Siddhartha
Authors: Hermann Hesse
Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #Criticism, #Literature - Classics, #General & Literary Fiction, #Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), #Classics, #Literature: Classics
ERMANN
H
ESSE
Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, poet, and critic who enjoyed a cultlike readership among young people during the 1960s, was born in the quiet Black Forest town of Calw, Germany, on July 2, 1877. He was the son and grandson of Protestant clergymen who had served as missionaries in India. Hesse attended the parochial mission school where his father taught and later the Latin school in Göppingen. Having vowed “to be a poet or nothing at all,” the headstrong youth fled the seminary in Maulbronn at the age of fourteen. Thereafter Hesse rebelled against all attempts at formal schooling. Instead he pursued a rigorous program of self-study that focused on literature, philosophy, and history and eventually found employment at the Heckenhauer Bookshop in the university town of Tübingen.
In 1899 Hesse published
Romantische Lieder (Romantic Songs)
, his first book of poetry, and
Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (An Hour After Midnight)
, a series of prose poems hailed by Rainer Maria Rilke as standing “on the periphery of art.” Hesse spent the next several years working as a clerk at bookstores in cosmopolitan
Basel, where he studied art history and the writings of the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt.
Hesse brought out his first novel,
Peter Camenzind
, in 1904. Translated into English in 1969, this story of a failed writer who embarks on a journey to discover the world became the prototype for much of his fiction. Its success enabled him to marry and start a family in the idyllic German village of Gaienhofen. His second novel,
Unterm Rad
(1906; translated as
Beneath the Wheel m
1968), proved equally popular. The tale of a gifted adolescent crushed by the brutal expectations of his father and teachers, it was proclaimed a “Black Forest
Catcher in the Rye”
by
The National Observer
. Hesse next pondered the sources of creativity in
Gertrud
(1910; translated as
Gertrude
in 1955), a novel of self-appraisal that strongly resembles early works by Thomas Mann. Chronic wanderlust coupled with growing discontent over his bucolic Rousseau-like existence took him on a formative trip to the East Indies in 1911. Hesse’s troubled domestic life provided the basis for
Rosshalde
(1914; translated as
Rosshalde
1970), the classic tale of a man torn between obligations to his family and the longing for a spiritual fulfillment that exists outside the confines of conventional society.
The Christian Science Monitor called
it “a kind of disguised biography, an account of Hesse’s quite private turmoil on the eve of war.”
The outbreak of World War I brought a sharp change in Hesse’s fortunes. An outspoken pacifist, he volunteered for service at the German consulate in Bern and devoted himself to relief work for German internees and prisoners of war. “The protest against the war, against the raw, bloodthirsty stupidity of mankind, the protest against the ‘intellectuals,’ especially those who preached war, constituted for me a bitter necessity and duty,” Hesse later observed. Yet a series of articles on war and politics written at the time alienated the generally
conservative and nationalistic public that had bought his books up until then.
During this same period Hesse endured two personal tragedies, the death of his father and the collapse of his marriage. In 1916 he suffered a complete nervous breakdown and entered a sanatorium near Lucerne to undergo psychoanalysis with a disciple of Carl Jung’s. Seeking isolation, Hesse settled by himself in Montagnola, a remote mountain village on the outskirts of Lugano in southeastern Switzerland, in the spring of 1919.
The publication of
Demian
that same year (it appeared in English in 1923) brought Hesse immediate acclaim throughout Europe. Based on his experience with Jungian analysis, this breakthrough novel launched a series of works chronicling the
Weg nach Innen
(inward journey) that he hoped would lead to self-knowledge. In the existential tradition of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Hesse portrays the turmoil of a docile young man who is forced to question traditional bourgeois beliefs regarding family, society, and faith. “The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by
Demian
… is unforgettable,” recalled Thomas Mann. “With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.” “The autobiographical undercurrent gives
Demian
an Existentialist intensity and a depth of understanding rare in contemporary fiction,” said the
Saturday Review
. “Hesse is not a traditional teller of tales but a novelist of ideas and a moralist of a high order.”
