Jared E. Berg and Professor Thomas G. Plummer, Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature
The novel Homo Faber by the Swiss author Max Frisch is an important post-war work that describes the psychic tragedy resulting from the denial of myth, beauty, and the feminine by a mind rooted too firmly in reason and logic. It is a story of the psychic separation and the spiritual demise which comes from this denial. Considering the dense mythic and psychological content of the novel, it is surprising that so little has been written about it using an archetypal approach and the theories of Carl Jung. This is even more surprising since Frisch himself attended some of Jung’s lectures in Zurich and was well aware of Jung’s work. My objective in researching and writing this paper was to fill this gap in the scholarship on Homo Faber while at the same time preparing myself for scholarly production as a graduate student and professor. I feel that I have accomplished these goals.
My research began with an intensive study of Jungian psychological theory and its application as a theoretical approach to reading literary texts. In addition to Jung, the works of scholars like Joseph Campbell, Maud Bodkin and Northrop Frye were particularly helpful in establishing a theoretical foundation for interpreting the novel. Archetypal theory is powerful because it traces common themes, motifs, and symbols which have universal significance. In Homo Faber, Frisch relies heavily on such devices to weave an intricate fabric of archetypal meaning.
Faber’s troubles begin twenty (or, according to Hanna, twenty-one) years before the start of the novel, when he was a promising young engineering student in Zurich. After impregnating his girlfriend, Hanna, he offers to marry her. However, the impetus for this offer was not love, but rather convenience. By marrying Hanna, he hoped to help her, a half-Jew from Munich in the thirties, stay in Switzerland. He also wanted to make things proper for the child: “Wenn du dein kind haben willst, dann miissen wir natiirlich heiraten”(my italics) . His r 2 eal motives are clear to Hanna, and she refuses to marry him. They decide instead that she will abort the child with the help of Faber’s friend Joachim Hencke, a medical student. A week later Faber leaves Zurich to begin work as an engineer in Baghdad. He neither sees nor hears from Hanna again.
This is the first step to Faber’s psychic destruction because, archetypally speaking, Hanna is “the mother.” This archetype can manifest itself in many ways, but for Faber, she represents the place of rebirth, or birth, into an awareness of his unconscious, his femininity, and his incompleteness. Of course she is not his real mother, but the symbolic mother. Regarding the difference between the two, Jung said, “The dual mother motif suggests the idea of a dual birth. One of the mothers is the real, human mother, the other is the symbolic mother; … she is distinguished as being divine, supernatural, or in some way extraordinary.” Jung also states that, “Woman … is and always has been a source of information about things for which man has no eyes”. 3 Hanna embodies everything that Faber sees as feminine, and so he is unable to comprehend her. He says more than once, “Ich verstehe Hanna nicht immer.”
However, his crisis has roots much deeper than this; it is not merely the inability to understand the feminine. Faber is unable even to recognize his own incompleteness, his need to move beyond his masculinity and embrace the feminine. “Ich bin Techniker und gewohnt, die Dinge zu sehen, wie sie sind.” Had he sensed his incompleteness, his motives for marrying Hanna would have been pure, and he would have united himself with the feminine in sacred marriage. The failure to marry her placed him in a position of complete otherness opposed to the feminine and, because the symbolic mother is a symbol for the unconscious itself, his own unconscious. Faber is, like Oedipus, the seeing blind man. To become the blind man who sees, Faber must learn to see through the eyes of the feminine beyond the physical world to the soul of his humanity. Because he has cut himself off from the symbolic mother, his complete otherness from the female cannot be resolved. Indeed, consciously he feels no need to resolve it. This is made clear through one statement on the first page of the novel: “Ich heirate gründsetzlich nicht.”
The fact that Faber is on a psychic journey is underscored by the fact that Faber is a perennial traveler. His work takes him all over the world, and his physical travels are symbolic of his psychological wanderings. On a ship to Paris, Faber meets Sabeth. He is at first unaware that she is the daughter whom he thought had been aborted twenty years before. Sabeth represents for Faber the anima, the feminine principle within the male psyche. Her role as the anima primarily entails acting “as a guide to the inner world.” She is a “mediator between the ego and the Self who is to lead Faber back to the place of rebirth, to Hanna4. As they travel together to Athens, Hanna’s current home, from Paris, Sabeth begins to open his eyes. He begins to recognize the beautiful and the feminine. Unfortunately, however, he mistakes the anima for the mother. He proposes to Sabeth although he knows that marrying her would be “unmöglich.” After he realizes that spiritual union, marriage, is out of the question, he seeks rebirth through sexual union with Sabeth. When he later discovers that their relationship is incestuous, it is clear that his demise is imminent. Instead of achieving unity, he violates the incest taboo which should serve to “create the possibility for canalizing the libido away from actual incest and toward the goal of rebirth” 1. By so doing, he cuts himself off from the sacred marriage, and his psychic destruction is unavoidable.
References
- Forsyth, James. Freud, Jung, and Christianity. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1989. BL53.G6573x 1989.
- Frisch, Max. Homo Faber Ein Bericht. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977.
- Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Ed. Sir Herbert Read et al. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP,
- 1967.von Franz, M.-L. “The Process of Individuation.” Man and His Symbols. Ed. Carl G. Jung. New York: Dell, 1986.