The Glass Bead Game (2 page)

Hesse's literary career parallels the development of modern literature from a
fin de siècle
aestheticism through expressionism to a contemporary sense of human commitment. Born in the Black Forest town of Calw in 1877, Hesse in his youth reflected the neo-romanticism then prevalent among many writers of his generation in England, France, and Germany. The misty yearnings of his earliest stories and poems display the frank escapism of a young man, not at home in the bourgeois reality of Wilhelmine Germany, who projects his dreams into a romantic kingdom that he locates, according to the title of one work, “An Hour beyond Midnight.” But the success of his first major novel,
Peter Camenzind
(1904), reconciled the young writer, at least temporarily, with a world that was prepared to bestow upon him the material rewards of literary fame. From aestheticism he shifted to the melancholy realism that marked his next poems and stories as well as the novels
Under the Wheel
(1906),
Gertrude
(1910), and
Rosshalde
(1914). Putting aside his romantic longings, he assumed the role of a settled family man who advocated in his fictions a bittersweet doctrine of renunciation and compromise.

But the war brought a radical change. Hesse, who had been living in Switzerland since 1912, found that his outspoken pacifism alienated many of his former friends and readers, who succumbed to the wave of martial exhilaration sweeping over Europe in August of 1914. Meanwhile, family and marital difficulties shattered the illusion of a happy life that he had carefully sought to preserve for some ten years. A lengthy psychoanalytic treatment at the hands of a disciple of Jung in 1916 and 1917 completed his disillusionment with his present state and the process of psychic re-evaluation. Hesse came to the conclusion that he had been living a lie and denying the authentic impulses of his own being. In 1919 he moved to the village of Montagnola, near Lugano in southern Switzerland, where he lived in relative seclusion until his death in 1962. Here he wrote most of the major works for which he subsequently became famous and in which he sought to discover a more mature ideal of the spirit to replace that “reality” with which he had become disenchanted.

In several essays that he wrote around 1920—most notably in pieces on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky—Hesse argued that men must seek a new morality that, transcending the conventional dichotomy of good and evil, will embrace all extremes of life in one unified vision. A later essay, “A Bit of Theology” (1932), outlines the three-stage progression toward this goal. The child, he says, is born into a state of unity with all being. It is only when the child is taught about good and evil that he advances to a second level of individuation characterized by despair and alienation; for he has been made aware of laws and moral codes, but feels incapable of adhering to the arbitrary standards established by conventional religious or moral systems since they exclude so much of what seems perfectly natural. A few men—like the hero of
Siddhartha
or those whom Hesse calls “the Immortals” in
Steppenwolf
—manage to attain a third level of awareness where they are once again capable of accepting all being. But most men are condemned to live on the second level, sustained only by a sense of humor through which they neutralize oppressive reality and by an act of the imagination through which they share from time to time in the kingdom of the Immortals, the realm of spirit.

Hesse's novels trace this struggle in the lives of heroes set against backgrounds from different ages of civilization. In each case the triadic rhythm of development is the same; only the historical circumstances differ. In
Demian
(1919) the milieu is that of the student generation of the turbulent years immediately preceding World War I. The hero of
Siddhartha
(1922) progresses through the three stages in the classical India of Buddha.
Steppenwolf
(1927) ironically depicts the dilemma of a European intellectual confronted with the tawdry pop culture of the twenties, while the dual protagonists of
Narcissus and Goldmund
(1930) act out their individuation in the waning of the Middle Ages. In the thinly veiled symbolic autobiography of
The Journey to the East
(1932), finally, the hero joins a League of Journeyers to the East in a timeless present set sometime after “the Great War.” Each novel postulates the possibility of a spiritual kingdom toward which the hero strives, whether he reaches it or not.

Castalia is clearly another attempt, this time projected into the future, to represent this same ideal: a symbolic realm where all spiritual values are kept alive and present, specifically through the practice of the Glass Bead Game. In this sense, then, the novel was originally envisaged as yet another variation in Hesse's continuing search for a spiritual dimension of life, for it depicts a future society in which the realm of Culture is set apart to pursue its goals in splendid isolation, unsullied by the “reality” that Hesse had grown to distrust.

