This is an anomaly in Hesse's ouvre – a personal piece in which he risks alienating his wider audience, and yet in another sense his most universal work. It's true, I say this having had few successes in recommending it, yet so far no-one I've given it to has disliked it, even if it has left them frustrated or puzzled or underwhelmed. The crux of it is, it's the story of a failure. An inevitable failure, I would say, but as Hesse himself says early in the piece, 'the seemingly impossible must continually be attempted'. What, then, is the seemingly impossible attempt made here? It's twofold: the telling of an untellable story; the making of an impossible journey. That the narrator fails in the telling should not surprise us; he warns us of this inevitability from the story's start. That he has failed in his journey – though he himself, at first, is unaware of it – is also unsurprising, given that the journey's goal is spiritual enlightenment, the absolute, a realm denied to humans except in glimpses.So. I feel keenly the irony of my reviewing this book as I sit in this far-from-perfect setting and write this. Like H.H., the narrator of The Journey..., I am depressed, self-pitying, unable to grasp with the greatest effort what once came so naturally, and sitting in the courtyard of a small-town cafe while children scream, dogs bark and a table full of bovine suburban-cum-country folk unfurl punchline after punchline at the next table, laughing uproariously. Like H.H., I am also without music, having left my i-Pod at home through some oversight, and back home are three children not my own, two of whom, I'll wager, are screaming, shouting and brawling as I write this, unless the television is on, in which case they're silent but may well emerge more irritable than before, positive ions and escapism being, like all drugs, imperfect balm, after all... And then there's this book – this brief book in which I've sought my own balm for twenty years or more, having read it five, maybe six times since I first found it in a secondhand store in Adelaide in my late teens. The book! It's personal. Hesse had tried something like this before, with Steppenwolf, when he submitted to his publishers a collection of ultra-personal poems which he intended to accompany the novel, but these were deemed too indulgent, too angry, too obscure for a wider readership, and were held back to be published separately in a limited edition. So with The Journey..., I guess Hesse put his foot down, determined to speak from his heart with as little translation as possible. And the result, to the casual reader, can admittedly be baffling. But even to the teenage me, it wasn't alienating. Just read over the references that make no sense. The important part – the universal part – is the story of faith gained, lost and gained again. And the failure is just a part of the cycle. The two characters – H.H. and Leo – are mirror images, two parts of a whole, at least symbolically, and Leo's apparent desertion (later revealed to be anything but) is the point at which faith becomes despair. H.H., despairing, self-absorbed. Leo, faithful, selfless. H.H., author, mortal. Leo, character, immortal. Read this way, the ending is uplifting, not a fade-to-grey. And the story is a dream-picture of sleep and awakening.Ugh. I'm aware that as a review this makes about as much sense as The Journey... makes as a novel. Novel? I don't even know if it is a novel. Novella, maybe. And a novella in which you won't find a well-turned character or more than one or two niceties of plot: writer and ex-journeyer attempts and fails to write the story of a failed journey, but in the process reveals the truth about that failure. Like all of Hesse's stories, it's a story of self-discovery. Like Steppenwolf (whose narrator, Harry Haller, is another H.H.), it's also a fairly naked and often despairing self-portrait. Yet it takes us one step beyond that despair and self-absorption – takes us to the brink of its demise, once and for all, in Hesse's fiction. And in showing an awakening from the inside out it achieves something difficult and valuable and profound. And besides, it's beautiful. Unique. Magical. All things my teenage self understood perfectly, even as he struggled with the rest of it. If what you value in fiction - and in Hesse - is instinctive striving after enlightenment, it's for you. That hallucination at the end of Siddhartha - that's what I love in Hesse, and it's in its most potent form here. A classic.
