Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Music
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.
Dancing
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.
Representation
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.
