Steppenwolf (34 page)
Authors: David Horrocks Hermann Hesse David Horrocks Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf
does have an unusual structure, but it is perhaps
more helpful to see this as determined by considerations of perspective. The novel begins with a seemingly objective view of Haller in the form of a reflective memoir by the unnamed landlady’s nephew who styles himself as the editor of the notebooks left behind by the lodger. We then enter the subjective world of Haller via a first instalment of his notebooks, ominously headed ‘For mad people only’, suggesting that our perspective on events will be totally different from that of the eminently commonsensical ‘bourgeois’ editor. A switch to a third narrative perspective occurs when Haller records the contents of the Steppenwolf Tract that has mysteriously come into his possession. This, in his own estimation, is ‘highly objective, the work of someone uninvolved, picturing me from the outside and from
above’. For the remainder of the novel – much the longest section – Hesse reverts to the subjective vision of Haller’s notebooks, though that vision is progressively modified, to an extent under the influence of the Tract, partly also as Haller learns from his encounters with Hermione and Pablo to view himself in radically different ways. The most striking change of perspective comes in the long Magic Theatre sequence at the end. Here all semblance of reasoned objectivity is left behind, as is suggested by the words ‘
PAY AT THE DOOR WITH YOUR MIND
’ that Haller reads on the announcement of the evening’s entertainment.
Hesse’s use of multiple narrators certainly makes
Steppenwolf
a more complex text in the modernist manner than any of his previous works. There is also evidence of his striving to achieve contrasts in tone and register within the novel’s different sections. Whether he is entirely successful in this is, however, debatable. The language of the nephew in the first section is, it is true, generally simpler than that of Haller when we first encounter him in the notebooks, where the sentences are far longer and more intricate. Yet even the supposedly non-intellectual nephew is familiar with aspects of Nietzsche’s thought and proves capable
of analysing Haller in ways that don’t differ markedly from what is later argued in the Tract. The Tract itself is a curious mixture stylistically. It begins like a fairy tale with ‘Once upon a time’, reads for a while like the cheap
‘self-help’ manual it appears to be, but then, despite its occasionally playful, mocking tone, it develops into something more akin to a sociological and psychological treatise with generalized comments on the bourgeoisie, suicide, and the complex psychological make-up of human beings. In other words, it is ultimately much more like the ‘study’ Hesse initially intended to call it than a cheap pamphlet obtained from a street vendor. The Tract is variously couched in the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ form, but exactly who the author or authors of the document are remains a mystery. There are suggestions that the perspective is that of the ‘Immortals’ and that they are the owners of a number of Magic Theatres like the one that Haller will eventually visit. Yet the sometimes ponderous and pompous style of the piece is very different from that of the inscriptions on that theatre’s doors, which is more appropriate to the kind
of crude ‘peep show’, as Pablo calls it. And at no point do the Tract’s authors mock Haller for his own pomposities as scathingly as Mozart does in that theatre’s last scene.
In short, it seems that Hesse has not entirely solved the stylistic problems arising from the structure he has chosen to adopt in the novel. Nor is that structure as radically modernist as is claimed by critics such as Thomas Mann, who regarded
Steppenwolf
as comparable with innovatory works of the same period, such as Joyce’s
Ulysses
or Gide’s
Faux-monnayeurs
. The novel’s strength lies rather in its honest depiction of a personal neurosis, which, as the ‘editor’ points out in the preface, is also the neurosis of a whole generation. As such, it has succeeded in appealing to several subsequent generations too.
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lanes disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.
We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books
The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.
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Der Steppenwolf
first published in Germany by S. Fischer Verlag A.G. 1927
This translation first published by Penguin Classics 2012
Copyright © Hermann Hesse, 1955
Translation and Afterword copyright © David Horrocks, 2012
Cover Illustration by Julian House
All rights reserved
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-93868-4
1
An epistolary novel in sentimental vein by Johann Timotheus Hermes (1738–1821), one of the most read works of the eighteenth century.
