Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf, for me, is easiest to examine when broken into two parts: pre-Hermine and post-Hermine. Before our half-man half-wolf protagonist meets the woman that will change his life, the novel is quite philosophically dense. There's a lot of meaty intellectual insight, especially in the Treatise on the Steppenwolf, and it takes some time to absorb. After Harry encounters Hermine, we've still got all that juicy, thinky stuff, but all of a sudden, things get fun!

I love a novel that challenges me intellectually, and there's no question that does just that. Harry's conversation with a certain famous composer at the novel's close brings up some really cool stuff to think about:

Humanity seems to be cursed with an ability to recognize and show more connect with the beautiful/great (you could even call it the divine) in the world but is very rarely able to accurately represent it in the way it deserves to be represented (e.g. Goethe's bust, Handel over the radio). How we react to our own shortcomings in our relationship to divinity is key to our potential for happiness.

The idea of giving up one's life for an ideal tends to be viewed as the ultimate form of sacrifice, but it seems to be neither the greatest nor most productive sacrifice. Harry is laughed at and derided for his desire to be executed when he is told, "You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live." Harry is seeking to exit life and reach "eternity," something Hermine also refers to as the kingdom of God and the communion of saints. By attempting to take the most direct and immediate route, however, Harry is both shortchanging himself and the world. When reading this passage, I thought of something that Elder Zosima said in The Brothers Karamazov:

"Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. Imaginary love yearns for an immediate heroic act that is achieved quickly and seen by everyone. People may actually reach a point where they are willing to sacrifice their lives, as long as the ordeal doesn't last too long, is quickly over - just like on the stage, with the public watching and admiring. A true act of love, on the other hand, requires hard work and patience, and for some, it is a whole way of life."

Really, though, Harry isn't being asked to go that far or to suffer to that extent. He isn't even asked to love. All he needs to do is to laugh a little more.

Now, all that alone would have made Steppenwolf fantastic, but what kicked things up a notch was the silly side of Harry and Hermine's relationship. While this was probably the wrong way to look at things, and Hesse probably wouldn't have been thrilled with me, I looked at quite a bit of it as a rom-com movie montage and found it hysterical. The dancing lessons, buying the gramophone, Harry learning how to shop for women, and even the almost-threesome all rolled through my head as Hall and Oates's "You Make My Dreams" played in the background. Most of all, I got a kick out of middle-aged Harry getting nervous about participating in his first Ball, like a kid getting ready for prom. I know this probably sounds like a knock, but it's not. The foundation of Steppenwolf is so solid that sprinkling moments of levity on top worked like gravy on mashed potatoes.

It's deep, it's unpredictable, and it's great. show less

Harry Haller is a well-off man (not a wolf man) who has no need of employment but has been unlucky in love and in his opinions. Approaching fifty, he has become restless with undemanding contentment and aging. He is still longing for adventure, still in search of something that will stir his heart. He calls himself the steppenwolf because he is suspicious of the animal side of his nature - really just all the portions of himself he thrusts down and away from his sense of identity as a man of wisdom and learning. Hesse despaired of readers who only focused on the surface level of this novel, viewing it only as the story of a man sinking slowly into despair and madness. If it isn't that, then what is it?

To a degree it is what Hesse is show more always saying, about the sturdy slap intellectuals receive after becoming lost in themselves, when they are reminded about reality, and what impact for good or ill they can have upon its unfolding. It's a story about how we get so wrapped up in the narrow stories we tell about ourselves, built upon just a small handful of events in our lives that we replay in memory, we abandon and forget the thousand other shades that formed us and were also a part of that story. And it reminds us that work's, art's and leisure's effects upon our emotions and well-being is what counts most, more than their objective worth. It reminds us that identifying too closely with just one slice of ourselves, one interpretation, creates a fallacy whereby we can mistakenly underrate our worth to ourselves and to the world. And that even if the entire world seems bent on moving in the wrong direction, it does not change the fundamental laws of the universe that underlie everything, and all must straighten out again in time. Those laws are accessible in even the darkest times, thus we can celebrate them even in the midst of despair.

Or maybe it's just some old man getting high on drugs and not learning a whole lot in the end. You decide. show less

Retrato do niilista alemão de meia idade e seu apego pelo melhor que há arte, a promessa de felicidade de um mozart etc, contra a cultura, da mediocridade dos pequenos ritos burgueses e leviandade e indulgência dos prazeres cotidianos. O problema é, e nisso o livro alcança um público maior, como viver então? Entre o lobo rabugento e o idealista deprimido, como em Siddharta, há um aprendizado espiritual que passa pelo amor de uma mulher, para o autor uma força integradora e mediadora. De escrita seca, até um pouco demais, duvidei que o final fosse ser estranho e maluco. Mas é. E deve ter influenciado as salas vermelhas de David Lynch.

I've read a few of Hesse's novels and I keep coming back to Steppenwolf time and time again. It's not as if books like Demian and Beneath the Wheel aren't worthwhile, either. It's just that there is something so grabbing and memorable about Steppenwolf. I was truly changed after I read this and I can't really say that for the majority of the books I've read.

One thing I think Hesse was obsessed with a little is the duality of life-the light and the dark side. Steppenwolf takes you to some dark carnival like dreams and forces you to see that life is incredibly complex. Someone like Hesse cannot live a simple life. He sees both and so do his protagonists. They all go through similar issues, temptations, even vices. There's a theme running show more through them that goes beyond good and evil...this is much more at the heart of the Earth's revolving center. Though I haven't yet read everything that Hesse has written, I'm pretty sure that nowhere has he developed this theme better than in Steppenwolf. It isn't just the characters that he gains a handle on but also his ideas overall.


