There was a time in my 20’s when I was obsessed with Hermann Hesse. I was a Hesse Obsessor. After all, he was regarded h"Poet of the Interior Journey"
There was a time in my 20’s when I was obsessed with Hermann Hesse. I was a Hesse Obsessor. After all, he was regarded highly enough as an author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.
Something now lures me back to the novels I read then, "Siddhartha" and "Steppenwolf". However, I thought I would try this one as a "wedgie" or stopgap between more ambitious projects.
In truth, this is more a novella than a novel.
Even burdened by a 30 page introduction by Dr Timothy Leary (he coined the term "Poet of the Interior Journey" for Hesse), it’s less than 110 pages long.
So, is it any good? Yes, well, it's OK.
The Home of Light
There is a suggestion in the title of the novel that, in order to gain spiritual awareness, you must head towards the East.
However, this is not a purely geographical concept. For the West, it doesn’t necessarily mean Asia. It is a metaphor:
"We not only wandered through Space, but also through Time. We moved towards the East, but we also travelled into the Middle Ages and the Golden Age."
The East is where the Sun rises. The East is the Home of Light, the Home of Enlightenment. Even more simply, it is Home:
"Throughout the centuries it had been on the way, towards light and wonder, and each member, each group, indeed our whole host and its great pilgrimage, was only a wave in the eternal stream of human beings, of the eternal strivings of the human spirit towards the East, towards Home."
Wisdom and spirituality are not just found in the East, they are found at Home.
Lost Pilgrims
One other thing is implied: we can embark on our spiritual journey individually or we can travel as a collective.
Whichever way we choose, each of us can stray and end up a lost pilgrim.
The collective pilgrimage of Hesse's characters appears to fail and they feel disillusioned, worthless and spiritless:
"There was nothing else left for me to do but to satisfy my last desire: to let myself fall from the edge of the world into the void – to death."
For them, the confrontation with the void ushers in a suicidal impulse.
The Inevitability of Despair
All along, there is but one enemy, Despair.
The protagonist HH’s ambition to write a book about his adventures is based on his desire to escape from Despair:
"It was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide."
Despair is not just the experience of Depression for an Individual. It is not just something that the mentally imbalanced suffer from.
All of us have to confront Despair every step of our spiritual journey. In Hesse's eyes, it's a necessary part of the journey:
"Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side."
The Freedom to be Happy
Along HH’s path, he imagines the source of his temporal Happiness:
"My happiness arose from the freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre."
Note the fluidity, not just of Space, but of Time, hence the earlier allusion to the Middle Ages and the Golden Age.
You can see the appeal to Timothy Leary, who speculated [inaccurately in my opinion] that Hesse wrote the novella while on drugs.
Home is Where the Soul Is
Once again, Hesse's spiritual journey transcends geography:
"Our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times."
The Journey to the East is not just a journey to Asia, but an Interior Journey, a Journey that begins and ends at Home and with the Self.
This is where we will find true Happiness.
The Disappearing Self
In any spiritual journey, as with any other, we have to be cautious of spoilers.
However, within the theistic framework of the novel, each individual member of the group must merge with the God figure:
"He must grow, I must disappear."
The enemy of Spirituality is the persistence of the Self or Selfishness.
Ultimately, it seems that Hesse’s message is that we must transcend the Self, embrace a Universal Love and become one with that Love, if you like, a God.
We don't need to go elsewhere to achieve this.
The best place to seek the Self and Universal Love is at Home, the Home of the Soul....more
"Steppenwolf" starts with a fascinating 20 page preface that places a more conventional perspective on the rest of the novel (Half Bourgeois/Half Wolf
"Steppenwolf" starts with a fascinating 20 page preface that places a more conventional perspective on the rest of the novel (which is quite radical, if not exactly nihilist).
The unnamed first person narrator could be one of us. He purports to be "a middle class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality, [as well as] an abstainer and non-smoker."
He gets to know the Steppenwolf, Harry Haller, while they both rent furnished rooms in his aunt's apartment.
