rick green
11th May 2004, 23:18
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
Whoa. This was wild. Has anyone here read it?
It’s a little dated, treating a kind of cultural watershed that was traversed in the early 20th century. As we’ve been on the other side for nearly a century now, much in the book comes off as quaint and antiquated. I’m thinking here of the pre-machine age mentality of the protagonist, Harry Haller aka the Steppenwolf. His alternating scorn and horror of the “wireless,†the “mimeograph,†and the automobile are understandable, but do not engage a modern reader’s sympathy. How could they? Such machines are at the very heart of our lives & have been for generations. But Hesse does fashion an elegant metaphor from this situation. In a surreal, drug-induced episode near the book’s climax, Mozart is instructing the Steppenwolf in ethics & metaphysics & using a radio broadcast of Handel as an audio-visual study aid.
…[T]o my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devlish tin trumpet spat out, without more ado, a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking there was sure enough, like an old master beneath a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music…
“My God,†I cried in horror, :what are you doing, Mozart? Do you really mean to inflict this mess on me and yourself, this triumph of our day, the last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art?â€
Mozart replies:
Just listen, you poor creature, listen without either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. Pay attention and you will learn something. Observe how this crazy funnel apparently does the most stupid, the most useless and the most damnable thing in the world. It takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction, stupid and course, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanism, its inane meddling and marring. Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.
The novel is liberally seasoned with essays of this sort--clearly it was written before Hemingway's "hard-boiled" narrative style became the fiction writer's stock-in-trade. While the style and much of the subject matter seems old fashioned, there are many interesting passages that could have been written yesterday. Take this description of Steppenwolf's experience at a costume ball where the Fox Trot and the Boston are danced to the fevered strains of a jazz combo. It might as well describe a rave where ecstasy and wheels-of-steel propel the fevered throng.
An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and student—the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I had often heard it spoken of. I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me of it and I had always treated it with a half superior, half-envious smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile, that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been turned by a common enthusiasm…But today , on this blessed night, I myself, the Steppenwolf, was radiant with this smile. I myself swam in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy tale. I myself breathed the sweet intoxication of a common dream and of music and and rhythm and wine and women—I, who had in other days so often listened with amusement, or dismal superiority, to its panegyric in the ballroom chatter of some student. I was myself no longer. My personality was dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in water. I danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the other women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to the same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic flowers, belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one another. And the men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no strangers to me. Their smile was mine, and mine their wooing and theirs mine.
This conflation of the orgy and the religious rite seems to be a timeless aspect of Western Civilization. The passage above reminded me of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as well as The Bachae of Euripides.
Other passages with contemporary relevance treat the modern war machine.
Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that therein lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war. They don’t forgive me that, for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the papers. Not one of them hs the least thing to blame himself for. Not one has any guilt. One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few million men lie under the ground.
This is really the heart of the book, the idea that we are all guilty of the crimes of war, because none of us--perhaps the the saints--have purged our hearts of violence. To replace this violence with laughter is the task set for Steppenwolf, and though he fails to do so, another chance is held out for him at the book's end. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.
One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh.
Steppenwolf is really a great book. It's a little wacky, a little dated, a little off the wall, but it strives for truth and hope and transcendence and these timeless virtues make it great.
Whoa. This was wild. Has anyone here read it?
It’s a little dated, treating a kind of cultural watershed that was traversed in the early 20th century. As we’ve been on the other side for nearly a century now, much in the book comes off as quaint and antiquated. I’m thinking here of the pre-machine age mentality of the protagonist, Harry Haller aka the Steppenwolf. His alternating scorn and horror of the “wireless,†the “mimeograph,†and the automobile are understandable, but do not engage a modern reader’s sympathy. How could they? Such machines are at the very heart of our lives & have been for generations. But Hesse does fashion an elegant metaphor from this situation. In a surreal, drug-induced episode near the book’s climax, Mozart is instructing the Steppenwolf in ethics & metaphysics & using a radio broadcast of Handel as an audio-visual study aid.
…[T]o my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devlish tin trumpet spat out, without more ado, a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking there was sure enough, like an old master beneath a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music…
“My God,†I cried in horror, :what are you doing, Mozart? Do you really mean to inflict this mess on me and yourself, this triumph of our day, the last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art?â€
Mozart replies:
Just listen, you poor creature, listen without either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. Pay attention and you will learn something. Observe how this crazy funnel apparently does the most stupid, the most useless and the most damnable thing in the world. It takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction, stupid and course, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanism, its inane meddling and marring. Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.
The novel is liberally seasoned with essays of this sort--clearly it was written before Hemingway's "hard-boiled" narrative style became the fiction writer's stock-in-trade. While the style and much of the subject matter seems old fashioned, there are many interesting passages that could have been written yesterday. Take this description of Steppenwolf's experience at a costume ball where the Fox Trot and the Boston are danced to the fevered strains of a jazz combo. It might as well describe a rave where ecstasy and wheels-of-steel propel the fevered throng.
An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and student—the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I had often heard it spoken of. I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me of it and I had always treated it with a half superior, half-envious smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile, that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been turned by a common enthusiasm…But today , on this blessed night, I myself, the Steppenwolf, was radiant with this smile. I myself swam in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy tale. I myself breathed the sweet intoxication of a common dream and of music and and rhythm and wine and women—I, who had in other days so often listened with amusement, or dismal superiority, to its panegyric in the ballroom chatter of some student. I was myself no longer. My personality was dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in water. I danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the other women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to the same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic flowers, belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one another. And the men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no strangers to me. Their smile was mine, and mine their wooing and theirs mine.
This conflation of the orgy and the religious rite seems to be a timeless aspect of Western Civilization. The passage above reminded me of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as well as The Bachae of Euripides.
Other passages with contemporary relevance treat the modern war machine.
Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that therein lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war. They don’t forgive me that, for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the papers. Not one of them hs the least thing to blame himself for. Not one has any guilt. One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few million men lie under the ground.
This is really the heart of the book, the idea that we are all guilty of the crimes of war, because none of us--perhaps the the saints--have purged our hearts of violence. To replace this violence with laughter is the task set for Steppenwolf, and though he fails to do so, another chance is held out for him at the book's end. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.
One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh.
Steppenwolf is really a great book. It's a little wacky, a little dated, a little off the wall, but it strives for truth and hope and transcendence and these timeless virtues make it great.