I wondered about this because haller learns to dance later in the book, but the narrator clearly indicates twice that Haller has health problems and difficulty walking.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
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I wondered about this because haller learns to dance later in the book, but the narrator clearly indicates twice that Haller has health problems and difficulty walking.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
I've just re-read the preface, and it does lay out the life of Haller up to his departure from the apartment he has rented.
It is worth the read, and re-read, as it offers insights into the nature of the ideas in the book.
I am curios about the business regarding the images, primarily the incident of the Goethe portrait, and Haller's reactions to it, and than his conversation with the currently nameless girl in the bar and her own expression about the saints and the savior, and the image she creates in her own mind vs the image that others create of them.
It seems almost like some sort of anti-idolatry sentiment, though not necessarily purely in a religious sense in spite of the example of the religious icons given, but rather as if these "immortals" in spite of the fact that they were in fact living flesh and blood people have transcended beyond having their own images depicted.
Particularly by those with him at least according to the Steppenwolf, who are in fact unworthy of the immortals and unable to truly understand or perhaps fully appreciate just who and what the immortals are/were and only the Steppenwolf might know them and be worthy of them.
Is it perhaps a reference to Plato's cave - that what the bourgeois see are mere shadows of reality, whereas the Steppenwolf perceives their immortal image.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
That is an excellent point, and a very interesting thought. Now that you have brought it up, I can very much see that as applying to the case.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
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. :lol: 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. :wink5:
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.Quote:
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.Quote:
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.Quote:
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.
I should really participate in this discussion. Steppenwolf... and a great deal of the rest of Hesse were favorite reads when I first began to explore literature some years ago. Beside... I have a new translation I'm in need of exploring.
I can see why ;) I haven't read it before and I'm really enjoying it :DQuote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
The story does take off after a fashion, but the preface seems to be a conventional narrative from a bourgeois narrator. Haller's narrative goes beyong this.
In his introducation, Hesse talks about the neglect of the healing aspect of the novel. I think it is clear to see how disaffected groups - I'm thinking of the 60's movements and onwards with their dislike of the Bourgeois Middle classes tok to this book. I think Virgil's laying out of the themes is an important aspect of the healing that takes place.
Hesse uses the irony of the bourgeois narrator who cannot fully understand... or even misunderstands... his subject in the Glass Bead Game as well.
I'd just started The Glass Bead Game when this thread came up. I already had Steppenwolf so I reverted to that.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
From the first chapter or so it seems as thouh Hesse develops the isolated Steppenwolf character into an intellectual monastic elite and continues the themes. I'm looking forward to it. :D
Harry and Hermine seem almost to be a sort of Anima/Animus to each other. They are like dual aspects of the same self. As Hermine put it, they are like looking glasses to each other, in which they can study their reflections within each other. And just like a looking glass they appear as if opposites from each other, and yet that opposite nature is something that seems to be purely external.
They are still as if part of the same core, the same self, in this way they can understand each other uncannily in spite of the fact that they seem to be opposites from each other in every conceivable or tangible way.
There is also something unavoidably Freudian in their relationship with each other. Though they seem, at least at the start to be primarily platonic, as they both state that neither is in love with the other, Hermine makes her declaration of causing Harry to fall in love with her. Yet at the same time her treatment of him and their interactions with each other are of a clearly and blatantly maternal nature.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
It takes another turn later in the book too. I don't want to give anything away, but what appears to be a conventional narrative becomes a different type later. It is only by reflecting back that we realise what Hesse has done.
The key to this, as I pointed out, is the bourgeois narrator's take. I think you can regard him as trustworthy, but uncomprehending. He gives us the actual events without the inner insight of Haller.
Yes, I agree. I've held off saying anything until I'd finished the book as the deeper you go into the book, the less this seems like a 'real' story. I have my views, now, on Hermine/Herman (Hesse?), and Pablo, and the 'Immortals', and who and what they are. But again, I think I'll wait until more people have finished the book. I wouldn't want to spoil anything.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
I really enjoyed reading Steppenwolf. It starts of slow, as Virgil said, but I think that Hesse is merely setting up the readers expectations which he slowly takes apart later. There are aspects of the book which spoke to me very deeply; it has made me think a great deal and on that basis I would give it 5 stars. There is more to it than is immediately apparent. I still feel I need to reflect on it.