2
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), humorous novelist of the Romantic period, greatly admired by Hesse, who wrote introductions to a number of twentieth-century editions of his works.
3
Real name: Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), Romantic poet and thinker.
4
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), major dramatist and critic; Friedrich H. Jacobi (1743–1819), novelist and thinker, critical of rationalism; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), physicist, philosopher and satirist. These three writers indicate Haller’s interest in the Enlightenment as well as Romanticism.
5
Both these aphorisms come from
Das Allgemeine Brouillon
or
General Rough Draft
, a vast collection of thoughts on science, philosophy and the arts that Novalis jotted down in the years 1798 and 1799.
1
Born in 1805, Stifter was an Austrian novelist and story-writer. The reference is to his suicide in Linz in 1868.
2
Central figure in
The Logbook of the Aeronaut Gianozzo
, a story of 1801 by Jean Paul. See
p. 13
footnote
2
.
3
Another Jean Paul character, this time from his 1809 story
Army Chaplain Schmelzle’s Journey to Flätz
.
4
Monumental Buddhist shrine in Java, erected in the eighth and ninth centuries
AD
.
1
Part of a refrain in the 1837 comic opera
Zar und Zimmermann
(
Tsar and Joiner
) by the popular Berlin composer Albert Lortzing (1801–51).
1
The reference is to a poem of autumn 1884, unpublished in Nietzsche’s lifetime, which he variously entitled ‘Vereinsamt’ (‘Isolated’) and ‘Abschied’ (‘Departure’).
3
Friedrich von Matthison (1761–1831), once popular, now almost totally for-gotten writer of neoclassical verse.
4
Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94), poet of the ‘Storm and Stress’ period, noted for his ballads. The ‘Molly’ poems were written for Auguste, younger sister of his then wife, Dorette. After Dorette’s death he entered into a short-lived second marriage with Auguste.
5
Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816) was for many years Goethe’s lover and eventually his wife.
6
The first line of the untitled eighth poem from Goethe’s late cycle ‘Chinese-German Hours and Seasons’ of 1827.
7
Goethe was not without admiration for the dramatist and story-writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), but he shied away from the more pessimistic aspects of his work, which he regarded as self-destructive. Kleist committed suicide in 1811. Similarly, though less strongly, the ‘Classical’ Goethe seems to have deplored the wilder aspects of Beethoven’s personality and his compositions.
8
Walther von der Vogelweide (
c
.1170–1230) is the most important German lyric poet of the Middle Ages.
9
The ‘Erbfeind’, that is to say, France, traditionally regarded by the Germans as their arch rival and enemy.
10
The foxtrot ‘Yearning’
,
written by the Philadelphia-born composer Joseph A. (Joe) Burke (1884–1950), was very popular from 1925 onwards. ‘Valencia’, another foxtrot, written by the Spanish composer José Padilla (1889–1960), became a major hit for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1926.
11
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), Norwegian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Like the philosopher Nietzsche, Hamsun influenced a whole generation of German writers, including Hesse.
12
A Sanskrit saying, literally meaning ‘You are that’ where ‘Tat’ (‘that’) is the fundamental principle underlying all cosmic reality, and ‘tvam’ (‘you’) denotes an individual’s innermost self. To recognize that the two are identical, as this pronouncement of Vedantic Hinduism teaches, is to achieve salvation or liberation.
13
Hesse’s invention, this work alludes to the famous collection of German folksongs
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
(
The Boy’s Magic Horn
), which the Romantic writers Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano assembled in the years 1806–8. By slightly changing the title, however, Hesse is also alluding to the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), specifically to his 1922 study
Bildnerei der Geisteskranken
(
Artistry of the Mentally Ill
), which contained many illustrations of artworks produced by patients in the psychiatric hospital of Heidelberg University.
14
‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne’, the beginning of an introductory passage that precedes the singing of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Hesse had already used the line as the title of a newspaper article he wrote in November 1914, a condemnation of the stridently nationalistic tones then universally to be heard in the first year of the First World War.
