I am now an ultimate authority on the works of Hermann Hesse, having read six of his books. What I observe, the judgments I pronounce, and the merits I accord are definite and final. You must be anxious! Does he now reach for the lever of the guillotine, to extinguish a legacy once thought ossified? Or does he, instead, now arrange a cushion for worship at His Reverence's shrine? Maybe, worst of all, he prepares a condemnation of mere mediocrity! None of these choices interest me! I have here instead some meandering, ambivalent suggestions about just the one book.
Ever since I had my own kind of awakening while reading Steppenwolf, an experience of a spiritual tenor that, among other things, introduced me to the vastness in books, I have repeatedly gone back to Hermann Hesse to get a taste of that feeling. It wasn't disappointing that my experience with Steppenwolf wasn't repeated: I didn't expect that it would be. Nevertheless, Hesse's books have always managed to stir feelings that incline toward the spiritual. So I came to his last novel, and the one often dubbed his magnum opus, hoping to find that same power in his writing that I had found so reliably before.
The Glass Bead Game is unmistakably Hessian. Features common to his other major works are found here--the focus on an individual who is, or who feels himself to be, an outsider, and who finds somewhere deep within him a longing for a greater purpose; having as its momentum the metamorphosizing of this individual, as opposed to the intricate development of a plot; and an emphasis on the friction between a greater societal force and this person. That it lies brick-like on the shelf is itself a swerve for Hesse--mostly his stories are confined, and to their benefit, to a couple hundred pages. Unfortunately the book's physicality owes much to the bloat of three "lives", supposedly written by protagonist Joseph Knecht and offering less compelling reading than Joseph's own life story. Still, the main body of the book yawns to about 400 pages in the Vintage edition, no mean sum. The gambit does not quite pay off.
The Glass Bead Game has its own language which is "capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines," and therefore can be a "mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture." In the time of Joseph Knecht, this "game", when played, is a rehearsal of a meticulously planned demonstration of the manner in which ideas from disparate domains can connect, and each game revolves around a set of themes, to limit and guide the scope. The vastness of this game is overwhelming to consider, and beautiful, the more so as it suggests a grand harmony within all human endeavor. But what fruit does it bear for the reader? We never experience one of these games in full or even part: the most we get are sketches of games, describing loosely the themes that they cover. Since it provides no setpieces in itself, and does not, then, provide any awesome (if not, I might expect, humorously pretentious) displays of intellectual virtuosity nor thematic sublimity, what does it offer? This most important of questions bewildered me while reading, and does so now. The best that I can muster, unsatisfying as it is, is that in building a system so noble that people might forego many of the pleasures of a worldly, active life for it, Hesse then sounds a most heroic, humanist note when Joseph decides to pursue the call of his own soul over that most worthy of masters.
And it is this discarding of Castalia that is one of the most interesting choices this book makes. During the reading I focused on what I thought about the symbiosis between Castalia and the world, or more specifically, about the worthiness of a life lived in scholarly pursuit, meditative tranquility, and strict discipline against one "out in the world", and what parts of each path were actually incompatible. I was also stimulated by Joseph's relationships--here, as in all his books, Hesse's characters find people who unlock new parts of each other, and form lovely connections. But Joseph's "awakenings", from early on, were maybe most intriguing--possibly, I admit, because they brought to mind other, more successful books by this author--as they suggested a freeing and subversive direction for the book. If only that freedom had been exercised sooner! I may have been saved some hours, and be warmer to this "magnum opus".
So what prevails is disappointment. But I wish to point out a couple of those sections which most grabbed me, too. Perhaps first was Joseph's response to meeting the Music Master for the first time.
"Sometimes he felt capable of any achievements. At other times he might forget everything and daydream with a new softness and surrender, listen to the wind or the rain, gaze into the chalice of a flower or the moving waters of the river, understanding nothing, divining everything, lost in sympathy, curiosity, the craving to comprehend, carried away from his own self toward another, toward the world, toward the mystery and sacrament, the at once painful and lovely disporting of the world of appearances."
It's these sorts of passages where it is at once clear how deeply Hesse understands people. The chapter "A Conversation" is also of note, particularly as it is unlike much else in the book. After years spent living in opposing worlds, Joseph and his childhood friend Designori meet, and what follows is a wonderful chat in which misunderstanding arises, is addressed, and the two friends are reconciled. A snippet:
"Designori's face had clouded over once more. 'Sometimes,' he said resignedly, 'it seems to me that we have not only two different languages and ways of expressing ourselves, each of which can only vaguely be translated into the other, but that we are altogether and fundamentally different creatures who can never understand each other. Which of us is really the authentic and integral human being, you or me? Every so often I doubt that either of us is.'"