for Walter Faber. He is unraveling; his life is at a point where it cannot possibly continue.

Why This Book Still Matters

I hope you enjoyed this. This is, I think, a glorious, a wonderful book with a wonderful understanding of human frailty, of human illusions, and also, as I said in the beginning, of the soul of the tech bro, the soul of the geek who thinks that he has the world under control because he has the technology of the world under control. But the world, and fate, and personal fate is not a machine. And so, although we think that we have this world under control, in reality, the world is just waiting to pounce. This is more or less what this book is trying to tell us. And it does. And it destroys Walter, and it destroys his life. But it does so in a way that really achieves this catharsis for us, this cleansing. And so you come out of this book not depressed because of what happens to Walter. You come out of this book with a new appreciation of what it means to be human, of what it means to relate to one's past in a responsible way, to relate to one's mistakes, and to take responsibility for one's life – which is very often something we try to avoid – and to appreciate how great and how wonderful life is if we only open our eyes, look at it, and engage with it.

Thank you for being here, and see you next time for a book you can't miss! — Andy