I'd agree with that Fifth.
On the culural front and how it's been taken, I can see how it has appealed to various types of marginalised people - bohemians, drug takers, anti-bourgeois, the dissatisfied, hedonists, peple of different sexual orientations etc, and these can fit lots of people I've known who might - but didn't having not read the book - have associated with the themes. It's perhaps possible to see what Hesse is getting at in saying his book has been misinterpreted maybe by the kinds of peopele I mentioned.
It is certainly about being different, but in a much more rareifed/ academic sense. Speaking of sense - do you think I am talking any? :D
I think you're making more sense than I am!Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
I can see how, on one level, the book would appeal to marginalised groups but I think Hesse is definitely aiming at something else. The juxtaposition of the intellectual self (or the 'soul', perhaps) against the animalistic self. Or, to put it a different way, the part of us that thinks (and feels itself separate) to the body over which we appear to have no conscious control. But of course Hesse goes further than that. Hesse, I think, introduces us to the idea of the multiplicity of identity, after building us up to think only of duality (Haller v the Steppenwolf) he offers much more than that. I think it's also interesting how the final stages of the story, prior to the Magic Theatre, take place in 'Hell'. But I'm still not entirely sure what I think about that bit.
I've been stalled in my reading. I'll try to catch up. Sounds like it will get better as I get into it.
Yes I think you're right. The multiplicity idea comes from Buddhism, which Hesse studied along with Hinduism and resulted in Siddhartha. I think he was aiming at some combination of the intellectual traditions of East and West. The figure with the chess pieces in the theatre is like monk. I think Buddhism may have attracted him because of it's very academic approach to the world.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
As for Hell - I, too, am unsure of the significance, though it is part of the shock tactics he's employing. At the time it was written - between the wars - it would have been a shocking book to read for the literate bourgeoisie. Sex, drugs, multiple partners, irreligious behaviour, transvestitism, alcoholism, an apparent murder, and pacifist anti-nationalism.
He will be aiming for the effects, but these must be metaphors for his spiritual journey.
That is an excellent point! In fact as I started to progress further into my reading and began delving into the liaisons between Maria and Haller, I instantly started thinking of the Hippy, Beatnik lifestyle, and the book On The Road came into my mind in that whole free love idea, as well as their general impressions about art and the interesting conversation between Haller's intellectual ideas on music and his views particularly upon Mozart vs. Pablo's much more "sensual" take upon music, and the role of art to appeal to the senses in the moment, and simply make people feel something.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
I can see where this book would appeal to a great many different types who are "outside" the system so to speak, that is those who do challenge the normal constants and restrictions which are set up by society. On the one hand Hesse is reaching out to a vast group of different people and there is something which a great many counter-culture types might find some connection or relation to.
Yet at the same time I agree that Hesse is aiming for something much more than that. There is something both strongly intellectual as well as I think spiritual that is meant to be taken from the book. Hesse's intentions regarding the role of the Eastern philosophies is stated quite plainly toward the beginning of the book.
It is a book that could easily be misinterpreted to fit into varying different vies and used as a sort of justification for many different anti-establishment groups.
I'm officially giving up I've tried and tried to get into this, and from everyone's comments, it seems pretty interesting. However, I just can't get into it at all. I think part of it is the first person narration, and that isn't my favorite style to read.
Should we focus upon the Treatise of the Steppenwolf for a bit to focus the discussion?
mkhockenberry - it's the second time I've read this book. I remember getting not very much out of it the first time round, but because of Siddhartha, I thought i'd give it another go. It's not your usual book is it? I joined the James discussion over xmas on the Turn of the Screw, but I didn't really like that one. All to one's taste I say.:D
Not a bad idea Paul. I assume we should. But let me tell you, I thought it was boring and unartistic. But I guess if the core of the novel is there, then we should discuss it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
I thought the Treatise was abolsutely fascinating though perhaps that is becasue I could see so much of myself within it. But at any rate I do think it is a key factor into understand the story at large and what Hesse was wishing to accomplish and convey within the story.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Ok there is something I just have to know, becasue it is not made completely clear to me. Is Hermine truly suppose to be one in the same with Harry's old friend Herman? Or is Hermine just playing the role as a way to attract Harry's attention?
