by Colin Wilson
This version of the story troubles Sinclair; its implication is clear: the descent into the dark world is not necessarily evil; it may be the necessary expression of boldness and intelligence. Demian is bold and intelligent, and rumours circulate that he has carnal relations with girls, even with his mother. Yet it is this Demian who frees Sinclair from the evil domination of Frank Kromer, and who appeals to him as being above the petty viciousness and dirty-mindedness of schoolboys. Still, Sinclair has not enough courage to embrace the conclusions that Demian shows him. With Kromer’s domination over, he flings himself into the peace and order of his home, and ‘sings the dear old hymns with the blissful feeling of one converted’. Only much later he realizes that it was not to his parents that he should have made confession, but to Demian. By returning to his old notion of order, he has only turned his face away from chaos; the chaos still exists.
The remainder of the book describes Sinclair’s adolescence and sexual awakening. The question he has passed up repeats itself, drives home its point that you cannot escape chaos by refusing to look at it. Demian reappears on the scene while Sinclair flounders hopelessly; he introduces him to his mother, and Sinclair finds in her the answer to the question of the two worlds. She symbolizes nature, the life force, the mother figure, Lilith, in whom all opposites are resolved. The novel ends in a whirl of Shelleyan airy-fairy that is a disappointment to the unromantic reader whose attention has been held by the terseness and practical eye-to-business of Hesse’s analysis. This is a fault that recurs in most of Hesse’s novels, a legacy from his romantic ancestry.
In spite of this, the conclusions of Demian are clear. It is a question of self-realization. It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result in freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos. This is Hesse’s conclusion. In theological terms, the fall was necessary, man had to eat of the fruit of good and evil. (Later, dealing with Nietzsche and Blake, we shall touch upon similar views: the idea that good and evil are not ultimate antinomies, but expressions of a higher force that comprehends both.) In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expresses it: Those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.
Hesse’s next novel has a delusive air of having solved great problems. Siddhartha was written on his return from India; it is the best written of the five novels and the most idyllic in tone. (We are reminded that it was through study of Hindu and Buddhist texts that Strindberg regained his sanity.) It suffers from the same defect as Demian: the reader feels that Hesse hadn’t foreseen the end when he wrote the beginning.
Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, born in the time of the Buddha (approximately 563 to 483 B.C.). He feels the attraction to the life of the wandering monk; he leaves home while still a youth and practises rigorous disciplines that give him great control of body and mind.
Siddhartha is already beyond the problems of Barbusse’s Outsider.
Still feeling that this self-control is not ultimate self-realization, he goes to listen to the preaching of the saintly Gautama, Sakyamuni, called by his disciples the Buddha. Gautama reinforces the conclusion that Siddhartha had already reached, that extreme asceticism is not an essential of self-realization, for its purpose is only to test the will. The Buddha teaches the ‘middle way’ that depends on achieving a state of contemplation, of complete separation from all the human faculties. This state achieved, the monk, having extinguished every tendency to identify himself with his body, emotions, senses or intellect, knows himself to be beyond all, and achieves freedom from ‘the wheel of rebirth’.
Siddhartha accepts this, but he doubts whether following the Buddha would bring him to self-realization. (In point of fact, Gautama said as much repeatedly: ‘Let each man be unto himself an island’, etc.). His best friend remains as a disciple; Siddhartha goes on, still searching. He tells himself: No man can teach another to be a Buddha; you can only teach yourself. Then the question occurs: Can a man teach himself by narrowing his life and perceptions until all love of nature has been filtered off? This decides him. He puts off the robe of the holy man; in the first town he comes to he goes to court a beautiful courtesan. When she tells him that he cannot possibly become her lover unless he has some worldly success behind him, he sets his mind to make money with such acumen that he soon has a house, and the beautiful courtesan for a mistress. After a few years of this, it dawns on him that he is less near to self-realization than ever, and one day his basic misery forces itself on him so irresistibly that he tries to kill himself. He fails, but the honesty involved in facing his own unfulfilment gives him strength to renounce the house and success, and become a homeless wanderer again. This time he doesn’t wander far; he joins the local ferryman (another contemplative) and again spends his days in spiritual discipline. When the courtesan dies, Siddhartha discovers that he has a son as a result of the last night they spent together; he brings the boy up, and then has to suffer the final misery of realizing that there is no real communication with other human beings, even those we love most. The son leaves home: Siddhartha accepts his loss and continues to contemplate the river. The novel draws to a close.