“Almost all the prose works I have written are biographies of the soul,” Hesse asserted, “monologues in which a single individual is observed in relation to the world and to his own
ego.” Exploring the oriental religious concepts that became central to his work, he wrote
Siddhartha
(1922; translated into English in 1951), which recounts the spiritual evolution of a man living in India at the time of Buddha. Perhaps more than any other of his novels,
Siddhartha
reflects Hesse’s belief that “the true profession of man is to find his way himself.” “For me,
Siddhartha
is a more potent medicine than the New Testament,” said Henry Miller; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., deemed it Hesse’s “simplest, clearest, most innocent tale of seeking and finding.”
Hesse again utilized the tools of psychoanalysis in
Der Steppenwolf
‘(1927’; translated as
Steppenwolf
in 1929), a novel that probes the “two souls” of a reclusive intellectual whose animalistic urges strive for release. Inspired by the dissolute aftermath of Hesse’s failed second marriage to a much younger woman, it is arguably his most autobiographical book, one hailed by
The New York Times
as “a savage indictment of bourgeois society.” Hesse pursued similar themes in
Narziss und Goldmund
(1930; translated as
Narcissus and Goldmund
1968) by presenting parallel biographies of an ascetic monk and a rapturous man of the world. Thomas Mann called
Narcissus and Goldmund
“a poetic novel unique in its purity and fascination.”
The New York Times Book Review
agreed. “What makes this short book so limitlessly vast is the body-and-soul-shaking debate that runs through it, which it has the honesty and courage not to resolve: between the flesh and the spirit, art and scientific or religious speculation, action and contemplation, between the wayfaring and the sedentary in us.”
In 1931, Hesse married for a third time and moved to a new home in Montagnola. His happiness is reflected in
Die Morgenlandfahrt
(1932; translated as
The Journey to the East m
1957), a personal fairy tale in which he reaffirms his belief in the superiority of the realms of art and thought. With Hitler’s
rise to power, Hesse (by then a Swiss citizen) began harboring Jewish refugees and blacklisted artists fleeing the Third Reich. Soon his work was declared “undesirable” in Nazi Germany. In 1932 he started writing the futuristic novel that endures as his magnum opus. Published in 1943,
Das Glasperlenspiel
(translated as
The Glass Bead Game
in 1969) takes place in the year 2400 in a Utopian land where artists and intellectuals strive to attain “perfection, pure being, the fullness of reality.” “The sublime work of [Hesse’s] old age,
The Glass Bead Game
[is] drawn from all sources of human culture, both East and West,” observed Thomas Mann. “This chaste and daring work, full of fantasy and at the same time highly intellectual, is full of tradition, loyalty, memory, secrecy—without being in the least derivative.” Admired as well by T. S. Eliot and André Gide, it is widely seen as the key to a full understanding of Hesse’s thought.
Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.
Krieg und Frieden
, his lifelong reflections on war and politics, came out the same year; in 1971 it appeared in English as
If the War Goes On
. One of Europe’s grand old men of letters, Hesse spent his final years in seclusion at Montagnola compiling volumes of his poetry, essays, and correspondence. Unaware that he was suffering from leukemia, Hermann Hesse died in his sleep from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 9, 1962. “The entire work of Hesse is a poetic effort for emancipation,” said André Gide. “In each of [his books] I refind the same indecision of soul; its contours are illusive and its aspirations, infinite.” Hesse’s longtime friend and countryman Thomas Mann remarked, “For me his lifework, with its roots in native German romanticism, for all its occasional strange individualism, its now humorously petulant and now mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times, belongs to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labors of our epoch.”
Hesse’s call for self-realization coupled with his celebration of Eastern mysticism earned him a huge following among America’s counterculture in the decade after his death. “Rarely, since a generation of young Europeans decked themselves out in the blue frock coat and yellow vest of Goethe’s Werther, has the youth culture of an age responded so rapturously to a writer,” observed the Hesse scholar Theodore Ziolkowski in 1973. Hesse “is deeply loved by those among the American young who are questing,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “The wanderers of Hesse always find something satisfying—holiness, wisdom, hope.” And the London
Times Literary Supplement
concluded, “The Hesse we read today is in fact no longer the bittersweet elegist of Wilhelmine Germany, the anguished intellectual
entre deux guerres
, the serene hermit of Montagnola
après
Nobel. The cult has adjusted the kaleidoscope of Hesse’s works in such a way as to bring into focus a Hesse for the 1970s: environmentalist, war opponent, enemy of a computerized technocracy, who seeks heightened awareness… and who is prepared to sacrifice anything but his integrity for the sake of his freedom.”
