Montauk erscheint im Holozän. Literarisches Schreiben und Altern bei Max Frisch

Abstract

In his poetological lectures, Schwarzes Quadrat, Frisch sketches a type of reflexivity which involves the assumption of a position of distance to the self and a process of understanding that has aesthetic, but also age-specific characteristics. The existential connection between the awareness of temporality and sensory experience is evident throughout Frisch’s narrative prose, but is made more explicit in those narratives that focus on ageing and transience. The mood of old age in Montauk (1975) and Der Mensch erscheint im Holözan (1979) – and indeed already in Stiller and Mein Name ist Gantenbein – is permeated by tensions associated with the experience of alterity, melancholy reflections on the past and eschatological-apocalyptic visions. The anthropological experience of the foreignness, finitude and historicity of one’s own existence is represented at different stages of the ageing process and takes different forms. Frisch’s narrative concentration on the interconnection of individual and human, cultural and evolutionary history on the one hand, and the parallels he establishes between phenomenological perception and erotic memory on the other, open a perspective on the mysteriousness of human existence which is at once subjectively estranged, but familiar, objectively distanced, but sensually immediate. Not only in old age, but there inevitably, life and its history only become real through the fictionalisation of experience.