I’m fifty pages in, and I’m ready to put this to the fifty page test, a reflection of what’s happened and what seem to be the themes and a look back. This does seem like a German opera, dark and reflective of internal tensions, the soul in crises.The fifty pages seem to be divided into three parts, that preface narrated in the first person of a fellow lodger, Haller’s first person writings of on the nature his life and workings inside his soul, and the written part of a fortune-telling booklet, titled, “The Treatise of the Steppenwolf.” All three are basically going over and over describing Harry Haller as a tortured soul split between a good nature man and a half savage beast who can’t find contentment, and the metaphor for that beastly part of the self as the Steppenwolf, the lone wolf of the Steppes. I think it worth looking at the first several paragraphs of Haller’s writings. Here are the first two, but forgive me if I mistyped; I'm not the best at the qwerty key board.
Hesse sets up a contrast with these first two paragraphs. The first emphasizes the good natured man and the moments of contentment, albeit short lived. The second emphasizes the other times, the days of “vacancy and despair.” That word “primitive” is curious in the first paragraph. What exactly is his “primitive…way of life?” And in that long first sentence of the second paragraph, Haller lists the two fold causes of his torture: internal pain (gout and headache) and the world of men and culture and the political chaos of the world. And then the next paragraph is rather revealing.The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or two and perused the image of old books. I had had pains for two hours, as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its kindly warmth. Three times the mail had come with undesired letters and circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found it convenient today to omit the thought exercises. I had been for an hour’s walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns penciled against the sky. That was very delightful. So was the reading of the old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all, it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days when I calmly wonder. objective and fearless, whether it isn’t time to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have an accident while shaving.
He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with the wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell for every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamor of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick self—he who has known these days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like today. Thankfully you sit by the warm stove, thankfully you assure yourself as you read your morning paper that another day has come and no war broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no particularly disgusting scandle been unveiled in the worlds of politics and finance. Thankfully you tune the strings of your moldering lyre to a moderated, to a passably joyful, nay, to at even delighted psalm of thanksgiving and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly stupefied half-and-half god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm look as like each other as two peas.
So the very moments of contentment lead to the dark, wolfish self. This is not a simple dualism of opposing forces. It’s complex. Instead of the two halves faced in opposition, they are sequentially linked. And how then do the internal pain and the outside world of men of the second paragraph fit in? Weren’t they the root causes? So Hesse has set up a rather complicated set of sources for Haller’s alienation, and how these play out are I think the process of development for the novel. Certainly we see through the suggestion of wars and dictatorships and scandals, the outside world is integrated with the alienation. But so is the ennui of life and the internal pain of an aging, suffering human being.There is much to be said for the contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash up my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than his warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious school boys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
Another motif that seems to jump out at one in these early pages is the religious language. Here are words from the first several paragraphs of Haller’s testimony: thanksgiving, fiendish delight, soul, psalm, cathedral, curse, devil, evil, divine, ablution, heaven, God, holy, spiritual. No question he’s suggesting something. Haller in an early paragraph recounts how once some “lovely old music” brought him back from “the world of wanderings to the living world.” He describes this in the manner of a religious experience, or nearly one:
So we see another dualism here, moments of internal spirituality set against the modernist (modernism being from the beginning of the century to about world war two) view of the outside world as being stripped of spiritual significance.After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute of two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more. Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk. Once it came to me while reading a poet, while pondering a thought of Descartes, of Pascal; again it shone out and drove its gold track far into the sky while I was in the presence of my beloved. Ah, but it is hard to find the track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men.
So these are the themes and motifs of the first quarter of the novel that I see. While I do find this interesting so far, I can’t say at the moment this is going to be a great novel for me. The characterization is excellent and the themes, though not all that original for its time, are intricately suggested, but hardly any narrative action has occurred, and it’s a quarter of the way through. This has all essentially been expository and descriptive. We have a character and we have some abstract themes, but where’s the story? A quarter of the way through and there’s no story yet. I’m waiting for something to happen, the destabilizing event.
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Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I haven't read it before and I'm really enjoying it 
