“Man in the Anthropocene”: Max Frisch's Environmental History

Abstract

The aesthetic practices in Max Frisch's late story Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene [1979]) lend themselves to a reflection on the current global environmental crisis and its anthropological and epistemological repercussions. Frisch's visual and narrative artwork anticipates central issues in the current Anthropocene debate, in which the humanities have made incisive interventions. I bring these interventions to bear on close readings of Frisch's intermedia aesthetics, unearthing an environmental reflexivity that revolves around issues of time and history, place and identity, nature and human knowledge, metamorphosis and anthropogenic transformation. I thus invite us to reconsider in the light of the anthropological and sociopolitical imaginaries of the Anthropocene some ways in which the literature of the past half century has negotiated the relation between human beings and their natural environments.

Narrating a Valley in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän: Material Agency, Rain, and the Geologic Past

“…Dürbeck (2017), for example, views the rain as one of many examples of catastrophe in the text, writing that "[t]he rainfall and the threat to humans serve as an allegory not only for human physical decline but also for the vision of an unstable natural world, where natural disaster and even the extinction of mankind loom everywhere" (Dürbeck 2017, p. 335). Similarly, Malkmus (2017) interprets Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän as emblematic of the changing understanding of humans' place in the world; as anthropogenic environmental changes shift on a global scale, so too do the conceptual categories used to understand one's relation to the nonhuman world (Malkmus 2017). 2 Along these lines, Völker (2016) reads the narrative structure of the text as inextricably connected to the geologic time scales and depicting "temporal forms of deceleration, slowness, and standstill that are realized through the use of montage, parataxis, and enumeration," but does not figure rain into his analysis (Völker 2016, p. 10).…”