It must have struck the reader, even from this brief summary, that Hesse had not quite succeeded in pulling off the conjuring trick. Siddhartha leaves home full of hope; asceticism fails him, so he turns to the Buddha. The Buddha fails him, so he turns to the worldly life. That fails too, so he becomes a ferryman. The reader is waiting to be told of a successful solution, and as the novel comes towards the end, he realizes Hesse has nothing to offer. The river flows on; Siddhartha contemplates it. Hesse arrives at the conclusion that there is no ultimate success or failure; life is like the river; its attraction is the fact that it never stops flowing. There is nothing for it but to close the novel feeling rather let down.
The student of Eastern religion will object that the novel’s failure is Hesse’s inability to grasp the essence of Vedantism or Buddhism, that he should have tried reading Ramakrishna or the Tibetan saint Milarepa to get his facts straight before he began writing the novel. This is probably true; we can only accept what we have, a finished novel, and consider it as a part of Hesse’s attempt to define his own problems.
That Hesse himself was not satisfied is proved by his next book. In Steppenwolf he returns to the attack, sets out all his facts, and starts from the beginning again. From the point of view of this study of the Outsider, Steppenwolf (i§2%) is Hesse’s most important contribution. It is more than that; it is one of the most penetrating and exhaustive studies of the Outsider ever written.
Steppenwolf is the story of a middle-aged man. This in itself is an important advance. The romantic usually finds himself committed to pessimism in opposition to life itself by his insistence on the importance of youth (Rupert Brooke is a typical example). Steppenwolf has recognized the irrelevancy of youth; there is a self-lacerating honesty about this journal of a middle-aged man.
In all externals, Steppenwolf (the self-conferred nickname of Harry Haller) is a Barbusse Outsider. He is more cultured perhaps, less of an animal; the swaying dresses of women in the street do not trouble him. Also he is less concerned to ‘stand for truth’; he allows his imagination full play, and his journal is a sort of wish-dream diary. But here again we have the man-on-his-own, living in rooms with his books and his gramophone; there is not even the necessity to go out and work, for he has a small private income. In his youth he considered himself a poet, a self-realizer. Now he is middle-aged, an ageing Emil Sinclair, and the moods of insight have stopped coming; there is only dissatisfaction, lukewarmness.
The journal opens with an account of a typical day: he reads a little, has a bath, lounges around his room, eats; and the feeling of unfulfilment increases until towards nightfall he feels like setting fire to the house or jumping out of a window. The worst of it is that he can find no excuse for this apathy; being
an artist-contemplative, he should be ideally contented with this type of life. Something is missing. But what? He goes to a tavern and ruminates as he takes his evening meal; the food and wine relax him, and suddenly the mood he has despaired of having pervades him:
A refreshing laughter rose in meIt soared aloft like a soapbubble ... and then softly burstThe golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars. For an hour I could breathe once more9
But this is at the end of a long day, and tomorrow he will wake up and the insight will be gone; he will read a little, have a bath ... and so on.
But on this particular evening something happens. The reader is not sure what. According to Haller, he sees a mysterious door in the wall, with the words ‘Magic Theatre: Not for everybody’ written over it, and a man with a sandwich board and a tray of Old Moorfs Almanacs gives him a pamphlet called A Treatise on the Steppenwolf. The treatise is printed at full length in the following pages of the novel, and it is obviously Haller’s own work; so it is difficult for the reader to determine when Haller is recording the truth and when he is playing a game of wish-fulfilment with himself.
The treatise is an important piece of self-analysis. It could be called CA Treatise on the Outsider’. As Harry reads it (or writes it) certain convictions formulate themselves, about himself and about the Outsider generally. The Outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.
To explain his wretchedness, Haller has divided himself into two persons: a civilized man and a wolf-man. The civilized man loves all the things of Emil Sinclair’s first world, order and cleanliness, poetry and music (especially Mozart); he takes lodgings always in houses with polished fire-irons and well-scrubbed tiles. His other half is a savage who loves the second world, the world of darkness; he prefers open spaces and lawlessness; if he wants a woman he feels that the proper way is to kill and rape her. For him, bourgeois civilization and all its inanities are a great joke.
