Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

A stray wolf of the steppes, now part of the herd of city-dwellers � there could be no more compelling way of picturing him, his wary isolation, his wildness, his restlessness, his homelessness and his yearning for home.

Herr Harry Haller has transcended his own timeframe and cultural space to become an universal symbol of the misunderstood intellectual, of the sensitive mind cast adrift on an ocean of mediocrity, of the voice of reason drowned by the howls of the dogs of war. Like Holden Caulfield, Jack Kerouac, Atticus Finch and, why not, like a later age Don Quixote, Haller is a rebel who inspires new generations to open their minds to new ideas, new experiences, to look at reality from a different perspective. Or, at the very least, to use the brains they were gifted with.

"Most people have no desire to swim until they are able to." Isn't that a laugh? Of course they don't want to swim! After all, they were born to live on dry land, not in water. Nor, of course, do they want to think. They weren't made to think, but to live!

With this Novalis quote, let's start our journey through the busy mind of this peculiar character: a 50 year old gentleman who rents a room in a bourgeois household in a little German town, sometime between two apocalyptic world wars. He comes out of nowhere, says very little, spends most of his time alone in his room or wandering the streets alone at night or drinking alone in out of the way bars. One day he leaves into the unknown, as mysteriously as he appeared. But he leaves behind a few weird notebooks, half confessional, half philosophical musings, half drug induced tripping.

He appeared to like everything, yet at the same time find it somehow laughable. In general everything about the man suggested that he was a visitor from an alien world, from some lands overseas, say; and though he found everything here attractive, it all struck him as a bit comical too.

There is little plot in the novel, yet also very little randomness or divagation. It's a carefully constructed edifice, with the occasional poetic arabesque blended in. Haller is introduced first by an outsider, the son of his host, then analyzed almost scientifically in a psychological treatise, later left to explain himself in his own words and actions only to finish in a psychedelic tour-de-force modeled on Dante's descent into Hell.

Haller is one of those people who end up caught between two eras, deprived of all security and innocence; one of those fated to experience to an intense degree, as a personal torment and hell, all that is questionable about human life.

also,
It makes no difference how much or how little they are based on real life, these notebooks are an attempt to overcome the great sickness of our times, not by evading or glossing over the issue, but by seeking to make the sickness itself the object portrayed. They signify, quite literally, a journey through hell; a sometimes anxious, sometimes brave journey through the chaos of a mind in darkness.

Most of the novel I believe it is autobiographical, a memoir of Hesse struggling to cope with middle age, with the dreariness of everyday existence, with the hysterical hostility his pacifism awakened in a country drifting towards Nazism, with the loss of his youthful dreams and aspirations. Like his hero Haller, Hesse struggled with loneliness and suicidal tendencies but managed to exorcise his inner demons with the help of some Eastern mysticism and faith in a higher sphere of existence, a place that can be reached by following in the footsteps of giants like Socrates, Bach, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Mozart, etc.

There were books everywhere, not just filling the large bookcase, but lying around on the tables, on the fine old writing desk, on the divan, on the chairs, and on the floor. Slips of paper that constantly changed were inserted in them, marking the pages. And the number of books constantly grew because he brought whole bundles back from the libraries as well as very often receiving parcels of them in the post.

As a poet and an intellectual, Haller journeys towards his fiftieth anniversary from the outside in, retracting from a hostile and banal society to live among his books, paintings and music. Believing a pure mind needs to be free of the corrupting influence of the everyday struggle to make ends meet and of the cheap popular entertainment, Haller ends up locked inside a bubble of his own creation. He has become Steppenwolf , a bitter outsider snarling at the blind happiness of the sheep surrounding him. He looks at the ordinary life going on and ignoring his existence and he wants to be a part of it again, yet he is repulsed by the banality of this same bourgeois complacency.

The same thing happened to him as to everyone. The thing he most compulsively desired, most stubbornly searched and strove for, was granted to him, but more abundantly than is good for a human being. Initially all he dreamed of and wished for, it later became his bitter lot. Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money; service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker. Thus it was Steppenwolf's independence that proved his downfall.

The novel is mostly self-explanatory and brilliantly argued, albeit a bit difficult to get through due to its 'wall-of-text' structure. The main themes are introduced, expanded upon, reiterated and even turned on their head with an almost symphonic arrangement. I have numerous quotes to help me along my review, and the problem was not in finding them, but in cutting down the elegant arguments of Hesse into Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ manageable chunks, eventually leaving out what are probably essential bits and pieces.