The Glass Bead Game
was a continuation and intensification in another sense as well. Hesse was aware of the fact that his earlier novels had employed the same basic pattern of individual development against different historical backgrounds. He now decided to incorporate this structural tendency into a single new novel. The idea that came to him, he wrote to a friend in 1945, was “reincarnation as a mode of expression for stability in the midst of flux.” Long before he began writing, he remarked, he had in mind “an individual but supratemporal life … a man who experiences in a series of rebirths the grand epochs in the history of mankind.” The novel, in other words, was to consist of a number of parallel lives, ranging through time, presumably, from the pre-historic past to the remote future. But the emphasis was to be distributed evenly among the parts. “The book is going to contain several biographies of the same man, who lives on earth at different times—or at least thinks that he had such existences,” he wrote to his sister in 1934. Around this time Hesse wrote and published separately three such biographies: one about a prehistoric rainmaker; one set in the Golden Age of India; and a third depicting an episode from the patristic period of the early Christian church. (A fourth life, set among the Pietists of eighteenth-century Swabia, occupied Hesse for almost a year, but was never published during his lifetime.)

As we now read the novel in its final form, of course, the arrangement of the parts is different. The biography of Joseph Knecht, which was to have been but the last in a long series of parallel lives, has grown to comprise the twelve central chapters of the book. The history of the Glass Bead Game and the organization of the cultural province are sketched in a lengthy introduction, and the three parallel lives, along with some poems, are added in an appendix as school exercises of young Knecht. Why this shift in plan, which seems to have taken place in the mid-thirties after parts of the book had already been written and published? At first it was simply a matter of expediency. Hesse found that he could best render “the inner reality of Castalia” through the figure of a dominating central figure. “And so Knecht stepped into the center of the narrative.” In fact, in the first three chapters of his biography we get a far clearer idea of the Castalian ideal at its finest than in the narrator's more abstract introduction.

But Joseph Knecht ends by defecting from Castalia, a conclusion that was far from Hesse's mind when he first dreamed of this new version of the spiritual kingdom and when he wrote the first of the lives. At least two factors contributed to change Hesse's attitude toward the ideal which he had been striving to portray in so many works for almost twenty years. First, the sheer reality of contemporary events—the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the horrors of Nazism—opened Hesse's eyes to the failure of the intellectuals and convinced him of the futility of any spiritual realm divorced wholly from contemporary social reality. His ideal had to give way, he wrote, “under the pressures of the moment.” This is the meaning that emerges clearly from young Knecht's debates with that emissary from the outside world, Plinio Designori, who argues that a life consecrated exclusively to the mind is not only unfruitful, but also dangerous. Fritz Tegularius, the brilliant scholar who is totally unfit for any position of responsibility in the order, is the living example of the excesses of an aestheticism cultivated in isolation from reality. Secondly, Hesse's growing uneasiness regarding an absolute spiritual kingdom was substantiated by his study of Burckhardt's writings. It is Burckhardt, in the person of Father Jacobus, who convinces Knecht-Hesse that even the most perfect spiritual institution, in the eyes of history, is a relative organism. In order to survive it must adapt itself to the social exigencies of the times. The central chapters of the biography, therefore, recapitulate in fictional form Hesse's own shift from his original belief in a haughty Nietzschean elitism to a more compassionate social consciousness shaped by Burckhardt's historicism. The ideological tensions between Knecht, Plinio, and Father Jacobus reflect on the level of character the areas of Culture, State, and Church, whose complex interrelationships Burckhardt investigated in his
Observations on World History
(a course of lectures delivered in 1870-1871 and posthumously published in 1905).