Why is Hesse's concept of enlightenment indistinguishable from mental illness? First, in The Glass Bead Game, we get the depiction of a 'secular saint', and the signs of his enlightenment are that he has stopped all his creative work, often sits lost in thought, making no sign he understands anyone speaking to him, and when he does respond, it is with a brief non-sequitur. He otherwise wanders the gardens day and night with a bland smile frozen to his face. Perhaps it's only me who looks at those symptoms and sees not enlightenment, but full-fledged dementia.In this work, we get a picture of a secret organization of enlightened individuals who seem to be a collection of homeless vagrants that wander the countryside obsessed with certain mythical objects, and convinced that an ancient, powerful conspiracy is running the world. Once again, my brain keeps telling me that Hesse must be writing satire, since there is nothing that separates this vision of enlightenment from mental disorder.The secret organization itself is the most interesting part of the narrative. It is a fantasy of magic, time travel, and Illuminist philosophy reminiscent of Italo Calvino's 'magical realism'. This odd vision of a world- and time-spanning sect of spiritual sorcerers was the most enjoyable and promising aspect of the book, so it was disappointing to me that it served only as a backdrop for a fairly bland story.The narrative is also full of allusions to various historical and literary figures, events, mythologies, and philosophies, but I didn't feel that Hesse did enough to connect them together into something meaningful. As usual, his spiritual philosophy was only as powerful as its vagueness. I did like the notion of a narrative which created allusive meaning like a metaphysical poem--combining references with a central argument to create depth--but Hesse failed to resolve it into anything so insightful.The weakest aspect of his presentation was the single-voiced, confessional style--something like a journal. Our narrator is constantly referencing interesting things that happened to him, but we don't actually get to experience them or understand them. Once again, vagueness is mistaken for profundity.I would have been interested in seeing more of this journey, and the odd experiences that made it up, instead of them being merely name-dropped. I'm not saying Hesse should have made everything clear or provided some grand meaning--I think an in-depth description of these fantastical events would have helped deepen his conceptual world, and provide for the reader symbolic examples to help lead us along.It's like those Lovecraft stories where the hero says 'the vision was too horrible to describe, its terror was beyond the meagre power of words to encapsulate it'--but then Lovecraft usually goes on to explain it, anyways--or at least he has an exciting, fast-paced story to make up for it. No such luck in Hesse.Once again we have a central, masterful figure who knows all but reveals little--the notion of the great teacher who has the greatest of reputations, despite the fact that we never see him do anything to deserve it. Hesse helpfully tells us that people like him and feel comfortable around him, but I wish he had just made the reader feel that way about him instead of trying to convince us of the inner life of a flat character. If you cannot believably write the Master, then do not make him a character. As depicted, he could have easily been a charlatan as a guru.Once again, I am reminded why I do not find bland spiritual wonderment enticing: the world is full of joy and wonder and mystery in infinite variations, so it always feels petty and false to me to try to encapsulate that in a vague symbolic experience, asking no questions and revealing nothing. I find it more enlightening to read an author with a hundred powerful and contradictory insights rather than a single, unified, featureless vision like this.
What do You think about The Journey To The East (2003)?
Haven't read anything by Hesse since, well, since I wore my hair long and Nixon was president, but found this on the book pile and spent an afternoon reading it. It reminded me what odd, weird, actually, stuff Hesse wrote. Part Christian mysticism, part psychoanalysis this book is an strange mix of fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, allegory and reporting. The guide/servant/master character was interesting. More like a magazine article. But difficult to pigeonhole. I think if you read enough of this stuff, you will definitely look at the world differently. Not necessarily better, but differently.
—T.P. Williams
الندم وحده لا يكفي. الرحمة لا تشترى بالندم. إنها لا تشترى أبدًا. ** هيسةتبدأ بـ قصة هـ هـ الذي اشترك في رحلة رابطة إلى الشرق يسيرون يبحثون عن الحقيقة ويعيشون بجو تسوده الألفة والأخوة ويقعون في اختبارات من القادة العليا في الرابطة لمعرفة مدى تصديقهم وأيمانهم الداخلي بما يقومون به , هـ هـ النادم وهو يروي القصة يحاول أن يضع إصبعه على الخطأ الذي ارتكبه ليضيع الطريق والقافلة والأفكار يشعر بالندم وهو يمسك دفتره ويحاول أن يكتب رحلة الشرق متحاشياً أن يكشف سر من أسرار الرابطة التي أقسم يوم انضم إليها أن يصون الأسرار , في كل روايات هيسه يكون الحديث روحانياً تتكلم الروح بينما الجسد يكون أداة خارج نطاق الوصف أو الكلام وبلغة شاعرية شاهقة ينتقي بها قراءه , المخاطب في كل حكاياته هو الفكر له سحر خاص يروي به ويصل إلينا محرض الخلايا الداخلية على التفكير. على ضفة نهر بينما الحروف تتقافز لتصبح أشكالاً تتفرقع بالهواء عالياً كانت الأفكار تعبث بعقل الموسيقي المضطرب وهو يفكر ويفكر و يفكر ... إلخ
—Mashael Alamri
I have read this book several times and well it always seemed incomprehensible to me. I have to admit that my experiences reading Hesse have been mixed. When I first read Demian in college, I hated it passionatly. Somehow, at the recommendation of a friend, I re read it not two years later and it was a much different book that now I truly love. I have since read of of his books except Magistar Ludi, and of them the only ones I have had problems with are Steppenwolf and this one. Really, I think this book is meant to be a sequal to Steppenwolf, it's almost the same character who is now young, or young in terms of the story. When he is judged at the conclusion, characters, Pablo/Mozart of Steppenwolf are there, so this indentification is clearly intentional. The ending is the same too. Harry Haller comes to the conclusion that he really has no separate identity, that the Steppenwolf and he are not separete but the same. Dopplegangers are important to Hesse, each character in his books has mirror selfs. In this book, the mirror self to the narrator H. H. is Leo. At first Leo is a servent, leading the group to the mysterious east. It isn't the east in terms of navigation whoever, but a spiritual journey. We know this because in direction they go several different areas and times, then finally they come to a mountain gorge where Leo deserts the group, and they fall apart and into despair. I think the journey isn't about travelling to the east, but embracing the spiritual values of the east, ie here that this world and it's trappings are vainity. What H. H. learns is the same that Harry Haller learns, that all life, even self is a illusion, and there is something beyond that. I think this book is problematic, but well worth checking out despite that, and can be very enlightening.
—Paul Dinger