I don't think Hermine exists. I think she is a construct of Harry's personality.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
So are Pablo, Maria, and all the other figures at the masked ball just different figments or aspects of the multiple different individualities of the Steppenwolf? And Harry expressing the varying different personalities which live within him?Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
I was beginning to think along those lines. The realisation that Haller's narration is only loosely based upon what actually happens made me re-think the events later in the book. The Magic Theatre is a fantastic construct, and I think you're right DarkM about the multiple personalities. Hermine/Herman - is she a cypher for aspects of love, (though not physical love - Maria)?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
There's a lot of dancing later, though our narrator makes it clear that Haller has difficulty walking - twice.
Yes, I think so. I think it's also significant that he kills Hermine in the end, and so he is 'condemned to live'. Hermine seems to represent the part of Harry which is adept in the things he himself avoids/despises - dancing, socialising, etc - and in expressing her wish for Harry to kill her this was, instead, Harry himself expressing his desire to destroy those aspects of his personality which he seemed to see as base or alien to him. But that wasn't his lesson, and so he failed; he didn't achieve 'Immortality' and was instead condemned to live. Because it seemed to me that he was supposed to be learning to live with, to embrace, all aspects of himself, to put aside his personality (or perhaps what he perceived was his personality) instead of permitting his perceived dual nature to pull him apart and feed his desire for self destruction. I think this is the 'healing' of which Hesse spoke. Or I might be miles off the mark, but that's what I got from it anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
He kills Hermione!!:eek6: Oh my gosh. I can't wait to get to that. :)
You make an excellent point and I think you are quite right about the meaning of the event and the death of Hermine. At first I was rather struck with the idea that even after everything else, after he had his eyes opened and rejected the Steppenwolf and saw the truth of the infinity of selves, he still reverted back the old Harry again, but it makes sense that it was his effort to try and reject that opposing aspect of himself.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
I do find it interesting though that it seemed to be so significant that before he could try and kill Hermine/that aspect of himself, he had to first fall in love with her/it. That must suggest that Harry had also come to love that side of himself that was adverse to how he saw himself, and it was his love for it that made him seek to destroy it.
Finished it!
So I've been reading your comments and there are some very interesting things.
There was something so particularly poignant in the treatise about people who share a similar fate with Harry as they are the epitome of men caught in between the chairs (so to speak) of two ages. I've often felt the same way about myself.
Regarding the killing of Hermine, I'm inclined to disagree with some of you. I personally interpreted it as Harry's breach of his narrow-mindedness in believing in only two entities within himself and not more (as the treatise explains) and in so he was able to successfully integrate the facets of himself - Hermine - that he was in need of; not emancipate himself from them. I feel that this point is strengthened by Hesse's therapeutic intentions as presented in the foreword.
I'm slowly getting there. I'm now three quarters of the way through. I can't say i'm overwhelmed. The characters aren't all that developed or three dimensional, I'm not sure where this plot is going, and it gets preachy in places. The love scenes with Maria are interesting, in a prurient sort of way. :D I'm also confused about Steppenwolf. Where is the supposed savagery of his nature? I've yet to see any dramatization of his dualistic self. I'm not seeing the description of the Steppenwolf as described in the Treatise and Harry Haller's character. But the story is engaging and I'm curious as to how it turns out.
Oh I'm reading this now. This has crossed my mind as well. I hope it's not a surprise ending and we find out at the end it's all a fantasy in Harry's mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
Regarding the so called "savagery" in nature of the Steppenwolf, I think that is looking at the concept of the Steppenwolf a bit too literally, which I do not think is truly what Hesse is intending to convey.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
As it is reference in the Treatise of the Steppenwolf and comes out later during the magic show, in truth the ideal of the Steppenwolf, that is the duel aspect between man and wolf, is in fact an illusion. The truth is that there are in fact countless numerous individualities contained within, but most people can only see a unified singular individuality.