Seen in this light and put into the contemporary idiom, Knecht's life represents typologically the radicalization of the intellectual, who moves from the
vita contemplativa
not to the opposite extreme of the
vita activa,
but to an intermediate position of responsible action controlled by dispassionate reflection. It is essential to understand that Knecht's defection from Castalia, far from implying any repudiation of the spiritual ideal, simply calls for a new consciousness of the social responsibility of the intellectual. Knecht remains true to his name, which means “servant.” Now his service takes on a fuller meaning. By quitting Castalia, Knecht fulfills two functions. He serves Castalia by warning it, through his example, to forsake its posture of arrogant and self-indulgent autonomy, which can lead ultimately only to its destruction. And he makes a commitment by putting spirit and intellect at the service of the world outside in the person of his pupil, the youth Tito. Knecht's death has been variously interpreted, and certainly that final scene has symbolic overtones that expand its dimensions. But Hesse made its basic meaning quite clear in a letter of 1947. “He leaves behind a Tito for whom this sacrificial death of a man vastly superior to him will remain forever an admonition and an example.” The spiritual ideal, once attained, has now been put back into the service of life.

The Glass Bead Game,
then, is indispensable for a complete understanding of Hesse's thought. It is possible to read
Siddhartha
as a self-centered pursuit of nirvana, but Joseph Knecht gives up his life out of a sense of commitment to a fellow human being. It is possible to see in
Steppenwolf
a heady glorification of hip or even hippie culture, but Joseph Knecht shows that the only true culture is that which responds to the social requirements of the times.
The Glass Bead Game,
finally, makes it clear that Hesse advocates thoughtful commitment over self-indulgent solipsism, responsible action over mindless revolt. For Joseph Knecht is no impetuous radical thrusting non-negotiable demands upon the institution and demanding amnesty from the consequences of his deeds. He attains through disciplined achievement the highest status in the Order and commits himself to action only after thoughtfully assessing its implications for Castalia and the consequences for himself. Above all—for the novel is not a philosophical tract or a political pamphlet, but a work of art—Hesse suggests that revolt need not be irrational and violent, that indeed it is more effective when it is rational and ironic. This is the value of the temporal distance, the double perspective vouchsafed by the fiction. In the Introduction, looking back at our own civilization from the vantage point of the future, we see it in all its glaring self-contradictions. At the same time, we look ahead to the Castalia of the future, where the problems of our age are displayed in a realistic abstraction that permits us to consider them rationally and dispassionately. Castalia has more than a little in common with the intellectual and cultural institutions of the sixties as well as the eighties to the extent that they have become autonomous empires cut off from the social needs of mankind and cultivating their own Glass Bead Games in glorious isolation. And Knecht's conviction that a State ruled without the tempering influence of Culture is doomed to brutishness reflects a prevalent contemporary concern: our computerized society has become so bureaucratically impersonal that it is no longer guided sufficiently by forces that are in the highest sense humane; our research and scholarship have attained dizzying heights of achievement without retaining a compensating sense of ethical responsibility. The longer we consider Hesse's novel, the more clearly we realize that it is not a telescope focused on an imaginary future, but a mirror reflecting with disturbing sharpness a paradigm of present reality.

All of these considerations twenty years ago justified a new translation of Hesse's late masterpiece. Society had caught up with his vision. And Richard and Clara Winston produced a translation eminently usable for the age. I do not mean merely that their translation is “correct” in avoiding the many mistakes of the earlier English version. More important: they succeeded in catching the sense and style of the book. They realized that with this last novel Hesse shifted his focus from the individual to the institution; hence they did not make the mistake of calling it
Magister Ludi,
which would suggest that it is simply another German
Bildungsroman,
a pretty fiction of personal development unrelated to the more general concerns of society. Instead, they reinstated the title that Hesse gave to the original (
Das Glasperlenspiel
), which sums up in a word the glory and tragedy of culture in our time. By capturing the monkish tone of the narrator, who repeats himself with clerical pedantry, the translation opens up the irony of the work. For the Castalian self-obsession from which Knecht defects is nowhere more evident than in the smug complacency of the narrator in the Introduction and opening chapters. Ironically, as he learns to appreciate the meaning of Knecht's life by writing his biography, the narrator assumes a more humane and, in the finest sense, “spiritual” tone, thus vindicating Knecht's action. And similar considerations suggest the relevance of his
chef d'oeuvre
for the nineties, as our society seeks to recapture that balance of knowledge, value, and action that characterizes any healthy polity.