Steppenwolf's nature was thus twofold, partly human, partly wolfish. [...] Far from helping one another, they were like mortal enemies in constant conflict, each causing the other nothing but grief. When two mortal enemies are locked in one mind and body, life is a miserable business. Well, to each his lot. None of us has it easy.

A facile interpretation of Haller is too see him only through the prism of his inner conflict between his animal side and his spiritual side, between his repulsion towards a bourgeois existence and his yearning to be a part of society, to come in from the cold. Indeed, I believe this forms a sizeable chunk of the whole novel. But at the same time, Hesse warns us against intellectual laziness, against pushing real people into prefabricated molds. In a passionate afterword the author even notes that most of the young readers who get fixated on Haller's rebelliousness or drug experiences miss the point that the novel is actually about a middle aged man breaking through the walls of his despair to find again a passion for life in all its misery and glory. His youthful innocence and enthusiasm is gone, but should Haller just throw his hands in the air and give up?

Was it a matter for regret? No, it wasn't. Nothing that was over and done with was a matter of regret. What I did regret was the here and now, all the countless hours and days lost to me because I just endured them and they brought neither rewards nor profound shocks to my system. Yet, praise be to God, there were also exceptions. There were occasional, rare hours that were different, that did bring shocks and rewards, tearing down walls and taking me � lost soul � back again to the living heart of the world.

also,
Even if I was a stray animal, unable to understand its environment, my foolish life did have some meaning. There was something in me that responded to things, was receptive to calls from distant worlds above. My brain was a storehouse of a thousand images.

This music of the spheres that Haller occasionally hears and draws comfort from comes from his books and collections of poetry, from the works of his favorite composers, from famous paintings in galleries.

The armchair and the stove, the inkwell and the box of paints, Novalis and Dostoevsky were waiting for me, just as other, normal people expect their mother or wife, the children, the maids, the dogs and cats to be waiting for them when they get back home.

Like a seesaw, such brief moments of bliss are followed by despair and boredom which lead to anger, starting the Steppenwolf cycle all over again.

At such times a savage desire for strong emotions and sensations burns inside me: a rage against this soft-tinted, shallow, standardized and sterilized life, and a mad craving to smash something up, a department store, say, or a cathedral, or myself. I long to do daringly stupid things: tear the wigs from the heads of a few revered idols, stand the fares of some rebellious schoolboys desperate to visit Hamburg, seduce a little girl, or twist the neck of the odd representative of the bourgeois powers that be. For of all things, what I hated, abhorred and cursed most intensely was just this contentment, this well-being, the well-groomed optimism of the bourgeois, this lush, fertile breeding ground of all that is mediocre, normal, average.

Two images come to mind : one of a serene mountain lake on a beautiful summer day, its waters a perfect mirror of the sky, of freedom and peace. The other of a stormy sea with huge waves breaking against a solitary shore, cold and windy and deafeningly loud. Heller's argument is that a peaceful existence is not conductive to higher thought, that only through suffering we break through to a higher understanding of the world.

It is in such moments of elation, fleeting and precious like spray over a sea of suffering, that all those works of art have their origins in which suffering individuals have managed to rise above their personal fates to such a degree that their happiness radiates like a star.

also,
Once, lying awake at night, I found myself speaking lines of poetry, lines far too beautiful and strange for me to consider writing them down. In the morning I no longer knew them, yet they lay hidden inside me like the heavy nut inside an old, brittle shell.

The image of the poet alone in his ivory tower is not a new one, but this particular poet would like to climb down and rejoin the human race. He could start by taking a closer critical look at what he calls highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. On the one hand, he sings odes of joy to the classics, on the other he despises jazz and radio shows. Does that make him a discerning critic or a dinosaur about to become extinct? The question is hardly resolved in the decades since the novel was published.

Were we ageing connoisseurs and admirers of the Europe of old, of the genuine music and literature of yore, merely a small stupid minority of complicated neurotics who tomorrow would be forgotten and laughed to scorn? Was what we called 'culture', spirit, soul, or dubbed beautiful and sacred, merely a ghost, long since dead and thought to be real and alive only by us few fools?

also,
Our whole cultural world was a cemetery in which Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were now nothing more than faded names on rusting metal plaques, surrounded by awkward and insincere mourners, who would have given a great deal to have their faith in these once sacred plaques restored to them.

