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Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf
by
by
Ian "Marvin" Graye's review
bookshelves: hesse, re-read, read-2015, reviews, reviews-5-stars
Feb 24, 2011
bookshelves: hesse, re-read, read-2015, reviews, reviews-5-stars
Read 3 times. Last read June 20, 2015 to June 27, 2015.
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."
"Steppenwolf" exhibition in Calw Hesse Museum
The Delusion of Dualistic Unity
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."
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) Equally, Harry and Hermine might be the two halves of Hermann Hesse himself. (view 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)
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)
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.
"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."
"Steppenwolf" exhibition in Calw Hesse Museum
The Delusion of Dualistic Unity
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."
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) Equally, Harry and Hermine might be the two halves of Hermann Hesse himself. (view 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)
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)
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.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
Finished Reading
February 24, 2011
– Shelved
October 24, 2012
– Shelved as:
hesse
June 20, 2015
–
Started Reading
June 27, 2015
– Shelved as:
re-read
June 27, 2015
– Shelved as:
read-2015
June 27, 2015
– Shelved as:
reviews
June 27, 2015
– Shelved as:
reviews-5-stars
June 27, 2015
–
Finished Reading
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Seemita
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Jun 27, 2015 10:42PM
What an absolutely glorious review of a book I had been wanting to read for a long, long time! I marveled at the careful deconstructs you presented , interspersed with your tugging musings and it upped my thirst for this book a tad more. Thanks for this, Ian! :)
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Thanks, Seemita. This is the sort of book you really want to deconstruct with friends. I might have overdone the spoilers, but there is a lot more enjoyment in it than I have suggested. I hope you get a chance to read it soon, and look forward to reading your review!
After more than 40 years, it remains one of my favorite novels, both stimulating and beautifully crafted. ---- Ditto. Very fine review, Ian.
The climax of the novel occurs in the Magic Theatre, which for me created memories that have survived over forty years since my first reading. The only fictitious scene I can liken to it is the ball in "The Master and Margarita". ----- Now that you mention it, I can see the connection quite clearly.
Excellent review, Ian. I'll have to read this soon. I've read a number of other Hesse novels, but not this one.I liked the way you divided the review up into captioned sections. That made it easier to read. I'm going to steal---err I mean borrow :) --that technique.
Thanks, Mona. You're welcome to the technique. I try to use the headings as signposts. They help break up the text thematically and visually. I also try to avoid long paragraphs apart from quoted text.
Wonderful review. When we callow youth were into Hesse in the 70s, it really did feel we had every right to expect novelists to elucidate the meaning of life. The big issues he hitched his plots to felt real as a magic mountain in an invisible geography. The distortions of the hidden reality he captured somewhere in a metaphor of receiving Mozart over a scratchy radio transmission--was that in this book?
Thanks, Michael. Pablo/Mozart has a big role in this book. I placed a great quote about radio/music behind a spoiler warning, even though it's not strictly a spoiler. I originally wanted to make a broader connection between Einstein (1916), "The Magic Mountain" (1924), "Steppenwolf" (1927) and Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927). The music of time?
Insights galore, per usual.You made me curious about the Hermine name with your spoiler, Ian. A search turned this up, with related speculation:
http://thereluctantpsychoanalyst.blog...
Thanks, Steve. Notifications of your likes always excite me, because they're always followed by an interesting comment/ conversation. That's a pretty good review.(view spoiler)
Stellar review! You made more meaningful one of the most meaningful and personally resonant books I've ever read
Thanks, Vishal. It's an old favourite of mine as well.
Just had a wonderful meal at the Wolfe in East Brisbane, which is subtly themed around Steppenwolf:http://thewolfeeastbrisbane.com.au
Check out the cocktail list.
