Some years ago, a visitor to this site , who had just read my essay, “Herman Hesse vs the Steppenwolf“, told me that I had completely misread Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, from start to finish.
That made me smile, for it showed me that he had read the essay from start to finish, and understood, at least partly, what I was saying. It’s just that he was taking Hesse’s side in a long-standing argument.
Herman Hesse might be the most read novelist of the 1920s still read today. His novel Steppenwolf is still a bestseller, almost a century after it was published, and deservedly so. If you haven’t read it, you won’t regret it if you do.
Though I was enthused about Hesse and the book as a young man (I first read it in the 1970s), since then he’s become something of an adversary for me.
Maybe fifteen years ago, I tried out a new website blog, The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fictional Characters. As a novelist myself, I’d noticed that some authors abuse and misuse their characters. They force them into paths that they wouldn’t be expected to take, try to get them to be someone they aren’t, and dump unwarranted suffering on them.
Thomas Hardy, Gustave Flaubert and Graham Greene provide good examples of this, and more recently Cormack McCarthy, but of all of them Herman Hesse takes the cake for me.
I had hopes for that website, but readers didn’t like it. I belatedly discovered that another author had tried this before a couple of years earlier, using some of the same novels, and almost the same title, but gave up at more or less the same stage as me. Sadly, I seem to have lost her name. A search today on that title failed to produce her, though it did find me, as well as something called the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fictional Characters, which I will check out shortly. The idea may still be alive.
Back then I wondered if readers just didn’t understand what the two of us were saying. The idea that some fictional characters have a mind of their own is difficult for some people to get their head around. But most experienced novelists are well aware of this phenomenon.
I wasn’t surprised that readers rejected it though. All my life I’ve been a loner, or outsider. Starting in elementary school, whatever I said always seemed to offend someone. I had to fight sometimes simply because something I said. Most teachers saw me as a student with little understanding, always heading off in the wrong direction. Not until I was in grade 8, fourteen years old, did I meet one who liked my thinking. Interestingly, he was Japanese.
Because of that, when I began submitting stories to SF magazines in the 1970s, it wasn’t a big surprise that I was always rejected.
I attribute this partly to autism now, but there are other ways of looking at it. If you find this interesting, my coming book, Autism Dreaming deals with the issue in depth.
Anyway, as I said, when this reader of Herman Hesse vs the Steppenwolf told me that I’d completely mis-read the book, I just smiled.
What makes Hesse especially interesting to me is that he anticipated my contrary view. He wrote his own essay about people who mis-read Steppenwolf. He said these were mostly young readers, naively inspired by Harry Haller, the “steppenwolf” the social rebel who stubbornly refuses to be part of the superficiality, selfishness, greed and hypocrisy of the modern world. Hesse admitted that there were a few older ones like me too, but all of us had missed the message he was trying to deliver.
He didn’t disagree that the selfishness and corruption of human society was unfortunate, but he claimed that one can exist in a higher world, above the mess of everyday life.
For example, whenever Harry encounters someone championing the growing appetite in Germany for another war (the book was published in 1928), he has to confront them. He has heated debates with them, and sends letters to the editor s of newspapers portraying this attitude as stupidity, which angers more of the many Germans convinced that war is inevitable (we of course have the benefit of knowing that the war would come, and that more than sixty million people would die because of it – Hesse was remarkably prescient about this, for Hitler would not be elected until 1933).
So Hesse sees Harry’s solitary life and frequent confrontation with society as a mistake.
When Harry tells the bar girl Hermine how he often argues about the war and brings down criticism of himself this way, she tells him that he should just let it go, live his own life and not think about what is coming.
What Hesse wants to show us that it is possible to turn your back on the ‘real world’, to live instead in a world of the spirit, as he discovered during his travels in India/South Asia.
He uses (misuses I say) Mozart and Goethe as examples of men those who understood this philosophy of nirvana.
But Harry resists. Then, while walking the streets late one night, he magically receives a little pamphlet – the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf.” This turns out to be a lecture on the faults of the Steppenwolf’s thinking, and, in addition, the value of leaving the corrupt day world behind. This takes up 26 pages in the novel! It would be hard to find another author who could pull that off and still hold readers. Of course, this lecture is not only for Harry. It’s also for you the reader. I think Hesse knew even as he wrote the novel that readers were going to be attracted to Harry and his brave rejection of the social world of 1928.
Harry reads it, finds it interesting, but it doesn’t stop being himself.
He has to undergo other machinations prescribed by the author, led this time by Hermine’s jazz musician friend Pablo, who apparently lives in a nirvana of his own construction, form of nirvana, and who introduces Harry to the maze of the magic theater, putting him through a series of bewildering experiences designed to put an end to his stubborn rebel ways.
But Harry comes out of it still his same self, just a little wiser now.
So, yes, that reader thought my view of the book was the misreading of a confused mind, and Hesse would have agreed with him. But to me those readers who continue, even now, to take the side of the Steppenwolf, who cheer him on as he walks away from the magic theater resolved to continue his ways, are not wrong.
We’re living in a time when the world seems to be heading towards another catastrophe. Once again, too many people want to not think about it, while those with an appetite for destruction have an increasingly free hand. Those young people who admire the Steppenwolf are not naieve. They sense the importance of the challenge the Steppenwolf puts before them. They include men and women who will not go into hiding, who will face up to the task of righting the world.
If you find this interesting, you might want to read Herman Hesse vs The Steppenwolf, where I go toe to toe with Hesse in defense of those readers.
My other Hesse essay– For Madmen Only – is not irrelevant here. By showing that the end of the book is not where you expect it to be, and that Harry Haller, at least in the mind of someone who gets to know him during the time of the book’s events, still roams dark streets at night, resolutely opposed to what is wrong with the world. For Madmen Only was for me the foundation for Herman Hesse vs the Steppenwolf.
If you want to check them out, here are links to both:
Herman Hesse vs The Steppenwolf
Alan Conrad 