Anthropocene Time in Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene

Abstract

This article offers a critical examination of Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene (1979) as an Anthropocene novel. I argue that Frisch’s novel represents the Anthropocene by engaging with its conceptual problematics concerning temporality and agency. Recent ecocritics have viewed the novel as challenging anthropocentric thinking by foregrounding geological time, the enormous scale of which relativizes and marginalizes the place of humanity in the world. In my view, however, Frisch confronts not only geological time but also human-scale history, thereby registering the double temporality of the Anthropocene, as scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty understand it. As I demonstrate by analyzing the description of Ticino and Iceland, Frisch juxtaposes two perspectives of geological and human scales. In the process, he describes not only how these two temporal scales coalesce but also how they collide with one another, registering the protagonist’s epistemological anxiety that arises from scalar confusion. Furthermore, Frisch’s novel elucidates the ontological structure of the human subject in the Anthropocene that straddles both geological and anthropocentric time. As Frisch portrays Geiser as a parodic figure of homo faber by deploying the device of literary collage, the human being with a double temporal consciousness retains minimal agency when he develops the “ecological thought,” or knowledge of his own lack of powers. For Frisch, “man” in the Anthropocene remains the remnant of the human, or the ghostly subject that gazes at his own wreck.