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 RiddleThe 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 MagicEarly 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 MuseumThe Delusion of Dualistic UnityHarry'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 ExistenceThe 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 MagicianThis 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 GlassHarry'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)]
TREATISE ON THE STEPPENWOLFEvery age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils.There were times, my friends, that I thought I was the Steppenwolf. Then there were times I did not. But that is perfectly within the character of the thing. Hesse gives you multiplicity in spades, and keeps stepping off into further steppes... It is the kind of book that would burn. It burnt in the streets out the front of Frankfurt City Hall in ’33. And it kinda burns in your hands. It’s hot, the lines simmer under you like elements. It can burn you like ice can, like European chill.It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.We follow Harry Haller through a range of fluctuating narrative frames. There is a kind of magic realism going on at times, but one that beautifully disrupts the page. Whether it be politics or relationships or aesthetics, everything is shined and dulled as we run a roller-coaster through the mind of Haller, one way or another.He assigns, we fear, whole provinces of his soul to the ‘man’ which are a long way from being human, and parts of his being to the wolf that long ago have left the wolf behind.Haller feels he is two things, both a man, and Steppenwolf (a wolf of the steppes): a social, thinking, moral (and immoral), subject; and a loner, instinctive, amoral, living-object. But his critics are already at work, both before we hear his own voice, and even later, when he reads a book about himself. He is both man, and the man-overcome. There is much of Nietzsche here, of course. Harry is an intellectual, an expert on Mozart and Goethe. He was also a public opponent of the first world war (but not enough to get himself executed, he is perfectly aware) and a pacifist who was predicting a much worse war on the way if things don’t change (and this book was published in 1927) and still being pilloried in the press for his previous articles as anti-German.Looked at with the bourgeois eye, my life had been a continuous descent from one shattering to the next that left me more remote at every step from all that was normal, permissible and healthful.But he enters the world of feeling through a kind of gender-neutral woman called Hermine, who looks like Hermann, and old friend of his. Hesse has a way of subtly destabilising events. His magic-realism (for want of a better way of describing it) comes in waves, and you never quite know where the dial is. As he gets lost, or found, in further worlds that start with foxtrot and head swiftly toward wanton fornication, homosexuality, interracial group-sex and hard drugs, he certainly does ‘loosen up’ a bit. And I suppose this was what attracted the 60s counterculture movement to pick it up as ‘a bible’ (according to the blurb on my edition); but there is just as much critique of the cross- as the mainstream here, in the story itself. The Steppenwolf is anti-cultural-as-a-culture. It moves to negate more than counter. And the result is both beautiful and disastrous, as it should be.”I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the devil?”Can either of them learn to live from each other? Is this even really happening? The original framing narrator has already suggested, no, it’s all preposterous, and it gets more and more so, as Pablo keeps the party drugs flowing and droppin’ da mad beatz. Certainly we descend (or ascend?) more and more into Haller’s interiority, but the realness still shifts up and back. Certainly there are savage shades of the first war futilities to come... But also innocent love revisited... It can be dark, but Hesse always wanted to stress the process of traversing the darkness that is there, the inconsistencies of living, the absurdities. If you don’t actually face them, then you are not letting the man or the wolf play. You must engage wholly in life, to live. In the end, he is determined to begin the game afresh. Why? And how? Mozart tells him:”Humour is always gallows-humour, and it is on the gallows you are now constrained to learn it.”And he laughs his ghastly laugh. He wants to start again because traversing hell is the only way to hear a good joke. But you need to read this book and stare into your own Steppenwolf, and stare back into yourself, staring back into you.
What do You think about Steppenwolf (1999)?