While the so called Steppenwolf, is tortured because he sees through the illusion of being a unified singular person, his ability to penetrate through the truth stops at this duel aspect of himself. It is this which drives him away from society and isolates him.
The term Steppenwolf, means "wolf of the steppes" which is meant to capture more the idea of a lone wolf figure, an outcast, an exile, more so than the idea of something savage or something "beastly"
Though Harry feels at times like he is a beast in his rejection of society, in the way in which he does not feel like he belongs, and the fact that he is incapable of forming relationships with other people. But this should not be confused with something werewolfian so to speak, that is something that is in fact physically brutally violent.
It is more of a struggle to try and break free from the norms, and limitations of the bourgeoisie society, and embrace a more libertarian lifestyle as expressed in his liaisons with Maria and the drug use of Pablo, and the free sort of lifestyle which they live.
I think it goes further than that. Although he chooses to live in the bosom of the bourgeoisie, he does not feel a part of it, and is perceived as different by our narrator.
Is his healing about accepting the fun side of life, whislt his killing of Hermine, which he anticipates her asking him, is a moving on from this?
I think that the killing her Hermine was the needed catalyst to make him realize that his seeking death, and his struggles with suicide had been wrong all along. He was awakened to the fact that he never was intended to kill Hermine/that aspect of himself, which I think is why it was so important to Hermine that he love her first, because he was suppose to embrace her and accept that part of himself.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
Yet, it was only through killing her that he was able to come into this realization. After the killing of Hermine, he then had his eyes opened to the lesson he was truly intended to learn, and that the way he had been living his life up until this point was wrong and his logic had been faulty. At the same time, it was also an acknowledgement that his struggle was not yet done, that the old Harry still lurked inside of him.
But I think that in the death of Hermine, in severing that part of him, it will allow him now, that he has seen the truth and the door has been opened, to strive to achieve those things within his life, that freedom, without having to do so through Hermine, it will no longer have to be a thing that is separate from himself.
The road to healing and the escape from misery can now be accomplished without his own mind having to deceive him into it, without the projection of these aspects of himself into other people, because now he knows they are all him, that it is all within him, and not separate from himself or outside of himself
Muse, that's an excellent summary. I agree with everything you said. Well put.
Agreed.
What do you think about the other doors where there is anarchy, kiling and the multiple personalty game?
I have to admit I was really confused by the whole car thing, where they were in a car, and than shooting at cars, and it was just complete chaos. That particular door/reality/vision, whichever it may be did not make a whole lot of sense to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
It was perhaps a complete freedom from the bourgeoisie which is rebelled against throughout the book and which Harry struggles with continually, the fact that he despises it and yet still wants to be a part of it.
It was a fantasy of complete freedom where no sense of order exists, and there are no restraints. A world constructed without rules or laws, and perhaps it was meant to offer the absolute extreme in the libertine ideal of free living. It seemed almost to reflect the id.
Since Harry was so pulled into himself and so reserved and bond so much to his intellectual ideas, and his Immortals, the introduction to the world of utter chaos which has no cares or worries, was meant to be a shock to Harry's system to help knock him out of the shell and once he had been exposed to the height of that lawlessness he would be more receptive to the other lessons which he was intended to learn.
It also worked as a physical manifestation, at least within his mind, of his negative feelings and of his conflicts and struggles, and perhaps it was meant to show him just how ridiculous his suffering and his struggles were, because the chaos was such utter nonsense.
Pablo tells Harry that he has no sense of humor, and that he takes himself and life too seriously, and in Pablo's opinion he also takes his art and music too seriously. The madness of the chaos was perhaps intended to try and show Harry just how ludicrous life would really be, and how meaningless it all was, and so he might as well just learn to laugh at it all.
I agree. It's perhaps telling that Haller is a pacifist and argues with his former friend and academic. Maybe Pablo's message is that he could have ignored the insult to his article, ignored the painting of Goethe, and had a thoroughly pleasant evening. Haller did after all publish under a pseudonym, but then he takes very personally his friend's views.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
There is no vioent ending to that fantsy either; it seems as though order is restored as they go off with the woman from the car.