He finds Harry and his behaviour foreign, alien, peculiar and odd.
Harry is "a real wolf of the Steppes, a strange, wild, shy - very shy - being from another world than mine [the narrator's]...a wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness."
The Torturous Riddle
The narrator sees a resemblance to Nietzsche:
"Haller belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell."
Harry vanishes amidst rumours that he has committed suicide. All that remains is a manuscript found by the narrator, who decides to publish it, "as a document of the times...the sickness of the times themselves", in case it guides those who succeed him.
There is little clue as to whether the manuscript is fact or fiction, apart perhaps from the fact that occasionally during the preface Harry is visited by a "young and very pretty woman". Initially, I wondered whether she might have been his daughter. However, it's possible that she might have been "Maria", one of the women mentioned in the manuscript.
No Balance Between the Mean and the Magic
Early in the manuscript, Harry meets a man carrying a sign advertising an "anarchist evening entertainment" at the Magic Theatre. He gives Harry a booklet called "Treatise on the Steppenwolf". The protagonist happens to be called Harry Haller.
If Harry is the alter ego of the narrator of the preface, the protagonist of the manuscript is the mirror image of Harry (mirrors, both whole and splintered, abound in the novel).
Harry believes he is a "mixed being", he has "two natures, a human and a wolfish one" (the former of which is "the very same average man of bourgeois convention", the latter of which is "the free, the savage, the untameable, the dangerous and strong").
Harry stands outside the conventional world of the bourgeoisie, remote from "the search for a balance...the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct...
"A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self...The bourgeois is consequently by nature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility."
Harry is unable or unwilling to find such a balance. The extremes and opposites live in perpetual conflict:
"In him, the man and the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and deadly enmity. One existed simply and solely to harm the other, and when there are two in the one blood and in one soul who are at deadly enmity, then life fares ill."
Harry's understanding of himself contains an error or delusion that is shared by the bourgeoisie.
Harry thinks of himself as wolf and man, flesh and spirit, either way, a dualism.
He finds in himself "a human being, that is to say, a world of thoughts and feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this he finds within himself also a wolf, that is to say, a dark world of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature."
The bourgeois worldview reflects a belief that humanity is a unity that endeavours to accommodate, if not resolve or reconcile, opposites or dualities.
In contrast, man is actually a bundle of selves, "a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities... man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads."
An End to Detested Existence
The internal enmity exposes the Steppenwolf to a particular risk:
"The line of fate in the case of these men is marked by the belief...that suicide is their most probable manner of death."
Harry recognises that:
"Death was decreed for this Steppenwolf. He must with his own hand make an end of his detested existence - unless, molten in the fire of a renewed self-knowledge, he underwent a change and passed over to a self, new and undisguised."
The Invisible Magician
This is the real story of Steppenwolf: how he acquires new or renewed self-knowledge:
"I had already experienced it several times, and always in periods of utmost despair. On each occasion of this terribly uprooting experience, my self, as it then was, was shattered to fragments. Each time deep-seated powers had shaken and destroyed it; each time there had followed the loss of a cherished and particularly beloved part of my life that was true to me no more...
"It was then that my solitude had its beginning. I had built up the ideal of a new life, inspired by asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a certain serenity and elevation of life once more, submitting to the practice of abstract thought and to a rule of austere meditation. But this mold, too, was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted and noble intent."
It's within this context that Harry finds and reads the treatise:
"I read the Steppenwolf treatise through again many times, now submitting gratefully to an invisible magician because of his wise conduct of my destiny, now with scorn and contempt for its futility, and the little understanding it showed of my actual disposition and predicament."
[image]
Corresponding Through the Looking Glass
Harry's mind inevitably returns to the Magic Theatre:
"I understood the invitation to madness and the jettison of reason and the escape from the clogs of convention in surrender to the unbridled surge of spirit and fantasy."