The civilized man and the wolf-man live at enmity most of the time, and it would seem that Harry Haller is bound to spend his days divided by their squabbling. But sometimes, as in the tavern, they make peace, and then a strange state ensues; for Harry finds that a combination of the two makes him akin to the gods. In these moments of vision, he is no longer envious of the bourgeois who finds life so straightforward, for his own conflicts are present in the bourgeois, on a much smaller scale. He, as self-realizer, has deliberately cultivated his two opposing natures until the conflict threatens to tear him in two, because he knows that when he has achieved the secret of permanently reconciling them, he will live at a level of intensity unknown to the bourgeois. His suffering is not a mark of his inferiority, even though it may render him less fit for survival than the bourgeois; unreconciled, it is the sign of his greatness; reconciled, it is manifested as ‘more abundant life’ that makes the Outsider’s superiority over other types of men unquestionable. When the Outsider becomes aware of his strength, he is unified and happy.
Haller goes even further; the Outsider is the mainstay of the bourgeois. Without him the bourgeois could not exist. The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society’s spiritual dynamos. Harry Haller is one of these.
There is a yet further step in self-analysis for the Steppen-wolf: that is to recognize that he is not really divided into two simple elements, man and wolf, but has literally hundreds of conflicting I’s. Every thought and impulse says T. The word ‘personality’ hides the vagueness of the concept; it refers to no factual object, like ‘body’. Human beings are not like the characters in literature, fixed, made immutable by their creator; the visible part of the human being is his dead part; it is the other part, the unconditioned Will that constitutes his being. Will precedes essence. Our bourgeois civilization is based on personality. It is our chief value. A film star has ‘personality’; the salesman hoping to sell his first insurance policy tries to ooze ‘personality’:
The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard to maintain and strengthen.10
The treatise comes to an end with a sort of credo:
Man is not ... of fixed and enduring form. He is ... an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature ... man ... is a bourgeois compromise.11
That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow.12
Steppenwolf knows well enough why he is unhappy and drifting, bored and tired; it is because he will not recognize his purpose and follow it with his whole being.
‘He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.’13 Haller knows that even when the Outsider is a universally acknowledged man of genius, it is due to ‘his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarifies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane’.14
This Steppenwolf...has discovered that... at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony.... No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair.... Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple.... The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God, leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or the child, but ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life.... Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.15
The last image of the treatise recalls an idea of Rilke’s: the Angel of the Duinese Elegies who, from his immense height, can see and summarize human life as a whole.
Were he already among the immortals—were he already there at the goal to which the difficult path seems to be taking him—with what amazement he would look back over all this coming and going, all the indecision and wild zigzagging of his tracks. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf.16
The Outsider’s ‘way of salvation’, then, is plainly implied. His moments of insight into his direction and purpose must be grasped tightly; in these moments he must formulate laws that will enable him to move towards his goal in spite of losing sight of it. It is unnecessary to add that these laws will apply not only to him, but to all men, their goal being the same as his.
The treatise throws some light on Hesse’s intention in Siddhartha. We can see now that Siddhartha revolted against the religious discipline that ‘narrowed the world and simplified his soul’, but in renouncing his monk’s robes, he failed to ‘take the whole world into his soul’; on the contrary, he merely narrowed his soul to include a mistress and a house. The effort of ‘widening the soul’ must be controlled by a religious discipline; nothing can be achieved by ceasing to Will. All this the ‘wretched Steppenwolf’ knows, and would prefer not to know.
Logically, the ‘Treatise on the Steppenwolf should be the end of the book; actually, it is within the first hundred pages. Harry has only rationalized his difficult
ies; he has yet to undergo experiences that will make his analysis real to him. The Bildungsroman is only one-third completed.
After reading the treatise, he hits rock-bottom of despair; he is exhausted and frustrated, and the treatise warns him that this is all as it should be; he decides that this is the last time he allows himself to sink so low; next time he will commit suicide before he reaches that point. The thought cheers him up, and he lies down to sleep.
The treatise is the high point of the book from the reader’s point of view, but Hesse still has a job to finish; he has to show us how Steppenwolf will learn to accept life again and turn away finally from the thought of cutting his throat. This comes about by a series of romantically improbable events. The man with the sandwich board has mentioned the name of a tavern; Haller goes there and meets a girl called Hermine. She takes him in hand; makes him learn ballroom-dancing and listen to modern jazz. She introduces him to the saxophone player, the sunburnt Pablo, and to the sensuously beautiful animal Maria, whom he finds in his bed when he returns home one night. Like Siddhartha, he goes through an education of the senses. In bed with Maria, he recovers his own past (as Roquentin was unable to) and finds it meaningful.
For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations. ... My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been, for all its wretchedness, a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it might—the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars... 17