NTRODUCTION
Tom Robbins
Dostoevsky is credited with having invented the psychological novel—although considering the millions of pages of tediously internalized, angst-ridden prose that have fluttered in on the Russian’s long, dark coattails (fiction that has been both a crime and a punishment), maybe “accused of” rather than “credited with” is the more appropriate phrase.
The problem, for writers and readers alike, with all this inward gazing is how few of us ever gaze in far enough to justify the strain. To reap lasting rewards, to escape the briar patch of perpetuated trauma, the gazer must delve beneath the ego level, the personality level, the level of genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning, must penetrate more deeply even than the archetypal underworld. One of the very rare Western authors not only to plumb those arcane depths but to do so in a narratively entertaining, stylistically engaging fashion (thereby making Dostoevsky’s overheated lemons into cool and refreshing, though highly potent, lemonade), was Hermann Hesse.
Steeped in German mysticism and Asian philosophy (he traveled twice to the Far East), and having expanded his
awareness by ingesting on several occasions hallucinogenic mescaline, Hesse (1877-1962) was perhaps ideally qualified to invent a new kind of psychological novel. Gradually he had come to recognize that very often despair, misery, and degeneration are simply the price we’re charged for our bad attitudes and myopic vision. Once he became convinced that we humans can alter reality by altering our perceptions of it, the lid was off the pitcher. Hesse went to his writing desk and poured the nectar.
Having shifted his focus from the concerns that had traditionally occupied serious novelists (socio-economic conflicts, physical challenges, romantic entanglements); from familiar territory to regions outside the zone of normal expectations, Hesse was now in a position to compose startling new novels-of-ideas, novels containing such ideas, in fact, as had seldom if ever been expressed in modern literature.
Like the existentialists, Hesse seemed to view the mass of humanity as one big twitchy, squealy, many-headed beast caught in a trap of its own making. Unlike Camus and Sartre, however, he suspected the trap might be sprung through a kind of alchemical transformation and/or spiritual transcendence.
Alchemical transformation he explored brilliantly in his 1927 masterpiece,
Steppenwolf
, destined to become, for obvious reasons, a favorite of the psychedelic counterculture. As far out as it was, however,
Steppenwolf was
pungent with the musk of Old Europe. Five years earlier, exhaling a sandal-wood effluvium of borrowed spirituality, he penned a shorter, though no less courageous, novel that follows the corkscrew path of a well-born East Indian who is fervently, if somewhat erratically, searching for ultimate meaning in life: an ambitious “golden child” whose goals do not lie at the top of any ordinary ladder, a restless traveler whose destination could not be found on any map.
In the parlance of cinema,
Siddhartha
would qualify as a “road movie.” But because the protagonist’s personal motto throughout his various and sometimes contradictory stages of development remains “Thinking, waiting, fasting,” and because he wanders barefoot in an age (circa 500 B.C.) when there was nary a pedal to push to the metal, he logs in a tiny fraction of the mileage accumulated by, say, the characters in
On the Road
.
Siddhartha
nonetheless does bear a superficial resemblance to Kerouac’s novel, in which, despite their relentless pursuit of kicks, the beatniks maintain a fascination with Eastern philosophy, and, however crudely, demonstrate a hunger for spiritual illumination. For his part, Siddhartha also takes a detour through the pleasurelands of flesh and fermentation before moving on to more refined ground.
Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethos to the contrary, there is an extremely blurry line between an appetite for life and a yearning for God, and both Kerouac and Hesse intuited this sensual/spiritual interface, though, each for his own reasons, neither was entirely comfortable with a melting of the largely artificial boundary: Kerouac’s fictional hipsters were restrained by the author’s own Catholic guilt, whereas Hesse’s pilgrim temporarily loses himself in the realm of the senses, thereby derailing his quest for union with the Absolute and illustrating the perils that can arise when the spirit is voted out of office by the body. (It should go without saying that the opposite is equally as dangerous.)