It affected my dreams and my waking life. It changed the way I saw life and the world. There is an undercurrent to this tide that some resist and ignore. Others fall in love with it instead. show less

I read this book at the very end of a very tumultuous stay and attempt at living life 'over' in Israel. It was discussed with a friend whom I had met in university and had become a brother to me as I had become to him, and he had recommended it to me for years. I had read Hesse's Siddhartha a few years previous, and I did like it very much, it was the most human telling of the soul's striving towards enlightenment that I'd read up until that point and up until now as well. But after a visit with my friend and brother in Estonia that, in many ways, served as a bookend to my Israel experience, my attempt, I read, or more devoured, the remainder of Steppenwolf I'd started in Israel.

And I'm glad, even further, I am changed because of it. I show more finished the book en route from Helsinki, Finland to New York, and when I reached the final line wherein Harry Haller the titular Steppenwolf loses 'the game' but is, paradoxically, stronger for being weaker, more whole for having been broken, and more stoic for having been forced to acknowledge the humor inherent in all tragedy and in all despair, and he is determined to do better the next time, I knew I hadn't so much as read the book as lived and breathed it in an ecstatic and agonizing panoply. I saw and felt the tortured mind and spirit and how it is cursed to be brought low to the deepest nadir of loss and pathetic tribulation but simultaneously its blessing in its potential to be elevated to the zenith of understanding and enlightenment that paradoxically again too few and too many can't understand either from fear, laziness, or simply contentment.

This is world class literature, this is necessary literature, this has to be read by everyone despite the repeated tagline and motif of it being 'not for everyone'. Along with the absrudism of Camus and the nihilism of Nietzsche and the anything of Kafka, this is a needed pain and an unexpected bliss. There are those out there who need to know that the life of the mind and the soul can, and often will, become much worse than it is now. But almost horribly, it is just as assured that it will become better, much better, so much so that you will hear the cold laughter and the eternal music of the immortals, and you will see, and maybe even believe in something as absurd and out of place as hope in the human soul. show less

When I mentioned to my Other Reader that I had begun reading this book, she said "re-reading, you mean?" When I said, no, reading for the first time, she said she felt shocked, betrayed even, that I had not read this book in my youth. Then, strangely enough, I read the 1961 "Author's Note," where Hesse speculates that much readerly misunderstanding of his intentions as a writer in this novel was "by reason of the fact that this book, written when I was fifty years old and dealing, as it does, with the problems of that age, often fell into the hands of very young readers." Having now read it myself, I feel the text justifies the idea that it was written by a man roughly my age, about a man roughly my age, and for men roughly my age.

This show more novel has a documentary conceit, according to which it is the "records" (journal) of Harry Haller, recovered and published by Haller's landlady's nephew. The primary effect of this framing is to allow some "objective" characterization of Haller from the nephew's perspective before the story begins in earnest. Haller is himself an alienated intellectual product of the bourgeoisie in interwar Germany. He is divorced, living alone, spending his time on literature and music without any evidence of productive employment.

The "Steppenwolf" of the title is at first a sort of nickname for Haller, which is later understood as his alter-ego or psychological shadow, and perhaps ultimately as his genius or instinctual spirit. But it may be that Haller's tutelary spirit is really figured by the girl Hermine, whom he meets when he is in a suicidal funk, and who grooms him to a new appreciation of life outside the blinkered cultural sphere he had inhabited. Hermine is, after all, the feminine of Hermann: Haller's author.

(Digression: Now it occurs to me that Palahniuk's Fight Club could be read as an updated rewriting of Steppenwolf, with Hermine replaced by Tyler Durden, and the dance hall transformed to the fight club. Maria becomes Marla, and the Magic Theater becomes Operation Mayhem. Fight Club is perhaps similarly vulnerable to misunderstanding by younger readers.)

Another key character is the musician Pablo, to whom Hermine introduces Haller. Despite Haller's initial dim view of this man, he appears to be in truth a saint or higher adept of an interior circle, and he presides over the Magic Theater where Haller's story culminates in a psychedelic initiatory ordeal. This ordeal might be glossed as the Adventure of the Abyss, in which the Tragedy of Man is to be dissolved into the Comedy of Pan.

My esoteric speculations aside, this short novel amply repays reading. It was seen as a notorious defect of Hesse's oeuvre when it was first published in the first half of the twentieth century, and then rehabilitated and valorized by the counter-culture of the second. Its relationship to our current social circumstance is not evident, yet its primary concern is not with society, but with the individual, and the nature of spiritual attainment and possibilities for self-redemption. show less

There are so many layers of meaning in this timeless masterpiece, and so many threads, so intricately interwoven that writing about it would itself be a serious creative activity. At times, one can interpret it under the shadow of Nietzsche's Madman who is alone with himself in his emptiness, or Dostoevsky's underground man, but by the end, one can realize the true ingenuity of Hesse; however, one is able to understand why the work is so violently misunderstood.

I would stop myself from restricting a masterpiece to a particular interpretation, but would at least say that its up to us whether we feed the wolf or the human living inside us. Being humans, we perhaps believe too much in our ability to theorize, furnish ideas, reduce the show more whole macrocosm to some supposed singularity. In the process, we endlessly characterize life around us, build hierarchies, give ourselves a place in those chains of ideas, call it with beautiful names such as humanity, society, civilizations. But the wolf is always there, ready to break every structure, take all our cherished meaning away, ready to annihilate the world within, make it all absurd, supply us with only one answer: suicide.

I believe its extremely important to reflect upon Hesse's narrative around the so-called immortals, Mozart and Goethe. I am not sure if he is using them to build a chain of reconstruction and repair, but I would love to have a complete week with myself to let the text open itself to me really slow. I can only say that I absolutely loved it and I also know that I won't go through the text again. Not in a decade, if I live that long. show less