March '10 Reading: Steppenwolf by Hesse

I have not had a chance to give my thoughts on Steppenwolf and assess the novel, so let me finally do so now. I’m not exactly sure what to say. It’s certainly different, I take it considered experimental, and except for the Steppenwolf Treatise section, which consumed 15% of the novel, it was engaging until the end. To be honest, I’m not a fan of novels that blur a dream state with reality. I don’t mind novels that use dreams, but if one doesn’t pin down a line between what is dream and what is reality, then what’s the story? What’s so important about someone’s dream? Sure one can make the point that one can’t tell the difference between reality and dream, but that’s been done. Besides, I don’t find that profound. And if the ending is such that it’s all been a dream, my God, that’s cheap and frankly amateurish.

And so in reading Steppenwolf, I’m baffled by several things. I can’t tell if the story is a dream or its reality. Obviously Harry exists. The point of the preface where the man at the apartment who finds Harry’s notebooks accounts for Harry’s reality through Harry’s stay at the apartment. So we know Harry is real, we know the apartment is real. Is everything else part of Harry’s dream or imagination? Does Harry really start shooting people as if it were a shooting gallery or does he then for a reason I can’t fathom kill the woman he loves? If it’s real, it’s perverse. If it’s a dream, then so what?

I don’t think after this one reading I can precisely articulate the novel’s central theme, but I would assume it’s coherent. I see the allusions to Jungian psychology and the mystical religious element that runs through the novel; I can see how Hesse is in dissension to the current state of his society. He certainly has issues with his contemporary world and I’m not sure if it’s because the world has gone astray from some better state (religious and psychological) or its inherent in man to be astray. I can see both possibilities. I didn’t after reading the novel feel the need to give it a lot of thought.

I didn’t feel the need because I didn’t feel the novel was all that well crafted.

Except for Harry, all the characters were flat, pure flat. Hermione, Pablo, Maria, his professor colleague, the professor’s wife, not one. I guess the flatness of these characters supports a dream perspective from Harry’s mind to the novel. Nonetheless where’s the writer’s craft? In the end these characters seemed to stand for allegorical concepts rather than people.

Second, Harry is supposed to be a tortured soul. What exactly is torturing him? I’m not sure I get it. And if he’s a person who is rude and uncouth, as he says he is, where’s the dramatization of it? If anything he’s quite cultured in his wine and music. The only rudeness is that incident with the Professor’s wife where he accidently demeans her painting. And he didn’t know it was hers. The description of Harry doesn’t seem to match the narrative.

Third, the Steppenwolf Treatise was incredibly not artful. This was a delineation of the novel’s themes in an explicative mode. A writer of skill would have integrated these themes into the narrative by dramatizing them. Or of a lesser craft would be where a writer has the characters speak the themes in the dialogue. Hesse takes even a lesser craft route. The Treatise was pure argumentative discourse disguised in a pamphlet that Harry finds. How unimaginative. And not only is it argumentative discourse, it’s a particular type. The argument is a critique on society and essentially politics, i.e. “bourgeois society.” Well, that kind of argument is called a polemic, and polemic is the antithesis of creative writing. I don’t read novels to read polemics, whether I agree with the polemic or not.

Fourth, the quality of the writing was mixed. I am not referring to the prose, since of course this was written in German and I read it in translation, and I have no way to assess the quality of the German. Hesse in his author’s note calls the novel poetic. I’m going to assume his prose is excellent. I’m referring to how a writer engages the reader in the development of scenes. A good writer draws the reader in so that through the details and pacing it creates the atmosphere of truth, that this scene really happened, and the reader is engaged by it. Hesse’s scene writing is spotting throughout the novel. I fully believed and was engaged with the scene where Hermione draws him in to dance; I was engaged and delighted with the love scenes with Maria. I found the Pablo scenes completely uninteresting and the shooting gallery was totally non believable. Here’s the shooting gallery scene. Now keep in mind, this is the first time Gustav enters the novel at page 181 of a 214 page novel.

Quote:

The best of all, however, was that my childhood friend, Gustav, turned up close beside me. I had lost sight of him for dozens of years, the wildest, strongest, most eager and venturesome of the friends of my childhood. I laughed in my heart as I saw him blink at me with his bright blue eyes. He beckoned and at once I followed him joyfully.

“Good Lord, Gustav,” I cried happily, “I haven’t seen you in ages. Whatever has become of you?”

He gave a derisive snort, just as he used to do as a boy. “There you are again, you idiot, jabbering and asking questions. I’m a professor of theology if you want to know. But, Lord be praised, there’s no occaision for theology now, my boy. It’s war. Come on!”
He shot the driver of a small car that came snorting towards us and leaping into it as nimbly as monkey, brought it to a standstill for me to get in. Then we drove like the devil between bullets and crashed cars out of town and suburbs.

Then they have a brief conversation and they situate themselves on top of a rock wall overlooking the road.

Quote:

We had scarcely cooled down when we heard the hoarse imperious horn of a big luxuery car from the next bend in the road. It came purring at top speed up the smooth road. Our rifles were ready in our hands. The excitement was intense.

“Aim at the chauffer,” commanded Gustav quickly just as the heavy car went by beneath us. I aimed, and fired at the chauffer in his blue cap. The man fell in a heap. The car careened on, charged the cliff face, rebounded, attacked the lower wall furiously with all its unwieldy weight like a great bumble bee and, tumbling over, crashed with a brief and distant report into the depths below.

“Got him!” Gustav laughed. “My turn next.”

And they go on to keep shooting others. I have no idea whether this is a dream or fact. I’m not sure I really care. The whole scene is rather cartoonish. The novel is 90% over and Hesse introduces a new character where they do some incredible and diabolic things and no such violence or action scenes have occurred before this point in the book. It comes out of the blue, both the violence and the swift action. A writer cannot just do that and be credible. Such scenes need to be “earned,” as we called in creative writing classes. An action novel does not just have action at the end; the author has to create the world of action, and so when the climatic action at the end occurs, it’s “earned.” This was completely unearned and so is the climax. I won’t spoil it, but I found it possibly as cartoonish as this scene.

I struggled to try to give this novel an average rating. The novel was boring at the beginning, interesting in the middle section with the engaging scenes with Hermione and Maria, and bizarre and crude in its apparent dream section (if it was a dream) at the end. In his author’s note Hesse from the perspective of over thirty years from when the book was published writes that this was his most misunderstood novel – “violently misunderstood” is the exact phrasing. He calls this novel “poetic writing.” Perhaps this could have worked as a long extended poem, but as a novel it lacks the flesh and blood feel of the real. No wonder it’s been misunderstood. It’s not well crafted as a novel. Sure it’s experimental, but most experiments in art go awry. I think there is the raw material for a good novella here, probably ninety pages long, but as a novel it fails. Sorry I had to go below average on this.