In his quest to find the next show, he is advised to go to a club called the Black Eagle. Here he meets the first of two women who will help change his life.
She reminds Harry of his first girlfriend, Rosa. Equally, he thinks she looks like a boyhood friend, Herman. He guesses that her name is Hermine. It is. How could this happen? Hermine explains:
"Doesn't your learning reveal to you that the reason why I please you and mean so much to you is because I am a kind of looking glass for you, because there's something in me that answers you and understands you? Really, we ought all to be such looking glasses to each other and answer and correspond to each other..."
Harry responds, "There's nothing you don't know, Hermine. It's exactly as you say. And yet you're so entirely different from me. Why, you're my opposite. You have all that I lack."
She is his other half (in a Platonic sense). (view spoiler)[She might even be the feminine side of the one person, Harry Haller. (hide spoiler)] Equally, Harry and Hermine might be the two halves of Hermann Hesse himself. (view spoiler)[H&H = H.H. = ha ha! Does it mean this is all a joke? Of course, now we must also ask whether J.K. Rowling named her two main characters after those in "Steppenwolf"!(hide spoiler)]
Teacher-Woman and Courtesan
On their second outing, Harry and Hermine go dancing at the Balance Hotel, which features a small orchestra. Here, Harry meets the second woman, Maria, a friend of Hermine's, with whom he dances and quickly forms a relationship.
Later, on an evening walk alone, Harry intellectualises about the significance of music in his life:
"In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals, instead of fighting against this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless.
"Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music. And so the German spirit, carousing in music, in wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its intellectual gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strange to it and hostile...There was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning."
The masculine seems to be Logos, the Word, Logic, Reality, whereas the feminine seems to be Music, the Imagination, Fantasy, Unreality.
(view spoiler)[Earlier, in language that recalled Heidegger, Harry writes:
"When you listen to radio [music], you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine."
Both "Steppenwolf" and "Being and Time" were first published in 1927! 11 years after Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory".(hide spoiler)]
When Harry returns home, he finds Maria waiting naked in his bed, which understandably distracts him from his preoccupation with "The German Ideology".(view spoiler)[At times, it can be difficult to tell reality and fantasy apart! (hide spoiler)]
Harry's recovery is effectively triggered by two women. To paraphrase Hesse's biographer, Ralph Freedman, one is a "wise teacher-woman", the other a "courtesan".
A Pretty Cabinet of Pictures
The climax of the novel occurs in the Magic Theatre (after an evening at the Masked Ball), which for me created memories that have survived over 40 years since my first reading. The only fictitious scene I can liken to it is the ball in "The Master and Margarita".
Just as the personality has manifold aspects, the Magic Theatre "has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures..."
Harry must laugh in a mirror, so that the image of his mixed being, human and wolf, can disappear and he can enter "our visionary world...(and a jolly one it is)":
"True humour begins when a man ceases to take himself too seriously...You will learn to laugh like the immortals yet!"
Here, his saxophone playing host, Pablo (who doubles as Mozart), teaches him the art of "building up the soul":
"We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life."
Nothing But a Lover
Harry seeks out love's door. Until now, he has repressed his capacity for love:
"I was living a bit of myself only - a bit that in my actual life and being had been expressed to a tenth or a thousandth part...I was watching it grow unmolested by any other part of me. It was not perturbed by the thinker, nor tortured by the Steppenwolf, nor dwarfed by the poet, the visionary or the moralist. No - I was nothing now but the lover, and I breathed no other happiness and no other suffering than love."
"The Devil, But You Shall Live!"
Ultimately, in the Magic Theatre, Harry's host teaches him, "You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live. The devil, but you shall live!"
Harry's response is to make a resolution:
"I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh...I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being...one day I would be better at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh."
"Steppenwolf" makes no promise that our inner being will not be hellish.
It does, however, encourage us to laugh and play the game of life. Its message is quite the opposite of the nihilism with which it is usually associated.
After more than 40 years, it remains one of my favourite novels, both stimulating and beautifully crafted....more
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