Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf describes Harry Haller's unusual, tragic condition. He is torn between two selves: a man-half who desires the respectability and comforts of bourgeois existence, and a wolf-half who scoffs at these vain, absurd desires. Although Hesse returns to this dichotomy throughout the novel, he also frequently dismisses it as overly simplistic and exaggerated. According to the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” the idea that Harry is composed of these two selves is useful in theory, but, like all such theoretical constructs, is ultimately unable to capture the complexity and richness of reality. According to the Treatise, “Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two.” Moreover, this is true not only in Harry's case but is an inherent condition of mankind.

The idea of multiple identities is most fully explored in the Magic Theater at the novel's close. Pablo speaks of the theater as a place in which to perform the dissolution of the personality. Behind one of the strange doors, a man closely resembling Pablo teaches Harry that the individual is comprised of innumerable selves that may be reconfigured in varying ways, like chess pieces. Drawing upon the Eastern ideas of reincarnation and transmigration of the soul into infinite bodies, and upon the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung, Hesse articulates a highly personal hypothesis of the multifaceted nature of the soul.

In her most intense and revealing discussion with Harry, on the day before the Fancy Dress Ball, Hermine emphasizes something she calls “eternity.” Eternity exists “at the back of time.” It is the realm of all the things that matter—works of genius by artists like Mozart, the strength and potency within all true feelings and acts, and the pure saints and suffering martyrs.

Hermine's speech provides the clearest formulation of Hesse's idea of such a world beyond time. Other figures in Steppenwolf refer to it in more or less straightforward terms; Goethe for instance, speaks of the mistake man commits in making too much of time. Indeed, the mere fact of Harry's encounters with past geniuses points to their continuing existence in some realm freed from the mechanism of time. More subtly, the idea of existence beyond time crops up as a frequent sensation whenever Harry is operating correctly. Caught up in the collective dancing fervor at the ball, for instance, Harry says that he has “lost the sense of time.”

Since Steppenwolf is meant to be an educational text, Hesse develops the idea of a world beyond in tandem with his other major ideas in the novel. The laughter of the “immortals” is one way of entering into the world of eternity. Likewise, the failure to recognize the existence of multiple selves within the individual may be linked to an insufficient consciousness of timelessness. Indeed, when Harry looks into the gigantic mirror of the Magic Theater, he sees dozens of Harrys of all sizes, inclinations, and temperaments. One Harry even darts off impetuously before Harry's astonished eyes. Being thus intertwined with the other major ideas of the novel, the existence of a space beyond time in a sense provides the soul of these ideas. Laughter may offer a way to confront life, but it is eternity that holds the key to the reason for doing so. Hesse suggests that our actions struggling on behalf of goodness and genius do matter in the large-scale view.

Steppenwolf recounts the drama of a conflicted, despairing individual's quest to resolve his internal difficulties so that he may once again live life. The novel offers a straightforward solution to this problem: laughter. Each source of wisdom in the story—the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” Goethe, Hermine, Pablo, and Mozart—advises Harry that laughter is the correct approach to life. Laughter tinkles coldly and beautifully at all of the novel's most intense, breakthrough moments, and the story finally closes on Harry's determined resolution to learn how to laugh.

Hesse's notion of laughter is complex. It is neither an escape from life into pleasure and entertainment nor a recasting of the darker sides of existence with an artificial rosy light. Rather, the laughter that the enlightened possess pierces through the serious traumas of existence while at the same time superseding and transcending them. Though Harry has been correct in finding human existence full of horrors, the appropriate response to this knowledge is not to destroy one's life through obsession with the ultimate failure. Instead, one must struggle and at the same time laugh at the world's mess.

Harry's profound attachment to music is obvious from the start, when the preface describes the curious changes that come over him at the symphony. Harry's earliest and greatest idol is Mozart. Among Harry's greatest frustrations with modern popular culture are the radio and gramophone, which he dislikes because he believes they defile sacred music. For Harry, music floats above the world of mundane realities, a perfect, transcendent sphere of the spiritual. This high estimation of music recalls German Romantic aesthetic theory, which prized music foremost among the arts because it does not attempt to represent something else, as visual or dramatic arts do. Strictly pure, divorced from having to picture or describe any physical thing, music seems to belong to the divine world beyond the visible one.

The motif of dancing operates alongside the motif of music. If music provides a sense of the immortal, lofty spiritual world, dancing suggests a tuning of earthly actions to the rhythms of the divine. Hermine teaches Harry to dance and at the same time teaches him how to combine physical and spiritual life. The fact that Pablo is a genius bandleader, choosing and directing the songs to which a multitude dances, reflects his gift for bringing the two parts of the self—the sensuous and the spiritual—into harmony.

Steppenwolf is full of many kinds of representations. The novel contains a multitude of different narrative representations of Harry, from the preface of his landlady's nephew, to Harry's own records, to the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” to the poems Harry pens in the course of the novel. Each narrative representation of Harry possesses its own limited share of truth. None contains the whole truth of Harry, yet each elucidates some aspect of his character. Harry himself notes this when he looks at the Treatise and a bit of his own writing. Exploring representation in this way, Hesse emphasizes his assertion that an individual is not a simplistic unit but a rich complexity of thousands of souls.

Though some representations in the novel are truthful but incomplete, many are simply inadequate. The most striking of these is the portrait of Goethe, which incites Harry's self-righteous fervor. As Hermine points out, in his outburst Harry has committed the same error of which he accused the professor's wife. If no one knows what Goethe really looked like, Harry's own cherished image of the poet is just as subjective and self-serving as the portrait. Hermine's criticism demonstrates that all representations are interpretations, each from a different angle. Each representation, though sometimes successful in its own way, is also inevitably limited.

In a novel concerned with the discovery of the self and its pluralities, mirrors occupy a central symbolic niche. The voyage in the Magic Theater is one long look into a hallucinatory fun-house mirror. Even the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” may be seen as a mirror made of words, one that speaks back to Harry specifically. Of the novel's other, subtler mirrors, Hermine is the most important. She recognizes her mirroring function, declaring that she serves as Harry's much-needed looking glass. Harry himself later notes that gazing at Hermine is like gazing into a mirror. Yet, as much as Hermine reflects Harry, she also draws out of him those aspects of himself to which he has previously been blind. Articulating the feelings that are hidden inside Harry, Hermine draws out both the expression of these feelings and Harry's realization of their existence.

Harry's relationship to the radio—the quintessential incarnation of the shabby mediocrity of modern life—is fraught with distrust, disgust, and foreboding. Harry distrusts the radio's warping of music, and feels disgusted that the general populace tolerates and fails to notice such defilement. Harry's negative feelings blind him to any positive interpretation of the radio, as we see in his conversation with his landlady over tea. After touching on some of the interesting philosophical implications of the radio, Harry quickly gets sidetracked into an angry polemic.

Harry sees the araucaria plant in the vestibule of an apartment in his lodging house as the ultimate symbol of bourgeois order and moderation. Everything about the plant, which is spotlessly clean and obviously cared for devotedly, bespeaks the routines and rhythms of bourgeois life. Harry experiences nostalgia for such a life, but he also feels excluded from it. The araucaria is thus both a beacon of a lost world and a symbol of the narrow-minded, shortsighted bourgeoisie that Harry scorns.