***WARNING*** for those looking for a serious review, please ignore the writings inside the parentheses (and visit us again)I was told about this book in a course on Existentialism. I recently became more and more interested in that school of thought, especially with its emphasis on personal experience and what I as a human am experiencing in first person (can anybody experience ANYTHING in second person?), as opposed to what I should experience or what I’m experiencing from an ‘objective’ point of view. Anyway, the lecturer was talking about Nietzsche and how he entreats us to be disciplined and responsible in our approach to life (that's another jerk for you!). The lecturer asked the rather interesting question whether Nietzsche underestimated the role of happiness in life and as an example talked about the Steppenwolf.To set that line on hold, the Steppenwolf talks about a man called Harry who has a particular view about who he really is. He thinks his being comprises two selves, one human and the other an untamed wolf. This echoes very much a famous problem in philosophy that goes back to Plato, namely the struggle between Passion and Reason (i.e. the charioteer who missed his driving lessons). Hesse, who was very much influenced by Buddhism, suggests that this view is mistaken and that we are composed of multitudes of selves all asking for their own share of existence and experience. One interesting facet of his existential woes is demonstrated in Harry’s relation to music. As he regards Classical music in general, and Mozart in particular as the epitome of what he calls “eternal” music, he spends a good portion of his time (including at a concert when he is supposed to get his shit together and listen to the fuckin music) lamenting the decadence of people’s musical tastes. He is unable anymore to enjoy life as he is too busy observing others and regretting the low point society has reached to in its shallowness (don't we all know this guy. Yes, male). His life is characterised by perpetual misery punctuated by jolts self-losing in pleasure and happiness, which evaporate the moment he regains his self consciousness. He is someone who has strong ideas about dancing for example, without actually ever having a dance. (The nerve of the prick!)Things may seem to be straightforward at first, but Harry undergoes interesting character(s) development. A day spent living in accordance with his ideals gives him only a colourless sense of existence devoid of genuine pleasure and personal meaning. He sees himself more and more disenchanted with the kind of life he aspires and wish others to aspire to. He has a troubled view about his middle-class surrounding pretending to hate it with its self-indulgence while at the same time feeling a certain attachment to its untroubled existence. Harry clearly has an image about himself from which he cannot diverge without feeling a tremendous amount of guilt and desperation which makes his life more and more (and more and more and more with this book) miserable till he reaches the point of carrying out his long planned suicide. Hesse says that we feel guilty just by virtue of existence. Well, I don’t think everyone feels guilty, but those who do must know they are not alone. Maybe's that's why Hesse wrote the book (besides the money of course. Authors being such money-grabbing jerks). Most of us, if we are lucky enough not to be like Harry, know someone who clearly is like him (except the superduper luckies are are cool enough to steer away of such zombies). Viewing herself in a serious light, such a person risks becoming an alien failing to make sense of the world and getting into serous trouble with those around her (here's a psychology lecture for you). Such impoverished state of existence drains life of its meaningful moments within oneself, in addition to cutting one socially from his surrounding as one becomes a burden, constantly self-commenting about others without considering the perspective of others. (ZzzZzzZzz....)As Harry meets a charming lady called Hermine, on one of his long wanderings through the night, he starts to question his state of affairs. With the help of Hermine, who has a cunning resemblance to a certain angle of Harry’s character as much as to suggest herself as a hallucination, Harry learns to converse with his multitudes of selves (read: goes nuts) and understand the import of perspective in everything. It is an interesting journey with many interesting questions being thought about and possibly answered. It shows how accepting the idea that there is no concrete self helps us get over ourselves and others, as there is no one there to get over! (what the fuck was that supposed to mean?) Such a state of existence, Hesse suggests, can only be tempered with laughter and humour: the most meaningful approach to life’s overall meaninglessness.Life will be flat if we say that it is a losing struggle against death because the latter will win in the end. Paradoxically, life will also be flat if it were a winning struggle against death. Therein lies a glimpse of meaning, which we may do a lot worse than actually, grasp. (Books, I hate books).