Maybe the answer lies in reconciling the two warring beasts inside our soul: the carnal and the spiritual. Herr Haller starts with a little jazz, a bit of opium, some dancing lessons, some bed sports and with a much needed touch from another human being:

I found jazz repellent, but it was ten times better than contemporary academic music. Naively and genuinely sensual, its breezy, raw savagery could even affect the likes of me at a deep instinctual level.

then,
... You take yourself too seriously, better take some dancing lessons

then,
All at once a human being, shattering the clouded glass cloche that covered my corpse-like existence and holding out her hand to me, her beautiful, kind, warm hand! All at once things that mattered to me again, things I could take joy in, worry about, eagerly anticipate! All at once an open door through which life could get in to me. Perhaps I could start to live again, perhaps I could become again a human being. My soul, having almost frozen to death in hibernation, was breathing again, drowsily flapping its small, frail wings.

This mysterious Woman, Hermione, a casual encounter in a bar, is to be Haller's guide to Hell, like Dante's companion through the Inferno, here in the guise of a masked ball and a Magic Theater, a journey of rediscovery and of reconciliation between his dual poles of attraction.

She was the tiny little window, the minute chink of light in the dark cave of my fear.

also,
Look here, once you can do it, dancing is just as easy as thinking. And it's much easier to learn.

also,
You are unhappy so much of the time. Nobody should be like that, it's not good. I'm sorry for you. Try smoking a little opium.

Most of all, Hermione is a fellow traveler on this thorny journey, another Steppenwolf locked inside her own mind, struggling with unfulfilled aspirations and a hostile world (womenlib was several decades away). Will Haller grasp the offered hand or will he retreat back towards his lonely room? Well, I should leave a bit of mystery out of my review for those who have yet to discover this cult novel.

—«»â¶Ä”«»â¶Ä”«»â¶Ä�

I still have a lot of quotes I was planning to use in my review, but most of them are riffs on the themes I already presented. Still, after all the work of writing them down, it would be a waste to delete them now that I've reached the final note.

Of course human beings are not fixed, enduring forms � which was, despite suspicions to the contrary on the part of their leading thinkers, the ideal view of the ancient Greeks � but rather experiments, creatures in transition. They are no less than the perilously narrow bridge between nature and spirit. Their innermost destiny drives them in the direction of spirit, towards God, while their most heartfelt yearning pulls them back towards nature, to their mother.

- - - -

A human being is an onion consisting of a hundred skins, a fabric composed of many threads. [a taste of Hesse's interest in Oriental studies, attributed here to Buddhist Yoga]

- - - -

Most human beings spend their lives acting compulsory, day after day, hour after hour. Without really wanting to, they pay visits, hold conversations, work fixed office hours � all of it compulsory, mechanically, against their will. It could all be done just as well by machines, or not done at all. And it is this perpetual mechanical motion that prevents them from criticizing their own lives in the way that I do, from realizing and feeling just how stupid and shallow, how horribly, grotesquely questionable, how hopelessly sad and barren their existence is. And oh, how right they are, these people, a thousand times right to live the way they do, playing their little games and pursuing what seems important to them instead of resisting this depressing machinery and staring despairingly into the void as individuals who have gone off the rails do, like me.

- - - -

Our country and the whole world would be a lot better off if at least the few people capable of thinking would stand up for reason and love of peace instead of blindly and fanatically heading towards a new war.

- - - -

On a few occasions I've expressed the view that all nations and indeed all individual human beings, instead of rocking themselves to sleep by mulling over false political questions as to who was the "guilty party", ought to be taking a searching look at themselves, asking to what extent they themselves, by their mistakes, their failure to act and their habitual bad practices have a share in the responsibility for the war and all the rest of the world's miseries. Only in this way, I argued, could the next war perhaps be avoided.

- - - -

Thus I had finally returned home, my head full of thoughts and echoes of the music, my heart heavy with sadness and desperate longing for life, for reality, for meaning and for things irretrievably lost.

- - - -

You had an image of life in your head, a faith, a challenge. You were prepared to do great things, to suffer, to make sacrifices � and then bit by bit you noticed that the world wasn't demanding great deeds, sacrifices and the like from you at all; that life wasn't an epic poem with heroic roles and that kind of thing, but more like the parlour of a conventional household where the inhabitants are perfectly content to eat, drink coffee, knit stockings, play cards and listen to music on the radio. And anyone wanting the other heroic and noble life, and having it in them, anyone venerating great writers and venerating the saints, is a fool and a Don Quixote.

- - - -

The final word of wisdom comes from the ghost of Mozart, a vision that comes to Haller at the end of his journey through Hell / Magic Theater, castigating our Steppenwolf for selfishness and pomposity: You are to live, and you are to learn to laugh. You must learn to listen to life's damned radio music, to respect the spirit that lies behind it while laughing at all the dross it contains. That's all. Nothing more is being asked of you.