At this point it might be tempting to compare
Siddhartha
to another fine novel about a young man’s quest for meaning, W Somerset Maugham’s
The Razor’s Edge
, but while parallels definitely exist, the differences between the two books are nearly as pronounced as those between a Chicago hot dog and a Bombay curry. Maugham’s searcher, Larry Darrell, is a Midwestern American who starts out not knowing squat about
matters of enlightenment. Siddhartha, on the other hand, is up to his shining brow in holy ritual even as a boy. The dissatisfied Darrell, merely “hoping to make something interesting of his life,” begins by rejecting a career in bourgeois business. The dissatisfied Siddhartha, a brahmin’s son, commences
his
journey by rejecting the same sacred methodologies that Darrell eventually ends up embracing (to his betterment, it must be said).
Indeed, Siddhartha’s journey may be plotted as a long succession of jettisoned doctrines and renounced dogmas. Everyone around him believes him destined to mature into an all-star brahmin, the LeBron James of Hindu theology, but unfulfilled by ablutions, scriptures and discourse, he walks away from guaranteed success in the religious arena. Later, he also spurns an opportunity to hang with Gautama (the Sublime One, himself), obviously not knowing—or not caring—which side his bread is buddhaed on.
Siddhartha turns orthodox Hinduism inside out, flicks the translucent lint from Buddha’s much-contemplated navel, and deserts the extremist samanas with whom he’s been starving himself in the forest; becoming increasingly convinced that “a true seeker could not accept doctrine.” Finally, the seeker even rejects seeking, concluding that ultimate reality can never be captured in a net made of thought, and that “knowing has no worse enemy than the desire to know.” Strong stuff.
Lest his ongoing rebellion smack of impudence or even nihilism, it can be reported, without giving away too much to the first-time reader, that Siddhartha’s litany of “No’s” leads him to one loud, resounding “Yes!” He trashes the This, he torches the That, only to arrive at an acceptance of the All. In the end, even mankind’s “nervous, proud little ego” is no longer despised as our worst enemy but rather accepted as just another piece of foolishness to be smiled at affectionately and calmly observed.
To reach that plateau of serene affirmation, Siddhartha has to reduce mainstream Hinduism and nascent Buddhism to their essence, and what remains in the bottom of his double boiler is a systemless system that perhaps most closely resembles Zen.
For reasons of historical accuracy, Zen could not have been mentioned in Hesse’s book, but the attitudes that were to engender Zen, to shape it, are very much at play here. There is, however, one glaring discrepancy. The Zen perspective is in many ways a comic perspective, and
Siddhartha
is as humorless as a hot rock. (We shouldn’t blame this on Hesse’s Germanic temperament. Germans actually have a great sense of humor: Otherwise there’d be no such thing as lederhosen.)
Those of us who believe that wisdom unleavened by humor is fundamentally unwise are destined to be confounded by
Siddhartha
, for as arid of cosmic wit as it is, it radiates more genuine wisdom than just about any novel ever published. How can this be? Well, although
Siddhartha
isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, it does pay tribute to laughter. At the saddest moment in his life, the protagonist hears a river laughing at his despair, laughing at time and at all the world, and, buoyed, is moved to ask himself if existence is not a comedy.
Siddhartha is attuned to the river by his friend and confidant, a simple ferryman who is perhaps the true buddha in this tale; and the eternal freedom resonant in the stream’s thousand voices emboldens the pilgrim, too, to let go, loosen up, and become eternally free. If the soundtrack of
Steppenwolf
is the music of Mozart, drawing down genius from the stars,
Siddhartha’s
soundtrack is a raga of river burble and leaf rustle: elementary songs with a natural immunity to the virus of opportunism that seems sooner or later to infect society’s every attempt at organized expression.
Hardly a repository of proto-New Age, feel-good fluff,
Siddhartha
totes some heavy emotional freight—but it bears its load with the attentive grace of a Zen master carrying a bundle of firewood back to his hut.
A tough little wind-tossed blossom of a novel,
Siddhartha
comes to rest in a place of deep wisdom. Ah, but while it has continued, decade after decade, to inspire its readers, to expose them to the mysteries of wisdom, it has never pretended that it could make them more wise. The road to enlightenment is an unpaved road, closed to public transportation. It is because we must travel its last miles unencumbered and alone that Hesse has
his
traveler remind us emphatically that “Wisdom cannot be passed on.” And that reminder may be the hardest, most valuable jewel in this literary lotus.
T
OM
R
OBBINS
is the author of eight offbeat but popular novels, all of which remain in print. They include
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
, and
Villa Incognito
. His new mostly nonfiction collection is
Wild Ducks Flying Backward
.
