Homo Faber

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Category: Literature

Published on Friday, 29 January 2016 15:49

One of the probably most famous parts of the ancient greek culture is the amount of myths, it has given us. For nearly every situation, one can possibly experience, there is a greek myth describing it. The ancient Greece has built such a big world full of gods, heroes and tragedies, that they still find place in our modern literature. One of the best examples for this is the book “Homo Faber”.

You may ask yourselves now, what a book called “Homo Faber” written by a swiss author called Max Frisch, has to do with greek myths, greek literature, and therefore with greek culture? Well, you will see!

The book was written in the year 1957 and is one of the most successful and critically acclaimed books of Max Frisch. It is about the engineer Walter Faber and how a series of unfortunate events and coincidences leads to the collapse of his own deeply rationalized world view and a total change of his person.
During a cruise from New York to Paris, Faber, who is 50 years old, falls in love with a 21 year old girl called Elisabeth. He then accompanies her on a car trip across Italy to Athens and starts a relationship with her. During the trip, and as he begins to learn more and more about his young lover, the indications, that this girl is actually his daughter, who he thought his ex-girlfriend would have aborted, increase, but all get displaced by him. In Greece, Elisabeth gets bitten by a snake and falls down a cliff, whereupon she dies in a hospital. There, Faber meets his ex-girlfriend Hanna, the mother of the child, and has to face the truth, that Elisabeth was his daughter. The whole book is written as a report from Faber himself, where he justifies his actions and states that he has no guilt in what happened and that he could not have known that it was his daughter. Only in the end, he accepts that the whole justification and therefore the whole report is a lie.
The references to greek culture are not only because of the ending point of Faber’s journey-Athens- obvious. The story of a man loving his own daughter is a repetition of the Ödipus myth, where Ödipus marries his mother and kills his father due to unlucky coincidences. In one scene, Faber muses about blinding himself, exactly what Ödipus did, after he realized the truth. Many other references to greek myths are dropped during the story, for example at a Museums visit in Italy, where Faber sees a display of the Erynnies, which are greek gods of revenge especially for the case of incest.
So, even if this Book is neither by a greek author nor has it a greek main character, it has many references to the greek culture und is a modern interpretation of the popular Ödipus myth. And therefore it basically is a part of the greek culture.
And definitely a book one should have read!