—Carlo
My best friend left this book at my house just before he left for the Peace Corps. That was almost two years ago. He'll be coming back from Mali at the end of the summer. I'd been thinking about him a lot, so I decided to read something he's read, to get into his head for a few hours. Before he left, we almost got the cover of this book tattooed on ourselves. Each of us would've gotten half, sort of like one of those friendship pendants little girls used to wear, only with blood and needles.I don't know how much my fondness for my dear friend colored my impressions of this book, but I thought it was fantastic. Harry's suffering really struck something inside of me and I've been feeling the reverberations ever since. Harry has some issues with the duality of his own nature, feeling that he is being torn between his "man" self and his "wolf" self. The human side of him is concerned with appearances and propriety and is constantly ravaged by guilt. His animalistic side, what Freud would refer to as his id, is rather clear about its desires. Harry is unable to reconcile these two aspects of himself, but clearly sees how they are intertwined. He cannot surrender to either side. He can't experience true happiness or true morality. As a result, he is unable to be content with anything.Harry continues in this manner until he meets a woman in a bar who then introduces him to a couple of her friends. Through them, he experiences unattached sex, drugs, and other youthful pastimes that he previously considered to be wasteful and overindulgent. He enjoys himself, but cannot succumb completely to this new way of life. He feels out of place and guilty. He hangs in there, though, as anyone will when there's someone he's immensely attracted to guiding the way.Harry confronts and makes major steps towards accepting himself in a metaphorical magic theatre introduced to him by a drug peddling jazz musician. He faces each aspect of himself and begins to understand the role each part of him plays. He, in essence, learns objectively of his suffering. This whole part of the novel was trippy and interesting. It was kind of like a Stephen King book in the sense that everything seems normal, but all of a sudden your protagonist just happens to walk into a painting (Rose Madder).After reading a Buddhist meditation manual, Hesse's Eastern themes made a lot of sense to me. The women he befriends are enlightened. They are completely aware of the impermanence of life and, as a result, live it to the fullest and take things as they come. They don't form attachments to anything and experience true happiness. Harry is their polar opposite, attached to everything and suffering greatly. His mind is so deeply rooted in his suffering that his greatest punishments are the same as his greatest desires. I appreciated the homoerotic undertones. They were quite amusing to me and gave the story some added depth. When Pablo suggests that he and Harry get it on with Maria, Harry is vehemently opposed. Yet, Hermine, Harry's great love, is simply a feminized version of Herman, his childhood friend. He even mistakes her for Herman, as they look so much alike. Harry shows that he begins to accept this part of himself too when he is in the house of mirrors, saying that he finally understood just what Pablo was suggesting.All in all, this book was very well written and very interesting. It got me thinking and left me thinking, even if the ending was a bit abrupt.
—Caris
The novel starts well with a preface by the young man of the house where the Steppenwolf (Harry Haller) is lodging, but then bogs down in a long disquisition on Harry's suffering called "The Treatise on the Steppenwolf." I found these pages turgid and thought they might easily be skipped. It's not until Harry enters a dance hall around page 95 that we meet Hermine, who becomes a matriarchal-figure for him; Maria, who becomes his lover; and Pablo, the impresario who leads the band and become's Harry's drug supplier. Hermine and Harry are soul mates with a death wish. They do not see the possibility of peace in this world, but only after death, which is supposed to bring them release and fulfillment. The culmination of the book is a great ball where Harry dances until dawn and the subsequent psychedelic drug fest known as The Magic Theater--For Madmen Only. I can see why the novel was so popular during the 1960s. There is liberal guiltless consumption of street drugs, mind-blowing sex (straight), cross dressing, and passages in the so-called Magic Theater where Harry is clearly tripping. The book is a novel of ideas and it is a strange freestyle combination of Buddhism and Christianity that informs its spiritual quest. Read this roman philosophique, at least its first hundred pages, as a period piece. The material of the first half to my mind does not transcend its time of its composition, the mid-1920s, i.e. decadent Weimar Germany. In these early pages author Hesse is taken up with a number of ideas: Freudian psychoanalysis; Decartesian mind-body "dualism"; Jungian archetypes and the collective unconcious; Einstein's theory of relativity; everything Nietszche; and a lot of literature in which the double or doppleganger runs amok. (Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson are some English-language examples). But then we get to page 95. Thank God.
—William1
